Rough Waters

[Glenn]

He listened.

She asked for one near-impossible thing after another. No, sometimes it wasn't her, it was him. Glenn Burnie had a lifetime (and two deaths, if one tallied that account) of horror to stretch his limits past that of the average person, even the average Myrkener. On this night, he had bypassed them twice over. There was a toll. There were consequences. One of these was that she could get her words in edgewise without him intervening.

"Second thing first," he began, tankard forgotten, not that it would have done him much good spilled anyway. "I know when I hear what I might say to someone else. It'll sound ridiculous, demean you or me or this, but you've been to Myrken. You've seen them." His voice trailed off and his eyes went slightly stormy once again. "Damn it. I'm going to concede your first point if I go that way." He placed both palms back over his eyes and looked as if he might scream. His nostrils flared. That was the end of it. He took a long breath and tried again.

"Fine, first thing first," Burnie was impeccable, a bastion of control. He had an answer for everything. He never needed to take a breath. One could not trap him or hold him for he always had the words to escape. If she gained nothing else on this night, she'd have an image to match the one she'd bullied out of him: Glenn Burnie repeatedly at a loss. "We're tied at the wrist. You don't escape me. I don't escape you. I've seen too much. You've seen too much. We've been through too much. We know too much. We may have put off dealing with tomorrow until tomorrow, but tomorrow will come, whether we like it or not. We can argue all day and night about how we ended up here, but we've ended up here. I can't imagine you not regretting it in this moment," and there was a smile, though his eyes were sad, "and I don't blame you for regretting it in this moment, what fools and tangled webs and all that, but here we are and here we'll stay, even if it'll be letters between us again. I don't regret it. I'm glad to be here with you." Then, because he'd said that much already and because she wasn't wrong. "I may need them and I may go find them, and soon, fairly soon, I may even go back to Myrken, because however dangerous and reckless my heart may be, however mad I might be deep down, you've let me see tonight that I am not what I was then. Whatever my restraint holds back, it is not that. So yes, I may need them, but I need you too."

Then, far more softly, because he would not run from her words, not even directly to her as he just did. "I believe what you say. I'd say it to another without hesitation. Maybe I'd convince them to do more than believe it, to actually feel it. I believe it, thank you, but the memories still make me feel less complete, not more so."

[Niabh]

“My first point was a good point,” she said, stiff with pride. “All my points are good points. You should concede me it.”

Save that now he was looking angry as well as exhausted and perhaps now was not the time. She bowed her head in unspoken apology. “But aye, I’ve seen them. They’re a knot-headed lot. Takes a lot of pounding to make a lesson stick, but once it’s in, it won’t come out again. You know what you have been. You’ve hurt people.” Her eyes lifted with the tenacious accusation of a betrayed child. “You hurt Him. I have never forgotten that, not through all of this. You can be sure He’ll remember it longer than I will.”

And if revenge had been the foremost thought in her mind a year ago when she first set pen to page, who could say she might accomplish any better than the result before her? He’d been inching along the path on his own ere she came along and set her boot in his arse, and now look at him: broken, exhausted, vulnerable, all in the best possible ways, ones that actually meant something. For sake of expediency and headache, she would just as soon turned him into a salmon, but there was something… gratifying about the way this had turned out. It might all undo itself by morning once he’d had some rest and enough mental gymnastics to skew everything in his own favor, but in this moment, the Queen of Fairy nodded in full approval of her handiwork.

On the heels of the triumphant conclusion of one game came the sobering truth of another. In scolding him for running away from questions, she’d succeeded in making him self-conscious of avoidance, particularly in those moments where he wasn’t certain whether he was doing it or not. This mean he had to confront everything lest he inadvertently prove her right, and she might have patted herself on the back for a clever bit of subterfuge save that now she found herself caught in the same snare. Any discussion of memories lost and the reclaiming of them still bore the sticky, gritty residue of that stone on the hill at the High Queen’s court. The coppery reek of blood, like coins clutched in a sweaty fist, made her stomach clench, but she couldn’t run from it without he realize she was doing it.

It was like that ridiculous game they’d all played as children, the one called Bull, where they charged at each other head-down and tried to make the other one swerve first. Not even a very enjoyable game. Cracked skulls and stars bouncing behind your eyes and no one wins.

There was a mortal word for this feeling, one from still another stupid game. Where it was pointless to go on playing because neither side would win. It took her a moment to draw it up. Stalemate.

“You’ve been through too much.” Neither pity nor gloating. Simple observation. “I have not. I can still walk away. It’ll bother me a bit, but not for long.” A note of helplessness crept into the words. Her brows drew together as she tried both to understand and explain. “I am not even certain what you mean by regret. I know when people say that, it means they wish something had not happened, but things do happen. There is no might-have-been. Only what-is. Whether we intended it to happen or not, this has happened. I cannot wish for it not to happen. That is why you need your own folk. They know how to feel hurt for other people, feel it properly, as if it were their own. They would understand it. I don’t. I feel only mine. I have nothing you need.”

