Antimony took her time walking back to her inn room, steps shuffling, hands clasped low at her waist and worrying over their joints. As the noises from the Quicksand's tavern dimmed, her ears and tail drooped further until the former sought into her hair and the latter dragged its tip across the floor. The Keeper's questions dogged her with a persistent worry, which merged unhappily with her keen isolation until she was just all around miserable.
She needed to find Aijeen.
She entered her room like this, head down, thoughts inward.
As Antimony entered the room, a figure on the floor twitched upright. Sitting against the far wall, looking every bit as tired and troubled as Antimony appeared, Loughree's ears didn't even rise all the way up before falling against her dirty, disheveled hair. Her face was smudged with dirt, and dark circles had been carved beneath her eyes. The woman, broad and large for a miqo'te, was curled up with her knees against her chest, her muscular arms wrapping them. Her tail shivered and went limp, and she did not speak.
Antimony took a few steps into her room before noticing anything amiss, and when she did notice the pale miqo'te opposite her, she barely had the will to react with more than a faint sound - hardly even surprised - and an upward knitting of her brow.
She processed the whole situation rather admirably as far as Antimony went, still and quiet for only a minute before one ear twitched. Hands flexed around one another as her mouth dropped open, tried for words, failed. She frowned, closed her eyes, did her best to pull herself together and recalled her brief talk with a certain Duskwight. "You... are a very lucky woman," she finally managed.
Loughree's gaze dropped to Antimony's hands. She lifted her tail and lay it down, but there was no other gesture. Then she looked back at Antimony. "I remember how I left last time. Is it okay that I'm here?"
Was it okay... You murdered four people, Antimony wanted to accuse. Instead she  pursed her lips until they ached. "That... is generally something one asks before entering," she sighed, shifted her gaze to one side, nervously adjusted her glasses. The frown was making the bruising along her nose and cheeks throb, so she stopped but didn't smile. "I... suppose you are looking for asylum."
"I don't know." She lifted her gaze to Antimony, and blinked very slowly. "What do you mean, I'm lucky? I'm not."
"You're lucky you're not in one of those Twelve-forsaken cells, or worse," the reply came a bit snappier than Antimony would have liked, but she was worn thin, her patience for trouble fraying rapidly. And what else would Loughree be doing here if not to cause trouble? Considering what she had done so far...
Her ears found enough energy to snap back on her head, and she ducked her face slightly away as if to hide it from Antimony. She was silence for a time, and then she buried her face in the back of her knees and muttered something unintelligible.
Antimony let out a sigh, locking the door behind her. "Megiddo spoke to me of what... you've done," she began cautiously.
Loughree snapped her eyes up, gaze narrowing. Her tail lifted and shook, fuzzing out until it was thicker than both of her legs put together. "He's a liar! I haven’t done anything! How can you talk to him?"
"He has been nothing but truthful to me." She was frowning again, but this time she ignored the ache it brought to her healing bones. This was too much. She didn't want to deal with this young woman's problems, not now. She felt horrible for thinking such, but she could barely hold herself together to go after Aijeen. Pressing her hands together to still their slight trembling, Antimony drew a careful breath. "I have no wish to condemn you, Miss Loughree. But you must understand..."
Crossing her tail over her ankles, Loughree reach one hand down to grab it and pull it between her knees, up against her chest and wrapping it around her neck. She buried her face in the tufts of blonde fur that stuck out comically from her cuddled tail. She stayed like that, with her ears flat and her powerful muscles tensed, quiet.
For several, long moments Antimony just watched the clearly upset woman. The sight of her, Loughree's body language, her few words, all made Antimony's chest ache, stirred instincts far too ingrained to ever shake, even if she wanted to. But... she couldn't. She just couldn't.
Ears drooping, Antimony crossed the room to her bed - still broken, but at least useable. She eased herself down onto it with the care of one with far more years than even she, gave Loughree's profile a sad look. "I am tired," she murmured, and though she'd protested at Ulanan not long ago, Antimony found that now she truly was. "I will not remove you, but please... ah, just don't... do anything rash."
After a long moment of unmoving silence, Loughree muttered, "Don't worry. I'm tired too."
_________________________
After a few hours of sitting, unmoving, Loughree rose from the ground in sudden silence and walked to the room's bathroom, shutting it behind her. The door was not so thick that she could not be heard on the other side of it, crying loudly, though she likely thought herself inaudible. She was in the for maybe a half hour before emerging again, the dirt on her face streaked with smudged tears, dirty hair pouring over the dingy leather and frayed linens she wore.
