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In order to survive in the backstreets, there were certain traits you tended—no, needed to pick up. They weren’t simply habits so much as survival skills, the kind that would simply hibernate upon a change of scenery rather than disappear back into grey matter after a period of idleness. They’d long since burrowed into every empty cavity Rodya’s brain would offer, a welcome guest who would every so often awaken and offer unsolicited advice before lumbering back into the recesses of the unconscious.
One of those habits was to to pay attention to wealth; a person’s clothes could change, but their mannerisms were not so malleable. In a land where somebody’s position in life was the difference between living to see the next sunrise and rotting in the street, knowing who you were dealing with was of mortal importance. Even without thinking, her brain kept a mental inventory of those she met; how they carried themselves, how they ate, what kinds of trinkets they kept on them.
The worn coin Sinclair would toy with in his free time. A chunk of whalebone that Ishmael absently runs her hands over, its surface etched with images of the hunt. If a trinket caught her gaze, they’d explain the artifact nine times out of ten, even if it was a short, quiet ‘a friend gave it to me’ (if the sinner in question was Ishmael, she was not so lucky; on a good day, she would stumble out of her breathless discussion about whaling half an hour later. On a bad one, only Dante’s ticking or Vergilius’ vengeful stare could shake her out of it).
Except for one. Outis keeps a well-loved pocketwatch, the edges worn and shiny from touch, from her hands tracing countless tracks over it. The whole thing strikes her as odd, really. It isn’t like Outis doesn’t have a watch——the fancy kind, she notes, with a whole slew of dials and knobs to tell you everything from when the sun would rise that day to the month of the year. Had she been in the mood to sell it, Rodya has few doubts that it could easily pay for a year’s worth of food. That watch is the one she glances at when she’s tapping her foot impatiently, waiting for the other sinners to get back with lunch, or when a traffic light is being particularly stubborn, or when she asks when a task will be finished. But the pocketwatch, something that would maybe sell for just a couple days’ worth of food, that is only brought out when the relative chaos of the bus has died down, when they’re all quietly looking out the window. She’ll catch Outis opening her coat just briefly, and for just a moment, catch glimpse of the only genuine smile she’s seen from the older woman.
It made a woman curious, was all. Curious enough to want to get just a peek at just what about the thing could crack a smile out of Outis of all people. She has seen the corners of Yi Sang’s mouth turn up when Faust talks to him about poetry; Ryoshu’s lips glimmer with a hint of a smile when she is in the eye of a hurricane of blood and gore; even Mersault’s mouth would form a thin, barely curved line on occasion. But Outis? Outis was a concrete wall, no seams, no lines in her facade, somebody whose only emotions seemed to oscillate between ‘sucking up to Dante’ and ‘insulting the other sinners on the bus’.
But she’s not that interested in getting her rotting corpse fed to the local street rats, so she doesn’t really push the issue. Outis doesn’t like to talk much to anybody not named Dante, which is annoying at the best of times, but it’s not like being as annoyingly stubborn as an ox is a crime, exactly. If that were the case, Rodya herself would’ve been shipped away far, far earlier than Outis ever would.
Things happen. Bodies piles up. Boughs are located, some of them retrieved, some of them slipped out from their collective grasp. She finds herself bringing Gregor a glass of milk in the middle of the night, the first time. The second, Gregor quietly slips her an extra serving of his sirloin. The third, Sinclair’s hands no longer trace the edges of his old coin. And still the clock ticks onward. She almost forgets about the old pocketwatch that Outis has, her memory only jogging one day during their collective downtime, when she hears the rustle of a coat to the left of her.
Outis must’ve forgotten she existed. Or more likely, thought she was actually napping (not like she’d blame her—Rodya has the skill of pretending to be busy or sleeping perfected down to an art). She lazily opens an eye to observe Outis, her coat open to reveal that little timepiece. Rodya can see its face clearly now; the glass is cracked down the middle, but she can barely hear its tick-tick-tick over the din of Mephi’s engine. If she had to make a guess, she’d say it looks military grade, the kind they’d churn out en masse and hand out to new recruits.
