Pitch

Pitch

Postby Rance » Tue Nov 12, 2019 7:18 am

Waking. Alone. Sweat-drenched. Sour-mouthed. Thumb jabbed against the bridge of her nose. And memories, piece by piece, fall into her: last night's, left far across the canyon of consciousness. Waking clarity forces them into her without warning, and they coalesce. Sounds. Visions. Smells.

In search of light, Elliot Gahald had found her.

* * * *

"Upstairs," she says to him like a breathless heathen—

(It was the Inquisitory; what mattered was that it belonged to Genny)

—and in the chaos of the night, the rustic key hanging upon her necklace — right beside the anvil of her Ruanno Proof — isn't lost. Frantic, drunken, swaying, she jams, jams, jams the key toward its port until she—

(Had to ask him to open it, good man that he was, helpful and patient)

—grabbing the knob, smearing it with mud, sputtering through blood, "Sylvius," like a slurred mantra.

* * * *

She's clawing at herself, like a titan tearing at the mountains of her flesh, until the tattered shirt comes free and falls away from her like a torn bandage. She grinds it into the hearthstones, her whole belly and chest fully immodest and heaving with desperate breath. "She knows nothing. Let her presume, let her chew her own tongue off with all her presumptions, with all her—" she sheds her boots, begins to tug listlessly at her pants, as if locked into some fabric prison, "—self-assured composure, as if she knows, as — if — she — knows!"

She's wholly unclothed now. She teeters with a drunkard's gait. Her eyes flash with wildfire. The anvil and key clatter against her breastbone. She's a brutish figure, now, of brown skin and black hair and curlicues of sweat and mud and she marches for Elliot Gahald until she's so close to him that her nose almost jabs into his eyeteeth.

"She called you that other name. Why did she call you that other name? Why does she think she knows? She doesn't know, she doesn't know, and — and I won't let her; I won't let her speak lies of you."


The fatum burns in her fist, along with the tidbit of wood. She shakes them. She shakes them, and aimlessly proclaims, as if begging the walls and books around them to convince her:

"I know you. I know you, I know you, and — and I always shall. I'll protect you; I'll help you, Elliot. I shall."
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Re: Pitch

Postby Glenn » Wed Nov 13, 2019 1:09 am

He did his best. His best was a damn sight better than many's. Why? Because it was artificial. He was made to be better. He was made to be something out of a story and stories always had smoother edges than real life. That was then and this is now and his smooth edges had crumbled; it could have left something sharp, jagged, dangerous, but instead it left something soft and shapeless, blemishes on his personality to match those upon his skin. Most situations highlighted these so clearly; just ask the raven. This, though? Being a shield against malice, being a mule to carry a load? Those were two of the things he could still manage instinctively.

Everything became all the harder when he actually accomplished his goal. The wraith-woman withdrew. Gloria Wynsee was carried to safety, relative safety at least. The Inquisitory was a fine place for her. That they tracked mud all over papers was unfortunate, but in a pique of with, he noted that the papers were probably already dirty in the first place. It was okay that she didn't respond to that insight. It was probably professionally insulting, though he meant no insult. That was why he avoided wit when he could. He meant to insult no one at all (The beautiful should be revered and the ugly should be lifted up). Better to complete his task.

She had asked him to leave, to find this person or that, a Sylvius. Did he know a Sylvius? He wasn't sure. It had been many years and certain memories crumbled at the touch. He should have left. Even if he knew this Sylvius, however, he would not have left her. Not yet. She wasn't safe yet. She wasn't well enough yet. Moreover, he had no idea what was going on, which, while ingrained within him to be a perfectly acceptable state of being, chafed quite a bit more when one was covered with mud. One or just him? Him or the him he was made to be? No, best not to leave.

In the face of what had emerged from her clothes and what advanced on him now, better to stick to discipline and answers to questions. His arms remained at his side, his one eye gazing just above her head. "I saw someone in the Dagger, the one, one time I went back there. A boy, selling dead birds. He called me that, Tristam. Not Tristan, which would be a more proper name, but Tristam. As strange as it sounds, I have to assume that the boy was her? Maybe her son? Probably her?" What did he know about her? About any of this? What was in stories, of course.
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Re: Pitch

Postby Rance » Wed Nov 13, 2019 5:11 am

Selling dead birds?

That sticks out at her. Lunges at her. There's an image that springs to life in her head: dead ravens, dead ravens, dead ravens, then dead dogs, dead children, eleven dead children, and—

She crushes her wrist against her mouth, denying nausea.