Instead of returning to her place on the wall, she collapsed on the floor alongside Antimony's bed. She didn't lie down or curl up or make any effort to get comfortable. She simply collapsed and lay there.
Sleep had claimed Antimony rather quickly, despite - or perhaps because of - her prior stress. She did not hear Loughree's crying, or even when the young woman returned and collapsed near her bed. She woke instead on her own time, some minutes after Loughree had laid on the floor. It had not been a restful sleep, despite how much her body had demanded it, and she blinked blearily through crooked glasses for several seconds before both resolving the inn room and recalling that she was not alone.
Several seconds more passed before she thought to search the room beyond what she could see in her immediate field of vision. Her body protested as she pushed herself up, as though she'd ran for hundreds of miles in a great migration before dropping to the bed though she'd done not much more than a tiny fraction of that, but her eyes settled quickly on the form beside her bed. Tail shifting to lay across her lap, Antimony felt her posture droop.
"Speak of it, if you wish," she murmured at last, resigning herself both to the situation and her instinct to listen. To care. Despite it all. "What brought you here."
Loughree wasn't asleep, though she'd willed herself to go to sleep, or to fall unconscious, or to die. She exhaled, "I don't know." Her tail shifted on the floor. Her ears and eyes were stationary, both pointing towards the ground in front of her. Her hands, pale fists, lay on either side of her head with her elbows out. "I think he took her away. I don't know how he..."
Shifting so that her legs hung over the edge of the bed, Antimony looked down on the top of Loughree's blonde head. Her eyes felt impossibly heavy, her body and thoughts sluggish. But still her chest ached and she traced the younger woman's thoughts. "Her... the child," she whispered, held back a sigh. Did she truly have the energy to deal with another's problems? When it involved a child, and someone she had begun to know... Her ears hung low. "Have you thought perhaps to speak with him?"
"I hunted." Loughree spoke without moving, her tone a hollow one. "I used to be good at hunting, in the Shroud. He moves quietly, in the shadows. But he stinks. I hunted him and found him near the Ossuary. I heard... screaming."
Letting her eyes fall shut, Antimony closed her hands around the curve of her knees, focusing for once on the aching of her aging joints there. Screaming. "That... may not be unusual, given... what abominable dealings that place engages in," she murmured reluctantly. It occurred to her briefly that D'ahl had supposedly died near the Ossuary. It was an unpleasant thought.
"No. People were dying. I was arrested for killing them, and then I was let go."
Her ribs ached when she drew in a breath. Too much. It really was... "Who am I to believe... the man who has helped me from many a crisis, or the woman who..." She hesitated, struggled with the desire, the outright need to help the woman, to understand her. To guide her. "I'm sorry. This is all.."
"You don't need to talk me through this." Loughree rolled onto her side and pulled her knees up to her chest. "I don't think I came here for that."
Antimony watched the set of Loughree's ears and found herself asking despite herself, "Then why are you here?"
"I don't know." The large woman reached up and took hold of her ears again, pulling on them. Her tail curled towards her face. "He took her away. I don't even know how he... How I'm... Why?" She shivered.
"I don't know," Antimony murmured, and she truly didn't. She didn't know if Loughree was telling the truth. She didn't know what Megiddo may have done if she were. She didn't know what she could do to help. She didn't know how to help anyone, it seemed. Even her own daughters...
Loughree was silent for a time, and then she muttered, "I don't know how to hold on to anything. Everything always falls apart. I tried to protect her and I couldn't. She cried when i sent her away but it didn't do any good. I don't even know if she's still alive or not."
Antimony's hands clenched around her knees and struggled to breathe against a vice that suddenly wanted to clasp tight about her ribs. Loughree's words were familiar. Painfully so. "I... understand," she breathed out and couldn't find anything else for her to say for the moment.
Pulling her tail against her face, hiding in the fur, Loughree muttered, "I tried waiting to feel something other than scared, or angry. And now I'm just cold. Maybe I was just looking for somewhere comfortable to freeze to death."
Opening her mouth to speak, Antimony found that she knew no words to comfort. There had been no words for her, either, back then. Instead she just leaned forward and reached down to rest one nervous, uncertain hand on Loughree's shoulder, in silence.
Loughree stared at the fur of her tail, the appendage shifting about but held stationary against her face. She was silent for a time, and then she said, "I saw something strange near the Ossuary. A monster made of shadow. He was watching it when I found him."