And, of course, there’s a photograph tucked away, almost like the watch itself is a locket. The edges are creased from countless foldings and unfoldings, whatever ink used to print it long dulled from age and sun, but she can still make out two figures. The one on the left is obviously Outis, from a time before time had creased and wrinkled her face. The Outis in the picture is smiling, not the gentle expression she gives the pocketwatch, but full-on beaming at the camera, the grin plastered all over her face like it’s stuck on with glue. It almost feels heretical, the idea that the stoic face sitting next to her is even capable of mustering anything resembling that expression. Like the universe, in all its vastness, has snuck in this single photograph specifically to spite her imagination.
The second person is a woman. like Outis, her skin is a warm brown, but unlike Outis, her hair cascades down her chest and back. She too is smiling, the wind carding itself through her hair as she grins, one hand looped over Outis’ shoulder. It feels candid, as if somebody had decided on a whim to immortalize that moment in time, trap a single second of pure happiness in amber to keep for eternity. Rodya never really got the chance to use a camera, but she never smiled like that on the rare chance she was photographed; she sure as hell wasn’t smiling when they took her mugshot, that’s for sure.
Some part of her must’ve chuckled at the thought, because Outis’ head whips around like a gun just went off, eyes immediately meeting Rodya’s.
There’s a moment of silence as the two of them size each other up, beasts of prey staring the other down to see who flinches first. Rodya’s brain starts overclocking itself to figure out how to smooth this out; it wasn’t like she meant to peek, exactly. She just heard a sound and cracked open an eye, though she’d doubtful that Outis would accept that as an excuse.
Her brain does the math and comes up with the following:
• Outis does not like questions.
• Outis does not like people prying into her life.
• Outis will probably respond to any of the above with force.
Therefore, the best way to keep her happy is probably (maybe?) a compliment, pretending like this was a coincidence instead of something that feels far more private than it should.
“Oooh, that’s a nice photo. Wish I had a sister that pretty~” She shoots Outis a small, extremely awkward smile, but all she hears is a metallic noise as her eyes catch sight of the older woman sheathing her weapon. Huh. Didn’t she have that sheathed a moment ago? Why would she resheathe it?
Her question is answered a second later as a warm, burning feeling starts flooding her neck, the heat cascading down her chest. She glances down to a sea of red as her vision starts to fade to black, gurgling blood as as she collapses to the floor with a gross, wet, thud.
‘Kay, she thinks as she feels her brain begins to shut down. Complimenting wasn’t the way to go, there.
Whenever Dante revives her, her first thought is never anything normal. It’s always that her neck is too stiff, or her leg fell asleep, or some complaint about the cacophony of small pains that dying has forced upon her. For all their miracles, despite being able to stuff their hands into the realm of the dead to tell the reaper, not today, Dante is somehow unable to fix those small, nagging problems. But hey, if the annoyances of rigor mortis are what she has to put up with for conditional immortality, she’ll put up with it. Though, that doesn’t mean she won’t complain as she stretches feeling back into her shoulders.
As she’s halfway through her normal post-mortem muscle warmup, Dante lets off a quiet, almost annoyed huff that sounds less like a clock and more like they’ve got a pipe organ hidden underneath all those layers of machinery.
<Erm, I know that Ryoshu can be a little hard to handle, but if she’s causing trouble, can you please just walk away? You’re one of the better sinners when it comes to staying out of interpersonal trouble, and I appreciate that, but…> Dante’s normal ticking is just a little frazzled as their brain—if that clock even has one—is no doubt trying to deduce why exactly they just found Rodya facedown in a pool of blood.
Normally she lets Dante’s lectures go in one ear, out the other, but the accusation that it had to be Ryoshu makes her let out a weary sigh through her teeth. Okay, yeah, maybe she points her finger at Ryoshu 95% of the time when there’s a corpse on the bus whose head hasn’t been caved in with a bat or mace, and yeah, 95% of the time that guess is right, but she is nothing if not a creature is at least somewhat honest at times, and the idea of just blaming the swordswoman and letting it slide sticks in her craw just a little too much to not speak up.
“Wasn’t Ryoshu~” Dante tilts their head, a cute little confused chime chirping from somewhere inside their head.
<…Hong Lu?> They’re counting on their fingers now, trying to recall the names of anybody with a sword, and she sighs. Snitching isn’t exactly a practice she indulges in frequently or all that willingly, but on the other hand, Outis is…well, Outis. It’s probably not a great idea letting a woman whose mental hierarchy probably puts any coworker not named Dante on the same tier as worms and maggots get off scot-free with murder.
