you've been acting awful tough lately smoking a lot of cigarettes lately;

[rhinemaid]

Who: Anna Demirovna and Ilde Decima
What: Grieving, faerie bonding, distractions and catching up.
Where: Sobek Croix (cemetery, then moonpools)
When: Veerdi night, after Boromir's funeral.
Notes: Funeral wear. ...yes. Also, title text.
Warnings: References to death; nudity.

After the funeral service, Ilde lingers to see him put in the ground; it's surreal, after having met Brian, and it makes an already uncomfortable experience a more bewildering one, leaving her unsure precisely how she's meant to feel. Does she grieve for someone who's gone if he isn't, really? --but he is, because Brian is different, even if he's the same, which makes sense and doesn't, actually, the whole thing is just...

(She wonders, but not for very long, what it was like to see her alive after experiencing her death in New York; it isn't a question she intends to ask anybody.)

When the earth is being patted back down into place, Boromir's marble headstone above it still a crisp new white, and the last stragglers are mostly gone or going - she moves away, finally, hat tipped down and hands hidden in her sleeves. She isn't entirely sure where it is she's actually going, but wherever it is, she's not going there in a particular hurry. There are probably people she should talk to (would it be prudent to warn someone-- she could always say something to Mycroft-- no, it's probably better not to wade into that herself), but it feels like a vague concern when she's so expertly distancing herself from the thing. It doesn't make sense and it's uncomfortable and so it's...somewhere else, and she's going for a walk (in the dark, in the woods, which is probably not as bad as it sounds when they're Sobek Croix's woods), and anyway--

Fuck it.

Comments

[indiscreet]

Of course she takes the offered hand. ("Of course" -- but there are times when a strange mood takes her, mist under her skin.) Right now there is a comfort in wandering, and there is always a comfort in the tallness of the trees and the deep green of shadowed moss, when she can admit it to herself. It isn't that she knows fairy stories -- not really, besides a few half-remembered from a grandmother's lips, and then the ones her own mind tells her -- but...yes. This feels right.

"I was glad, to have him there." Her voice is soft; a kind of vicarious gratitude, that Ilde introduced them. "And he told me that you had a way to be safe." She pauses; offers a quiet diagnosis. "He is a good man."

[rhinemaid]

“No,” Ilde says, like she's paused to think it over, is now offering her carefully considered assessment. “No, he isn't.”

--there is a curious satisfaction in not kidding herself about that. Ilde knows exactly what Ivan is; that's the man she's with, that's the relationship she has, that's the reality that she has to fold into her own. She's not going to pretend it's anything other than what it is.

It's hard to imagine her lasting long with someone she could agree on that about, anyway.

[indiscreet]

She ruffles her shoulders. "Ah. Well." No matter. She likes him; she is content to decide that, for her, that is close enough.

"It was nice, watching him kill." A pause, and she adds on (since the right thing to do is to justify these things), "Since they deserved it."

Though she hadn't been thinking about it, she realizes (she's halfway through ducking herself under a tree branch -- why is it she decided to turn here?) that she is heading somewhere specific. For a moment she considers and --yes, that will do, and nicely. It bothers her less now than it might, to recognize which part of her the desire comes from.

[rhinemaid]

Unconcerned with direction for her own part, Ilde is content to let Anna lead her wherever it is that they're going-- the road to whatever hell she'll eventually burn in is paved with things like it seemed like a good idea and I didn't really mind and I wasn't doing anything better anyway. It's not as though the choices she consciously makes for herself are, in fact, any better than the things she lets herself be so easily led into.

(She can justify all of them. That doesn't make them good; it just means she's got a nasty little mind.)

“He was annoyed with me when I got him into a barfight and then wandered off, once,” she says, reflectively. “But the bar got claustrophobic.”

--but yes, she enjoys watching him hurt people. So there's that.

oh hello

[indiscreet]

Some part of her is operating on instinct -- a hound heading back to the reassurance of the kennel, quickening its pace accordingly, except of course the moonpools are nothing at all like a kennel; quite the opposite, if anything. She simply assumes Ilde can keep up, and she does at least seem to know what she's doing. More or less. If there is the occasional tendril of mist trailing from her, well, her control has seen worse days than this.

"Men do have their particularities about these things." Deliberate nonchalance: they might be having tea. "Leander only killed the ones who deserved it, but it had nothing to do with...morality, really. Just...how he wanted his story told." It's been a long time since she last spoke of him; out here, it hurts less than it might have.

They're getting close now, she thinks.

[rhinemaid]

“I don't think Ivan cares about 'deserve'. Except in the retaliatory sense.” He'd certainly cared about what Candlelighters deserved, after the tainted blood supply; he lashes out when struck at, and she supposes that's natural. Doesn't everyone? At least most people. She does, sometimes.

Sometimes not.