Years in the past
Beyond the rip current, a shoal of seadwellers play just within my line of sight, kicking sand on each other on a beach under moonlight, ignorant to I and the rest of the world. I watch them with vacant eyes, bobbing in the waves as the surf takes me wherever it wants. I feel no need to get closer. I feel no need for anything.
The attention to which I pay them could be mistaken for interest, if not for the lifeless way the image reflects off my eyes. Thinking upon my situation, I wonder if this is some sort of subconscious demand for companionship, the misaimed attempt of a repressed adolescent impulse genuinely in need of the comfort of other trolls. I don't know. Either way, it brings me places like this, watching strangers from afar as my legs churn bubbles in saltwater.
But being this far away, this removed from others, it gives me perspective. I am able to notice what they do not; namely, the fact I am not the only voyeur on this beach.
After a moment of contemplation, I go to investigate.
I swim closer, abandoning my previous entertainment and getting a better look at the troll nestled between the razored rocks at the beach's border. It's a clown, her ears pricked to the revels as mine were, but her face frozen in pure Duchenne, upper lip raised to reveal the small teeth tucked beneath. They are fangs; canines surrounded by tinier, flatter ones, but the delicate mania across her cheeks does not match that illusion of harmlessness. Her facepaint is frayed like it hasn't been removed in days, cracking around the edges, save for where the salt spray causes it to melt.
The jetty forms a canopy above the water, shelter where I can slide beneath her without being seen. I am impressed that she has managed to find purchase at all, the rocks jagged and hungry for the cut palms of anyone who dares the attempt their roost.
Her pupils are dilated down to mere pricks, fixated on the scene unfolding on the beach. Despite the way she has trapped my attention, I turn, watching as a violet tackles one of his companions. I do not know what holds her interest at first. Not until I see the break in form. A seadweller, the only girl, slips from the others and checks her palmhusk. There is a quiet moment, one where I cannot read her expression from this distance, but somehow I know what's about to occur before it happens. The violet girl starts to scream, drawing the attention of the others as her howls direct themselves at one boy in particular. He growls in defense. I glance up at the clown.
Her smile has draw back more, and I can't help but marvel at her thickened body, her gill-less face, so different from my own. I've never seen a landweller this close before, near enough to study the shape of her paint; white shaped around dark eyes, like a mask, like a skull.
Back at the party, the screaming has gone to blows, wisteria spilling over white sand. They are, like me, of ocean and storm. Things will not deescalate.
"If any survive, they'll find you," I say.
She looks down at me, in what later I will come to realize is shock. But for now, I do not know her, and to me her unchanged smile and raised eyebrows make it look like she's known I've been here all along.
"Heh," she says, like the laugh is caught in her throat. "I doubt it. I'm very good, you know."
She tilts her head in examination. I know how must I look; chin sunk back into the water, hair floating around I like kelp, or perhaps a grim halo, only eyes visible above the surface. I am reminded of movies where the lonely seadweller drags their victims below, snatched from the shore and held under until they'll keep company for all time. I fantasize of putting claws against her throat.
"You're not going to tell, are you?" She grins it out.
"No," I say.
But I have a feeling she already knew that.
She is confident. Too confident. To me—at this point—it is unearned, dangerous, and the first time I ever feel something that could be generously described as concern.
"Why do this?" I ask. Bait swallowed.
"Why not?" She pulls on the line. "Got a better idea on how to kill some time?"
Months in the future.
"Sure you want to go with something this mainstream?" Sombra doesn't have to raise her voice over the music, diluted as it is in the cavern of the empty dance hall, but she does anyway, for that is how Sombra is.
"Of course." I extend a leg out, stretching across the floor with the pad of my slipper, dragging bits of dust and land-dirt along the way. I breathe in, then out, sinking into the fire of the stretch. "'In Which the Lead Lowblood Female Is Transformed into a Longneckbird, Only to Be Unenchanted by the Empress in so That She Retains Her Troll Form By Day, Proceeds to Make a Flushed Connection With a Male of Royal Blood, Who Betrays Her at the Behest of His Kismesis', is classic tale."
"Yeah, I'm sure it is," she snorts. "The most classic. So classic its title is only like, three sentences."
"Was this not your idea to begin with?" I ask, rising from the floor and settling into a plie.
An attempt to get me out of my hive. Sometimes I think I spend more time on land than not.
She taps something out on her palmhusk. "Thought I'd do something a bit more out there, ya know? Like 'Beautiful Women Representing Spring Dance Voluptuously-"
"Ballet is an art of tradition," I interrupt. I'd rather not hear any of what she considers good theater. "People will come to see what they are familiar with."