“Erm, I might’ve made Outis a touch angry~ It was an accident, honest.” Which might’ve flown by the Old Dante, the one who hadn’t tried to pull Sinclair from a mountain of corpses all by themselves, but they’ve been on a self-improvement streak lately, it feels like. Which means that any hope of this getting out with a simple ‘ah, okay, be more careful next time’ has flown out the window, hit the nearest building, and plummeted a hundred or so feet to its death onto hard concrete.
Rodya winces as <Outis, can we speak?> filters through her brain, trying to give Outis as apologetic as an expression she can muster, but she either doesn’t seem to notice or doesn’t care enough to register it as she strides up to Dante.
“What is it, executive manager?” Outis remarks, as if she didn’t just turn Rodya’s neck into a shiskebab ten minutes earlier. She admires the confidence, honestly.
<I heard there was an incident with you and Rodya…?> Dante’s fingers knit together and pull apart in a seemingly endless loop; even while faceless, the base human emotion of I really wish I wasn’t dealing with this right now shines through clear as day. She doesn’t exactly blame them for not wanting to deal with a sinner who gives her vibes equivalent to a pile of unexploded ordinance.
“That has been resolved.” Rodya only now meets her eyes, and sees an angry fire, no an inferno burning in them. Ouch. Not a good sign, but hey, Dante’s here, and she’s pretty sure in the grand mechanisms of the universe, her desire to not get on Dante’s bad side should overrule whatever pent up anger she’s got. Should. In theory.
…….wasn’t Sonya always saying that theory isn’t necessarily how things shake out in reality? She’s going to conveniently ignore that fact as Dante clasps their hands together once more and chirps happily, evidently over the moon they don’t have to mediate yet another meltdown between sinners.
<That’s good, then. What was the issue?>
For the first time in recent memory, Outis is silent as Dante poses question. Normally she’s tripping over her own feet to provide information, but every muscle in her body is stock-still, knuckles white around her weapon as her purses in a thin line. Only when her statue impression has gone on for the better part of a minute does Dante tentative wave a hand in front of her face.
<Outis? What is it? I understand it may be a little personal, but I don’t really like having to revive sinners after they fight among themselves…can you tell me what happened?> Their ticking trails off just as Outis gives the first sign of movement in what feels like forever, her shoulders tensing and relaxing as she lets out a long, annoyed sigh.
“Rodya made an unpleasant comment regarding my wife. I took my anger out on her. That is all. I apologize for the trouble, executive manager. It won’t happen again.” The words are strung along with more tension than a wire, the peaks and valleys of her voice ground down to a reply that almost seems more mechanical than human as her eyes move in a languished trail to the floor.
Well.
If the sudden heat of Dante’s flame almost melting her hair to her skin is any indication whatsoever, they’re roughly as floored as she is. Which is to say, if they had a jaw, it would be pummeling its way through Mephi’s undercarriage right now. Seriously? Outis? Married? Erm, well, she was on the older side of things, so that did make a little bit of sense all things considered, but…Outis??? Imagining Outis on a candlelit date with another human being is as impossible for her to imagine as trying to conjure up a mental image of the entire cosmos. Marriage is fundamentally incompatible as a concept with every iota of information she knows about the older woman.
<Ah. Well! In that case, Rodya, can you not make comments about that in the future?> Dante evidently was either living in a more malleable reality, or would try their best to let the cognitohazard of a married Outis trickle out of their memory as soon as possible. Their disordered ticking was now something approaching vaguely ordered ticking, but was still counting ten seconds for every single second that passed. Evidently Dante was spending less brainpower than her trying to comprehend the union of these two universally incompatible facts—that there is an Outis she knows, and the Outis she knows is also married—because they end up waving a gloved hand in front of her face, snapping her back to reality.
“Oh, uh, yeah~ no problem~” She lets out, only vaguely remembering what it is she’s supposed to be replying to.
Dante nods, and that is that.
Or well, it would be that, if Outis hadn’t taken to glaring holes in her every time the two are in close proximity. Every time Rodya approaches trying to apologize and smooth the issue over, Outis lifts a hand and says ‘later’, the song and dance getting so ridiculous that eventually, Rodya starts wondering if later meant the heat death of the universe in Outis-speak. Because Outis, despite this weird insistence on dealing with the matter at some undisclosed date in the future, has taken to cleaning her gunblade in public, in front of her, as if the whole tension between the two isn’t so blatantly obvious that Gregor asks her what the hell is up with the two of them the next time he’s outside for a smoke break.