"A foolish boy's clumsy tongue does not define you. You're only Tristram if—"

She doesn't care to stand before him uncovered. That is Jernoah. That is Gloria. Imperfection is written by sand on her skin, places where pockmarks had been burned into her by hot specks of glass, or where flesh stretches, mottled by time. Loose skin around the hips, tightness at the ribs, berms under her arms. A mutilated hand desperate to busy itself grabs restlessly at the clotted lumps of her hair and tugs and rakes at it, a process of cleanliness or strange obsession. She sweats. It gleams in the divot beneath her hawkish nose. "Unless," she reasons, "you desire to be Tristram. She plays trickeries on the mind, that creature; she comes to our home and — and demands we bend our being to accommodate her."

Her hand lowers, lands a blow upon her thigh.

"We know the dangers in such a thing. When others demand we be what we are
not."

Perhaps he knows it more than others. Perhaps he never cares. She does. She paces back and forth, burning-hot, her brain barreling at wild, unconstrained speed. She snares a canteen from the bedstead, uncorks it, drinks it frantically. Old water. It gleams on her chin. "You can be whatever you like, Elliot. You can — can be a knight or a hero. You could be a landowner or a carpenter. If so desired, you could be a fair lady's hand, or the lady herself.

"But you choose it.
You choose. No boy on the street, no beast in the woods."

Closes her eyes. Tight-knit. Fighting tears not of emotion, but of exhaustion. Trying to breathe her way to balance and clarity.

"How did you find me," she asks.
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Re: Pitch

Postby Glenn » Thu Nov 14, 2019 1:32 am

He listens. Listening to women (though generally to one's betters) was something he was made to do. He stands and he listens and his face might well be marble for all of the fevered emotion she flings about. She begins a thought, amends her path, returns back to the first, and he stands like a sign in the road that she is left to squint at as she meanders in circles. Finally, when she's sufficiently finished, has gone so far to ask him a question, he relaxes slightly, his attention, which had been just above her forehead, safely above her hair and everything beneath, slips to a spot slightly lower, a spot right between her eyes; he lacked the luxury of meeting both and the wherewithal to choose one or the other.

"I told him then, and I'd tell her later, and I'll tell you now, Gloria," and there wasn't even a stumble for a Miss Wynsee; frankly, she wasn't a Miss Wynsee right now, and it would have been insulting to both of them, and to the Miss Wynsee who had met him not that long ago, to suggest otherwise. Gloria she wanted and Gloria she'd be, "that Tristam, with an m, isn't a proper name. My Ma wouldn't like it. Tristan is a name. I'm sure it's a fine name. It's not my name. We all agree that I'm an Elliot, I think. We living, the dead, everyone." The Elliot? Maybe that was a different story, and he didn't want to poke that bear, certainly not now. Brown or Gahald? Well, he didn't much feel like either anymore (generally; this last day had been pretty good for him feeling like the latter), but there were other colors and time enough to work it out.

Then, even as his shoulders sank, if only a little. "It would be easy, would even feel right, to let someone else name me, but that seems about the worst thing I could do. It's a sort of cowardice I can't stomach." That didn't seem quite right, though, and a slight frown edged onto his face. "Scares me to do it, scares me not to, though it ashamed me to admit either and both. I'm just going to stick with Elliot now, if it's alright to you."

That finally brought them to her question. "Gloria, I can understand how you might feel, but I think I'm the one who ought to be asking the questions, especially because the answer to my question is that a talking bird led me to you and maybe your answers will make more sense. She accused you of things, Gloria. I defended you, best I could. I meant what I said, but do you remember what that was? Was I right or was I wrong?"
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Re: Pitch

Postby Rance » Thu Nov 14, 2019 2:37 am

She stares at him. She cannot help but stare at him. The words that come next are quiet, more quiet than perhaps she has ever been in the presence of another. These words beg her own patience. Yet, they tremble. With rage. Not a loud and bombastic fury, but an exhausted anger: she tires of it, and it tires of her. "I have performed," she says, breathing with power, breath in, breath out, "a heinous act — committed five years in our past. But tonight, I can only ask for your decency, Elliot: I was driven to it by a force I do not have the language to explain, let alone understand, but I do not awaken a morning without absolute disgust. For myself. At myself. I ask that for now, as we stand—" she says, "—you allow that pain to be enough punishment."

