In Which The Two Arrive On The Scene Again, Yay! [1528]
Lissa twitched her eyebrows the barest bit, then shook her head. "You may not be worth much," she said. "You're ignorant and outcity rude. You've given far many problems, and you've no conception of justice, nor of politics. But you've killed no one."
Thanks for the vote of confidence, Kellerin didn't say, but only just. "Yeah."
Lissa frowned further. "Not the Ironjust. Not the Sorrover Bansacan. Not those guards -" she looked down at the paper and shook her head. Then she looked up again. "So to tear your ignorance, I'll tell you. The Two commanded us to leave. This may be why."
Kellerin stared. Seth and Piotr knew about this? They knew this was going to happen? They just left Visney there, while this happened just let him die? "How'd it happen?" she asked.
Lissa shook her head. "I can't know."
"Yeah, but - d'you've an idea, at least? Like who could've -" killed Visney, shit she couldn't even believe he was actually dead! She'd just left, just seen him waving her off and the door closing on him-
"No conception." Lissa broke into her remembering - probably a good thing. "None of the Houses have enough roses, to my knowledge..." she petered out, and went into thinking, brows going back down. Kellerin waited, but it looked like she'd gotten distracted.
"Huh?"
Lissa looked up.
Kellerin helped her along. "What's roses?"
Lissa paused. "Agents," she said, looking away, and stood up. "I need more information," she said. "I'll return this evening. You'd be wiser not to leave this room. Keep yourselves in."
She swept past Kellerin, who started to turn - but by the time she got faced round, the door had clicked shut.
Leaving Kellerin back mostly-alone in the room, but for the bad news.
But that was okay, really. Because Kellerin still couldn't - she just couldn't get it. She couldn't fucking understand. Visney? Visney?? She'd just talked to him fi- yeah, five days ago. Five days ago, she'd been in that room, and doing that seswork, and leaving the palace, and thinking she was going home. Visney'd thought she was going home, too.
If she'd gone home she'd never have known he'd died.
She'd be - she didn't even know. Probably in a police station or a psych ward right now, telling people how she wasn't crazy, really, she'd just been in another world, see, look at this card. And her parents would be all worried and totally wouldn't understand what had really happened, and Nathan would be on his way down from New York right now, since he always promised to look after his little sister.
Instead, though, she was here, and no one knew she was here, and people here thought she had murdered a hero.
(Oh god, she was fucked.)
Had her forehead down on the table when she heard movement behind her. Movement, and a sigh, and a shuffle, and then - "...Kij-girl?"
Not now. Not right now. Fucking heart started jumping and her stomach getting all weird and fuck, she couldn't handle feelings-shit, not right now.
She stood up, picked up the paper, dropped it in front of him, and went out of the room.
Went over to the window at the end of the hall, because how smart would it be for a murder suspect to go fucking wandering like some dumbass Disney princess gathering daisies? not smart, that was how.
So she stood at the window instead, leant against the sill, arms crossed and hands balled up and stuffed against her sides, not-really-watching people pass by the alleymouth.
God, she wished this'd never happened. She wished it was yesterday.
Oh, and you were doing so much better yesterday, you and your randomass crush out of fucking nowhere? Yeah, that's a real improvement, Kellerin.
Fuck, she thought, for a very long time. It was kind of hard to think anything else. Everything had gone off the shit end, all in the past twelve or whatever hours. Fuck everything. Fuck it all. Fuck all of this shit right here.
But she did have a choice. Right? Stay here, or go home. Try the card again. Go to whatever place it opened up. Or keep trying it til it opened to a place she knew.
Stay here, with this shit, or go home. To Charlotte Fucking Laine. Where none of this would even matter. Where she'd have gotten hauled downpath and set up in a seswork and flown through the wind and seen another world and accused of murder and had a giant crush and seen the whole city and learned to like this place all for nothing.
All of that ending up for nothing.
Bunch of nothing and grey skies and concrete and nothing.
