[Lost] October challenge - Nemoa

[http://users.livejournal.com/_crimsonearth/]

Okay, well akonken tagged me in to this group, and annwfyn asked me to get writing so I thought I should start as I mean to go on by contributing something - advanced warning though, I'm afraid I don't play terribly cheerful characters :D (October was easier to start with) - Also, hello all!

She knew exactly where she’d be. She always knew. Not because she’d been following her for months, but because it was exactly where she’d have gone in the same situation. She slowed to a walk as she caught a glimpse of the moonlight catching on still water and ducked close to the line of trees for her final approach. Sitting, hunched by the water’s edge was a small, shadowy figure. Nemoa circled slowly and quietly around her with a wide berth to get a better view and then sunk down behind a willow to watch.

Her quarry was a girl of nineteen, with long, tousled locks of auburn hair and a fair complexion, streaked with mascara and half-dried tears. The girl was still convulsing and making sobbing sounds, but seemed to have run out of tears to shed as she sat sniffling and pressing her thumbs against her sore eyelids, and clutching her chest, but no longer crying. Her legs and shoes were covered in mud where she had chosen to sit too close to the bank so that she might have somewhere to wash the sting away, and the backs of her hands and the insides of her arms were streaked red and white from hours of angry scratching with bitten-down nails. Nemoa knew the signs without needing to look too hard.

As they sat there, in silence, but twenty feet apart, the one utterly oblivious of the other who was so intensely aware of her, the crying girl drew a penknife out of her pocket and flicked the blade open in her palm and gazed at it darkly. Nemoa felt her insides tighten and a pang of guilt bloomed in her gut at the pressure of her own dagger blades pressing against her thigh. Suddenly, it dawned on her that for all her time spent waiting for the right moment, preparing and considering, now a moment was upon her that, right or wrong, she might be forced to move upon. A cold flush swept across her skin and noiselessly, she crept out from her holding spot and inched toward the girl, shadow by shadow, step by step, as she watched the blade turn back and forth in the girl’s shaking palm, morbidly playing over her options.

At eight feet behind her, she straightened up and had a split-second decision to make, and not one she was remotely ready for. Think of a face to wear. Think of a thing to say. Or don’t pick a face. Take the risk that she’d be recognised. How bad could it be? Take the risk that she wouldn’t be recognised. How much worse would that be? Risk finding that she didn’t have the words, that she couldn’t think of a single thing to stop the inevitable, to ease the pain. Find herself at a loss. The world could change in the turn of her head. It could come tumbling down or transform into something beautiful or unbearable. It could end. Everything she was and thought herself to be seemed suddenly to be hanging in the balance, in a heartbeat and a breath and it should have been as simple as putting up a mask and picking a platitude but she didn’t even know where to begin and for the first time since leaving the Hedge, Nemoa was utterly terrified.

A phone rang into the silence, and Nemoa froze. It should have snapped her out of her panic but instead her muscles ceased up and her breath stopped in her throat. In a flash, the penknife was closed away, back in the girl’s pocket and she drew the phone to her ear with a sniffle.

“Dad?” She half-sobbed.

She wanted to reach for her daggers. Change her face. Sink into the shadows. Anything. But she couldn’t move. Her heart was racing but her limbs had gone catatonic and somehow it was crippling her glamour. In one smooth, swift movement, the girl was on her feet and as she turned toward Nemoa, her lovely, dark, swollen eyes flickered up, and barely registered her, as she brushed past, leaving a lingering scent of vanilla perfume and peach schnapps. A stone’s throw away, she resumed her conversation in low, stilted sobs as she wandered off.

Nemoa lost time. She gave in to emotion because she couldn’t not, and it consumed her. She staggered noiselessly over to the spot where the girl had sat only moments before, and settled down beside the water, pulling a swathe of shadows about her as a buffer against the world and drawing one of her daggers from its sheath to rest in her palm. Perhaps she hadn’t recognised her. Perhaps she hadn’t really looked. She had certainly been distracted. Then again, perhaps the nagging suspicion that she had been harbouring for so long, the simplest explanation, was the right one; perhaps there was nothing there to recognise... As she turned it over in her palm, she caught a glimpse of her face flickering and shifting in the muted reflection along the flat of the blade. Cold tears worked slow, winding rivers across her cheeks, and as sorrow splashed on steel, shattering her image into a dozen disjointed fragments, she closed her fingers tightly around the glistening edge.