"You're violet, love," she says with all the care of a collapsing lung. She smiles, fangs parting the white paint on her lips. "People are going show up whether they're familiar or not to see a fish dance."
I turn, pretending the dip upstage is part of my routine. Often I think she'd do better to say less, to listen more. She wears trouble like a cloak, breeds discord until it sticks to her like bubbles on the skin.
It is this quality that irritates me; that, and the fact that, for some reason, I still stick around. In that way, I and the trouble are much the same. It bothers me, the idea that this is not a coincidence.
I resume practice with staunch indifference.
Months in the past.
She brings me to her hive.
This surprises me, of course, and I am principally expecting to see a sea of grinning purplebloods cloaked in hoods and blood waiting for me as soon as she opens the door. Instead there are plush and pillows, screens and loose cables, all awash with that faint plum glow. She sits cross-legged on a cushion and offers me a bag of chips.
It is more modest than I would have expected—certainly for someone of her blood status—though the sheer value of tech in the room could more than make up for it.
I see no sign of a lusus. I make no mention of it.
She brings me snacks that aren't poisoned, and the two of spend that first day as friends sitting in her respiteblock talking until the sun rises over trees. Well, she talks for the both of us. It is near impossible to get her to stop, as I will learn as time goes on. I marvel at her openness, of inviting a relative stranger into her hive and casually striking up conversation. Perhaps it is landweller thing; I have heard that the lower castes don't try to kill each other nearly as often as my ilk. I wouldn't know. I've only met the one.
When I tell her this, she laughs and laughs.
There are many things that surprise me about Sombra. I ask if hacking is not more of a goldblood hobby, and she says I'd be surprised. I ask why she lives in such a place and she says she likes her privacy. I ask—delicately—what purpose she had in inviting me here. She tells me I need a friend.
There is a stuffed toy lusus sitting against a beanbag chair. This, I also make no mention of.
Still, place is not without its stereotypes—she is obviously religious, the paintings of acclaimed minstrels staring down at us from all walls. Charts, those drawn by a madwomen, cross from screen to paper printouts to screen again, connected by fine purple wires escaped from their cables. Bottles and bottles of that horrid clown soda roll around on the floor, and my stomach lurches when I think of what's inside them. At the very least they're cancerous, poisoning the many who imbue them by the gallon with each of its chemical components. So then, I don't even think when Sombra reaches for one and my claw snaps around her wrist.
She looks at me, and for the first time since I've met she is unsure. Her eyebrows arc high, blinking obtusely up at me as I hold her arm in a death grip. Then she laughs, a reactionary chuckle—as though I've just told some sort of wonderful joke.
She pulls her arm out of my grasp, still laughing. I stare back. If nothing else, then to not reveal I'm just as surprised as she.
She twists open the bottle. I sink back into silence.
Years in the future.
It goes on like this:
She grows up. We make friends. Life never seems half so lonely when I follow the shadow like a shadow. She has a way with people, and a way with places, able to get us both in wherever we want to go. The later I think has something do with her particular brand of chucklevoodo; some facet of her that makes eyes skip by and psionics discount.
There is always some place to go or something to do with her—never a moment where she isn't snooping in places we don't belong. I follow her, of course, and say very little. She winds her way through gangs and congregations, trying to find the shoes that fit. Nothing ever seems to satisfy her, and she settles down only ever long enough to buy new trinkets. She takes up scrapping. She makes friends with an heiress. A bounty ends up on her head.
Again: I follow, and say very little.
Often she bites the hand that feeds her, in that she needles me often but I am still with her despite all the mounds and heaps of reasons not to be. I always have something dry to drawl back, and she'll laugh, mocking me for my "painfully blatant flushed crush". An exhausted hm is my only response.
Sombra flirts like it is going out of fashion.
By the time we are five sweeps I know what she is to me, although somehow Sombra has retained a complete and impenetrable shield of obliviousness when it comes down to the conciliatory.
Sombra gives me plenty of opportunities, entering into half-hearted caliginous relationships whenever it strikes her fancy. The cerulean girl, the one who built little machines only for Sombra to break them, lasts the longest, and I mediate spectacularly with all those sweeps of practice under my belt. But she eventually grows bored of Sombra's empty games, sees the kismesisstude for what is and realizes it is going nowhere.
Once, as desperate as I was, I even tried to auspisticize between her and her solitary red fling. The tragedy was made even more embarrassing by the fact that Sombra still attempted to fire up black sparks that weren't there, to my continuing mortification. The rustblood boy had been more kind than Sombra deserved; I admire him for that. His patience lasted long enough for me to realize that as harshly as I may judge Sombra for turning everything into a contest of pitched throes, whatever can be said about her goes doubly true for me.