She considered tearing up the card, so she wouldn't think of it again. Then, whatever happened, at least she'd know she could've chosen nothing, and had decided against it.
Behind her, the door opening. Landri. She tensed up and waited while he shuffled out, paused for a long pause, then went on down the hallway. Bathroom door shut. Silence, and street-sounds, and people passing by underneath - and then the bathroom door again, and a stiff-legged step back down to the doorway. And a pause - long, long, and couldn't he just come over here already? - before finally, a slow couple steps into the room, and the door shutting again.
Kellerin leaned forward against the windowsill. She turned, and hunched, and squatted down onto her haunches, and dropped her head onto her knees, fists still balled up against her sides. She tried to stop thinking, and it didn't work at all.
Meiches found her like that. It was a while later. She didn't have anything to say to him, but he stood there til she pulled herself together and stood up, and then looked at her hard.
"You didn't?"
Kellerin shook her head, teeth clenched in her mouth.
"That's well," Meiches nodded to himself. "I know eiba's brought some types, but one so far gone I don't think he'd bring to me here." He turned, indicating the room. "I've brought you cold food, as the kitchens abeen closed. There's no mourning-dinner here til ten days til, but we'll've death-drinking these nights. I don't suggest you come -"
"To what?"
"The death-drinkings, th-"
"What'sat?"
Meiches frowned. "Topside doesn't have samyingi?"
It still just translated to death-drinking. "What, like - you drink cause someone's dead?"
"It's not to just drink," Meiches said. "It's to sing and to mourn. They'll be coming with the pás-ha buns, too, and you - you don't have this?"
Kellerin shrugged. It wasn't like she'd ever been to a funeral.
Meiches looked at her like this was weird, but shook his head. "Nought to say, though, if you're not to come. It's best you wouldn't, as the newscall's put word out wide by now."
Kellerin nodded glumly. Great. She couldn't even go to her first funeral.
Meiches stepped back in preparation to leave. "Well, then, ressani. That's all I'd've asked. I'll bring you up some p´s-ha when it's brought." He nodded, then redisappeared down the stairs.
And Kellerin went back to the window.
Well, it wasn't like she could do much else. Couldn't go downstairs. Couldn't go into the room if Landri was there, because this wasn't the fucking time for little mental voices going "oo~oh, do you like-like him?" That basically left this windowsill right here. So she sat and watched outside and felt like shit and tried not to think and ended up thinking in circles til she got sick and tired of it.
Tired, too, but too sick-feeling and numb and stomach-workingly anxious to actually think about sleeping.
So she sat there.
So she sat there til voices, downstairs, started collecting. They weren't happy voices, either - low, muttering, mumbling, murmuring. She couldn't make anything out.
The voices collected til it was more irritating that she didn't know what they were saying, so she got up off the sill, her legs cricking and her back protesting, and went over to the rail over the stairway entrance, and slid down to a sit there. Must've been empty up on this floor, because there were no lights on under other doors. Least she had the place to herself, and no one would come out and stare at that weird girl in a crazy-person squat over by the railing.
She got some words: Ironjust. Dovaris. Topsider. Dovocai. Houses. Palace. Murder. But it was still mostly an indistinct mutter, a low-grade constant hum of voices, of a bunch of people who were feeling like shit too.
Misery loves company? Haha. No, that wasn't fucking funny.
She heard a small racket of door-opening and closing, and then more of the swaying muttering. She couldn't get any of it from up here, and hell if she was going down there.
Instead she put her head onto her knees and shut her eyes.
Drifted off.
Woke up once, to find a tray beside her, with a glass of some kind of liquor and a small leaf-shaped bun. The liquor was strong as hell and had her coughing. The bun was salty and plain.
She took the tray into the room - dark by now - and put it on the table. Stood there for a bit. Then went over to her bed and lay down.
There was one point where she did kind of cry a bit, but then she slept.
And woke up to someone trying to get the door open.
Rattling, and thumps. Kellerin's eyes sort of opened.
"Open up, or we will."
