open. “Please tell a story about a girl who gets away.”

[delphian]

WHO: Tsenka Abendroth + YOU?
WHAT: Tsenka takes a bath. A lot.
WHEN: After the skeleton wars.
WHERE: The heated baths in the former Templar tower.
NOTES: Nudity, discussion of trauma, the uzh.

Against all of the odds stacked heavily out of her favour, Tsenka Abendroth is alive. She has survived her first, unlikely rescue; she has endured time in the infirmary, ensuring that having made it to the Gallows she wouldn't simply collapse with all of the foundations of her taken away. She has survived, again, the attack on the Gallows itself by what Riftwatch left behind in Nevarra City—it feels like a thread pulling tight, somehow, her Nevarran name buying her freedom and the Nevarran dead coming to take it away from her again—

she is alive. She is with Riftwatch because she has chosen to be, and not for any other reason. If she decided the choice didn't suit her any longer, she could leave. She has been released from the infirmary under her own power, and she can choose any unused room she wishes,

but right now, she has decided to choose the baths. Tsenka is not, typically, given to overindulgence in luxurious hygiene, but it's been actual years since she's had the leisure to do or not do at her own inclination. Bathing, during captivity, had been...nonexistent, if one were not to stretch the definition to include the occasional bucket of cold water thrown on her if she seemed like she might be sleeping easy. There had certainly not been any soap involved. At liberty to do as she pleases until she can commit to doing something useful to anyone else, it pleases her to set up camp in a corner of the heated baths with a clean robe and towels, a platter of food she'd gathered from mealtimes and the occasional application of large, sad eyes. A bottle of cheap wine, easier to drink from directly with hot, wet hands than fuss about with cups or glasses—some incense that she'd found, and had set up to burn where the ash would fall directly into the water, making it much easier to clean up after.

A few books, though she hasn't figured out the best way to read them without getting them wet, yet. Her crystal. Scissors, because even wet it's obvious that about half her hair is a good several inches different from the rest.

She will be here for some time.

Comments

[poleaxed]

A grunt of a laugh-- real laughter requires smiling, which is a dangerous proposition until the stitches are out, and maybe after. Still, her humor at the elf's words is obvious.

"Tough... gettin' company?" She'd meant to say tough pickings, not being one to mince words, but the euphemism saves her having to flex that damned fucking lip again. "Were hard meself, first days."

From one free with her company to another, or someone who used to be, anyway.

[delphian]

“Might've lost my touch,” she allows, “but I've been out the infirmary all of—”

The illustrative gesture she makes in the air above her doesn't really mean anything, but presumably Jone can interpret it to mean: fuck all time, actually. Probably about as long as it took her to gather up everything she needs and park her slippery little self in this corner of the communal baths.

Her smile is something just barely there; suggestive of the bright boldness, underneath.

“I don't consider myself hard up, as yet. Apparently you're all very attractive around here.” So how bad can her odds be, honestly.

[poleaxed]

Another sniff of laughter. Jone usually knows when to avoid her euphemisms, but she's so focused on not saying a word that'd rip her mouth apart, she's fallen right into one. A shrug. What can you do?

She brings her hand out of the water, waggling it a bit. So-so. Her own feelings on her personal level of attractiveness, with or without the scar, aside... well, humility never hurt nobody, at least not when they were starkers.

"How long you been-..." Jone manages to say without any evident difficulty, saved by the fact that her accent shaves the H off of the front of every word... "Here. Gallows."

So close. 'Gallows' comes out like 'gals'.

[delphian]

Probably the question isn't meant as a stumper, but Tsenka stops. Is made to stop, by being made to think — probably not about where she fits into the Gallows grade curve vis a vis her curving parts, obvious smokeshow, no further questions. No, it's the way time slips and slides around her now; how long was she gone? ('Gone'.) How long has she been here? One day had been very like another for a long time, followed by a burst of activity, and then,

days, very like the day before. She looks down at herself, as if her current state might provide some answers, and it isn't a terrible gauge.

“Weeks,” she decides. “More than days. Less than months.”

[poleaxed]

Jone raises a brow, letting her face talk for her. It's expressive, can convey how underwhelming that answer is.

She leans back in the bath, but not before slicing one finger over the thick cord of her neck. She points to Tsenka then. You?

[delphian]

As answers go, it lacks a certain something, she can admit it. Jone's query requires a moment of pause to parse, and then—

Her shrug isn't unpleasant to look at, so there's that.

“My brother thought I was dead,” is agreement, “'til now. Tame Venatori — Florus — fetched me away with him when he decided to defect. He were friendly with a traitor sorry to leave his Templar here who said Kirkwall would be the place to land.”

It is not difficult to read distaste into the way she says Templar like she might have said cunt. Or into the way her assessment might have been more dubious, if the first thing she had said hadn't been my brother.

“Neglected to mention the Templar part. Funny.” It's not funny, she's going to beat the shit out of Vanya Orlov.

[poleaxed]

I'd pay to watch that fight is, unfortunately, surpassing the quota of words she want to use in this exchange. Instead, she looks on, her nod subtle but approving.

"Venatori-" she says it like bentory, so Tseka will be excused if she can't quite interpret it. Likewise Jone's next move, where she makes an X with both fingers and fits it over one of her eyes, then the other.