The small church dots the countryside in as much a picture of alternian tranquility as any monument to the Mirthful Messiahs can be, burying within the bloodstains, dried puddles of soda, and—for the night—me. I've felt the lethargic stares of the highbloods all through the service, and paid them exactly as much mind as I pay any other non-Sombra landweller; which is to say I pretend like I am very far away and enjoying a nice glass of wine.
It is a rare moment of silence now; a gap in-between different mistrals speaking slow and plodding drivel. None of it makes a lick of sense, but between the drinks I earlier declined to imbue, I think wordcrafting isn't the point. My head is lifted to the ceiling, eyes closed while the congregation takes a moment of silence. Sombra has never asked me to come before tonight. It is because of this sheer idiosyncrasy that I agreed.
Without moving my head, I crack my eyes open, and glance down far enough that I can see her out the corner. Her usual facepaint is gone, replaced by a more elaborate skull design, with swirls and starbursts decorating the contours of her face. She has her head down in prayer.
It is strange to see Sombra subdued, and I wonder why this place somehow touches someone like her, a girl who seems to believe in nothing.
The silence breaks. Sombra shuffles to wakefulness, and I close my eyes and let the light cast a rainbow from stained glass onto my lids, drifting off again as another sermon begins.
In a few minutes the tension in the room will come to a head. I am not all together unaware of it, but I have no idea what faux pas Sombra has committed, or understand the extent of what bringing me here has cost her. All I know is that, intent to follow through or not, I will not abide threats made against her life.
So let's cut to the chase then, shall we?
I slam the last of the clown's to the floor, my grapplekind strangling his breath from his neck. He slumps, and I me left in the now empty church, dark purple running rivers to mix with the other kaleidoscope of stains. It was a close thing, this fight, for they were many and I was few, (One. Just me, Sombra stood too stark still as I tore through her brothers and sisters in a fury of tooth and claw, eyes wide and paralyzed), but it is I who stands victorious, chest heaving and ignoring the mace-fracture in my hip. My eyes dart around for more, for other enemies that aren't they, a line of amethyst dripping from my lip.
Sombra feebly grasps the reigns on her composure, and looks around the massacred church. "Woah, haha. You can really tear shit up when you put your mind to it, can't you?"
Where, where, my brain is still asking, instincts not letting me accept that a battle is over with no consequences, no call back to the stage. I can hear her swallow. A disembodied arm drops from a nearby pew onto the floor.
Then, with my gills still flaring and my grapplekind tight in my hand, she takes a step toward me. Slowly, as though even she isn't sure why she's doing it, she appears in front of me and strokes a finger down my nose.
At first I stiffen, but Sombra is good, Sombra is not my enemy, and hesitantly I relax as she draws a palm down the side of my cheek. She fumbles through a few croaking shooshes, as her unpracticed hands rain awkward paps on my face.
I lean into her touch. It is my body betraying me, because although the soft caresses along my cheekbones drag me down from my murder-high, it doesn't change the fact that it feels wrong. The quake in Sombra's hands reveal just how unconvinced she is, and after only a minute I draw back sharply.
"They were a poor influence anyway," I say, sliding my weapon back into place. I turn and walk to the sealed double-doors.
There is a brief sputter. "Ha…yeah. I am probably right."
And then she is beside me. I feel as though this is something we will not speak about ever again, but now she is coming after me instead of the other way around.
Years more in the future.
"How much longer?"
I sit in the tide pool below her, casting eyes up to where she's jammed an umbrella into the rocks as to avoid the mid-morning sun. The shadow graciously falls onto the water, protecting me as well as I tread safely within the jetty. Still. The water is a bit too warm for my liking.
Sombra is decidedly more comfortable than she was the last time the two of us visited this barren beach. She leans out of her lounge chair and lowers her shades. "Why? Got somewhere to be?"
We have known each other long enough that I can dance this song with my eyes closed. She twists the baton, and I follow the motion.
"Having prior arrangements has nothing to do with preparing oneself mentally for an unpleasant situation." I splash slightly in the stagnant water. "Also, this place smells like grub piss."
She laughs, ever the predominant voice. And she will always be, the wind in my sails that takes me where I need to be, even if it is not where I want to be. Without whom I would simply be stuck. Adrift. Left to my own devices I would still be watching the world turn from beyond the waves.
She returns to her palmhusk, lazily waiting for another one her clients, buyers of flagrantly illegal tech. "Relax, you'll like him. He's kind of a bitch."
"Like me?" My mouth makes a hard line.
Hers, forever soft, does not. "Like you."
So I resign myself again to patience, perched in protection from the sun, waiting for another passing face.