That, a commanding voice, and Kellerin saw Lissa sit up and remembered - oh hell - and got up on her knees, sleep gone but brain still empty and tired. It was full light.
After a second of silence, she heard a voice. "-not going to get us anywhere,", just loud enough to hear, then the same voice: "Kellerin, we're really at a loss for time, here, and would appreciate your opening the door for us."
A woman's voice? A woman who knew her name? Kellerin frowne,d and caught Landri's glance as he turned his head to her. He raised his eyebrow; she shook her head and shrugged.
"That won't get us anywhere, either," said the first voice, and then a hand reached through the wood of the door and fumbled with the latch on the inside. Finding that locked too, it grabbed the entire mechanism and tore it out of the wood entirely. The door swung open.
In walked two old ladies, darker than Chandra and wrinkle-faced and small with age. One had her head shaved. The other had little grey pencil-curls all over her head.
The first one tossed the lock-mechanism aside with a thunk. "Kellerin. We need to go."
And the second glanced back at the first. "Now really, no apologies? You know how they are about shock." She looked around the room with a smile that wasn't reassuring at all. "We're the Two, of course, and we really do need all of you to come with us. You," she looked at Lissa, "you know why we'd need you."
Lissa kept looking awestruck for a moment, then nodded slowly, swallowing. She slid out from under her blankets, turning and starting to fold them up.
Meanwhile Kellerin was experiencing the very familiar feeling of what-the-hell-is-going-on-here. "Are you rea-"
"Yes, we really are, and we don't have time for this," the first - Seth? - said. She handed the lock mechanism to Piotr - was he still Piotr if he was a she? - and came forward. "Take what you need. We're bringing you away from here."
"Wh- you guys - couldn't you've -"
"Argue later," Seth said.
"As I'm sure she will," Piotr rejoined, over where she was fixing the lock. Her voice muffled, she continued, "Kellerin, our time is extremely limited, as we can never know when one of the staff will decide to inform on you, and so we'd prefer it if you could simply come with us and barrage us with your questions later? I don't delude myself that you will have many of them, and that you'll shower us with invective, but right now we simply must go."
"Right now," Seth added.
Kellerin frowned. "Long as I get to do that later, yeah. You better not dip out, though."
"Wouldn't dream of it," Piotr - Piotr-as-a-woman - said, straightening from the lock. She turned back round just as, on the bed, Landri pushed himself up to a kneel.
"O-Ses, O-Piy," he said, and the Two looked at him. Landri kept his eyes determinedly down. "Is it that the Osterai would take Kellerin home?"
Seth - O-Ses, that worked a lot better - O-Ses looked at O-Piy. "We could."
"Right now we just need her leaving," O-Piy told Landri. "We'll remove her from this city, as it's far too close to the center of the mess for our comfort. We have debts to pay, now, and we'd rather not have her complicating them."
Landri bowed his head in understanding, but still didn't look up. "Then is it that I might join the Osterai with Kellerin?"
O-Piy frowned. "But you -" and looked at O-Ses.
"- he's from -"
"- he is. That -"
"- could, yes." O-Ses looked back at Landri. "We'll take you all to Olinscarr."
Landri looked up, at that. He remembered himself and brought his eyes down again. "Would the Osterai, then?"
"We would," O-Ses said. "Except for her."
"Her we'll send back to the Mendraniy House," O-Piy nodded, looking at Lissa's back. "She'll be safer there, and it is, after all, her own home. So," eyes moving to O-Ses and starting to grin, "I suppose it's not that we'd take them all to Olinscarr, but that we'd take them both -"
"Semantics," O-Ses shook her head.
"You can't forget semantics. They're very important."
"Be ready in a hundred-count," O-Ses said, elbowing O-Piy out the door and closing it behind her.
~:~
AWWWWWWW
HILLLLLL
YEEEAAAAHHHHH
fuckin stresssss and brainings and own-life problems jsut melted into awayness, and I wrote!
(I'll have things to say about that, too, but look for it later.)
