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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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."

"So Regina and Dorian have got the filthiest 'mouths?' ...Can't say as I'm surprised really," he smiled, plain enough in his tone even if she couldn't quite see it.

"Wouldn't surprise me," Corbie giggled. "Regina gives me looks for swearing, but you can tell she wants to."

"What's your favorite swear?" He paused at where he'd started to lace another thin braid on the opposite side. "Does that still mean magic, or have we moved on to actual bawdy talk? I've lost track." It was so easy to get tangled in the merry conversational bullshit, not that he minded in the least.

Corbie surrendered to a fit of giggling hard enough that she couldn't talk for a moment. "I'm partial to 'fuck me sideways 'til I cry.'"

"Wait, it's what?" He lifted his hands away from her hair as he asked incredulously, both smiling and taken aback at the same time. Who would've expected such a bookish, curly-headed sweetheart to swear like a bloody sailor? "'Fuck me sideways...'til I cry.' Is that - are you wanting someone to do that, when you say it, or are you saying it because it would be awful?"

Corbie bit her lip to muffle herself so she could calm down. "The latter. It's the favorite swear of a very dear friend. I got a fondness for it."

"A mouthful of soap couldn't put a dent in that," he told her, still mildly incredulous. "Books and magic weren't all you learned," he observed, reaching to finish the half-done braid he'd abandoned to her giggle fit.

Corbie shrugged. "I was a whore in a port city. I didn't just learn filth, I learned international filth." She had, after her initial reservations, decided to just roll with her past instead of trying to hide it. It was a fact about herself, and one she wasn't exactly ashamed of.

Even if her gran would most certainly have washed her mouth out with soap.

"Were you?" A different girl, a different tone, a different context, he might've taken it as some sort of joke or a lie to cover something more painful in its honesty. But he didn't see it as fitting with what else he knew of her to make up a story like that, even if it was a surprising truth.

"Was this before or after your schooling?" He'd properly ended the second little braid by then, and started to gather up all of her hair, braids included, so as to put them all together.

"Before," she answered simply. "I got snatched here out of school." Quite literally, as she'd been deep in the Nullity. Magic shouldn't have been able to reach in there, and yet it had and here she as.

Vax put the whole of her hair into three, and loosely braided them all together where they would frame her face on one side. He left the uneven ends to come back together in a brush, tips curling coy and natural.

"Corbie," he said as if he'd just decided something, and held the large, loose braid together in one hand, the other reaching for the end of one of his own braids to steal away the tie that held it fast. "You're too interesting to go without having other people around you. Do you know that?"

Faced away from him, Corbie took comfort from the fact that he wouldn't see her cheeks going pink. Too bad her ears were betraying her blush, too. "Um." She shrugged awkwardly.

"Now you know." He wound the bottom of the braid with a couple of snug loops of the skinny black leather strip, then tied a tiny bow rather than his usual knot.

Vax sort of looked at her hair, but it was different from the back of course. "Let me see?"

[EP] Progress (OTA, Corbie or Curnen)

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