Bakersfield
1 Bakemes, 333
Slavina
Truong's place, the morning after closing the rift:
Early morning light filters through the window lattices to make intricate patterns on the floorboards. Little motes of dust float in and out of sunbeams, flaring gold in the light. The furnishings are of excellent quality (as one would expect of Truong's house), but sparse, and the room's small closet is only about a quarter filled with belongings. A few pieces of clothing hang on the rod, a mirror on the back wall, some small clay pots and combs on the shelf. The rest of it is occupied by a shrine to La Dama: a stone bowl of clear water on a tiny brazier, with a spray of fresh ferns behind it and a thick layer of spun-glass skittles at the bottom of the bowl.
Slavina stands in the middle of the room, not yet fully dressed. She moves gradually through a series of deep stretches and slow-motion acrobatics, immersed so fully in the exercise that she doesn't acknowledge Aaren's presence at first. Once she reaches the end of the sequence, she lets herself roll slowly out of her handstand and sits on the floor. Slavina reaches for a comb and some ribbons, and starts working at her hair.
"Good morning, Renina. What can I do for you?" She asks.
Aaren
"Can I talk to you about stuff? I have a list." The butterflowers nesting in Aaren's hair had taken off for the window at the sight of the sun. They slipped through the lattices, flashes of gold and blue and irridecent shimmering. Aaren's noises clink and rattle and chime as she shifts her head to watch Slavina's hands. "I can comb that for you." Aaren sounds cheerful.
Slavina
"Sure!" Slavina says with enthusiasm. "To both." She clarifies, as she hands over the comb.
Since Aaren's taking over combing, Slavina starts on her makeup - first scrubbing her face clean and then carefully applying bits of stuff from a jar using her fingertips.
Aaren
Aaren steps into the room, shutting the door behind her, and takes the comb. She turns one of her voices to detangling Slavina's hair as her hands get busy teasing out knots. Another voice sings a verson of Vir's song, for grace. "Thanks. I've got four things. Do you want to hear them all at once, or one at a time?"
Slavina
Slavina continues annointing her face as Aaren starts detangling. "Hm. Let's do one at a time. What's first?"
Aaren
Aaren "Item one: Where have you been? And why does your family think you're dead?" She narrows her eyes for a moment in thought, her songs turning more inquisitive, but decides to wait for Slavina's response.
Slavina
The ripple of her skin as she tenses is oh-so-slight, and the disruption of her movements oh-so-small, and both are cleverly diverted by reaching for a knit shawl to drape over her shoulders. "I spent a few years working on a boat on Heartbreak Lake and the Kern river. Then I came to Bakersfield by way of La Dama's springs. I've been here about a year and a half." She rushes through the words a little, in a mix of nerves and other, murkier feelings.
Slavina sets the current jar back on the shelf and selects two more, plus a brush., and begins applying their contents. "I assume they think I'm dead because I dissapeared and haven't contacted them. But I don't know for sure what they thing, seeing as how... you know... I haven't contacted them." She shrugs one shoulder. "It's not like I deliberately faked my death or anything. I think. I'm a little fuzzy on some of the details."
Aaren
"Any idea why Frankie couldn't find you?" Aaren sings to the question song, still working gently on Slavina's hair. "Daina asked him where you were the second year your family came through without you, when they went back to that town they'd left you at and you weren't there. Freaked the piss out of us."
Slavina
"Frankie couldn't find me?" Genuine beffudlement infuses her voice, although Slavina keeps her face perfectly smoothe so she won't mess up her work. It takes a moment of thinking, and then...
"Holy shit," she breathes. "I can't believe...." She sort of trails off and leaves the thought unfinished - possibly by accident. The revelation is profound, and profoundly disturbing. Slavina puts her brush down while she waits for her hands to stop trembling.
Aaren
Aaren waits with practiced pateince. She doesn't even sing the 'go on, talk' song, because they haven't gotten to Item Three yet (which is boundaries). Instead, she finishes combing out Slavina's long black hair and begins putting it up in the complicated nest of braids it had been in yesterday.
Slavina
Slavina's throat works a bit. She takes a deep breath and picks up the brush again, dipping it in the dark paste she uses around the eyes. "I made an unusually significant offering to Ulfynja, along with a request for her and her servants to avert their eyes from me. I guess she listened."
