Wanderlust (Olkhon Island | Baikal Lake, Siberia)

[Thalia]

Tristan took the sketchbook. Curiosity burned insatiably for a moment, like a current pulling her to follow, and she longed for the connection to a facet of herself she did not understand. But he was solemn and quiet to the task and it felt intrusive to linger let alone speak. Patricus had commanded a similar bearing, and he had spent a ponderous amount of time looking through all her drawings, but he never explained much of what he saw there. Whatever understanding had been gleaned, or not, he had kept it for himself. It curled a small flame of disappointment, remembering the exclusion, but only for a moment. 

Thalia gave them space. 

The sofa rushed up a little faster than anticipated when she sat, her wobbly legs glad to be free of the burden. Her head throbbed a moment afterwards, then stilled to an ache. A sensible person would take the moment’s reprieve to clean the blood from her face and seek a little privacy to change into her borrowed clothes -- a good suggestion, really, but not one she heeded. Her grim redecoration of the bathroom walls she was fairly sure she could ignore, but she was afraid to look in the mirror again, so she just stayed where she was, legs pulled up comfortably, the bundle of clothes and food in the hollow of her lap.

Her bruised ankle itched. She covered the red splotching with a hand, mostly for the relief of a cool palm against the skin. No point worrying about that. And she didn’t eat, at least not yet. Sierra had proclaimed the bread and cheese all the food they had, and it had the feel of travelling rations. Usually Thalia accepted kindness with the same open enthusiasm with which she offered it to others, but she was not wholly sure of her welcome here. There were no hostilities, so it wasn’t that, and she was not afraid of either of them (nor their dog-not-dog companions), yet it felt like ice cracked little hairline fractures beneath her feet. Maybe that was why she sat so still.

When her attention returned it was to the act of disrobing. She watched openly, but did not react until the explanation followed. Her eyes grew wider then, curious, a little enchanted. He offered back the sketch, but she did not need it to mark the differences between ink and flesh and know that it was not exactly what she had drawn. Oddly, it looked like the pale comparison; like something old dredged through silt until it reached the watery surface. Except the centremost symbol. That was something else.

“It looks incomplete.” The words were murmured, thoughtful. Her fingers itched to touch, but that was skin not canvas, and she was mindful of Sierra’s quiet presence. Thalia did not know if such things were normal, or even that it was possible to awake altered in such a way. Her thoughts were racing, and there was a waterfall behind her chest, frothing it all up with emotion. She didn’t try to parse sense from any of it, just swam in the strangeness, until a question arose and with it her gaze refocused to anchor on gold eyes.

“Do you... think it was my fault?” She asked it with a genuine sort of surprise, like she shared it aloud before she’d finished thinking it. Not because she felt accused, but because she realised it might be possible (don’t think about the doctor). Did Tristan think he had been coerced to come here? Like those marks were chains, authored in a script she could not even read? She’d call that preposterous until recently, and now she had no answers at all. Noctua had professed a need to save her soul. Told her she dabbled in dangerous things. With dangerous people. She didn't like to think it of herself; knew how it felt to be clipped, caged, expected of. But neither could she exonerate herself.

“Tristan, I don’t remember,” she said softly. A hand scrubbed the front of her own tshirt. “None of it. I never have. I wake, and I draw, and sometimes it’s--”-- a terrible experience. But she’d never even told Nox that much, and she didn’t want to feel the weight of pity from strangers for something she couldn’t control, even as the evidence of her oddness was right in front of them in full technicolour experience. For every answer she had found along this journey it seemed another island of certainty was stripped away. 

“She’s not a monster,” she said instead, glad to steer thought away from her own distress and towards something she could at least be definitive about. To have been included in the declaration of monstrousness herself did not appear to phase her, if she even noticed. “I can’t even imagine how long she must have been alone. No one deserves that.” A strength of feeling that pulled her across a continent, with Sage’s help. Not that things had gone smoothly, perhaps especially given all the blank spaces in her reasoning. “It’s not the wisest thing I’ve ever done, but I just thought…” Well, no, she hadn’t thought. She never did. Her hand lifted from her ankle, where, amidst the blossoming bruises were angry red welts. Round like suckers, as if from a tentacle.