"These are the silver tipped ones," she pulls out a glimmering arrow from the small holsters in her boots and places it on the ground for them to see. "I've used them for almost every single killing blow, and they've been fool-proof."
She smiles at them non-expectantly, and they don't respond. She thinks they're too in awe, staring at all her equipment, lavishing her career in approval, praising her work and her achievements.
There's a full moon among the horizon of the grass-covered hill, and the Night Hunter sits under the shallow shade of a large weeping willow. Her red sunglasses are pushed lightly atop her head, and the ponytail she wears even to sleep is let down without hesitation, imdenting dramatically where each of the ponytail holders had been tied like a cascading waterfall.
"I've protected many..." she continues talking, and her voice is the only one that speaks. Pulling off the crossbow on her left hand, she places it on the ground after a few seconds of fiddling with the mechanisms. "With this bow. It's small but its aim is very precise. It was modeled after my father's. Do you like it?"
She keeps her eyes glued on the crossbow, doesn't look up at their grinning faces - she knows they're grinning - and continues with her last introduction.
"I knew you'd like it," she finishes, brushing a single piece of hair behind her ears. "And last but not least, I have my condemning arrows."
She takes one from a brown satchel she brought. The arrow is added to the collection on the ground, and before Vayne lies each and every single piece of equipment she could manage to bring. Different sorts of arrows, varying sizes of crossbows, a single bow and arrow she had kept since she was a child but never used, pieces of fabric she had used on her suits, numerous pairs of red shades (she promised they were all different in some way), the list went on and on.
"I'm so happy you both enjoy my craft," she replies with a heavy sigh, a grim smile, a furrowed pair of eyebrows, a grin that never reached her eyes.
She didn't know whether she was supposed to continue. A subtle breeze settled upon the hilltop, blowing her brown locks out of their place, and she remembered that part of her introduction had been her hair.
"Oh, yes, do you like it?" she asks with a sudden burst of enthusiasm. She palms the silky threads with pride. "I was quite hesitant to put it up like usual. I don't think you've ever seen me with my 'night hunter hair.'" She lets out a small chuckle, but they are laughing a lot louder than she is.
She hadn't heard them laugh in so long, and she loves it. Vayne wasn't the comical type; never made others fall on the floor with laughter. She was reserved and quiet and stoic, and her only intent was to get what had to be done, done.
But with them, she felt relaxed. She felt free to be who she truly was, to be who she used to be. It's not even that funny, what she said, but laughing as hard as she is now feels like compensation for all the years she had held back laughs. Suddenly, everything's funny.
And so she continues laughing, tears building near the edges of her piercing eyes, and her sides began to hurt after a long while. For a long few minutes, the only thing that can be heard throughout the grounds is their communal laughter. She settles down as the moon begins to shift its angle behind the leaves of the tree, and it's comfortably dark under the weeping willow. There's still a bright smile painted on her face; she's happy like never before.
"Yes," she replies to them. "Thank you, I love my hair too."
It's strange how the conversation shifted from battle gear to hair growth, but she assumes it's somewhat normal.
And after what seems like ages of sitting and staring at the two people before her, she unconsciously loses the bubbliness. First, her eyes fall a deadly stone cold, then her lips downturn into an almost-frown (in reality, that was just her face), and she begins to push the hairs that fell in front of her forehead behind her head entirely. The sudden amount of hair on her back is uncomfortable. She wants it up. She wishes she had brought hair ties.
Grabbing the satchel, she gets up from her criss-cross applesauce position and sits into a squat. Gathering all of her equipment into her bag with haste, wordlessly, effortlessly. Moving quick and ferverous, as though she's in a hurry. She stands and stares.
"Goodbye," she says quaintly, as though the entire conversation they just had was blown away like the leaves of the willow tree.
"Mother, father."
Their gravestones do not respond. They do not call her back as she steps to the bottom of the hill with fresh tears streaming down her face.
She is suddenly aware of why she lost her bubbliness. It wasn't a sudden change of tone, it wasn't tiredness or boredom, it wasn't a loss of interest. Rather, it was the remembrance of a single thought. In the cemetery where her parent's coffins had been buried deep beneath the ground, Vayne almost forgot one crucial fact.
Her mother and father are dead, and even an imagination can't revive what once was.