“It’s complicated,” she sighs, leaning her back against the bus. The thrum of the warm engine seeps into her back as Gregor takes a puff from a cigarette, the smoke swirling and mingling with the smog of the city until the two are indistinguishable. “What’s your read on her?”
Gregor mull the question over for a moment, fingers tapping an unsteady rhythm against the side of the bus before he pauses to light another smoke.
“Smoke war vet,” He finally says, barely audible above Mephi’s throaty growl. His words are confident, declaring it the same way you’d declare it was raining outside, or that the weather was cold.
“Mmm?” She tilts her head, inviting him to continue, but he only closes his eyes.
“You learn to pick up the look in their eyes,” he sighs. he takes another drag as they both go silent, listening to the rattle of the engine harmonize with the sounds of the city.
Outis approaches her in a rare moment of downtime, her eyes saying very firmly that Rodya will not be saying no to this. Before hopping off the bus after her, she gets in a quick wave bye to Gregor—partially because Outis had just interrupted her 6-win blackjack streak with him, partially because if Rodya ends up on a missing persons list Gregor can at least point a finger at the prime suspect.
Even for somebody with a stride benefitting a 180-centimeter frame, Outis is hell and a half to keep up with. She twists and turns through whatever labyrinth of alleyways and streets Charon dropped them off at like a rat in a maze, and when she pauses for Rodya to catch up, it feels like she’s silently being chided for not knowing the place like the back of her hand.
They play that song and dance for a good half hour, until finally Outis stops in front of a gleaming building, its sign proclaiming it was called Lambda Taverna. Outis wordlessly hands a reservation to the waiter as Rodya hunches over to catch her breath, the damn older woman not even breaking a sweat as the two of them follow the waitress into the dining hall.
The place was, if one word could describe it, bougie. Sonya would have a field day walking the place down, his eyes blinded by the crystal in the chandeliers, the spotless white tablecloths, the dishes which had to be what, pure porcelain? Outis shoots her a Look as she hefts it, tapping a fingernail against the material. In Rodya’s defense, if Outis didn’t want somebody gawking at all the rich stuff, should not have invited somebody backstreets born-and-raised to a place where the air itself felt like money.
Everybody else in the place had to have clothes that cost her yearly salary, and after a moment of gawking, she feels the hair on the neck of her neck go on end as she hisses to Outis how the hell they’re going to pay for this. Yeah, she did grab all those casino chips, but Dante confiscated them after she started trying to use them to get the other sinners to wager on a game of poker with her, and she isn’t exactly made of money.
“My treat,” Outis says, sharp and quick like a blade, the tone of her voice indicating that she’d rather not be paying for Rodya, but if the fates willed it…well, Rodya isn’t going to argue.
A waiter better dressed than anybody aboard the bus comes to take their order, handing the pair menus. The paper is thick, fancy stuff, embossed in gold. Rodya doesn’t pay attention to the dishes as she flips over to the second menu they’ve been given, her eyes instantly alighting on the IPAs—
“We’ll be having water. No lemon for me, please.” Outis rips the alcohol menu out of Rodya’s hands, earning a yelp for her efforts. Rodya gives her best pout to her stablemate, because yeah, Outis is paying for this, but that doesn’t mean she’s gotta be a total square about it. If Outis notices the pout, she doesn’t acknowledge it.
“Do you have tea, at least~?” She puts on her best ‘sad little puppy’ eyes to the waitress, who sighs, clearly not wanting to deal with whatever the two of them have going on. She reminds rodya of Effie and Saudie, her annoyance concealed beneath a dozen separate facades.
“We have chamomile, sage, and mountain tea for your pleasure.”
“Chamomile is fine~” Rodya’s more a black tea kinda gal, but hey, free lunch is free lunch. She’s not going to complain that much if somebody else is footing the bill. Outis puts in a request for mountain tea a second later. It’s a testament to how fancy the place is that the waitress doesn’t question the sudden change in drink orders.