She shrugged a shoulder, which sent the tunic’s too-large collar slumping down the opposite arm. Absently she yanked it up again. “Still. I am the one who’s here now.”

She stepped toward him in much the same manner as the glam: arms extended but no longer thorn-bound, palms turned upward, open and empty. A truce. It was always easier to speak in gesture than in words.

[Glenn]

She was fascinating to watch. He was exhausted, well past his limits. She was apparently at the height of her power, showing both physical prowess and mental acumen. It was those sharp turns, though, that were something to behold. Petulant and imperious to apologetic to spiteful to triumphant to depressingly matter-of-fact. Finally almost deprecating and then back to a simple regal, as if there could be such a thing.

At one point in there, at least one point, maybe three, his blood had begun to boil. "Are you trying to rouse me?" he asked shortly after her invocation of Catch. Something akin to amusement twinkled in his eyes, even as she was looking at him as if he was utterly desiccated prey. "I know myself. I am not sure even at my best... no, not best; at my most rested and refreshed, that I am capable of refusing your challenge. Your challenge, however, draws out, again not my best, my most passionate, save for when I allow idealism to rule. Are you sick of the taste of this and want the taste of that again and again?"

"I know well what I did. I also understand the Cycle of Him. I think it ought to be a talk for another day." Then, with eyes still twinkling, his chin jutting upwards just a tiny bit. "If my punishment was the infection into my life of the glorious and wondrous ailment that is you, then I have been far more rewarded then punished. Good neighbor and all that."

It was different than before, that look in his eyes. Before, there was the hint of madness coiled serpentine around his thoughts and utterances. Now the energy was there but it was somehow purer, cleaner, not quite as frantic. "What you showed me was beautiful, Finn, but you're wrong. We could all be gone, all of us. You and yours could have all of this and it still wouldn't change things. Don't you see? A people that are expanding need more land to prosper, not one in decline. It would all be the same as it is now, just at a farther distance with less interaction, not more. They'd come together over a greater span of years to play out all of the old. There would be new tricks but old targets, new schemes but old grudges, and you'd decline all the same.

"In some ways, we're not dissimilar. We deal with the confines of our lives, large or small, and we overlay meaning upon it. For you, given the endlessness of your lives, there's no reason to change or grow. For us, there's no benefit in not expanding indefinitely." He finally took a breath, sympathy if she could even recognize it, having entered both his gaze and his voice. "You need fire, Finn, to warm your people's hearts and, dare I say it, their loins. What are we but a spark," His chin turned inwards with a hard admission, "a spark and kindling both as it would play out."

He was slowly working back to his feet now, making some real effort with it, certainly not about to crash headlong into her anytime soon, despite the verve to his words. "I need you too. They may understand, but you question. They take for granted things that you refuse to let me accept. You pushed me to places they never would or never could with all the tools at your disposal. You were hard and harsh but rarely to outright harm me." It didn't even take until morning. She had devastated him and he was smiling at her for it. She had dragged him through the mud, over jagged rock, but she had gotten him to the other side of it and he was grateful. Did that make her triumph all the sweeter or bittersweet. "And don't underestimate yourself: you understand more than you did before, I think. You'll come to understand more as we go. So I need them, but I need you too. We're stronger together."

Her arms were outstretched in a sign of truth. He had nothing so formal in him right now. No, he was still working his way back to his feet, creating an image of momentary knelt supplication. He'd snatch for those arms, pull himself up the rest of the way with them, and then, without the least bit of further warning, would give her the loose squeeze of a hug.

[Niabh]

His speech veered dangerously close to sincerity. To deflect it, she tossed her head back and shook her hair over her shoulders, like a pony. “An I were trying to rouse you, I’d show you my tits.” She gave a prim, exaggerated hitch to both sides of the bodice, then grinned and flicked her fingertips at his face again. “Besides, challenging you as you are now is no challenge at all. I am not even certain how you’re still upright. I suspect you are buoyed by your own lungpower and that if you stop speaking, you will deflate and straightaway collapse and there I would leave you. And take your purse with me. Only so that no one else robbed you, mind.”

Her efforts to sound imperious and disdainful were coming off a little short. If it was in any wise possible that a fairy queen could be flustered, that was probably the correct term. Belatedly she suspected that the hard-won flattery, which she had only just been thinking would be prize enough from him, was sincere. Now that she had it, she wasn’t quite certain what to do with it. She squirmed under his sympathy.

