strangetrip | [EP] Progress (OTA, Corbie or Curnen)

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[EP] Progress (OTA, Corbie or Curnen)

It was almost December, but the day was still more than warm enough to spend outdoors. So two girls were out in the sunshine, one fair, one dark, aware and amused with each other’s efforts but not particularly paying attention to each other.

Curnen’s fingers were starting to remember what to do with a guitar, though they were still incapable of being fancy. Sitting on the lawn with Rob’s guitar in her lap, she played anything that came to mind. Her sixth fingers were a bit lost, but it did sound like music at least. It would be some time yet before she could really play again, though that didn’t bother her much. If it meant she was scraping herself back together, becoming a Tufa again, it didn’t matter. And besides, the singing was always the best part. She wasn’t sure why this song, since there was no wind and rain, but in many versions of this same song there were two girls colored rather like the two of them.

There were two sisters came walkin' down the stream
Oh the wind and rain
The one behind pushed the other one in
Cryin' oh the dreadful wind and rain

Johnny gave the youngest a gay gold ring
Oh the wind and rain
Didn't give the oldest one anything
Cryin' oh the dreadful wind and rain

Corbie meanwhile was busy setting things on fire again, but this was different fire. Or at least it was for her. She and Regina had been practicing creating fire and putting it out. She set a circle of protection around a small stone, using what she understood of Cabaline theory to keep the spell literally grounded. And then she proceeded to do her best to destroy the shit out of that rock by throwing fireballs at it. It gave her something to aim at, gave her more than one thing to practice at a time. She was getting better at aiming and her ward was holding.

She stopped only to take the ward down and set another one, larger this time, on her knees in the road with a piece of chalk.

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Curnen had thought nothing about that wet, naked hug and she'd probably do it again with just as much fore- and afterthought if in the same situation again.

She considered him quietly for a long moment. He knew she wasn't just some girl, and she hadn't openly lied so much as evaded. It was how she had been raised. It was part of their culture. Tufa kept to their own. But she was the only one here, and weren't these people her own now? Hadn't Coby told her that she didn't need to worry about more than doing what felt right in any given encounter?

Didn't she trust Kash, after what he'd done for her?

Trying to think deeply about most anything made her head hurt, so she made a snap decision. The sweat on his skin gave her the idea. She wasn't going to call up a storm, so she needed a different song. She went with something she'd picked up while they'd had access to that town in Maine. Just her voice, she hadn't heard any accompaniment to learn it.

How soft the breeze through the island trees
Now the ice is far astern
Them native maids, them tropical glades
Is a-waiting our return
Even now their big brown eyes look out
Hoping some fine day to see
Our baggy sails runnin' 'fore the gales
Rolling down to old Maui

Rolling down to Old Maui, me boys
Rolling down to Old Maui
We're homeward bound from the Arctic ground
Rolling down to Old Maui

And the wind did blow, but unlike the gale promised by "Dreadful Wind and Rain," this was soft and gentle, and wouldn't be alarmingly out of place. Indeed, though Corbie was nearby, she didn't so much as look up.

Curnen let out a sigh. That had felt good.

Kash didn't recognize the song, but he rarely recognized any of Shorthalt's either. With bards, the words didn't matter as much as the music or the intention did. He knew that much.

So when the soft breeze blew across his chest and dried his sweat, he waited for the song to finish, then said, "Thanks," without thinking anything of it. Hadn't he said she was a bard?

He did come closer and since he wouldn't sweat on her guitar anymore. "You want some company for a bit?"

"I shouldn't have done that, I shouldn't have done that, I shouldn't have done that," Curnen was muttering under her breath. And truly, she should not. But she could not summon true regret. Only fear that... "Bliss would fucking kill me."

But when Kash offered to keep her company a while, she held out a hand to him. "Please?"

"No one is going to kill you." He wouldn't let that happen. Kash wasn't a noble idiot who went around protecting everyone he met, but he didn't take kindly to people damaging those he'd worked hard to heal.

"Why do you think you shouldn't have done that?" he asked as he sat without taking her hand, but without avoiding it either.

Curnen rubbed her hands over her face, letting the guitar rest against her belly. "Not literally, but my sister'd be really pissed."

She lowered her hands. "I'm not supposed to show anybody I can do things like that."

Not for the first time, Kash wondered at her family. Were they like Zahra and Lillith's and Curnen the only good in the bunch? He almost asked, but decided to let Curnen tell it in her own way.

"Why not? You're a bard. That's what bards do. Make magic from song."

She very nearly smiled at that, but she didn't except for a little twitch at the corner of her mouth. "'Cause for the most part, people in our world don't have magic, and they don't believe in it neither," Curnen explained. "It ain't something they can handle." But there were always exceptions. Rob had been one of them.