The waitress disappears for a moment, giving Rodya a moment to glance over the menu, and her eyebrows almost shoot off her forehead at the prices. She knew Outis probably had some money, the gun blade she carried was proof she had cash to blow on ammo, but the fact that she’s so willing to pay for two people here? Her brain does the calculations of how many days of (albeit, shitty) food just a single appetizer here would get her, and comes up with a number she’s not quite sure is correct, mostly because the numbers she’s working with are in terms of weeks, not days.
She sighs. Some part of her brain feels guilty eating here, as if her not having a meal here would magically feed her neighbors that fateful winter. Sonya had said, once, that a penny spent within the nest would stay there for months, if not years; yet a penny that wound its way into the backstreets would disappear in seconds, sucked up by the limitless greed of the Nest. No matter what you personally did, the moment it touched the concrete in the backstreets, the penny was already circling the drain, spiraling towards its eventual home, sheltered by a benevolent Wing. It feels wrong visiting that paradise built upon blood and bone and gore and seeing it as spotless as a fresh snowscape. She wonders if Outis feels the same guilt. Probably not; a woman that strict probably never set foot in the backstreets.
She sighs again, banishing the thoughts to the back of her brain. She is not a miracle worker; no matter how special she is, if the world is to be changed, it will not be by her hand alone.
(She is good at that, banishing those unpleasant things she doesn’t want to think about. Like a hamster, running on an endlessly turning wheel, never overcoming the cycle which binds it.)
Her eyes turn again to the menu, only to discover she has absolutely no idea what half this stuff means. The names are in a language she doesn’t recognize, and the plain language descriptions below them are not particularly useful. Not for the first time, she wonders if Outis decided on this place on purpose, some tactical plan to put her at a disadvantage before negotiations even properly begin. She resigns herself to whatever the waitress recommends, she supposes.
Speak of the devil, the waitress pops in nary a second later with their drinks. The second Royda’s tea hits the table, she reaches for the pot of sugar and dumps a spoonful into it as outis gives her a silent look that can only be described as abject horror. She decides against adding the second spoonful, even if the tea is still way too bitter for her liking.
Outis orders in the quick, clipped voice she recognizes from the battlefield as Rodya asks for a recommendation. The waitress suggests some moose thing she doesn’t quite catch the name of; when pressed, she describes it as some eggplant lamb lasagna, which sounds good enough for her. It’s only when the waitress leaves for the kitchen that Outis looks up, meeting her eyes for what feels like the first time that day.
Right. There’s only one reason Outis would invite her here alone, let alone treat her to food.
“This is about what happened a while back, isn’t it?” Outis nods.
Outis has an aura about her that’s more than a little intimidating, Rodya won’t lie. If she were to be brutally honest, she’d rather be facing down a gang of thugs armed with only her axe than deal with whatever the hell Outis has in store for her.
Well, no time like the present. Not like she hasn’t been mentally practicing what she’s going to say to Outis for the past week.
“Sorry for what I said earlier. I didn’t know, and I swear it won’t happen again.” …Only for her preapproved speech to spill out of her brain through her ears the second she opens her mouth. She’s not that good at apologies or serious talk, and she feels Outis wants more than an empty platitude, else why else would she bring her to the middle of nowhere to eat at this fancy restaurant? It feels like she’s asking for more than mere words from Rodya, but she was never all that good at discerning the specifics of that sort of thing. Sonya had the gilded tongue, not her.
Didn’t the Thumb or something want you to cut off your ears or something if you screwed up? She hopes Outis doesn’t ask for that, though maybe Dante could fix that? If it’s between permanently pissing off the team tactician and dealing with a bleeding ear for a couple hours, she’ll take the latter pretty happily. Honestly, she’d deal with the ear thing a lot of things if it was strictly temporary. Mostly for food and beer.
Outis nods in a way that Rodya hopefully thinks is approval, even if her eyes are still scanning her for something that Rodya can’t really determine. Just once, she wishes she was dealing with Heathcliff instead; sure, he was prone to bashing skulls in, but at least once your frontal lobe was reduced to a smatter of blood and gore, he was at least open about what it would take for his relationship to you to get back to something resembling normal. Outis’ stoic facade doesn’t give her that privilege, blocking out anything short of gambling on using the right words. Rodya decides to push her luck a little, even if it means a slightly increased chance of becoming worm food in the next 15 seconds. She gives a small smile.