Her fist strikes her breastbone, as if seeking to pierce the hard carapace of brown Jernoan skin and browner Jernoan bone. Or perhaps seeking to make her heart stutter, as a reminder that it yet exists.

"But do not stand there, on a night you find me at another creature's mercy, on a night you intervened for someone who hopes you consider her a friend, and ask me to justify whether you were right to act, or wrong to act. The one you believe is — is what matters. Would anything she have said urged you to turn to face me as an enemy? Would you have seen me perish in a pit? Would you find righteousness in that?"

The sandrose has all but lost its touch. She shivers with cold, though her flesh pours black sweat. She scrambles at the bedside for a cleansing-rag and begins to wipe and dab at the filth upon her cheek. That task, too, becomes tiresome. She drops to sit upon the edge of the hay-stuffed mattress and slumps like a melted candle. Inert, the mountainous woman does not move, but only stares at her fist, until,
until

It tightens. Then, a burst of noise, a shout drawn from the depths of her empty stomach, and she batters the headboard with her fist. The blows bellow against the ornate wood. Four smears of blood grow like blossoms on her knuckles, on the oak.
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Re: Pitch

Postby Glenn » Thu Nov 14, 2019 5:51 am

What a strange place, Myrken Wood. What a strange, odd world in which they lived. Things should be simple. Language should be simple. A happened because of B. A force moved me. He tried to see the world as a simple place, but there was nothing simple about that sentence. Was it magic? Emotion? Bestial instinct? What moved him? Did he not feel strings pulling this way and that all the time? When he questioned them, were they not the very height of reason or nobility? When someone else questioned them, however, or when he compared them instead of looking at them all on their own...

"Gloria," he did not interject. He waited, instead. He waited until she was done, waited upon this woman who had, within her, the impetus to never, ever be done, who had inexhaustible depths and unquenchable thirst, all tempered only by the fatigue of a thousand disappointments, and as he said to the being earlier, more than half of which stemmed of herself.

Eventually, though, she was done, and while he did not interject, he did speak. Her words had been hot. His were steady, veering on apologetic but never quite falling in. "More than anything, I want to understand what happened. Maybe we can get to why, but I don't even know what." That frown tugged down at his lips, his eye straining to see a truth that could only be heard. "A talking bird bid me to save you, of all people, from a woman who had been a boy when she, he, it last saw me, and you were in a pit that was barely a pit, having trespassed for reasons you don't seem to understand and having, having transgressed," his voice threatened to falter here, even as he found the correct word, "in some way that doesn't have anything to do with the situation at hand."

He was still capable of exasperation, and it, more than anything else, showed the spark of the boy he used to be. "I can believe in justice in this world, Gloria, but you're right in that it's never in a pit in the middle of the woods. As for the rest, I don't even understand the what, let alone the why or the, the so what."
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Re: Pitch

Postby Rance » Thu Nov 14, 2019 7:22 am

Lashing out comforts her. It is her balm. With pain, the world makes sense: all the unsure colors drift away, and she is left with black, with white, with delineations and borders that instruct and limitation. Cradling her battered hand against herself, the warmth she seeks rests within. And yet, even with her bloodied fist pressed against her breast, she finds nothing but chill. The wood, the bolts of the bed, they moan; she rocks herself like some dull child, and snaps at him from behind the brambles of her hair. "The pit was a pit was a pit! Can Gloria's eyes be enough? Can what she feels and — and experiences be true enough, for now, without being reduced? A woman can drown in an inch of water if she is incapable of lifting her head! A needle driven through the eye can kill as swift as a soldier's blade.

"Call it a pit that was not a pit, or a trench, or — or a divot if you will, but it could have very easily been my grave."

Silence, now. Long moments. She knows the retort is out of line, but knowing such neither softens her breath nor ceases her fidgeting. Hand resumes its raking through her hair. The muscles in her legs and thighs cinch, loosen, cinch, loosen, as if testing their readiness, in any moment, to spring.

"I trespassed," Gloria says, softening her voice once again, "on nothing. There is no deed for any property within those woods. Check the Meetinghouse records if — if you will, or ask
Messa McKinnon to verify the fact. I entered those woods on Inquisitory business. That woman, that thing and all her trickery, she breeds poisons there. I investigated. I discovered. But her interest in my destruction is purely her own."