“We, ah, have a saying. Don’t swallow stones bigger than your own stomach.” The grin turned to a half-smile and a shrug. “It doesn’t translate well. Means don’t steal anything you can’t carry away. I suppose for your folk, it would be something like don’t start what you can’t finish, don’t promise yourself if you can’t see it through. I had to get something out of you. Otherwise it would have been a whole year wasted. But not everything need be a challenge, Sionnach. I was just standing here thinking of how exhausting this all is. And I thought about what you said before, how you didn’t even know what you were beyond gamesmanship and strife, and it struck me…much as we’ve done together, if we couldn’t have been doing something else all the while. If I might not have gotten so more done with all the effort I put into trying to win. If I’d done that, who knows how much further we’d be instead of just here?”

Abruptly her brows scrunched together. “Wait. Is that regret?” She looked back to him, impatient for confirmation. “Am I having a regret?”

On the one hand it was an experience she had never had before, and one she had managed all by herself without prompting, making it cause for excitement; on the other, she wasn’t sure what it was or if she was doing it right.

A bedrock of pride made the whole notion of underestimating herself unthinkable. Of course she was right; they didn’t let you be queen if you weren’t correct by default. It was why one had to whisper that the High Queen might be mad even when she was a whole ocean from hearing. It was why you didn’t let a tultharian get away with suggesting you had improved and might be improved further.

But there had always been in her a faint suspicion that she had come into this whole queening business by chance. A paltry, placeholder queen summoned into being to settle an ageless debate that never had much to do with her anyway. If she could not play the part, there might be no place for her at all. To be told she didn’t need to know everything all at once was a little overwhelming. If she spoke, she would spoil it. She shrugged again and was silent, neither conceding nor dismissing his point.

She offered her hands to help him stand. Instead he took them and pulled her toward him. Brief bafflement bordering on alarm crossed her face, her thoughts plain as print: wait, are we dancing again? The embrace was as startling as it was awkward, and her back arched as if to pull free of him, which only made things more awkward. Immediately she reversed, relaxed, and let her arms slip under his to find a comfortable, natural position crossed over his back, gathering him against her. It was probably all right.

“I don’t know if you can even tell the difference anymore,” she whispered tenderly in his ear, “but you’re babbling. You’re really, really babbling. I think you ought to be gotten home.”

[Glenn]

"The stick up your ass is more of a challenge than your tits," spoken while either feigning or feeling boredom. It was a challenge in and of itself and it was best to show her, this time at least, that he could meet it. "Anyway, the real tricky bit now is finishing me off. That's what we humans do. You knock us down and we get back up again and again, too smart and too stubborn to know better. Speaking of such kicks, best to leave the purse on me. If someone finds something on me, they're less likely to kick me out of frustration." Better robbed than to nurse broken ribs (again).

All of that twinkling brilliance in his eyes seemed to flicker as she mentioned her people's saying. He let her explain though, and then simply shook his head. "I've wanted that for a while." The shake fell into some embarrassed laughter. "I have no idea if that's true. My sense of time isn't what it was a few hours... minutes ago? I'm pretty sure I've wanted that for a while. I hold no major grudges. I wish you no ill. You are my friend. I see the path forward with us working together." On the other hand, he threw a book at her. Was that today? Was it really today?

Then she had her regret and that made it all better somehow. "I think it is. Let's leave that for tomorrow though. We can talk about the good parts of regret and the bad and maybe even get to tears again. That'll fit well with horrors." Was that where this was all going to end? Tears?

In the immediate it led to a hug. In truth, this was a structural sort of hug. She was all but holding him up and he was shameless about it. "Maybe I'm babbling," he spoke directly into her shoulder. It was audible, but it'd be better if she could understand it through vibration alone, perhaps. "This is important and I worry I'm not getting it right," which was exactly the reason he had pushed regret to the morning. He was about to say something else when her previous disruption of his twinkling brilliance came back around for a second thought.

"Swallow a stone. Hey, Finn, speaking of stones..."

[Niabh]

For a split-second she went stiff as a cord of wood, the arms still around his back like the arms of a jointed wooden doll—still embracing but not quite touching him, aware of his weight sagging against her. She disentangled herself with alarming alacrity: one moment there, next moment apart, with seemingly no intermediary stages between the two states. The only concession was keeping her hands braced on his shoulders lest he drop.

“Glenn,” she began, sharply enough…except that now he really was on the verge of babbling, and whatever rebuke was on the verge of being born suddenly lost its punch. Only a ghost of the sick quivering in her stomach. Not angry, then. Only startled and taken by surprise.

She took a half-step closer, drew next to him, and slipped one arm under his to hoist him up. The gods knew if she had one skill beyond the bow, it was holding aloft drunken friends and escorting them gently away from the fire before they stumbled into it.

