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Entry tags:
open. “Please tell a story about a girl who gets away.”
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.
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.
no subject
“You're doing it for free,” she observes, holding onto the towel placed around her shoulders to catch falling snips of hair before it reaches her robe. The Gallows do not feel safe, not when so many of the people within them are walking around like rung bells, but she is aware of feeling — peaceful. Here, specifically, sitting cross-legged in front of Marcus and looking at nothing in particular.
It's warm, and her belly is full, and her family is here. Someone will ask her to fight for those things. It feels right. She is ready not to begrudge it.
“Does Julius go to the place in Lowtown?”
Her eyebrows aren't doing anything suspicious. If someone were to walk by them this moment, as someone well might do, nothing about Tsenka's placid expression would suggest anything at all.
no subject
"I've recommended its services," Marcus says. The scissors are set aside so he can comb through her wet hair, trying to judge its evenness. He very gently pulls it all back behind her pointed ears. The scrape of scissors indicates he's found more work to do.
At some point, he's just going to have to make peace with it, before he cuts it all way too short, but there's a couple inches to go before that point.
"I'm cutting your hair for free," he adds. "Salons do more than just that. You'll have to ask them."
no subject
“Mayhap I will. He said,” without a breath between the two thoughts, “that you were close, the two of you.”
no subject
Then the rare—for him—instinct to leave it there. Not that she'd let him, of course, but for a second he labours beneath the delusion that she might and that he can successfully obfuscate from her the life he's been leading while she's been in chains. A life that isn't without its difficulties, and certainly not without its luxuries. It's a delusion he discards in the next moment, along with a sliver of hair under sharp blades.
Marcus clears his throat. "Julius and Petrana are my partners," he says. "For the better part of a year, now. The room you saw is the room we share. How short do you want this?"
no subject
She says, and then that's all for a time, which isn't unusual. The things she says are not usually unexamined, before she says them; she twists this new information which is not entirely a surprise between her hands to decide how she feels about it, past the superficial humor of contextualizing Julius's mild disorientation at everything about her.
She decides that she likes that he knew her name in the same moment that she realizes that her face is wet, which isn't strange, but the way it drips off her chin in twin rivers,
it's good, that he had a life. That he's been building a life. And she's here, now, and he can tell her all of the important things, but it is a loss all of a sudden to realize that she must be told things that she should have been here to know. Her gut twists unexpectedly, unprepared, all the time that she was robbed of. How stupid and ugly it seems to grieve a few years in the face of having a future again. Not everyone has a future, again.
She is grateful to have a future again.
She pulls her knees up to her chest.
“Well, tell him I'd not have made a pass at him if I'd known.”
no subject
Then she speaks, and Marcus understands that silence as a pause, and he sets his scissors aside after a moment to hesitate about it.
"It's alright," he says, a hand cupping her shoulder, "if you're angry with me."
no subject
“For living?”
Yes.
She remembers being angry with him for running. And deciding how she would not speak to him, and then he wasn't there for her to snub and the guilt like a hole in her heart the shape of him. His absence at mealtimes and in lessons and where he was meant to sleep. She had been angry at him, then, and it had felt as if her anger had made it happen.
Her anger can make things happen.
“For seeing him first? He's pretty, I grant you it—”
no subject
But she says this second thing, and he squeezes his shoulder, a gesture that affirms, you're hilarious. Marcus shifts to sit alongside her, points of contact in their closeness. "For whatever you like," he says. "For being out here while you were there, and everything that meant, and means."
It's sort of a curse, being cognizant in dreams, with none of the same power and will that she possesses. Those first few nights, standing on the edge of it, dreaming like a raging storm trapped within a bell jar, willing the glass to break, for some kind of sign—
"I'm sorry," he says.
no subject
she lets herself lean against his side, staring down at her wet toes on wet stone. She has cleaned off every remnant of where she's been except that that she can't see, that burrows inside and stays to be carried with her after whether she wants it there or not. Where she names it or not. It isn't allowed to be a gut wound. She's free, she's here, she's as safe as anyone has the right to ask to be, these days. It's good.
Can't it just be good.
“You didn't know I was alive.” It is an absolution; it is an accusation.
no subject
A different way of saying the same thing, but a distinct difference. Final, as certain as granite. They'd lost so many in so many unique varieties of ways. Why not cut down by Red Templars? Perhaps it was egotistical, to count her among his own personal losses. Perhaps perhaps perhaps, perhaps it was any number of character deficiencies that saw her imprisoned all these years.
Even here, Marcus knows he will work his way back to squaring the blame where it ought to live. It shouldn't be Tsenka's task to help him.
Then, a gentle but still full bodied nudge into her lean. Quiet gratitude, wildly understated, that she is in fact not dead.