Her chest chilled, an icy touch that spread to her shoulders and down her back. Antimony resisted a shiver. "Made of shadow," she echoed lowly, swallowed. The question of whether or not she believed Loughree had somehow fallen away during the minutes passed between them. The way the younger woman spoke rang with a certain degree of truth to Antimony that she automatically acknowledged, that stirred a certain deep-held fear.
Her voice caught in her throat then, and when she tried to speak again, only a short, thin sound came out. A few breaths later, she managed, "Did you see... Aij--a... green-haired girl..?"
"... I think. She was screaming." Loughree twisted her tail in her hands. "Some men heard and went to look. Maybe they were going to help. But he killed them. I tried... But I couldn't..."
"Aijeen," Antimony murmured, her shoulders sagging. Screaming. She chose not to focus on Loughree's account that placed Megiddo as the true murderer of four men; if she was honest with herself, it didn't surprise her, given their past conversations, but she was far too emotionally tired to dwell on that and Loughree's worries and her daughters and a certain Tia's grief all at once. "She didn't mean..." she began, then stopped herself. The argument wasn't necessary with Loughree.
She wanted to offer to help find the younger woman's child - opened her mouth to speak again almost without thought. But something stopped her, and it left her feeling horribly selfish. Still, perhaps she... "I could ask him."
"Don't." Loughree twitched, fists tight, spine curling forward. "Don't ever talk to him."
Antimony wanted to frown, but she only had the energy for a slight pursing of her lips. "... You should rest. I can get you some warm food, and you will feel... more centered." Not better; she knew there was very little that would make one feel better in these situations.
Closing her eyes and shivering again, Loughree almost whispered. "I'm trying."
She almost didn't trust her legs to hold her up when she pushed up from the bed, but the exhaustion was more mental than physical and so they did. Antimony stood next to Loughree for a few moments and then bent to give the woman's shoulder another, light squeeze before stepping away, towards the door. "I will see what I can do," she said quietly, opening it.
The filthy woman remained unmoving on the ground, not acknowledging what Antimony had said to her or seeming to notice the touch.
When nothing further came from Loughree, Antimony slipped back out through the door and shut it quietly behind her.
She needed to find Aijeen.
She entered her room like this, head down, thoughts inward.
As Antimony entered the room, a figure on the floor twitched upright. Sitting against the far wall, looking every bit as tired and troubled as Antimony appeared, Loughree's ears didn't even rise all the way up before falling against her dirty, disheveled hair. Her face was smudged with dirt, and dark circles had been carved beneath her eyes. The woman, broad and large for a miqo'te, was curled up with her knees against her chest, her muscular arms wrapping them. Her tail shivered and went limp, and she did not speak.
Antimony took a few steps into her room before noticing anything amiss, and when she did notice the pale miqo'te opposite her, she barely had the will to react with more than a faint sound - hardly even surprised - and an upward knitting of her brow.
She processed the whole situation rather admirably as far as Antimony went, still and quiet for only a minute before one ear twitched. Hands flexed around one another as her mouth dropped open, tried for words, failed. She frowned, closed her eyes, did her best to pull herself together and recalled her brief talk with a certain Duskwight. "You... are a very lucky woman," she finally managed.
Loughree's gaze dropped to Antimony's hands. She lifted her tail and lay it down, but there was no other gesture. Then she looked back at Antimony. "I remember how I left last time. Is it okay that I'm here?"
Was it okay... You murdered four people, Antimony wanted to accuse. Instead she  pursed her lips until they ached. "That... is generally something one asks before entering," she sighed, shifted her gaze to one side, nervously adjusted her glasses. The frown was making the bruising along her nose and cheeks throb, so she stopped but didn't smile. "I... suppose you are looking for asylum."
"I don't know." She lifted her gaze to Antimony, and blinked very slowly. "What do you mean, I'm lucky? I'm not."
"You're lucky you're not in one of those Twelve-forsaken cells, or worse," the reply came a bit snappier than Antimony would have liked, but she was worn thin, her patience for trouble fraying rapidly. And what else would Loughree be doing here if not to cause trouble? Considering what she had done so far...
Her ears found enough energy to snap back on her head, and she ducked her face slightly away as if to hide it from Antimony. She was silence for a time, and then she buried her face in the back of her knees and muttered something unintelligible.
Antimony let out a sigh, locking the door behind her. "Megiddo spoke to me of what... you've done," she began cautiously.