GUH SETH AND PIOTR I LOVE YOU GUYS EVEN THOUGH YOU'RE SUCH DICKS GOD
(insert hundreds of heartmarks of heppiness here :D)
♥
Thanks for the vote of confidence, Kellerin didn't say, but only just. "Yeah."
Lissa frowned further. "Not the Ironjust. Not the Sorrover Bansacan. Not those guards -" she looked down at the paper and shook her head. Then she looked up again. "So to tear your ignorance, I'll tell you. The Two commanded us to leave. This may be why."
Kellerin stared. Seth and Piotr knew about this? They knew this was going to happen? They just left Visney there, while this happened just let him die? "How'd it happen?" she asked.
Lissa shook her head. "I can't know."
"Yeah, but - d'you've an idea, at least? Like who could've -" killed Visney, shit she couldn't even believe he was actually dead! She'd just left, just seen him waving her off and the door closing on him-
"No conception." Lissa broke into her remembering - probably a good thing. "None of the Houses have enough roses, to my knowledge..." she petered out, and went into thinking, brows going back down. Kellerin waited, but it looked like she'd gotten distracted.
"Huh?"
Lissa looked up.
Kellerin helped her along. "What's roses?"
Lissa paused. "Agents," she said, looking away, and stood up. "I need more information," she said. "I'll return this evening. You'd be wiser not to leave this room. Keep yourselves in."
She swept past Kellerin, who started to turn - but by the time she got faced round, the door had clicked shut.
Leaving Kellerin back mostly-alone in the room, but for the bad news.
But that was okay, really. Because Kellerin still couldn't - she just couldn't get it. She couldn't fucking understand. Visney? Visney?? She'd just talked to him fi- yeah, five days ago. Five days ago, she'd been in that room, and doing that seswork, and leaving the palace, and thinking she was going home. Visney'd thought she was going home, too.
If she'd gone home she'd never have known he'd died.
She'd be - she didn't even know. Probably in a police station or a psych ward right now, telling people how she wasn't crazy, really, she'd just been in another world, see, look at this card. And her parents would be all worried and totally wouldn't understand what had really happened, and Nathan would be on his way down from New York right now, since he always promised to look after his little sister.
Instead, though, she was here, and no one knew she was here, and people here thought she had murdered a hero.
(Oh god, she was fucked.)
Had her forehead down on the table when she heard movement behind her. Movement, and a sigh, and a shuffle, and then - "...Kij-girl?"
Not now. Not right now. Fucking heart started jumping and her stomach getting all weird and fuck, she couldn't handle feelings-shit, not right now.
She stood up, picked up the paper, dropped it in front of him, and went out of the room.
Went over to the window at the end of the hall, because how smart would it be for a murder suspect to go fucking wandering like some dumbass Disney princess gathering daisies? not smart, that was how.
So she stood at the window instead, leant against the sill, arms crossed and hands balled up and stuffed against her sides, not-really-watching people pass by the alleymouth.
God, she wished this'd never happened. She wished it was yesterday.
Oh, and you were doing so much better yesterday, you and your randomass crush out of fucking nowhere? Yeah, that's a real improvement, Kellerin.
Fuck, she thought, for a very long time. It was kind of hard to think anything else. Everything had gone off the shit end, all in the past twelve or whatever hours. Fuck everything. Fuck it all. Fuck all of this shit right here.
But she did have a choice. Right? Stay here, or go home. Try the card again. Go to whatever place it opened up. Or keep trying it til it opened to a place she knew.
Stay here, with this shit, or go home. To Charlotte Fucking Laine. Where none of this would even matter. Where she'd have gotten hauled downpath and set up in a seswork and flown through the wind and seen another world and accused of murder and had a giant crush and seen the whole city and learned to like this place all for nothing.
All of that ending up for nothing.
Bunch of nothing and grey skies and concrete and nothing.
She considered tearing up the card, so she wouldn't think of it again. Then, whatever happened, at least she'd know she could've chosen nothing, and had decided against it.