She cannot look at him. He asks worthwhile questions, and upon the edge of her tongue is an ever-present sprig of offense, a blossom of noise ready to grow into fury. In her gut, tucked just between that place where stomach meets lungs, lingers a cruel and screwing tightness, like a nail being driven into an organ. Tension. Sickness. The room compresses, but he's outside of it, well beyond its confines. She grips at a woolen blanket, drags it to herself, clutches it violently beneath her chin.

Modest again. Covered. Staring at some distant point in the room, where shadows meet a knot in the grainy wood.

"I'm sorry," is all she says, hoping the words are enough.
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Re: Pitch

Postby Glenn » Fri Nov 15, 2019 1:03 am

She lashed and he did not rush to her side, did not snatch at her hands. He watched, he listened, and eventually, yes, he spoke. He let her have her pique. He did not interfere. He did not interject. She may have beaten the wall to death, beaten herself to death and would he have stopped her? Where in any chivalric code did it say that you had to save someone from herself? "You were in danger," he agreed, finally, wincing only slightly when she mentioned the eye. "I am glad to see that you are now safe." The wince had been a brief thing and his words, though plain and uninteresting, sounded earnest enough. He was likely glad. He had no reason not to be glad. There was no reason to think he wouldn't be glad. Her being out of a pit was preferable to her being in a pit. This was, of course, the basest, shallowest (the pit was deeper), least assuming and least offensive notion of friendship and fellowship. It was hardly anything really.

The silence was more meaningful without it.

He had endured her outburst, stood ready to endure her vitriol. Had he been made for such secret moments? Such moments of weakness and wrath, to witness abuse, to take it, to say nothing, to not judge except for kindly. Just what use had Rhaena Olwak, mad, wrathful, spiteful, petty, powerful, intended for him in a world where she no longer faced any real threat?

"If you tell me that you meant no harm, I believe you. I do not think you would lie to me about your intentions." His voice was calm and measured. This? This was easy, easy enough at least. It was about her, about factual things that happened. It was not about disappearing red women or pits that were not pits. It was about what was done and what it happened. "If you tell me that you think you broke no law, I believe you. You know the laws of Myrken Wood better than I." This was more mercy than kindness, but it was also clear and simple, not overthought, barely thought at all. Steady, even in the face of barely covered indecency, of rage exhausted through fury, "You need not say sorry, Gloria. Not for tonight, not for simply doing what you thought was right, or you duty. Not for needing to be saved. It's my duty to save people, just as it was your duty to investigate those woods." He knew how it sounded, maybe not completely, but a little, enough. He said it anyway, because it was true. "As for the rest, that's all bigger than me, isn't it? Whatever you did five years ago, I cannot, cannot remedy." Standing to arcane threats was one thing. Pulling women out of ditches was one thing. Enduring the wrath of women, one thing as well. Now that the storm had cleared, however, now that the silence remained, he was not sure what else he could do. "You mentioned names. If I can help more, I will, of course, Gloria."
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Re: Pitch

Postby Rance » Fri Nov 15, 2019 2:33 am

"I am safe because of you."

It's with no external disdain that she admits this, though the words bring acid to her belly. She draws in a breath of the woolen blanket, feeling its fibers scrape across her nose, imagining the scents within it: wondering if that's Genny, or memories, or imagination. She cannot close her eyes for long. There, in the darkness behind her eyelids, the sandrose still leaves traces of its images, still dares her with vague nightmares and created terrors. The risk of heightening one's senses in that Jernoan fashion? The chance that the senses themselves could neither tell threat from comfort, nor spark from fire.

Her heart races still. Her legs twist, turn, wrestle one another beneath the blanket's edge, and her toes scrape across one another, as if in constant combat with their neighbors. Restlessness. Unspent energy.

"I should not require saving. An oversight," she says, "of my zeal. While I may have personal matters to attend to with that creature, I went into those trees tonight with no intention to do harm. My knife remained here." Too many times, men and women under the sandrose's influence found themselves far too engaged by their curiosity of a blade: by its taste, by its effect — on others, on themselves. "Her associates have done her a — a grave injustice. Beings of power, whether in possession of it or seeking it, do not live long in Myrken Wood.

"It becomes far more dangerous for them than for us. We have proved ourselves a machine far too efficient at grinding beings of — of malice into dust. Perhaps that—" Up, now, springing back to a fully-erect seated position upon the bed, it's as though the woman's in the throes of some revelation. "
That is our greatest export. Isn't that keen? We murder pride. Theirs. Ours. A resource that needs neither be mined like ore nor — nor picked like berries!" She laughs, but it rings humorless. Her eyes still see distant mirages, and when they finally go back to Elliot's, it's as though she's seeing two of him, or ten of him.

