[ closed ] dusk dropped her starry gown

[gramarye]

Who: Ilde Decima and Wolfgang Einhorn
What: A fairy and a witch investigate the river.
Where: The Gross Tar by Echomire
When: Givdi afternoon
Warnings: Creepy spooky stuff, violence, human death, animal death. TWs for discussion of suicide, sexual assault/rape.

Despite having slept upwards of ten hours, Wolfgang does not feel rested when he leaves the house. He is at least dressed for the occasion this time in shorts with his hair pulled back neatly out of his face, figuring he is probably going to get wet. Doing this in the middle of the afternoon does not make anyone any safer, but it will hopefully make it less awful than the last time he ran off to go chase something that felt wrong in the middle of the night in a creepy abandoned amusement park.

He likes to blame Baedal for this, but honestly, this is what he did back home, too.

He arrives roughly at three, sidling up to the bank of the river, figuring Ilde will be easy to spot. Then again, so is he. While he walks up, he's opening his senses, trying to see if he can feel anything off, and the closer he gets to this part of the river, the more he feels it. The cold. He frowns down at the water, his brow furrowed as he tries to sort through what that might mean. He won't jump to any conclusions, but Ilde mentioned an awareness, and he's inclined to believe her.

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[rhinemaid]

“I can do that-- it might not be comfortable.” Because in order to be sure, the simplest way to do it is to hold him in place with the water around him, and that's a little like being clenched in a fist that gets everywhere. So.

--it's better than drowning.

[gramarye]

"None of this is going to be comfortable," he says, sounding more resigned than anything as he hauls himself back up and towards the edge of the river. He waits to be sure she's ready before he lets the water touch his flesh again, not wanting anyone to be surprised this time.

Wolfgang does not actually know what he's doing — this isn't something he's done before, but in feeling out the edges of magic, what he's discovered is that the limits of what he can do is what he wants to do. So. This should work. Still, he feels awfully silly standing there waiting for something to happen and for a moment he thinks maybe he was wrong, maybe it was some freak accident, a coincidental shared hallucination.

Then the water goes all white, like milk.

[rhinemaid]

Ilde is ready and already holding onto him when the water changes, but when it does her grip tightens perceptibly - painfully, even, with Wolfgang playing the role of human rope in a tug of war between nymph and ghost. The woman in the water is doing her damnedest to be an unstoppable force vs Ilde's immovable object and if nothing else the struggle slows the moment down enough that he'll have time to do whatever it is he's intending to try before disappearing arse-first under the water.

This seemed like a much better idea a moment ago, which isn't saying a lt.

[gramarye]

When he moves his submerged limbs, raising an arm out of the water, he is momentarily distracted by the fact that it seems to be covered in hair. White, wet hair, someone else's, the same colour as the water, which it simultaneously is, and —

Oh. Good, this is exactly what he wanted to do with his afternoon.

Wolfgang winces, but pain is — while not something he would choose to use as a focus, there is a reason it's so popular among mages of his type: it works well. What also helps: she, this spirit, has the same idea. Acquiring a human mouth in order to tell these people who keep coming into her river getting their shit everywhere —

"Get out!" she says, using his body. That is definitely a woman's voice, accent as close to native as Baedal gets.

[rhinemaid]

“No,” Ilde snaps back, instinctively contrary and briefly, madly relieved to discover that yes, their dead woman does speak something she comprehends. The possibility that she might not had only struck her once Wolfgang was already in the water, and she has no idea what they'd have done otherwise. Then, “No,” still firm but not quite so sharp, and she's so glad she has to focus on Wolfgang's face and not whatever is going on by the water's surface. “You showed us a man-- do you want us to find him for you?”

tw: suicide

[gramarye]

"No! I never want to see him again!" she says.

There are flashes of images there, sequential, telling a story. She met him. She was young, she used to be pretty until the river bloated her grotesquely, turned her skin the texture of grey cheese. He never said I love you but she heard it anyway in the way he touched her hair, called her secret petnames when they made love, told her she was different from the other girls. They picnicked here, he gave her a Claddagh ring, the one still digging into her bloated finger. He never said I love you but he said he could see himself marrying her, so she waited, and then —

His things in her apartment, but he wasn't there. How her clothes didn't fit her anymore, but she wore the dress he liked. She poisoned herself before she jumped, just to be sure.

Below that, her feelings are pretty clear. Anger. Disgust. Anger. Sadness. Anger. Rejection — not that he left her, but that he left her to die.

"Get out of my river," she growls, her voice too low and raspy, like there's silt stuck in her (his) throat. She lifts them both in the air — Wolfgang, at least, if Ilde can't be moved from the water — and tosses them on the bank.