Behind her, the door opening. Landri. She tensed up and waited while he shuffled out, paused for a long pause, then went on down the hallway. Bathroom door shut. Silence, and street-sounds, and people passing by underneath - and then the bathroom door again, and a stiff-legged step back down to the doorway. And a pause - long, long, and couldn't he just come over here already? - before finally, a slow couple steps into the room, and the door shutting again.
Kellerin leaned forward against the windowsill. She turned, and hunched, and squatted down onto her haunches, and dropped her head onto her knees, fists still balled up against her sides. She tried to stop thinking, and it didn't work at all.
Meiches found her like that. It was a while later. She didn't have anything to say to him, but he stood there til she pulled herself together and stood up, and then looked at her hard.
"You didn't?"
Kellerin shook her head, teeth clenched in her mouth.
"That's well," Meiches nodded to himself. "I know eiba's brought some types, but one so far gone I don't think he'd bring to me here." He turned, indicating the room. "I've brought you cold food, as the kitchens abeen closed. There's no mourning-dinner here til ten days til, but we'll've death-drinking these nights. I don't suggest you come -"
"To what?"
"The death-drinkings, th-"
"What'sat?"
Meiches frowned. "Topside doesn't have samyingi?"
It still just translated to death-drinking. "What, like - you drink cause someone's dead?"
"It's not to just drink," Meiches said. "It's to sing and to mourn. They'll be coming with the pás-ha buns, too, and you - you don't have this?"
Kellerin shrugged. It wasn't like she'd ever been to a funeral.
Meiches looked at her like this was weird, but shook his head. "Nought to say, though, if you're not to come. It's best you wouldn't, as the newscall's put word out wide by now."
Kellerin nodded glumly. Great. She couldn't even go to her first funeral.
Meiches stepped back in preparation to leave. "Well, then, ressani. That's all I'd've asked. I'll bring you up some p´s-ha when it's brought." He nodded, then redisappeared down the stairs.
And Kellerin went back to the window.
Well, it wasn't like she could do much else. Couldn't go downstairs. Couldn't go into the room if Landri was there, because this wasn't the fucking time for little mental voices going "oo~oh, do you like-like him?" That basically left this windowsill right here. So she sat and watched outside and felt like shit and tried not to think and ended up thinking in circles til she got sick and tired of it.
Tired, too, but too sick-feeling and numb and stomach-workingly anxious to actually think about sleeping.
So she sat there.
So she sat there til voices, downstairs, started collecting. They weren't happy voices, either - low, muttering, mumbling, murmuring. She couldn't make anything out.
The voices collected til it was more irritating that she didn't know what they were saying, so she got up off the sill, her legs cricking and her back protesting, and went over to the rail over the stairway entrance, and slid down to a sit there. Must've been empty up on this floor, because there were no lights on under other doors. Least she had the place to herself, and no one would come out and stare at that weird girl in a crazy-person squat over by the railing.
She got some words: Ironjust. Dovaris. Topsider. Dovocai. Houses. Palace. Murder. But it was still mostly an indistinct mutter, a low-grade constant hum of voices, of a bunch of people who were feeling like shit too.
Misery loves company? Haha. No, that wasn't fucking funny.
She heard a small racket of door-opening and closing, and then more of the swaying muttering. She couldn't get any of it from up here, and hell if she was going down there.
Instead she put her head onto her knees and shut her eyes.
Drifted off.
Woke up once, to find a tray beside her, with a glass of some kind of liquor and a small leaf-shaped bun. The liquor was strong as hell and had her coughing. The bun was salty and plain.
She took the tray into the room - dark by now - and put it on the table. Stood there for a bit. Then went over to her bed and lay down.
There was one point where she did kind of cry a bit, but then she slept.
And woke up to someone trying to get the door open.
Rattling, and thumps. Kellerin's eyes sort of opened.
"Open up, or we will."
That, a commanding voice, and Kellerin saw Lissa sit up and remembered - oh hell - and got up on her knees, sleep gone but brain still empty and tired. It was full light.
