ic Let's All Visit Kimber's Corpse

[Avenger Assembled]

Tarva took a breath, then released it, unselfconscious of her own nakedness, and tried to regroup. While she'd had results like this from attempted seductions in the past, a failure here could be potentially disastrous. The night was cold; and the others here would surely be wrathful if she broke Kimber's heart. Not to mention the thing in the woods! "Kimber, Kimber, it's all right," she told the ghost reassuringly, swallowing her own panic in a reflex she knew only too well. She followed Kimber towards the back of the tent. "I meant what I said about not feeling alone anymore. I know this is something you want - and giving you my body is..." She looked down at herself and shrugged. "...nothing that matters to me, but it does matter to you. You're very kind, and you're very pretty. I'm sure with enough time, I can be the kind of woman you want me to be," she went on hopefully.  

[Gizmo]

Kimber's chin shot up from staring at her knees to meet Tarva's eyes as her hand moved from her mouth to her nose. "O-oh god, you're so scared and I want to hug you b-but--! Tarva, I swear, I swear, I'm not going to let them send you away or send you back or whatever you think might happen! That's what I meant, I wasn't going to let any of that happen no matter what, s-so you d-don't..." She took several rapid breaths, on the verge of hyperventilating despite not having actual lungs.

The tears continued to stream down her face but she managed to get the quivering in her chin under control. "I do like you. I like your poetry, I like that you like to sing, I like that you took time to learn a bunch of Canadian songs before the trip. I like how you can look confident even when you're not. I like that you don't give up even when it would be a lot easier. A-and I like that you're really pretty, which I didn't really know I liked until recently but I guess I really like it, s-sometimes, anyway..." Her whole face had turned a dark azure by then but she maintained her momentum. "And you don't like me that way and that's fine! I'm a little em-motional right now, but it is! It's f-fine. Pretending that you do is so much worse. If it's not something we'd be... be sharing then I don't want it. I could never want that."

The phantom wrapped her arms around her own shoulders and squeezed tightly, her voice taking on a weak veneer of her usual chipper cheer as she bottled up anything else she was feeling as tightly as possible. "I promise, you're still safe. If I'd been stronger you wouldn't have had to feel like this but I'm going to get stronger. I'm going to make it happen, just like you said. I'm going to be strong enough to protect everybody."

[Avenger Assembled]

Recognizing that her efforts had failed, Tarva looked away, considering her options even as a black cloak of night wrapped around her body again. "The last time I wanted someone that way, I cut out their hearts so I could see another sunrise." Her voice tightened with agony at those words, the never-healed wounds brought up on the occasion of a new one. She rose to her feet, ducking inside the confines of the tent, and taking and releasing a long, deep breath. "It's much easier for me not to care." Unable to finish the thought, she turned and headed for the exit of the tent. Before she left, she hesitated, in a rare moment obviously unsure of herself, and turned back with black tears in her eyes. "It would be easier if I didn't care, now."

 

 

Edited July 2, 2015 by Avenger Assembled

[Gizmo]

"No!" Kimber blurted a moment before she screwed together her determination and rushed forward to catch Tarva's hand before the shadow witch could finish stepping out of the tent. "You caring is why it's so good you did survive!" she attempted clumsily, pressing her lips together in frustration when the sentiment came out clumsily. After what had just happened holding the shadow priestess' hand felt fraught but she squeezed anyway, desperate to make herself understood before the other woman could leave. "Bluebird told me more about the Annihilists, how they don't care about anything and they make other people the same way but with you they couldn't! You still care and that's-- it's just-- please don't go." Looking at Tarva with big, sad eyes of seawater green-blue she placed her other hand around the first, surrounding slim, pale digits. "Just stay. We can talk, talk about anything you want! Please."

[Avenger Assembled]

"Do you think there is some words you could say that will fix me?" demanded Tarva, her voice tight with pain and the cold shadow of self-anger. "I know what I am. I know the thing that was saved from the Doom Coil. A small, flickering shadow of the woman that was. The woman who killed her soul so she could live another day." She squeezed Kimber's hand tightly; almost painfully - not a familiar sensation for the ghost, and gazed into her eyes with a burning intensity that belied the lie they'd worn just a few minutes earlier. "People like you have been food for me since before your grandparents were born. What can you offer me now?" 

[Gizmo]

"I don't know!" Kimber shot back hotly, chin jutting out defiantly as she refused to break eye contact with the taller woman or let go of her hand. "I usually don't know what I'm doing but I try anyway! Trying's all I've ever got!" Previously when Tarva has seen Kimber get this worked up over something the reaper had come to the surface a little: eyes like chips of ice, a mouth full of too many teeth, hair billowing backward. This time, though, it was the human side coming to the fore, the palate of blues looking more solid than the witch had ever seen without relying on illusions. "I do know I'm not going to fix anything by talking but I don't think you need fixing! Okay? I don't even have to talk, I can just listen. But I'm not letting you shut me out just because I'm a little harder to lie to than you thought!" She planted her feet in determination, even if the soles of her boots were still a few centimeter's above the tent's floor. "Seriously. I walk though walls, I get into everywhere. It's super annoying and you're stuck with me."

