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Rin & Girey Story: Baths – When Is This?

Sep20

So, I thought this story was after “Pause in the Journey,” but the weather doesn’t fit…

Girey woke slowly to the warm sun streaming in, and the familiar sound of water splashing. He reached for the tent flap to close it, eyes still closed, and hit wood instead of canvas.

Wood. He opened his eyes, blinking, as the long evening past came back to him. It had been raining buckets, cold nasty stuff that didn’t seem to want to let up long enough for them to pitch a tent, and so they’d kept riding long past sunset, torches lighting their way, until they’d found this way-station. His captor seemed to have an allergy to them, using the sturdy buildings only when no other opportunity presented itself, but this had counted as an emergency, or she’d been too damp to care about her normal objections.

She hadn’t shared her logic with him – she never did – so Girey was left to simply be happy for the soft bed, the roof, and the pleasant fire. And the splashing water, which made less sense now that he knew they were in a waystation.

Splashing…? And the scent, trailing under drying-goat-odor, of perfume. Girey sat up, looking around. A bath? There was a bath?

He had his feet on the floor before his arm was jerked short, his left arm chained to the box-bed. He swore quietly in his own language; did she ever, ever forget?

“Good morning, sleepyhead.” Rin’s voice, treacherously cheerful, wafted over the screen separating the two halves of the small cabin.

“You chained me to the bed,” he informed her, although he was sure she hadn’t forgotten.

“I did,” she agreed.

“Let me go.” That was, of course, futile. He’d spent nearly every moment of his captivity so far chained to something. As if he had anywhere to go.

“You’ll have to wait until I’m done with my bath. Just give me a few more moments, and you’ll have your turn.”

His turn. A real bath, from the sounds of it, with soap and warm water. A chance to be clean, to wash the stink of goats off his skin, if only for a little while. He lay back down, trying not to sound too impatient. “I’ll wait.”

“Good.” She made splashing noises for a few more minutes, while he tried not to think about the hot water, the soap, his captor, naked, in the tub just a couple body-lengths from him. He squirmed uncomfortably, his chain jangling. “Almost,” she called, and he could hear her stand up, the water sluicing off her body.

Girey caught his breath, and reminded himself that she was the enemy, his captor, and generally a miserable woman to be around, not the sort of woman that hung around Bitrani war camps.

Of course, a treacherous part of his mind whispered, if he had captured her and not the other way around…

He yanked hard on the chain, letting the shackle dig into his wrist, and thought about sword-drills. Sword-drills, and long marches through swamps, and not….

“All right.” She dropped a fluffy scrap of cloth atop him. “Stand up, it’s your turn.”

He stood, blinking to clear his eyes. She was in her undertunic and trousers, hardly revealing clothing, her hair falling loose and damp around her shoulders. And she was smiling. Girey held out his wrists to her, surprised as she unlocked his wrists altogether.

“No peeking,” he teased nervously, as she ushered him behind the screen.

“You have nothing to worry about there,” she assured him.

“Good.” He tried not to think too hard about why that itself would concern him.

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30DaysMeme: Well, Crap, where am I? (fanfic/Cali/Criminal Minds xover)

Jul6

Day 15 of 30 days of Fiction: “28) Prompt: overhearing a conversation.”

Tir na Cali/Criminal Minds, another scene from that fan fic my brain demanded I write. (Lj Link)…(This was the first one written) (LJ link; this story comes right after this one (LJ Link)).

Reid woke slowly, groggy, and cotton-mouthed, the last of the drug cocktail leaving the world hazy and his stomach uneasy. He was still bound – no, not still, bound again. For one, he was no longer in a chair; his knees were almost at his chest and the floor under him was padded. For another, whatever was holding him now was both less uncomfortable and had less give than the ropes Tobias had tied him with. His hands were behind his back, his ankles together, and he was leaning sideways against something padded. His eyes, when he opened them, were covered, hooded or blindfolded.

When the first voice he heard was male, he almost believed Tobias had sprouted a new personality.

“So, you’ve got him, now what are you going to do with him, then?” His accent had the peculiar combination of Irish and pioneer that suggested Californian working-class. Unlikely to be Tobias, then. All his personalities had Georgian accents.

“What we do when we kidnap someone.” The second voice was female. From the swallowed, lazy consonants, she might be royalty. This wasn’t looking all that good.

“Mor, he’s an American Federal Agent. You can’t just go kidnapping fibbies.”

“I don’t see why not.” And that was a third voice, another female, working-class. So the bleary memories he had of getting snatched from Tobias’ hands were accurate. He wondered what they’d done with his captor. “Ours now, isn’t he?”

That couldn’t be good. He cleared his throat into the moment of silence. “Excuse me,” he croaked. “Could I have some water?”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/70222.html. You can comment here or there.

Intro – Alexa

Jun15

Alexa had spent more time in the Doorways than anyone else she knew, more than, as far as they could tell, anyone in their world, possibly in any world. She was, much to Aerich’s continual annoyance, the resident expert on the things. And yet, every time they went through one, she had to swallow a surge of panic.

They held hands when they went through the Doorways. Roping off would be too obvious if, as they often did, they landed in the middle of a population center. But Alexa wasn’t certain that they would all end up at the same place otherwise, and Aerich couldn’t say yay or nay to that with any certainty, so they held hands.

They made sure it was Cole, or Josie or Xenia, who held Alexa’s hand – her left; she Opened with her right – and kept Aerich on the other end of the chain. And they all pretended they couldn’t tell she was white-knuckled, palms-sweaty, clinging to that hand for dear life until they were all through the Doorway.

She was grateful for the fiction. It allowed her to hold her head high and walk tall into strange worlds, to maintain the cool, perfect Lady Diplomat façade that had held her so well for so long. It allowed her to lie with her body, and smile, and act as if nothing had changed.

Everything had, of course, changed. Since the day she’d stormed out of Aerich’s house and ended up in the desert, both her public persona and her internal self had taken a bit of a beating. The Lady Diplomat, Alexa Bianchi, darling of the US Foreign Services, was missing, presumed dead. While the team had thoughtfully provided her a new set of credentials, as far as their homeworld was concerned, she no longer existed.

And in something closer to reality, Alexa herself wasn’t totally certain of her status, or, on bad days, of her existence. She tried not to think about that, though, as much as she could avoid it. She had a job to do. They all had jobs to do.

They had made it through the Doorway, intact, safe, and not falling through mid-air. She felt the hard soles of her boots click on pavement, took in a lungful of sooty air, and, with the rest of the team, took quick assessment of their surroundings.

“Carriage,” Josie warned, and they stepped back out of the road as the brass-and-iron contraption- not, technically, a carriage, but calling it a car would be entirely inaccurate – clattered by in an amazingly tuneful ringing of pipes.

“Steam and soot,” Aerich commented, brushing off his sleeves. “You take us to the most lovely places, Alexa.”


We met Cole from the Facets of Dusk team two weeks ago, and now we meet Alexa. Stay tuned for more!!

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