Loughree snapped her eyes up, gaze narrowing. Her tail lifted and shook, fuzzing out until it was thicker than both of her legs put together. "He's a liar! I haven’t done anything! How can you talk to him?"
"He has been nothing but truthful to me." She was frowning again, but this time she ignored the ache it brought to her healing bones. This was too much. She didn't want to deal with this young woman's problems, not now. She felt horrible for thinking such, but she could barely hold herself together to go after Aijeen. Pressing her hands together to still their slight trembling, Antimony drew a careful breath. "I have no wish to condemn you, Miss Loughree. But you must understand..."
Crossing her tail over her ankles, Loughree reach one hand down to grab it and pull it between her knees, up against her chest and wrapping it around her neck. She buried her face in the tufts of blonde fur that stuck out comically from her cuddled tail. She stayed like that, with her ears flat and her powerful muscles tensed, quiet.
For several, long moments Antimony just watched the clearly upset woman. The sight of her, Loughree's body language, her few words, all made Antimony's chest ache, stirred instincts far too ingrained to ever shake, even if she wanted to. But... she couldn't. She just couldn't.
Ears drooping, Antimony crossed the room to her bed - still broken, but at least useable. She eased herself down onto it with the care of one with far more years than even she, gave Loughree's profile a sad look. "I am tired," she murmured, and though she'd protested at Ulanan not long ago, Antimony found that now she truly was. "I will not remove you, but please... ah, just don't... do anything rash."
After a long moment of unmoving silence, Loughree muttered, "Don't worry. I'm tired too."
_________________________
After a few hours of sitting, unmoving, Loughree rose from the ground in sudden silence and walked to the room's bathroom, shutting it behind her. The door was not so thick that she could not be heard on the other side of it, crying loudly, though she likely thought herself inaudible. She was in the for maybe a half hour before emerging again, the dirt on her face streaked with smudged tears, dirty hair pouring over the dingy leather and frayed linens she wore.
Instead of returning to her place on the wall, she collapsed on the floor alongside Antimony's bed. She didn't lie down or curl up or make any effort to get comfortable. She simply collapsed and lay there.
Sleep had claimed Antimony rather quickly, despite - or perhaps because of - her prior stress. She did not hear Loughree's crying, or even when the young woman returned and collapsed near her bed. She woke instead on her own time, some minutes after Loughree had laid on the floor. It had not been a restful sleep, despite how much her body had demanded it, and she blinked blearily through crooked glasses for several seconds before both resolving the inn room and recalling that she was not alone.
Several seconds more passed before she thought to search the room beyond what she could see in her immediate field of vision. Her body protested as she pushed herself up, as though she'd ran for hundreds of miles in a great migration before dropping to the bed though she'd done not much more than a tiny fraction of that, but her eyes settled quickly on the form beside her bed. Tail shifting to lay across her lap, Antimony felt her posture droop.
"Speak of it, if you wish," she murmured at last, resigning herself both to the situation and her instinct to listen. To care. Despite it all. "What brought you here."
Loughree wasn't asleep, though she'd willed herself to go to sleep, or to fall unconscious, or to die. She exhaled, "I don't know." Her tail shifted on the floor. Her ears and eyes were stationary, both pointing towards the ground in front of her. Her hands, pale fists, lay on either side of her head with her elbows out. "I think he took her away. I don't know how he..."
Shifting so that her legs hung over the edge of the bed, Antimony looked down on the top of Loughree's blonde head. Her eyes felt impossibly heavy, her body and thoughts sluggish. But still her chest ached and she traced the younger woman's thoughts. "Her... the child," she whispered, held back a sigh. Did she truly have the energy to deal with another's problems? When it involved a child, and someone she had begun to know... Her ears hung low. "Have you thought perhaps to speak with him?"
"I hunted." Loughree spoke without moving, her tone a hollow one. "I used to be good at hunting, in the Shroud. He moves quietly, in the shadows. But he stinks. I hunted him and found him near the Ossuary. I heard... screaming."
Letting her eyes fall shut, Antimony closed her hands around the curve of her knees, focusing for once on the aching of her aging joints there. Screaming. "That... may not be unusual, given... what abominable dealings that place engages in," she murmured reluctantly. It occurred to her briefly that D'ahl had supposedly died near the Ossuary. It was an unpleasant thought.
"No. People were dying. I was arrested for killing them, and then I was let go."