Edited 2017-12-02 07:42 (UTC)

"Most people in Exandria don't have magic. Plenty don't like it. But with dragons flying around besieging cities, it's kinda hard not to believe in it." Some managed. In far-off places and small towns. But it was rare they didn't know it was supposed to exist, even if they didn't believe in it.

"I saw you were talking to Vex at the meeting. She and her twin, her boyfriend, Percy, and the white-haired gnome, Pike, are all from Exandria like me. They travel with that bard I told you about."

"She was nice," Curnen confirmed with a nod. "And I know, it ain't weird here, but..." she shrugged awkwardly. "It's how I was raised. And Bliss... she's practically my second mom. She fusses over me, at me, and in my general direction. Somewhere across realities, she's shuddering right now and she don't even know why."

"I never knew my mother." It had been so long ago, Kash felt almost nothing in saying it. His left hand did stray unintentionally to the scars on his right forearm, but it didn't mean anything. "But Bliss can stop fussing. About me anyway. You're okay by me." Which, honestly, wasn't something he said all that often.

"It's a hard habit to break," Curnen admitted. She knew how much she'd broken her sister's heart. "She raised me. She taught me to play, because our granddad didn't have the patience to work with my extra fingers. He was barely patient enough to teach her, and she's amazing. She..." her voice lowered almost to a whisper. "Toward the end, with the curse, she was one of the last people who could still see me. And I wasn't much to see."

"A true sister will follow you anywhere, find you anywhere, save you even at the cost of their own life." Zahra had been that for him. Still was, as creepy as it might sound to someone who didn't get it to call her his sister when they were together, too. "Sounds like Bliss would've seen you if you were invisible."

Curnen nodded. "So when I remember someone like that telling me I can't share these things..."

Kash nodded and reached over to set his hand on her wrist. "Someone like that would forgive you anything you needed to do to thrive." He knew. There was nothing Zahra wouldn't forgive him in a situation like this.

Curnen went still, looking at his hand on her arm. Not because she objected, but because she recognized it was significant that he was willingly touching her. Her lips curved in a tiny smile, and she nodded.

"Maybe." After all, bringing in an outsider had saved her life. "And I think she'd like you." She chewed her lip. "If it really wouldn't alarm your friends, I'll take your word for it. But I'm asking you not to talk about it to anybody else if you don't have to. I'm not ready. 'Cept Coby, Coby knows already."

"It's not my story to tell," Kash demurred immediately. "The only person I'd ask your permission to tell isn't here. The rest of them can learn when you're ready." She'd learn soon enough she could trust them. But maybe...

This was probably the stupidest idea he'd ever had. Familiar laughter echoed in his mind, Zahra's fangs flashing over the time he'd suggested in frustration they just ask Vecna how to get rid of the ziggurat (in his defense, he'd been trying to get her to come to bed at the time). Okay, maybe not.

"We're having this...dinner. To celebrate a winter festival from home. Pike'll probably make us all say we're thankful for something. Then it'll get all emotional and awkward. But it'll just be us." Last week he'd been thinking he'd invite Molly. Now it felt too much like putting a rival in Zahra's space. Curnen was a lot of things, but not that. "Would you want to come?"

Contrary to what anyone who knew the truth of them might think, Tufa did do Christmas. Compared to the length of Curnen's life it was still a fairly new custom, but it was there and even before then winter holidays were important. It was the sort of thing where you keenly felt it when your family weren't about you.

So... yeah. It'd be nice to belong to people. If only for a night. She smiled. "I'd love to."

"Don't say that too quick." But Kash smiled back at her. "Lord Percy and Lady Vexhalia--" he said with only a trace of mockery and a strong dose of teasing. "Are insisting on nice clothes and an actual seating chart."

It struck him as thoroughly ridiculous, but on matters of protocol, 'one did not argue' with nobility. Even when they were family. Yeah, family.

That revelation though only made Curnen look uncomfortable, the smile slipping slowly from her face, her eyes falling to the guitar in her lap.

"What did I say?" Kash knew immediately he had. If Zahra had taught him anything, it was how to know when he'd stuck his foot down his throat.

"It ain't you," Curnen assured him. "I just... I dunno how to do that." Fancy wasn't something that she'd known before the curse, it was something she'd never been taught. Normally her utter lack of sophistication really didn't bother her very much, but this was one of those things where her mother or Bliss would tell her to act like she'd been to town before.

Right. Cursed for fifty years. Kash looked at her steadily. "If they put up with my grumpy ass, they'll love you. You move the floor whenever you feel like it. If anyone says a word, I'll sic Mittens on them."

"... Mittens?" Just saying the word was making her smile.

For the second time in several weeks, the question drew an absurd, but somehow proud, grin from Kash. "My secret weapon," he told her, enjoying the opportunity to make a pretty girl laugh instead of cry.

"Okay, I'll bite," Curnen's gaze lifted toward him. "I known men who named their guns, what the hell kind of weapon is a 'Mittens'?"

[EP] Progress (OTA, Corbie or Curnen)

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