“Sionnach.” More gently. “No fear. You’ve lost no time. If anything, you may have gained some since it’s likely nowhere near as late as it must feel. I’ve no idea the hour but the moon’s scarce risen. It’s long before dawn.”

She sighed. That was her fault, too. This regret thing was insidious. You spotted one and all at once you started seeing them everywhere, like fireflies.

“I know I promised you answers. Nothing would please me more than to let you ask a full score of half-addled questions as you are and consider the debt discharged, then have you wake clearheaded in the morning cursing yourself for squandering your chance and me for letting you squander it. But that is not quite fair. So let’s put that stone in the same basket with Catch and all those other things we said could wait and you can ask me tomorrow. I can stay one day more.” Even as she said it, she felt her muscles knot in anticipate. She could bear it. Two days in the city, ten years in Myrken…not pleasant, but not prison either. “I have to see to my horse in the morning. And talk to the raven. But I can come back to you by noonday, an you’ll have me.”

An uncharacteristic doubt caused the last phrase to quaver, as if she feared he might not.

[Glenn]

Her withdrawal was surprising and in its wake was left a questioning look, one that was far more effective than a slew of his words might have been given his current state. Beginnings and endings. They mattered. At least one of them was naturally inclined to have a sense of that. That wasn't the point, but it was a point, one of many. "Did I say we'd talk about Catch tomorrow, too? That was irresponsible of me." Was he talking to her? To himself? Did it matter?

When their eyes did lock again, he found his way back one point. "See, because I've gained time, it obviously means that I've been on your side for years, not hours or days. Six, seven years. I don't think you can deny that." She could be left to wonder if he was joking, trying to get away with something, or just that far gone.

It was like trudging through molasses, but he was getting through her statements, albeit not in the right order. "Finn, I could be twice-drunk, half dead and hanging upside-down, and my questions would still be the..." quite a good run of energized words, really, until he stumbled and couldn't quite drive the overstocked carriage of words to its destination. "the good. They'd be good questions. Good ones."

Then, finally, with an unfortunate waggle of his finger, unfortunate because he didn't actually make the effort to raise it. "Oh yeah, the raven. Where the hell has HE been anyway? Can you imagine how much he's going to swear and flit about when I tell him you gave me his name?" No, that wasn't quite right. The carriage had been moving just a little too quickly. He tried again. "When I tell him that you gave me your name, I mean."

Finally somehow lingered into a second finally, and Burnie turned his head back towards the tankard. "I'm going to go pick that up and stumble back to that tavern and hire a room. Really confuse the spies, right? Come and find me tomorrow," then, as an afterthought (which might have been the only thought he had left), "unless you'd rather meet outside. If you're more comfortable, and promise not to jump like that again or make me think you jumped like that, because I don't know which it was and I hate not knowing."

[Niabh]

She found herself with his eyes suddenly locked upon her, so serious and grim that she had to wonder if this was all weary rambling. Glenn Burnie half out of his head was still Glenn Burnie with a hard core of relentless logic to him. In any case, his words gave her a chill. Seven years had its own connotations for her.

"Not seven years nor yet seven hours. Two or three at most." She patted his shoulder comfortingly. "Well, tomorrow I'll pour whiskey down your neck and strap you up by the ankles and beat you with a belt so you can prove that theory. I promise I will be ever so impressed if you manage it."

At that point she tried to give him a little nudge with the tips of her fingers to coax him along in one direction or another, But the man had his own plans. She was not a woman of unlimited patience but stubbornness filled the gaps; if it should take until true dawn, she would not allow herself leave until this was settled to her satisfaction, which meant getting him off the streets ere she departed. If he wandered back into the streets after that, it was no longer her concern. She sighed, gave a little exasperated stamp of her foot, and made a sound of frustration dangerously close to paugh before folding her arms over her chest and leaving him to stumble.

"The raven is at the stables with my horse, probably asleep. He hates flying by night." A lie. It seemed pointless to waste a perfectly good truth on Glenn in this condition, and in this case the truth wasn't his business. "I don't much care if you tell him about the name but you're only going to worry him needlessly. He hasn't aught to say about what his lady chooses to do." Another, milder lie, in that while the raven would have plenty to say about it, he had no place to stop her from doing it.

She sighed again, arms unwinding and falling back to her sides as she listened to him carefully explain his plans, in detail. His plans were better than hers; hers involved invariably coshing him over the head with a glam, leading him through the streets in a stupor, and installing him in his own sitting room. "I cannot very well come and find you tomorrow if you don't eventually go inside. Which I do wish you would." At last shook her head and chuckled in amusement. "Good night, Glenn Burnie," with a distinctly insistent stress on the night.

Like a kingfisher darting toward a lake, she hovered, then swooped in and gave him a quick peck on the cheek. And that one really might have been glamourie or exhausted hallucination, or simply so spontaneous that even she did not quite realize she had really done it.