"Sylvius understands. Duquesne. He knows me. He knows the extent of my cruelties and how to find my goodness despite them. Seek him out if you want. I need him, always. Here, now, come sit — and let me see your eye. I see it, now."

Her throat spasms. She pats the edge of the bed. To invite him.

"I need you too, Elliot. As my friend. If you want to be needed."
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Re: Pitch

Postby Glenn » Fri Nov 15, 2019 2:27 pm

Gloria Wynsee had so, so much to say. Even now. Especially now. She had been more patient with him during their last meeting. He hardly blamed her now, but it was a lot to follow, a lot to think through, a lot to respond to. More than he could begin to manage. So as she spoke, he said nothing at all, and as she finished, patting the bed beside her, he answered as only he could. "I am your friend, and it is not a need, not an obligation, but instead a choice, but I am going to be your friend over here, if it is alright." She was decent, but only relative to her state a few minutes before. He had so little now that he was reluctant to release his tight grasp on propriety; that meant it would keep such a grasp upon him as well.

"As for the rest, I am afraid to admit that..." He had not drawn closer, and no smile had graced his face with the admission of friendship. He certainly did not smile now; in fact, his voice dripped with a reluctant hesitation. "You are sharp, Gloria. Smart, maybe the smartest person I know," though of course she was the only person he was currently speaking with so regularly, "I don't understand why you would go into the woods, on the trail of a crime, with no guard and no weapon?" If anything, she was one to be overcautious, to suspect too much, not too little.

All of this very much brought him back to his initial concerns. "Plus, if you know her, then you must have known she was magic. I don't know her, or her associates." He did not know much about how Myrken could devour pride. Of course he didn't, for Myrken had destroyed him already because of his own pride. There was very little of that left to remember and perhaps less to understand. "I would appreciate understanding more of what I saw and what I felt and why a bird spoke to me," for it seemed more embarrassing by the moment that she seemed to expect him to. "Nor, I think, do I know this Sylvius Duquesne, but I am glad to seek him out if that would be of assistance to you."

Then, and only then, with all that said, with her words finally responded to, did he walk forward, reaching the bed but not sitting upon it. "I'm not sure that this is the right time to look at my eye, Gloria."
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Re: Pitch

Postby Rance » Sun Nov 17, 2019 8:06 am

"Just because it isn't the right time," she reasons, "doesn't mean it's not time. Do not be afraid to be like me, Elliot—"

Missing pieces. Whole-but-not.

Has she ever truly looked upon him, this gifted face of his, for more than a few moments at a time? Now, though, she seems to have all the energy for it, pinning him from afar with an augur's gaze. What secrets would she find in that pit, that blemish, that damage? "When," she begins her answer, "have you ever taken me to be reliant upon — upon a sharpened edge to do whatever work I must? I trust in my fist more than I ever will any weapon. If a creature wishes to do me damage, it shall do it with or without I have a knife to wave. If it comforts you to know: I didn't go into those woods to seek out her, nor did I anticipate coming into contact with her.

"I was, for a time—" She flexes her lone hand into a fist, then loosens it, and clutches nothing again, as if gripping the air for words, "—
compromised. I took a brew to — to enhance my mind, for there are a great number of acres in those woods and one's eyes are often too narrow to find so delicate a needle. A necessary risk to reduce wasted time. I had no reason to believe she'd made an industry of trapping women in pits.

"But here we are," Gloria says, if lightly. "Here we are."

If he was not Elliot Gahald, she might confuse this for an interrogation: the presumption that she's somehow to blame for the circumstance. His, however, is an innocuous curiosity. A silent plea to be told, informed, and provided investment. It does her little good to be a continued source for his discomfort. She jerks her chin toward a footlocker across the way, a wooden antique scarred and battered by years of movement from one room to the next. "In there, I've a dressing-gown. Would you, please—?"

She sucks on her split knuckles. Feeling the sting. Alive.