[Avenger Assembled]

"Oh, it's not a very interesting story," Tarva warned Kimber, cold bitterness bubbling in her voice. "A minor priestess is expelled from the temple when she tries to drug her greatest rival before their final competition. Right in the middle of the war, too, what a petty little creature she must be." Kimber could hear the voice of someone long dead, or worse, in Tarva's mimicking tone. "While the Great Six fight the forces of Chaos and lose every day, all she can do is cling what she has while the world burns around her. And then the Six go into the place between places to find a way to bring peace to our land. And they come back, changed." Kimber had heard this story before, and so Tarva evidently felt no need to expand on it. "And when everything is ended, our priestess finds that in the end she thinks that life is sweeter than death, even if to get that life she has to blot out all she once loved. Like a shadow in the night." She fell silent for a moment, leaning back in the tent and staring off at nothing. At some point in the conversation she had sat down, her hair now shaped into a black ponytail that hung between her shoulder blades.

"And after that, I had my magic, and myself, and the way it pleased some in the Terminus to have me as one of theirs. I liked Taarvon better than the rest, so I took his name. He was pleased to see one who came to the shadow of her own wicked will - and to hear the secrets of the Hounds before they became Madrigal's. Oh, don't get me wrong," she said with a wave of her hand. "he slew proles when it pleased him and used their blood as components in fell rites. But in the end he worshiped himself more than any other god - and understood those who did the same. It was he who taught me the true shadow magic. When I left him for Steelgrave, he was furious that I did not even bother to poison him as I left. But of course you already know what happened there." 

[Gizmo]

True to her word, Kimber said nothing while Tarva related her story, sinking down into a kneeling pose as the shadow priestess sat down. She refused to let go of the other woman's hand just yet, not entirely sure Tarva wouldn't race out of the tent at the first opportunity and choosing to ignore that she could probably slip through her immaterial fingers whenever she liked. She listened in attentive silence, not even daring to make murmurs of acknowledgement or sympathy. Only once they reached the point in the story that she already knew did she bite her lower lip, hesitating before haltingly prompting in a quiet voice that was barely more than a whisper, "Do... do you want to talk about... them? Blades and Beanpole?" She was terrified that she'd overstepped her bounds, reopened the worst of all Tarva's wounds at an already vulnerable moment but it seemed like what she needed to talk about more than anything else.

[Avenger Assembled]

"Their story is even shorter. They loved, and lost, and never were at all. You know, when I was a girl, I learned at my mother's knee that the souls of those who died ascended to a beautiful equestrian kingdom where they could ride forever alongside the gods of sun and moon." Tarva stared at nothing in particular, hardly seeming to notice Kimber there. "The Omegadrones found that realm too, of course, Nightmare Doom showed them the way." Tarva let out a long breath, then released it. "Steelgrave had the Sun's head hollowed out into a mask to wear at his debaucheries, while the last I saw, Omnibeast had made a blanket out of the Moon's skin. So you see, Kimber, wherever the boys were, they are no longer there."  

[Gizmo]

Inwardly Kimber added another item to the list of things she'd promised herself she'd do to Steelgrave when she encountered him again, once she was prepared, once she was strong enough. Some of that unbridled hate spilled over her features before she was able to exhale and let it go for the time being to focus on what was more important. "I know," she agreed simply, expression mournful. What she'd sensed while in the Terminus had convinced her of the fundamental difference between natural death and what the Annihilists did to their victims. "That's not what I meant, though. Whatever happened, they were real. You remember them. They're part of your story and part of you, at least as much as the stuff that came after. So teach me about who they were?" She'd meant it to be a calm instruction but her voice lifted in pitch despite her, making it a request.

[Avenger Assembled]

"Five years against five lifetimes. A drop in the ocean." As Tarva spoke, she extended her hand and a black, shadowy drop of liquid spattered against her palm. "We had a traveling caravan, then, and we would go from little town to little town, busking and fortune-telling for money. Blades would do some swordplay and entertain the crowd, Beanpole was a straight man...well," she said, waving her hand back and forth with a half-smile. "The boys would tell jokes, and then I would come out and dance and do magic for the people. Things were..." Her voice trailed off, and for a moment it seemed she was going to clam up again. "Blades had the softest hands. And Beanpole had the sweetest way about him, and the most beautiful voice. When we had enough money, we were going to settle down together and open a school, and the boys would teach music and I would teach magic, and Blades would teach swordplay and Beanpole numbers and writing."