Aaren
"That's a relief." Aaren sings. "Kind of. We were worried you'd vanished to somewhere seriously" and the trill of song that was an abstraction of that nerve-numbing funny bone feeling. Not enough like it to make anyone feel that way, but close enough to give most people the idea.
Slavina
"No. Not really. I was just..." she shrugs, not really able to quantify what she just was. "Remind me to give an offering to Frankie next time he's around. And I'd appreciate it if you didn't mention me to my family. Please."
Aaren
"Sort of guessed you'd feel that way about it." Aaren sings. "Are you going to work your way up to them, then?"
Slavina
"That's the idea. Janin says that's 'the path of spiritual growth La Dama's laid out for me.'" She parrots the last line in Janin's voice. Energy has seeped back into her, both voice and movements, but tinged with a healthy dose of frustration.
Aaren
Aaren wrinkles her nose in sympahty. "Oh gods." She finishes tying up Slavina's hair. "That sounds... annoying." She doesn't really mean annoying so much as agonizing and frustrating, but hey. "Can we help?"
Slavina
Slavina's quiet for a moment except for a grunt of agreement on account of applying her lipstick. "You already are - I think. Probably. I'm using you as a trial run, sort of." She stands up and starts putting on the outfit sitting on the bed, starting with some loose flowy pants.
"Truong was the first test. You guys are a little harder, I had to have Janin come along in case I panicked and bolted. Give it another twenty years and maybe I'll work my way up to a cousin I've never met." She smiles in a self-depracating way.
Aaren
Aaren sings her listening smile, not really agreement but certainly affirmation. Then, after a pause, Aaren cocks her head, making her noises rattle. "So, should I ask you what you were running from?"
Slavina
"Initially?" She shrugs. "I'm not quite sure. Some kind of malevolent spirit." Slavina checks Aaren's braiding in the mirror, makes a few minor adjustments to the drape of her shawl. "It all made perfect sense at the time, but now it has that kind of dream-sense where things don't fit together right and you know you knew things but you're not sure how. So I guess it's most accurate to say I was initially running from a nightmare." She gets into it as she talks, emphasizing and expanding the words with her tone, her gestures.
She paces the length of the room - three paces each way, it's not big - and continues, again with that strange-for-Slavina rushed feeling to the words. "That was only initially, though. Since then I guess I've been running from myself. Which is a loosing proposition, obviously."
Aaren
Aaren is singing her listening song now, sucking up the tones and rythum of Slavina's voice as she is sucking up every other detail. It's been almost ten years, and she'd thought Slavina was worse-than-dead. "Why did you keep running?" Aaren sings the question quietly, as if to slip it unoticed into Slavina's path.
Slavina
Pace... pace... "I screwed up. Big time." She spins abruptly off course to peer out the window-lattice, then sits down on the bed for half a second before she gets up and paces again. "I don't know if they told you about why I was separated from them in the first place. They left me behind with the understanding that I'd bring Atlishya and a baby back with me. I couldn't face coming back with neither, not when it was entirely my fault."
The cadence of her voice, the intensity of emotion... it would be easy to get swept up in if one weren't paying attention to that kind of thing.
Aaren
Aaren sits down on the bed and keeps poking. "What happened?"
Slavina
"Atlishya died, I panicked, I think I went a little crazy, and I tried to kill myself and my baby by jumping in Kern River. I was halfway successful." The bitterness and self-loathing drips off her tongue and slides around the walls.
Aaren
Aaren nods, her face serious, her songs still only listening. But she waits a moment before singing, gently, "What happened to Atlishya?"
Slavina
Slavina huffs a sigh, hangs her shawl back up on its hook. "He had an infection. It may or may not have been exacerbated by a parasitic, malicious spirit. Either way, he died from it."
Aaren
Aaren cocks her head for another moment, then nods. "Alright." Then she waits.
Slavina
Slavina winds herself down some - she's still strung tight as a lute string, but at least she's not vibrating now.
Aaren
"Do you still want to talk about the other items on my list today?" Aaren asks, after Slavina has eased a bit.
Slavina
"Yeah."
She takes a breath.
"Yeah. Sure. What's the next one?"