[rhinemaid]

Moving Ilde would take more - this isn't her territory, but it is the river that she's part of now and she isn't easily stirred from it - but breaking her grip on Wolfgang isn't impossible, especially when holding someone there so tightly is something she's never needed to do before, not with someone else trying to force him out. It's an odd sensation, which would be more distracting in and of itself if not for the situation in which it occurs--

The sick feeling in the pit of her stomach, though; that's familiarity. Recognition. She crawls out of the water on her own, palms and knees on the muddy bank, and wishes briefly and pointlessly that she didn't understand.

[gramarye]

The narrative is a familiar one. He has a long time to think about it, lying there catching his breath again after having the wind knocked out of him. (This is the last time, he's not getting in there again for love or money, and he is briefly grateful she didn't think to duck him under, or crush him with a stone, or summon up one of Shada's children; he wonders if she can feel that.)

The story, though, it gets told in fiction all the time, especially old ballads. A woman falls for an unfaithful man, who hurts her or leaves her, so she swallows poison and jumps in the river. It should be straightforward —

but it isn't. It's a trope, but something being familiar does not make it real. Wolfgang occupies a strange grey area in terms of gender, so he can't say he has a woman's experience. But he's known them better than men and he has never known any woman to behave like that, ever, outside of stories written by men.

He sits back up on his elbows. "That didn't feel right," he says aloud eventually.

[rhinemaid]

“It wasn't,” she says, sitting sideways and leaning her weight forward on her hands, wanting the water for steadiness and forcing herself to hold in place because getting back in there - here - is not a good idea and she knows that, even if every instinct she has protests. “I know what it was.”

Her eyes close. Jesus. She wishes she didn't.

(She wishes she believed he'd been sorry for something other than the consequence.)

[gramarye]

"What was it?" Ilde looks — well, he can guess whatever it is, he's not going to like it. The wrongness of the scenario has settled over him like a cloak, leaving a strange itchy feeling. It feels like coming back to your desk to see everything moved an inch to the left.

[rhinemaid]

Ilde exhales, brushing her hands off as she straightens, uncomfortable in her skin and uneasy with the sense of intrusion that comes with this particular kind of understanding. Some questions you regret asking; some answers you never ask for.

“Humans fall in love with fae all the time. If I took stories for gospel truth then I should be knee-deep in them-- half what's written about us is just poorly veiled sexual fantasy. 'The mermaid problem'. But it's different, with some.” She doesn't say 'of us' because this is not something she's ever wanted to be close enough to touch.

“It's different, it's an obsession, it isn't natural. It eats these women from the inside out, until there isn't anything left. There was a girl in our cohort, and I couldn't do anything for her, I didn't know what to do. Sonja knew how to undo it, but if she'd come back to the city any later, then it would have been like this. He looked familiar, but not like I knew him. Because I know what he is.”

[gramarye]

A pause. He's not sure if he's interpreting this correctly.

His contact with the fae has been limited. He met some, but he was a child, the context was different — there were none of the romantic or sexual overtones that currently plague the urban supernatural landscape, they were the biting, mischief-causing, child-killing types, thoroughly unhuman and uninterested in fucking any.

"Would he... know?" That this is the effect he has, that this is the result of it. It's the difference between a tragedy and a predator.

[rhinemaid]

“Yes,” she said, quietly. “If he's properly-- if he's always known what he is, if he's as powerful as her reaction suggests, then he should be able to control it.” It should be, her point is, something that he's capable of stopping; it makes it something he chose to do, or at most generous chose to allow.

Most fae are predatory somehow, mischievous and callous as cats, pretty troublemaking monsters that inhabit a very ambiguous place morally. Some aren't as ambiguous as others.

[gramarye]

His reaction abruptly changes. Just like that. There is swift, penetrating anger, radiating outwards until he realises he is broadcasting and reels it back in, where it simmers somewhere under his skin. Reacting like this frightens him, but it is useful, so he keeps it there instead of dismissing it.

He looks back at the river, the colour and gentle current typical for a Givdi afternoon, no hair, no stones. They might have been here half an hour, an hour maybe. "How likely is it this is the first one?" His voice is flat, because he guesses the answer is 'not very'. The man he saw didn't look that young. Late twenties, maybe early thirties.

[rhinemaid]

Wolfgang isn't wrong.

“I doubt it. The kind of logistical backflips required would make it...unlikely. Really unlikely.”

Her tone is-- not neutral, but flat, controlled.

[gramarye]

"We have to do something." His glance there is questioning. He says we, but he wouldn't blame her for stepping out, here.