“You two looked really happy in that photo. You lucked out.” There’s a billion other words she could say here, about how she’s seen those marriages that didn’t work, but they die on her tongue. She’s seen the resulting bodies in the street when a marriage turns sour, had to treat the poor souls who showed up trembling on Sonya’s doorstep because they’d heard they could help. They said money couldn’t buy happiness, but it could buy security. Comfort. You could purchase the confidence that you wouldn’t be weeping over your lover’s corpse as it rotted, that you had money for a coffin and a burial instead of leaving it to the sweepers after cutting a lock of hair from a rapidly chilling corpse. Rodya isn’t a rich woman by any stretch of the imagination, but she thinks that’s pretty close to happiness.
Outis’ face shifts in small increments, from a hard glare to something that seems a couple degrees softer. She sighs. Seems like she has good memories of the two of them. That’s a good sign, right? Probably? Maybe?
Neither of them speak for a long moment, and she wonders if this really is why Outis took her here. The oppressive aura that permeates so much of her normal being is gone, even if her boot-camp instructor tendencies stubbornly remain. The clink of a teacup hitting its saucer just a little louder than was polite gets a glance from Rodya as Outis’ gaze wordlessly demands her attention.
“That photograph was why I called you here today. I don’t want you bringing that up with the other sinners.” Outis’ fingers are interlocked, a web as impenetrable as her expression. The words catch her off guard, her mind turning the sentence over a couple times to make sure she heard Outis right.
“Huh? The photograph?”
“Correct. that information and my marital status is strictly on a need-to-know basis. I already talked the matter over with the executive manager.” At the mention of Outis asking for a favor from Dante, Rodya pinches her thigh under the table just to make sure she’s not dreaming. Outis doing anything that could potentially lower Dante’s opinion of her itself was a miracle.
“Erm, what?” She’s not going to be an asshole about that, if that’s what she’s worried about, but the request still baffles her. Outis’ eyes narrow, and she feels all the hair on her neck stand on end as if it’s been electrocuted.
“You will remain silent on the matter.” If looks could kill, Rodya would be in the furthest ring of hell right now, beyond the reach of even Dante.
“No, no, it’s not about that. If you wanna be a weirdo about your love life, I won’t spill the beans, but——why do you want me silent?” Outis’ eyes are ice, her mouth a thin line revealing nothing. Rodya sighs and continues.
“I at least want to know why you care so much about keeping this secret, y’know?” I’m not interested in extorting you over it or anything” Outis’ shoulders tense just barely at the word extort — Rodya doesn’t mention that she wouldn’t mind a couple snacks every now and then, a testament to her restraint—“but we’re working together, yeah? If we’re trusting each other with our lives, can’t you at least trust me with the reason you’re being weird over this?”
Outis pauses, probably to mull her words over in her mind like a good aged whiskey. The whiskey Rodya got robbed of, she sighs as she takes a sip of tea. Outis is cautious with her words in times like these, so there’s a shared moment of silence together before she speaks up.
“Leaving your heart exposed is a danger in my line of work,” she says, finally. She steadfastly refuses to elaborate, but Rodya can fill in the gaps well enough. Love made you vulnerable. Even if you were a typhoon of death, even if your skin was made of unbreakable iron, that didn’t mean your loved one was the same way. It was a common enough thing in the backstreets; if somebody refused to pay, their family would, one way or another. By crook or by hook, debts in the backstreets were paid. She’d seen it firsthand, gang leaders holding down people as they sucked the wish power out of them, leaving them an empty husk.
But still, even with those memories, every bit of that worldview rubs raw against her old memories of Sonya’s endless lectures, about how to create something, anything, to build something solid that won’t crumble to ash under your feet, you needed to reach out. If the outside world would not protect you, you simply built your own with your comrades, brick by bloody brick. You couldn’t build a world with only one person; a universe without an outside observer was simply a bundle of dust and dirt. A house without a foundation was simply a pile of nicely arranged branches, waiting to be felled by a coming storm.
A beating, bleeding, yearning heart was a strength, not a weakness, something you should be proud to wear on your sleeve.
“You disagree.” Outis’ voice is firm, her face calculating.
“Guilty as charged~” She shoots a guilty smile over the table. “I’m not really big on the whole keep your heart hidden thing.”
