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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Corbie surprised herself when she realized she had tears welling up even before she'd opened her mouth to say, 'no really, I'm fine.' "Oh..." She took a breath and blinked, brushing them away. "Um. Maybe."

Vax's dark eyes softened, a touch of concern come easily to crease his face as if the expression were never far from it. He swept his feathered cloak so he could sit with a practiced flex of his hand, and crisscrossed his legs where he sat down beside her. "Okay. You let me know when you decide."

He didn't know her, hardly, though she was friendly enough. They had seen one another around, but not stopped to talk much. Because they were so different, maybe. It could be most other people here knew Corbie just the same.

And when he stopped to think of it like that, watching the struggle on her face... He reached over, on an impulse, to rest a gloved hand gently on her back.

Corbie had not actually known she was going to say anything, given that all of the options she came up with sounded far too much like whining. She didn't want to say no one has time for me when Vax was specifically doing that thing, and she dismissed anything about not being liked or cared about out of hand because she knew that wasn't true. People liked her. People would care if something happened to her. But...

And then his hand touched her back and she cracked. "I don't fit anywhere."

That would do.

"I always assumed you'd made friends with the other magical sorts here," Vax admitted after a moment. "Haven't you?"

"Kind of." Corbie shrugged. "Compared to most of them, I can't do very much. So if somebody wants to talk shop, I'm not the person they turn to. And if I want to... well. Regina's had the patience to teach me." And she was grateful for that, and it wasn't as if Kash hadn't tried so much as he literally couldn't. But as far as she could tell, Molly, Dorian, and Carlos weren't particularly interested in her. Before that, she'd pushed Harry away until it was too late and Joanna was gone before anything could come of that.

Edited 2017-12-15 05:03 (UTC)

"You're more than your skills," he reminded. "You're a whole person. You're memories and feelings, actions and opinions and...favorite sweets," he suggested. "So maybe it's not doing you any favors, to look only there. Have you tried with some of the others?"

Corbie tamped down the flare of frustration that came in reaction to that question and kept her answer simply to, "Yes."

The short, crisp reply again reminded him of Vex in a snit she didn't entirely want to explain to him. He gave a nonplussed shrug, tone still mild enough. "I was only asking. How would I know?" Which...was part of her trouble, he was starting to think.

Corbie sighed and pushed her hands back through her curls, a gesture she'd picked up from Felix and had never really noticed that and when she'd done this.

"Fuck it," she said. "Maybe it is whining. I'm just gonna whine." Even making that decision though, it was hard to actually start. Gram had always taught her that working was better than worrying, and it was an ingrained habit that any form of complaining wasn't productive so why bother? She drew up her legs to her chest and hid her face in her knees, and only hiding like that did she feel safe letting anything out.

"I feel like people look at me and they see a kid, so I'm not gonna be much for company unless they wanna do the extra that comes with that. But they also see that I can take care of myself fine, and there's others who need caretaking more anyway, kids or not. I've got magic, but other magic types can barely talk shop with me. World I came from ain't like this place and I'm not alone in that, but I am, 'cause other people in that boat there's a shared history to latch onto or at least other goddamn people who know what the fuck they're talking about. No one knows my faith, no one gets my slang, no one here knows anything that I came from. I don't fit anywhere."

Edited 2017-12-15 15:07 (UTC)

Vax watched, and listened, until she seemed to have said as much as she'd say. He knew what he'd do if this was Pike (who probably well understood being mistaken for a kid) or Vex or Kiki or Steph. Maybe it would help here.

"...Would you let me dress your hair while we're talking? Maybe that makes me sound weird, like a creep or something. But it's what I'd want to do, if I did know you better. It's always helped me to put my thoughts in order." Leave it to the elves to make a comfort ritual out of lacing themselves even tighter.

It was easily the first time any man had offered to do that for her, and the surprise got Corbie's head back up. "Yeah... okay." It wasn't like she couldn't undo anything later if she didn't like what he did.

He flashed her a bit of a smile, shifting to sit behind Corbie rather than at her side. He started with just petting her curling hair back from her face, tucking it in behind her ears at the sides, brushing it away from her scalp and nape to see what he had to work with. He was in no hurry to do it either, like Vex might stroke an animal not sure of her yet. Soothing.

"What do you miss most about home, do you think? Is it the being understood part?"

The fingers moving through her hair felt really nice and Corbie let out a little sigh through her nose. "Something like that. I mean, I didn't fit well all the time, but I didn't feel so... cast adrift?" She chewed her lip. "I was going to school. I was learning about my magic. I wanted to be..." she realized there was no real context for 'virtuer,' and she swallowed. So instead she said, "Women ain't encouraged to take studying magic seriously, where I'm from. I wanted to. I wanted to learn and advance as much as I could. And there's always some self-teaching involved, but now all I got's me, two books, and whatever Regina and me can get through what's basically a big translation problem."

Vax realized as he set his fingers to slowly roll at her temples for a few moments what it was that nagged at him as familiar about Corbie. She was low-born, he thought, just from how informal and down-to-earth she was about things. But she'd been well-educated, formally trained, probably at a school fancier than what she'd come from. He knew what that was like.

"And that made you special, that you were able to tell them all that didn't like a young lady learning magic to go fuck themselves. But the women using magic here - I don't think most of them had to deal with that, or not in the same way."

Corbie chuckled. "Well, yeah, telling 'em to fuck themselves was great, but mostly... I just liked the learning. My gran didn't let me go to school after I was eight or so."

He moved his hands to massage her scalp a bit, kneading fingers beneath the weight of her hair. "Why not? Because of you being a girl?"

"Mmmmm..." Corbie's eyes fell closed. "She said it wasn't right for girls. And anyway, it was just us. She needed me at home."

He considered asking about where her parents were, but that was... Maybe a bit much, for their first hair-braiding?

"But you did get to your magic school, later," Vax pointed out, thumbs rubbing loose the muscles at the back of her neck and down into the first of her shoulders. So something had changed, clearly.

"I had some help," Corbie admitted, relaxing into that touch. "If it weren't for Felix, I'd prolly still be trying to scrape together the apprenticeship fee."

"And Felix was your patron?" Vax gave her hair another brush through with his fingers, then started sectioning it out loosely between his hands.

"My teacher," Corbie clarified, straightening her shoulders. Even if she never saw Felix again, she'd never forget how much he'd changed everything. "My first teacher."

He started with a skinny plait off to one side, weaving it taut and tidy as the bouncy curls would consent to. Her hair was fine as cornsilk, anyway, playfully slippery. Good thing his thieving fingers knew what they were about.

"Is it much harder, to try and study without him? I gather Regina's good at magic, but she's not exactly laid-back either."

"Regina and I make our way," Corbie admitted. "And it's very kind of her to do it. Only the way she talks about magic and the way I talk about it are really different. We're not speaking different languages, but it's definitely different dialects. Sometimes we understand each other just fine. Sometimes we got no clue what the other's saying."

"How d'you curse in magic, then? Or does that break the whole metaphor?" He said it mostly to amuse himself, as he wove the tails together and wrapped the ends over one another to tie-off on that side.

Corbie surprised herself by laughing, bright and bubbly. "Fire, I guess. Fire seems right."

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