Her ribs ached when she drew in a breath. Too much. It really was... "Who am I to believe... the man who has helped me from many a crisis, or the woman who..." She hesitated, struggled with the desire, the outright need to help the woman, to understand her. To guide her. "I'm sorry. This is all.."
"You don't need to talk me through this." Loughree rolled onto her side and pulled her knees up to her chest. "I don't think I came here for that."
Antimony watched the set of Loughree's ears and found herself asking despite herself, "Then why are you here?"
"I don't know." The large woman reached up and took hold of her ears again, pulling on them. Her tail curled towards her face. "He took her away. I don't even know how he... How I'm... Why?" She shivered.
"I don't know," Antimony murmured, and she truly didn't. She didn't know if Loughree was telling the truth. She didn't know what Megiddo may have done if she were. She didn't know what she could do to help. She didn't know how to help anyone, it seemed. Even her own daughters...
Loughree was silent for a time, and then she muttered, "I don't know how to hold on to anything. Everything always falls apart. I tried to protect her and I couldn't. She cried when i sent her away but it didn't do any good. I don't even know if she's still alive or not."
Antimony's hands clenched around her knees and struggled to breathe against a vice that suddenly wanted to clasp tight about her ribs. Loughree's words were familiar. Painfully so. "I... understand," she breathed out and couldn't find anything else for her to say for the moment.
Pulling her tail against her face, hiding in the fur, Loughree muttered, "I tried waiting to feel something other than scared, or angry. And now I'm just cold. Maybe I was just looking for somewhere comfortable to freeze to death."
Opening her mouth to speak, Antimony found that she knew no words to comfort. There had been no words for her, either, back then. Instead she just leaned forward and reached down to rest one nervous, uncertain hand on Loughree's shoulder, in silence.
Loughree stared at the fur of her tail, the appendage shifting about but held stationary against her face. She was silent for a time, and then she said, "I saw something strange near the Ossuary. A monster made of shadow. He was watching it when I found him."
Her chest chilled, an icy touch that spread to her shoulders and down her back. Antimony resisted a shiver. "Made of shadow," she echoed lowly, swallowed. The question of whether or not she believed Loughree had somehow fallen away during the minutes passed between them. The way the younger woman spoke rang with a certain degree of truth to Antimony that she automatically acknowledged, that stirred a certain deep-held fear.
Her voice caught in her throat then, and when she tried to speak again, only a short, thin sound came out. A few breaths later, she managed, "Did you see... Aij--a... green-haired girl..?"
"... I think. She was screaming." Loughree twisted her tail in her hands. "Some men heard and went to look. Maybe they were going to help. But he killed them. I tried... But I couldn't..."
"Aijeen," Antimony murmured, her shoulders sagging. Screaming. She chose not to focus on Loughree's account that placed Megiddo as the true murderer of four men; if she was honest with herself, it didn't surprise her, given their past conversations, but she was far too emotionally tired to dwell on that and Loughree's worries and her daughters and a certain Tia's grief all at once. "She didn't mean..." she began, then stopped herself. The argument wasn't necessary with Loughree.
She wanted to offer to help find the younger woman's child - opened her mouth to speak again almost without thought. But something stopped her, and it left her feeling horribly selfish. Still, perhaps she... "I could ask him."
"Don't." Loughree twitched, fists tight, spine curling forward. "Don't ever talk to him."
Antimony wanted to frown, but she only had the energy for a slight pursing of her lips. "... You should rest. I can get you some warm food, and you will feel... more centered." Not better; she knew there was very little that would make one feel better in these situations.
Closing her eyes and shivering again, Loughree almost whispered. "I'm trying."
She almost didn't trust her legs to hold her up when she pushed up from the bed, but the exhaustion was more mental than physical and so they did. Antimony stood next to Loughree for a few moments and then bent to give the woman's shoulder another, light squeeze before stepping away, towards the door. "I will see what I can do," she said quietly, opening it.
The filthy woman remained unmoving on the ground, not acknowledging what Antimony had said to her or seeming to notice the touch.
When nothing further came from Loughree, Antimony slipped back out through the door and shut it quietly behind her.
![[Image: AntiThalSig.png]](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/179079766/AntiThalSig.png)
"Song dogs barking at the break of dawn, lightning pushes the edges of a thunderstorm; and these streets, quiet as a sleeping army, send their battered dreams to heaven."
Hipparion Tribe (Sagolii)Â - Â Antimony Jhanhi's Wiki
