strangetrip | [EP] Change and desperation

Being a woman and not a First Daughter, Curnen knew nothing of the men's mysteries of her community. She did not know the words of the Silent Sons, "Silence is more musical than any song." But when Kash disappeared from her life, he who had given her songs back to her... she could think of no better way to mourn. What song was there? He had not been her love, but he had been more than her friend. And her utter fucking joy at not having to keep an eye out for Zahra, at being able to move freely in their small space again, made everything even more confusing. So when out and about, for weeks there had been no singing. No playing. No whistling, no humming, no dancing, not so much as idle tapping on a table. She did not forbid herself to speak, but it was rare, if she wasn't spoken to first.

In public at least. In the privacy of her room she threw herself into a project she had been cobbling for some months now, but this it seemed was the final push she needed to see it through. She told Coby, when she realized she really needed a man's voice for the last piece, but even he was not privy to the whole of the project.

No one would have known until the flyers went up a few days before she planned to do it. "Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation" they promised. Not quite horror stories, but a story hour for the time of year. She had never performed a whole set by herself at the inn before. Kash would have told her to be brave. If it was time. If she was ready. And now, she really thought she was.

Saturday night, Curnen put on her good dress (and still no shoes) and played for the dinner crowd. She didn't expect everyone--or even anyone--to deliberately come and stay through the whole thing. Indeed, she tried not to pay attention to that, the comings and goings of faces. She sang for the audience she had. Between songs she flirted, she charmed, she teased, and she taught, explaining what pieces were and where they had come from.

Beginning with a song that could sound perfectly innocent if not for the unease infused through the arrangement and her voice, Curnen progressed through a series of tragedies and murder ballads. At the seventh and center piece she set her guitar aside and sang unaccompanied, and this was the first admission after a kind. Though she did not think anyone in the audience had the language. She explained neither before nor after what the words meant.

The center of this labyrinth wasn't the heart, though. They proceeded there next. These four songs were chosen not just for their nature, but also because each one them touched on something of Curnen's life--her curse, her losses, her trials. For anyone who had not heard the story from her already there was nothing to make it obvious. But there was something there in the increasing wildness of her eyes, in the edge in her voice. In the way she swapped a guitar for a bodhran when she came to the heart of it.

"I know least one of y'all's impatiently wondering, 'Curnen, honey, what's the worst story you know? Just tell us that and get it over with.' All right." And she told them. And she didn't die in the telling.

The twelfth song was a break, to dispel some of that dark energy. At the thirteenth she had Coby join her on guitar while she drummed, and the two of them passed "The Ballad of Tam Lin" back and forth between them.

She could not say what compelled her toward the end, when she took up the words of the fairy queen in her mouth. By now, she had done a handful of things that no ordinary girl could or should be able to do, but no one had been able to pin down and put a word to what she was. She told them as best she could now, in the way the room went colder, in the way her eyes went black from end to end, in the way her voice crashed like bells and broken glass, in the ghost of glamour wings (for still, still her own eluded her) for just those verses to show the queen's icy rage.

Then she was herself again, and the song ended. Curnen grinned. "Happy Halloween. Tip your waitress." And it took everything in her not to stumble away from the stage. Bliss would have killed her, and Curnen was terrified and defiant all at once, but also lighter for it. She had not said the word 'fairy.' But she had shown them. Maybe they'd be fine. Maybe they'd stone her. Only way to find out was talk to anybody with a thing to say.

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"Well, you're you, so it's got to be good, yeah?" Jag worked it out as he spoke, slowly and unsteadily, but once he'd said it, it made perfect sense. He reached out and brushed his hand on her shoulder, because gestures made things clear a lot more easily than words.

Still, he had to ask, because he needed to know, even if he wasn't sure he wanted to, "Are you Fae?"

Even if she'd had a mind to do it, Curnen couldn't lie about it when she was asked so directly. "Yes."

Right, all right. That was... a bit to take in. But it didn't change who she was, it only meant that... "I'd grown convinced all of them were proper arseholes. I guess I was wrong."

"You ain't too wrong," Curnen murmured, suppressing a shudder. The memories of her father were too close, had been too close from the first song. The Royal Forester ended a lot better--in theory--than anything to do with Rockhouse, but his shadow had still hung over the performance from beginning to end. "But no. We ain't all like that."

Jag nodded along to her words, and reached out again, fingers brushing her forearm, before tangling with hers, if she let him. He'd grown so familiar with the feeling of her six-fingered hand in his, and it made everything easier, holding her hand now. "Okay," he simply said, and gave her a small smile. "The show really was amazing."

It was that hand taking hers that allowed Curnen to believe that this wasn't going completely to hell right before her eyes, and she squeezed Jag's hand back and let herself breathe a sigh of relief. "Okay."

Then she smiled back, shyly pleased. "Thank you. I'd been wanting to do that for a long time, I just..."

Why couldn't she have had the balls to do it while Kash was still here?

"Yeah," Jag nodded. He thought he understood at least some of the reason for that delay. Some things it was easy to come out about. Others you needed to build up to, or get a push, or... "I'm glad you did."

She nodded. All the same... "I didn't know how to tell you. I would have, if I did."

"You did," Jag pointed out, with a hint of an encouraging smile. "You just have." They all had truths they didn't know how to share, until they did. Fuck, he had so many of them, things he'd only told his Em, and only partly. And Curnen hadn't owed him this. He was glad she'd told him, but he didn't begrudge her the time it took; she could have never told him, too. She would still be Curnen.

"I guess I did," she agreed with a small smile of her own before she just hugged him. "Thanks for not being a dick about this." Not that Curnen wouldn't understand. She understood with everyone she'd told why it made them uneasy. It was just always hard knowing that with one little sentence she could destroy the only friendships she had in a place where they were all trapped with each other.

That hug did wonders for Jag, who wrapped his arms around her and relaxed into the familiarity of proximity to her. "Thanks for telling me. Us. All of us," he settled on, amused.

"I kinda can't believe I did," Curnen admitted with a nervous little laugh. "My sister'd kill me for doing something that flashy and dumb."

"I reckon being stuck here's as good an excuse as any for any dumb shit we might pull," Jag pointed out. He squeezed her tighter for a second, then pulled back from the hug, but stayed close and tangled their fingers again.

"Ain't that the truth," Curnen agreed.

She wouldn't admit it to anyone, even and especially herself, but she knew and feared a future where everyone here had died of old age and she went slowly mad by herself. That fear was something she couldn't look at head-on for anything, but the shadow of it made her understand completely. "Though I've watched it make you go the other way." Fading. Washing out.

"Doing smart shit only?" Jag asked, tilting his head to the side curiously. He was quite sure that wasn't what she meant, so he was really asking about what she did mean.

Curnen shook her head. "You..." and then she knew what words she was looking for, "your flame is going dim."

Jag had stubbornly decided that her 'you' had been the general sort, but there she went. And putting it that way, at that. Something caught in his throat, flashed in his eyes. I'm all right, he wanted to say, but she already knew that he wasn't. "I'm doing my best," he told her, quietly, something in his eyes pleading for her not to push.

"We all are," Curnen answered quietly. But that look in his eyes... she didn't go further. She lowered her gaze.

"I will be fine," he told her, hating the way she looked down. "We can't be stuck here forever." The thought of it was enough to press down on his chest.

"Well," she said, lifting one shoulder in a shrug, "I'm here if you're not. For what that's worth."

He gave her a small smile. "Right back at you."

[EP] Change and desperation

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