Is he dead?

[delphian]

The quiet shift of her mouth is echoing back that pronunciation, feeling it so she can identify it; certainly helps having only a moment before said the same word herself. A safe context clue. And—

Fair question. Tsenka wonders, briefly, if that's what usually happens to defectors. If she'd have been in more danger without Marcus to vouch for her, to promise that that wasn't what she was. (But he had vouched for Riftwatch, too.)

“Dungeon,” she says, “for a time. Ascertain his sincerity.” She gestures vaguely at herself, says dry: “He's no idiot, rescuing me.”

A Tevene mage going out of his way — risking his own plans with a significant variable predictable only in that it'll definitely be complicated — to rescue an elf that no one was looking for and that everyone believed dead, well. It's not nothing. Tsenka, who is a cynic, sets only a little store by that. He's smart enough to know it, too.

[poleaxed]

Jone can't help giving a skeptical look, and then cringing at scars pulled. She shakes her head and schools her expression back to something more neutral.

A momentary pause to work out which sounds will suit her best-- or worst, she throws out the word smarts in favor of cleverness. "Saved you. His cleverness, your concern?"

Odd fucking thing to prioritize, Jone thinks, but she's no mage.

[delphian]

“No.”

She considers how to put it; drags her fingers through the water while she does that, deliberate with her words. Eventually, she settles on: “No part of it's my concern. Whatever he is,”

sincere defector, bullshit artist,

“he's smart enough to know that, and it'll be someone's job to decide what that means.” A shrug. “Luck or design.”

[poleaxed]

She considers that, letting it pass with a shrug. The bleeding elf mage would know better how to judge people from her vantage, wouldn't she?

Jone offers a hand. "Jone."

[delphian]

Tsenka shakes it — there's a birdlike, uncomfortable thinness to her, all edges and wrists that shouldn't be so exposed as they are, but the sheer amount of hoarded cheese she's brought down to the baths with her ought to do something about that in reasonable time. The name strikes a chord, for all its been long enough now it'll be a while before she puts the echo to what it's reminding her of.

“Tsenka,” she says. “Tsenka Abendroth.”

A beat, and she adds, “Marcus Rowntree's my brother.” Rueful, “In arms, except that we met in short pants.”

[poleaxed]

It's been well over a year since she's had any meaningful contact with an elf, but even Jone can tell the woman's had some hard living. Uneasy with dying, a chevalier had once said when Jone had brought used the phrase. Sometimes, it's not a hard life. It's a refusal to die.

The difference had seemed, at the time, academic, but she wonders at that now, as her tongue pokes at the back of her scar.

She opens her mouth to speak-- something about Rowntree and the half-impression of the man she has, before shutting her mouth. The thought of spending the rest of her life like this, carefully picking over her words, is a potent reminder to cool her heels. For once in her life, she watches her tongue.

Instead, her hands rise from the water, and she wiggles her fingers while staring at the empty wall-- as though casting some kind of spell. She looks to Tsenka. A mage?

[delphian]

It isn't that the gesture is difficult to decode so much as the question itself is, for a moment, a surprise. A great many things about Riftwatch are new to her, but the most immediate thing is simply—

No one has ever had to ask. No one has ever not known the things that matter, because for as long as Tsenka can remember and one way or another she has been surrounded by people to whom those things also all matter. Templars locking doors behind her or trying to put swords through her gut—mages, debating rebellion or concession. (The Venatori, determined that there must be a way to bend her to use.) Even the handful of people somehow neither of those things had always been somehow adjacent to them, and certainly not somehow unaware of the capacity of the slight and sly woman in front of them.

She's always wanted her world to be bigger. It's just going to take some getting used to, now that it is. Her instinct is a little incredulity—who else is going to meet a mage in short pants and call him so close—but she swallows that, better prepared for it now by a man who'd not known the Gallows to be a Circle. Jone isn't being unkind, and she isn't stupid. The world is bigger than Tsenka was allowed to see, and freedom means the seeing.

“Aye,” she says, instead, “that's so. So was the Nevarran traitor up in Minrathous,” as it happens, “very saucy, him and Orlov. Star-crossed.” She is absolutely going to kick the shit out of both of them.

[poleaxed]

Jone grins at the commentary-- silly gossip is always endearing, or at least entertaining-- before hissing and drawing one of the corners of her mouth back down. She can't hardly stand this.

There are things she wants to ask-- what kind of mage? Her brother was a mage, too. Do all mages see their fellows as kin?-- but she lacks the fluency. But she's been getting good at figuring out sentences she doesn't have to move her lips for.

"Y'know all the mages here?"

[delphian]

Somewhere, Vanya Orlov feels the chill of someone walking over his grave. It's probably fine.

“No,” slower, more thoughtful — though not because the question itself is much of a challenge. It isn't: “I only know Marcus.” The tilt of her head is as one presented with something as a puzzle, and it becomes clear that she's at least trying to guess what Jone might be curious about beyond that, and limited to in her current mouth situation.

After a moment, she offers, “Him and I—we were close in age. Taken close together. Learned together. We grew as siblings do, he's my brother. I don't know any of you lot as have been here, though catching you all naked is doing a good deal to break the ice, no?”

The bath hangouts are multipurpose.