“That would explain a lot,” Outis remarks, her voice dryer than the outskirts, a finger inching its way up her scalp to massage at her temple. “However, if you use your straightforwardness as an excuse to go talking about this to every person you meet—”
“Yeah, gotcha. You’ll feed me to the sweepers, I bet. Or find some other creative way to test the limits of Dante’s clock-windy-thing.” She’s pretty sure the record there was….maybe the time they got all partially digested? But then again, even after fighting Kromer, the bulk of their bodies were still there. The thought of being revived from bits and pieces of sweeper shit is….eugh.
“I’m glad we’re on the same page.” Unlike Rodya, Outis seems pleased with herself, if the way she’s sipping her tea without breaking eye contact is any indication.
It’s not exactly her preferred way of this whole mess resolving. Sure, it’s better than being disembowled in some unknown corner of the city, but it feels like she’s being bribed to satiate Outis’ desire to be a enigma, giving fuel and fire to her wish to refuse to tell the people she fights and dies with even the slightest scrap about herself. All to protect this woman whose name she doesn’t even know.
She at least wants to know the name of the person Outis cares so much about protecting.
“Can you at least tell me about her?” She tries to ask as quietly as she can, like it’s a request between friends and not mere acquaintances forced onto a man-eating bus together.
For her question, Outis shoots her a look that could rival the Red Gaze.
She almost laughs, if not for the insanity of Outis trying so hard to lock down this information when their entire journey is predicated upon this whole fucked up dungeon thing reliving their worst memories.
“I mean, you heard Sinclair’s dowsing rod theory, right? At some point or another…”
It’ll happen eventually. Regardless of how much she struggles, no matter how closely she keeps her love inside her, they’ll march right in and pull out her guts and secrets alike, regardless of how hard she kicks or how loud she screams. Outis is a smart woman; there is no universe is which she is not cognizant of that sword dangling over her neck. She hopes her being married is the worst thing the older woman’s got, but judging by the way she got that lovely glimpse of Sinclair’s parents getting disemboweled, that’s probably not the case.
“I will cross that when it comes to that. Until then, I want this information secure.” Her voice is clipped, in a way that makes Rodya think that it’s clearly a situation she’s thought over before. She wonders if Outis has some plan reserved to avoid the voyeuristic romp through her deepest secrets, or if she’s simply accepted it as inevitable truth. If not for the fact that Dante would be furious, she would not put the idea of Outis slaughtering all the other sinners to challenge the thing at the end of the dungeon alone past her.
She’s like to not be murdered over a secret wife, thank you very much. It’s not like that was probably the juiciest thing she was keeping hidden, if the other sinners were any indication, and it’s not like the memory romp was that bad. Though, that could just be because she’d already went through it, back when they were naive as to what their quest truly entailed. If she had been dealt a different batting order for the dungeons, perhaps she’d be like Outis too, trying to hide her secrets piled high alongside the skeletons in her closet.
Would she have started dropping hints? Veiled references to her past? Or would she have simply accepted it, whispering about her past to Gregor late at night in some facsimile of a confession? Was Outis feeling the same? Did she even have anybody she could speak to like that? She sighs and takes another sip of tea, the sugar and herbs mingling on her tongue.
There were worse times to offer that sort of olive branch, she decides.
“Mmmm. I mean, a secret shared with people hurts less when it’s pulled out. Seems she’s important to you, yeah? There’s a good chance it’ll come up in whatever place your bough is. If you tell me, I can at least go ‘oh yeah, no biggie, Outis told me about her’ when people start freaking out about you being married. Doesn’t feel like you were trying to hide it from everybody else like that.“ Even though she tries to shove as much empathy she can into the words, Outis is once again annoyingly silent, eyes only moving over when they hear the approaching footsteps of the waitress.
Quiet as the waitress walks over, holding two steaming plates, with her moose lasagna and some sort of meat stew for Outis. She wastes no time in digging in with the gusto that Gregor had once politely compared a starving lion. Compared to her, Outis eats almost mechanically, her eyes fixed on the food and ignoring Rodya’s wayward glances.
She glances up at the sound of Outis clinking her glass for a drink, and their eyes meet for just a fraction of a second. Slowly, like a cat, the older woman closes them.