"What bird spoke to you? And when you mean what you
felt, can you explain it?"
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Re: Pitch

Postby Glenn » Mon Nov 18, 2019 12:58 am

Would you have asked Rhaena Olwak her intentions during that last year, she would have responded in earnestness, if not honesty, that she was creating a new Myrken where everyone might fit. There were limits to her power, though in time and with adulation, there would have been less and less. Not everyone could be woven into the tapestry, some not at first and some not ever. Social cues, rewards and punishments (in truth, mob mentality), were meant to fit the gaps and over the brief, horrific time of her rise, it seemed like they may have been enough. The truth was something different, something about an abhorrence, an allergy really, to those things that annoyed her. Now, though, many years removed, the tapestry was naught but ashes, and yet the truth matters no more than it did then. There were a few scraps remaining, people forever changed, never recovered. In general, they were honed towards success, a frightening notion considering what she had become.

Gahald, however, simply frayed at the edges. "The way you speak sometimes, Gloria," he noted, clenching his eye, trying to find a center, a focus. "Even when you are at your best, and we can admit together that you are not right now. It is with such familiarity to the world." He strained for these words, but he did not retreat from them. It just took a bit longer, if she was to be patient with him. "You are you and if you are ever anything else, it seems to be for a purpose. A sword and a shield and a shroud." Only two of those things did he truly understand. "You expect us to just accept that. In my memories, we were never quite so close. You were Lady Olwak's student or apprentice or something like that," for he would never quite be able to grasp the false but desired word, supplicant. "I didn't know you when I was young, before it all happened, because you weren't here." There was no room in the tapestry for a rambunctious Elliot Brown to run about Myrken and crash and clash into a newly arrived Gloria Wynsee arguing about Myrkenite vs Myrkener and whatever else. "You are very careless with the word friend. I do not mind it. It is refreshing despite how little you seemed to want it back during that summer when I would have been more than happy by it. It is just strange."

As was that interlude, between matters of business, but so little had they spoken and so much did she just take as assumed, as if she knew everything about him and he was to know so much about her. "It was a talking bird." He repeated even as he retreated to the footlocker, there being some modicum of safety in the distance between them after his words. He opened it, though not as carefully as one might expect; perhaps it was that he was stronger than he knew and perhaps it was something else entirely. He took more care with the belongings inside, some of which not of his typical handling. "I couldn't tell you what sort. It wasn't an eagle or a hawk or a falcon, nothing like that. Probably bigger than a sparrow or a dove though? Dark, not light." Then, a pause of his entire body, as if he could not handle all of these conflicting demands upon him at once, searching, speaking, listening, remembering. "He didn't think much of me."
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Re: Pitch

Postby Rance » Mon Nov 18, 2019 11:19 am

"There is no way we could have ever been friends, then. It would have damaged you. It would have damaged me. Now would have never been possible. But...is it strange?" She mulls over the word, then jerks her head sharply to the side, as if shaking it away. "I hesitate to call it strange. And I hesitate to call it careless — or rather, to say that I alone am careless. Befriending me, Elliot, is an exercise in personal danger, a covenant entered at your own risk." She tries to smile. It struggles. Sometimes she cannot find them; sometimes she forgets how. "I recognized only too late that you needed friends. And I recognized too late that I did, too."

The inside of the trunk, for all that Gloria Wynsee was a element of chaos, might have been unexpected: its contents had been organized with a stunning meticulousness. Seven books tucked into the lowest edge from smallest to largest perfectly filled the space left by a pair of battered clogs and crumpled riding boots. Dresses, legged drawers, and blouses formed a distinct, perfectly-folded square, from which stuck the tongue of a dressing-gown sleeve. All manners of other tiny belongings peppered pockets and nets within: a bag of coins and buttons, a cast-iron pan, a bundle of untrimmed candles, and an abandoned prosthetic: a fist carved from cherry — her whole world all measured and compressed into this well-manicured space.

And letters. So many letters. Bound by sinew, tight-packed. Like several bricks of parchment.

She keeps all of them.

The shroud, though. He gives her something to latch onto with this, her disjointed mind, her winnowing thoughts. Sometimes distant, sometimes near. "Does — does all of this make you think I've befriended you out of purpose alone, Elliot? That my earnestness to know you is not genuinely mine, or anything other than authentic?"

It's a tall task to banter philosophy and identity with Elliot Gahald, the boy-who-was-not, the boy-who-used-to-be. But she's finding it easier to look at his face as he fills it out, makes it his own, forms it from thoughts and ideas burning in his brain like embers abandoned after a long-tended fire.

You are responsible for him. For this place. For what he wants it to be. What he needs it to be.