She shook her head. "They were the best of friends before they fought over me, so I'm very glad I got them to stop fighting. If I was lucky and I got them both in a good mood, they could start singing old songs that..." She looked off in the distance again and began to sing a slow, ancient-sounding tune that reminded Kimber of Renaissance-era music. "Isn't the world a lovely place; everywhere you go, a smiling face...what does the future hold?" She'd shed tears in Kimber's presence before, but now, as the song caught in her throat, Tarva put her face in her hands and began to softly weep.

[Gizmo]

Without a word Kimber let herself float just high enough into the air so that she could wrap one arm around the taller woman's shoulders and place her other hand gently behind Tarva's head, pulling her toward her chest. Squeezing her eyes tightly shut to keep herself from starting to cry again she slowly stroked impossibly black hair and made soft, comforting shushing sounds, thickened by the tightness in her throat. She'd meant what she'd said before but only now did it really sink in that there wasn't any grand gesture or perfectly worded encouragement that going to put things right. All she could do was be there, listen and hope that someday that might start to be enough. Luckily, she supposed she wasn't about to run out of time. She'd meant it when she'd said that Tarva was stuck with her, too. She didn't have it in her to give up on her friends.

[Avenger Assembled]

By the time Indira arrived, Tarva had composed herself and put away the woman who had burst into hysterical tears in Kimber's arms over memories of lost love. The layering process was visible enough when you were right there with her, but the sharp-smiling, flashing-eyed shadow-witch waiting for Indira might as well have been an entirely different person. "Well, I suppose I should be getting back to my tent now," she offered as Indira and Avro came in one side of Kimber and Indira's space. "I look forward to hearing all about your hunt, Indira! Thank you for the lovely evening. Kimber." She gave the others a winning smile as she gracefully made her way out of the tent. Making her way back to her own black-dyed tent, she slipped inside and zipped up the door behind her. With her shadowy tears having left no stain on the tent floor or Kimber's ectoplasm, she might as well have not been there at all. 

[Gizmo]

"I know what you're going to ask and no," Kimber told Indira once Tarva had left, failing to keep a note of mournful regret out of the last syllable. She opened her mouth and began gesturing with her hands in an attempt to explain what had transpired and ended up simply groaning and throwing herself backward, levitating parallel to the ground with her hands on her face. "Oh, forget it. I don't even know what's going on any more. For once I wish I could actually sleep, 'cause nobody has ever been this tired. Ever. Ever ever." Certainly the Kinigosi had rarely heard her friend sounding so spent but from the peeks the phantom kept taking from between her fingers in the direction of the middle tent it didn't seem like she'd given up on the cause of that exhaustion just yet. "Oh, got the bone, by the way," she added, the flap of her backpack flipping open seemingly of its own accord, revealing the dirt caked humerus. Kimber waved splayed fingers back and forth wish as much meager enthusiasm as she could muster. "Yaaay."

[Fox]

"I was not going to ask. I might have implied some questions, perhaps, but it is not the same thing," the alien insisted, looking concerned...but amused at having her concerns caught out. "The bone - it is good progress," Indira encouraged. She was humanoid again, likely more for the comfort of her camping mates than her own, but she'd retained grasping feet long enough to gently usher Avro into the tent to keep him from wandering off. "Ours was perhaps not as fruitful. Avro caught you a small rodent, but I made him leave it outside the clearing so that it would not attract predators. Otherwise we saw one wild dog, but it was without a pack and moving away from camp."

She sat, cross-legged, and studied her spectral friend. "You cannot sleep, but you can still rest," she pointed out, not entirely disguising the worry in the statement. "I do not know that I could offer you tips on human meditation, but you might at least find value in settling down and trying to relax or distract yourself? It is not good to worry so much."

Edited July 8, 2015 by Fox

[Gizmo]

"I'm like eighty-seven percent worry by volume," Kimber groaned, letting her head fall backward through the empty air to look at Indira upside down. Avro made a demanding little sound and the ghost accommodated him by reaching a hand down to the tent's floor to scratch him fondly behind the ears. "Yes, I heard about the rodent, thank you! Did you have fun? I bet you did!" Playing with the manticore seemed to cheer her up a bit and she helped him up onto her chest where a night of scampering about with the indefatigable Kinigosi seemed to catch up with him all at once. With a yawn that revealed a mouthful of shark's teeth, the kitten hunkered down and promptly began dozing while Kimber continued to run her fingers through his quills with a tired laugh. "I guess things aren't so bad, no. Good point."

Morning came soon enough and the hike back through the woods felt very different in the light of day. Kimber was noticeably quieter than usual, almost reticent, but she maintained a characteristically cheerful disposition whenever anyone asked her a question. Eve and Becky had plans with the latter's family once they made it back into Thunder Bay while the others killed time around the city as inconspicuously as possible until their flight back home. As they jet took off from the runway Kimber considered the bone floating above her outstretched palms with mixed feelings.