After a second of silence, she heard a voice. "-not going to get us anywhere,", just loud enough to hear, then the same voice: "Kellerin, we're really at a loss for time, here, and would appreciate your opening the door for us."
A woman's voice? A woman who knew her name? Kellerin frowne,d and caught Landri's glance as he turned his head to her. He raised his eyebrow; she shook her head and shrugged.
"That won't get us anywhere, either," said the first voice, and then a hand reached through the wood of the door and fumbled with the latch on the inside. Finding that locked too, it grabbed the entire mechanism and tore it out of the wood entirely. The door swung open.
In walked two old ladies, darker than Chandra and wrinkle-faced and small with age. One had her head shaved. The other had little grey pencil-curls all over her head.
The first one tossed the lock-mechanism aside with a thunk. "Kellerin. We need to go."
And the second glanced back at the first. "Now really, no apologies? You know how they are about shock." She looked around the room with a smile that wasn't reassuring at all. "We're the Two, of course, and we really do need all of you to come with us. You," she looked at Lissa, "you know why we'd need you."
Lissa kept looking awestruck for a moment, then nodded slowly, swallowing. She slid out from under her blankets, turning and starting to fold them up.
Meanwhile Kellerin was experiencing the very familiar feeling of what-the-hell-is-going-on-here. "Are you rea-"
"Yes, we really are, and we don't have time for this," the first - Seth? - said. She handed the lock mechanism to Piotr - was he still Piotr if he was a she? - and came forward. "Take what you need. We're bringing you away from here."
"Wh- you guys - couldn't you've -"
"Argue later," Seth said.
"As I'm sure she will," Piotr rejoined, over where she was fixing the lock. Her voice muffled, she continued, "Kellerin, our time is extremely limited, as we can never know when one of the staff will decide to inform on you, and so we'd prefer it if you could simply come with us and barrage us with your questions later? I don't delude myself that you will have many of them, and that you'll shower us with invective, but right now we simply must go."
"Right now," Seth added.
Kellerin frowned. "Long as I get to do that later, yeah. You better not dip out, though."
"Wouldn't dream of it," Piotr - Piotr-as-a-woman - said, straightening from the lock. She turned back round just as, on the bed, Landri pushed himself up to a kneel.
"O-Ses, O-Piy," he said, and the Two looked at him. Landri kept his eyes determinedly down. "Is it that the Osterai would take Kellerin home?"
Seth - O-Ses, that worked a lot better - O-Ses looked at O-Piy. "We could."
"Right now we just need her leaving," O-Piy told Landri. "We'll remove her from this city, as it's far too close to the center of the mess for our comfort. We have debts to pay, now, and we'd rather not have her complicating them."
Landri bowed his head in understanding, but still didn't look up. "Then is it that I might join the Osterai with Kellerin?"
O-Piy frowned. "But you -" and looked at O-Ses.
"- he's from -"
"- he is. That -"
"- could, yes." O-Ses looked back at Landri. "We'll take you all to Olinscarr."
Landri looked up, at that. He remembered himself and brought his eyes down again. "Would the Osterai, then?"
"We would," O-Ses said. "Except for her."
"Her we'll send back to the Mendraniy House," O-Piy nodded, looking at Lissa's back. "She'll be safer there, and it is, after all, her own home. So," eyes moving to O-Ses and starting to grin, "I suppose it's not that we'd take them all to Olinscarr, but that we'd take them both -"
"Semantics," O-Ses shook her head.
"You can't forget semantics. They're very important."
"Be ready in a hundred-count," O-Ses said, elbowing O-Piy out the door and closing it behind her.
~:~
AWWWWWWW
HILLLLLL
YEEEAAAAHHHHH
fuckin stresssss and brainings and own-life problems jsut melted into awayness, and I wrote!
(I'll have things to say about that, too, but look for it later.)
GUH SETH AND PIOTR I LOVE YOU GUYS EVEN THOUGH YOU'RE SUCH DICKS GOD
(insert hundreds of heartmarks of heppiness here :D)
♥