"She says she doesn't want to see him again, but... she needs closure; she needs to move on." At the very least, they need to talk to this man to find out who she is, to be sure that if she has any family, they get closure. It's a massive impending headache and, sitting up, he braces his head in his hands, aware of this. He's not even sure what 'do something' means. Drag him here, rub his nose in it like a bad puppy? He is fully prepared to do that. Report him to the authorities? That, he's much more hesitant over. For many reasons.

[rhinemaid]

“Um...okay. What do we know? He is fae. He killed her. He's probably killed before. We don't know if it's purposeful or just...indifference.” Her expression is steady - mostly, except for on that last word. There, there's tension she has more trouble locking down. “And...she's a ghost. What do we know about ghosts?”

[gramarye]

"Ghosts stay in the material realm when something is keeping them from moving on, and when their spirit is strong enough to outlive the flesh. They can get — trapped like this, locked in their pain, especially in this city. Reliving their last moments over and over."

He brushes his hair out of his face, his gaze firmly planted on the ground. "I mean, I'm not an expert, I just..." He trails off. "Knew a lot." Of ghosts. Lonely children will befriend anyone. "When they get closure, they tend to move on, and I think — I think if anyone does anything about this... person... it needs to be her."

He is talking about letting her kill him, yes. It seems more fair, in a way, than passing this off on well-meaning but detached strangers to review evidence — this woman's life — and then decide on some arbitrary punishment.

[rhinemaid]

“So...we find him. And we bring him here.”

This makes sense to her; she remembers being in the rain, wearing a borrowed coat, being told to choose the one she hated most. When she's frightened, when she's uncertain, when she doesn't know where to find steadiness-- she remembers how his blood was so warm it felt like it'd burn her cold fingers, that he didn't make any sound, and how it had been almost like her own heart started beating again when his stopped.

She understands retribution, even if she doesn't always understand justice or closure.

[gramarye]

"Yeah." He plucks a stray long white hair off his arm. It isn't his. Frowning at it and then the river, he considers for a while. "Okay. I can find out his name, but my things are all at home. You can come if you'd like, or I can meet you back here."

[rhinemaid]

“I'll meet you back here,” she decides, mirroring his expression unintentionally as she glances back toward the river. “I should tell someone what I'm up to.”

...not...in any great detail, from the absent-minded tone of her voice.

[gramarye]

"All right," he says, getting up slowly to leave. His everything is sore, but whatever, he'll deal with it, he's not dead. "An hour-ish, then." And he's got his CiD, should something happen between then and now.

He makes his way back home, because there are some supplies there he needs -- he's figuring out all this focus and ritual stuff mostly on his own, or else out of books, some from notes taken in Martel's library (and he's not certain whether the other man is keeping track of which volumes Wolfgang is studying, but would not be surprised) and some from books from occult stores, secondhand, other people's notes in them. It's one of those he takes up to the roof with him, because it is written in Hebrew, and he trusts his own people over others.

He also brings a saucepan from the kitchen, because like hell will he ever own anything that can actually be called a cauldron.

It's a pretty simple ritual: the pan gets filled halfway with distilled water, into which he adds three drops of river water, three drops of wax, and then spits in three times. (Sometimes magic is gross, but virgin spittle comes up over and over in his books, and -- it works.) He braids two of the hairs from the river along with one of his own together, then ties a golden ring to the end and suspends it over this, gently rocking it back and forth until it hits the edge -- ping, ping, ping...

On the seventh strike, the sounds begin to change, to take shape. He has to close his eyes to hear it properly, to see, his mind fixed on that face, her anger, her sadness, that face.

Berach Carmody, it says.

When he opens his eyes, he sees, in the wax floating on the surface of the water, that it has taken the shape of a house on a street, and it must be Baedal because he recognises the Spire in the distance behind it. It's gone just as suddenly, but he remembers, has it locked in his mind's eye.

Frowning heavily, he dips the ring in the water and swirls the whole thing up with his hand, disrupting the magic and ending the rote. It takes little effort to clean up, dry his hands, and climb back downstairs and back out the door, heading towards that same spot on the river -- this time armed with a name, a face, and an idea of where to look.

[rhinemaid]

When he gets back to the river, Ilde is there waiting for him - having cleaned herself up a bit, or at least having convincingly pretended to, and having sent a text to Ivan not to expect her for a while. Which is apparently what 'telling someone what she's up to' means when it's at home, because it certainly doesn't involve 'mention the fact she might be conspiring to murder someone'. The word she has in mind is 'closure', but the image is of rain, and it doesn't involve talking it out.

“Did you get it?” she asks, one hand clutching the other elbow, one hand by her thigh, looking up towards him as he comes down.