“You’re not going to tell anybody else about this,” Outis starts, a low growl of a threat. She’s dealt with those before, easy. She nods enthusiastically.
“No prob. My lips are sealed~” She mimics zipping them, drawing a line across her mouth, but it only succeeds in getting sauce on her hand. She wipes it clean on the tablecloth. Outis’ eyes catch that, and her expression very clearly reads that she is regretting this already.
She’s quiet for another moment; whether it is because she is thinking or because she is reconsidering telling Rodya is a mystery up until she opens her mouth again.
“Her name is Penelope. We met when we were younger. Got married right before I went off to the smoke war.” There’s a halting to her words, like this is something she’d never told anybody about. Considering how she’d put Outis in the top 3 in the category of ‘most emotionally constipated sinners on Mephi’, she’d put money on this being a first.
“Mmm. From what I saw from Gregor, that looked like hell.” Hell would put it mildly, because the searing smoke choking her lungs was nothing like the backstreets, even on days where the smog was so thick you could barely see a foot in front of your face. She’d heard whispered stories from older people on the backstreets, but she always assumed it was an exaggeration just by the fact that she never assumed a person could make it through that hell described in their stories and come out unharmed.
“It was like the gates of the underworld opened on earth.” There is no wavering to her voice, no pause to her reply, nothing to indicate exaggeration. To her, that statement was irrefutable truth. For her to say that after suffering partial digestion courtesy of Kromer makes her wince. Perhaps it wasn’t wise to stay on the topic too long; even Gregor would space out after enough discussion of the matter.
“At least she was there to welcome you back home,” she replies, eyes drifting to the pocketwatch tucked into the inside of Outis’ jacket.
Outis is quiet again, her eyes searching for some point beyond the horizon that Rodya does not, could never see. It’s a look of pain, of loneliness, of yearning all wrapped up in a single glance, one that physically hurts her to look at.
“…I was never able to return home.” For the first time, the older woman’s voice is quiet. There is no sternness behind the words, only a deep, profound sadness.
“Not even after all this time?” Outis looks away. Oh. That had to be, what, years? Decades? “Does she at least know you’re alive…?”
Outis shakes her head. Oh. God. The backstreets were hell on earth, but at least you knew where your family was. If they didn’t show up, well…you put their photo on the mantle, put held onto their things next to them even if you knew deep down in your heart they’d never reappear and claim them. She’s had to do that a number of times. They never showed up, and in the end, those shelves of portraits and trinkets were left to gather dust until somebody had to choose between selling the tchotchkes and getting tossed out on the street.
She wonders, briefly, if that is why she doesn’t mention Penelope. It might be an old wound, a worry that she’s since moved on, the mantle upon which Outis’ picture rests covered in dust.
Quietly, Rodya extends a hand across the table. If it was Gregor—hell, if it was anybody else—she’s squeeze their shoulder, but there’s something to Outis that makes her hesitate before touching her.
“I’m sorry.”
Quietly, Outis’ hand finds its way to hers. Her fingers grip tight around Rodya’s, squeezing them so hard she’s afraid she’s going to loose circulation, but she doesn’t complain. She feels like if she relents for even a second, she’s going to lose this moment if she lets go. Her eyes wander to Outis’ hands, callouses and scars crossing over each other like ley lines. Idly, she rubs her thumb over one of them. If this was anybody else, in any other moment, she would’ve probably been beheaded, but Outis doesn’t react. In this moment, Outis isn’t the weird, stoic, bootlicking weirdo she’s come to know, but a lonely old woman looking for home.
They sit like that for a silent minute, before Outis realizes that this conversation has delved further into her heart than she ever anticipated; her hand retreats, falling back into place on her lap.
“This doesn’t change anything between us,” she cautions.
“Mmm, wasn’t expecting it to~ I’ve got Gregor to buy me snacks, anyways.” She winks and grins. if it has any effect on Outis, she doesn’t show it.
Outis gives a cautious nod before turning back to her food. They eat the rest of the meal in silence.
True to her word, Outis is exactly as uptight and bootlick-y as the day they met once they get back on the bus.
And yet, she catches Outis a couple times staring out the window, watching the scenery pass, one hand idly tracing the upraised curves of her pocketwatch. When Rodya plops herself down next to her, Outis shoots her a wayward glance and moves the slightest bit over, wordlessly making space for the both of them.