"I — I knew of no bird. I saw nothing, not in that darkness. Did you trust it? Did it frighten you, to see such an impossible thing?"
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Rance
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Re: Pitch

Postby Glenn » Thu Nov 21, 2019 2:00 am

"Currently," her attempt at a smile is noted and welcomed, and it is not alone. His come more easily, perhaps, but with a color that was muted at best. The notion of their friendship may not be strange, but his smile certainly was. It is an expression made despite things and not because of them, yet it is one made often enough to be impactful. "I have little outside of what you see. I require little more, but that does not mean I would find having more unpleasant." Something tugged at his voice, however, something lingering. Little was not nothing and something was still missing, something that he veered away from in order to voice a cliche instead. "Friends are of great value, Gloria."

Regardless, when he turned back with the gown, it seemed he had purchased it from the trunk at the cost of the strange smile. Was it something he had seen within? Was it something she had said? Was it something he did? "We have our duties, Gloria. That's all. I do not know you well enough to know where duty ends. I was taught that it should never end, but well, you know," and he did not wish to say it aloud; it, in this case could have been many dozen things and even a single one of them could have sent his entire sense of being spiraling once more.

Instead, he walked towards her, handed her the gown with gentleness and care. Handling clothes was something he had been trained to do, apparently. There was a sense of sudden purpose beaming from that one focused eye. In refusing to face one challenge, a primal challenge, he had instead decided to meet a more temporal one. "I was happy to help you tonight, Gloria, if maybe somewhat confused. I am happy to receive your help when and where I need it. The bird did not frighten me, though I thought I may be mad. That did not frighten me either, not really. There are things in this world that do frighten me, however, but I know we must face our fears. We need not face them alone, though."

Gahald built it and built it, stumbled around it. "Gloria, I have very little, but I did once have more." He did not look away, though he may well have wanted to. He became more still and not less. Instead of fidgeting, he seemed almost at martial attention. He swallowed hard before continuing. "I am ashamed to admit it, but more than any talking bird or lady of magic, I am afraid to face young Cherny, to express to him my current doubts and feelings, to tell him of what I have discovered. Will you help in this? Please?"
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Re: Pitch

Postby Rance » Thu Nov 21, 2019 3:17 am

Cherny.

A name that visibly strikes her. She sucks in a hissing breath, pausing halfway through the donning of the dressing-gown, though perhaps that pain could have easily been attributed to some ache in her shoulders, some twinge in her rib. She's a woman again when the gown covers her: smaller, it seems, the way the world might want her to be. Meager, but never lesser. She scoops her hair from the collar of the garment, then glances fully at him through coils of black-and-ash. "If I know Cherny—" she did; she had. "if I know Cherny, he'd loathe the idea that you might fear him, whether it be him or his retribution or his disappointment. And he'd tell you the right of it: what you must hear, and what you should hear. And he'd—"

She smiles. For a moment, she's somewhere else.

"He'd certainly give you that righteous way of it, like an old mother. But I think what you fear most, Elliot, is how you shall feel in seeing him. Opening that pit — the one right here." She taps militantly at the divot beneath breast and above belly. "Facing that you've somehow done something wrong, or abandoned him. Of course, you've done neither, but the mind refuses to agree with such a fact. If I know Cherny," proclaims Gloria again, "he'd be happier to see you and know your truth than to never know at all."

She stands and makes her way to a small basin filled with stagnant water. There, a porous stone sits beside, and she lifts it, brushes it with her thumb, then begins to scrub intently at her cheek, at her neck, freeing herself of the pit's dirt. Water diffuses into the fabric of the wrinkled gown, diluting black sweat.

He smiles, but turned away from him, she doesn't. For the moment, she finds herself unable to look at him. Her throat spasms. This hurts. It hurts.

Cherny.

"If you want me to — to help, I'd be delighted. Cherny means the world to me. Perhaps he does not think so anymore, and perhaps he's outgrown me, but if he means something to you, Elliot, then we shouldn't tarry. Your heart deserves softness, too."

In the murky water of the washing-basin, she sees herself distorted and cloudy, cheeks and hawkish nose just brown smears in the water and her bristling black hair an unkempt frame. She dips the stone, casting out ripples. Gloria likes it better when she can't see herself. It's easier. This, she realizes, is something she can do. To be his shield. To be there. To let what she's done protect someone else. In her shadow, Elliot Gahald is gold.

"Let's not face this fear alone. How is it you wish I should help?”
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