Chapter Text
“Should I?” Euphrasia asked. She groaned. Ryuko groaned, her hands on her hips, her hips acheing after the day fighting on her feet deep in the concrete maze where trouble ran rampant and citizens still stumbling and reeling after the disruptions of the Merge tripped over each other. She adjusted the blue surgical mask now ill-fitted to her face after being bent and re-pinched and pulled this way and that over her face all week. She needed to sneeze. The bright shop lights were starting to give her a headache. Muddied boots, one untied, dirty jeans, a long leather coat that had never, to her knowledge, been washed: Ryuko had never felt more out of place. Euphrasia held the dress in front of her body and frowned at herself in the mirror. “I shouldn’t.”
“Then don’t,” Ryuko said plainly. The handles of several bags dug into her wrists and forearms.
“Do we have the money?” Euphrasia asked. She swayed back and forth and the dress moved with her. Ryuko wrinkled her nose. She wished that she could wear that sort of twirly thing.
“Of course. We put down a rogue fire dragon in the centre city, we can buy anything we want,” Ryuko replied.
“I think I’ll get it, then,” Euphrasia said. She put the dress neatly over her arm. Her own black robes and battle-tossed hair didn’t make her look any more in her element in the high-end shop than Ryuko. They dressed like a pair of shadows, the two of them together, earning them more than their fair share of double takes in the bright shop with its racks of fine clothing and ambient jazz that was too light a sound to be much of anything.
“Then get it.”
“I will,” she said with a beaming smile. Ryuko nodded, if Euphrasia couldn’t see her smile behind the mask. “Thank you.”
“I just hold the money,” Ryuko said, although it was she who took out her wallet as Euphrasia handed the dress over the counter to the cashier. “It’s yours, too. You earned it. You’re getting good.”
Euphrasia bashfully tucked a loose strand of her long hair behind her ear. Ever-polite, she muttered her thanks to the cashier as she handed the dress back in a crisp paper bag printed with some logo Ryuko had a sneaking suspicion she was supposed to recognise.
“Have a nice day, sir,” the cashier said politely. Ryuko nodded, if she also gave an exasperated grunt, more on reflex than anything else. Euphrasia followed her as she quickly ducked her way out of the shop.
“Why don’t you ever say anything?” She asked. Ryuko shrugged.
“Who cares?” Ryuko asked. “I’ll never see her again. I’m one of dozens of people she sees every day. I don’t care.”
Euphrasia hummed. She hummed like she had something to say, but Ryuko wasn’t going to do the thing and humour her. She hummed all the way to the car. Ryuko put all their shopping in the boot and Euphrasia waited for her in the passenger seat. She watched her expectantly in the rear view mirror as she got in and put on her own seatbelt. It reminded Euphrasia to do the same.
“Oh, what the hell?” Ryuko sighed. “Just say it.”
“Say what?” Euphrasia innocently asked.
“What you’re thinking. You’re doing the thing.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The thing you do when you have something to say and want me to ask you what you’re thinking. What are you thinking?”
“Just that you should stand up for yourself more!” Euphrasia exclaimed. Ryuko rolled her eyes as she put the car in reverse.
“In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not the prettiest of ladies.” Choppy, overgrown hair half-covering tired eyes, half a beard, and all the accoutrement of a bounty hunter had never particularly screamed at the world to treat her like a lady. She had grown more or less accustomed to it.
“I don’t think that matters,” Euphrasia said firmly. Easy enough for her to say. Ryuko snuck a glance at her in the rear view mirror now. Soft eyes and a soft face, it was hard not to think of her like a baby sister who had stumbled into her life. It was hard, sometimes, to think of her as the bounty hunter she was becoming, the deadly elemental master of the breath in their target’s lungs, Ryuko’s partner in the dirty business her father had left her. Ryuko wondered if she had made the right choice, taking her on this journey with her.
“To each her own.”
Euphrasia sighed and hugged her knees to her chest.
“Put your feet down.”
It was sometimes so obvious that she was raised somewhere far from here. She put her sandalled feet back on the ground as Ryuko merged into the ever-present traffic. To be honest, they were both more accustomed to taking to the air: Euphrasia in the Cloud Kingdom’s elegant gilded gondolas, Ryuko in airships that groaned and sputtered when they caught a bad gust. Life in the city would be a learning experience for them both. It was good, then, that jobs frequently took them far away. Euphrasia leaned her head against the window and watched the buildings roll slowly by.
Ryuko chuckled as they pulled into the car park. It never ceased to feel unusual when she went through the motions of a law-abiding citizen. Euphrasia looked like she felt the same: simply humouring foreign rules of some alien place. Neither of them belonged here, and they knew it. It was simply a place to crash between jobs— a nice place to crash between jobs— and it certainly beat dark roadside motels and not knowing where she’d be next month. Good bounties passed for a steady income, and after the Merge, landlords had stopped caring so much about who their tenants were, or where they got their money. Even so, the nicer parts of the city still reserved themselves for a classier clientele than the two bounty hunters trudging up the stairs. Even Euphrasia, who never seemed to tire, pushed herself languidly upwards. She yawned and apologised as Ryuko unlocked the flat.
“I need a shower,” Ryuko announced. She set their shopping— it was all Euphrasia’s shopping— on the floor next to the boots she unceremoniously kicked off her feet. Euphrasia sauntered over to the sofa, with that walk that seemed as if she summoned the winds to lift her, too, and she flopped down on her back with a contented huff.
“Can we order takeout?” Euphrasia called after her as she disappeared around the corner to the washroom. For the price, it was not a very large place.
“The world is your oyster, kid.” Ryuko closed the door behind herself as Euphrasia cheered, and she heard a sound like her getting tangled in her flowing robes as she scrambled off the sofa to the phone.
The jaded bounty hunter sighed. She brushed her hair back and caught a glimpse of her own dark eyes in the mirror as her hand snagged in tangled hair. Ryuko ducked quickly out of the washroom to gather a change of clothes. In the kitchen, Euphrasia happily rattled off menu items from one of the takeout menus they kept stuck to the fridge now, just for her. It sounded like Master Chen’s, again. Euphrasia cheerily thanked the person taking her order. Ryuko closed the washroom door again and lost track of their conversation as she turned on the shower.
She dumped her new clothes on the floor in one pile and shed her dirty clothes into the laundry basket. Ryuko set her coat carefully in its own pile to the side. She unlooped the surgical mask from her ears and left it unceremoniously on the counter. Two toothbrushes on the counter, two towels hanging in the washroom, half a dozen bottles of shampoos and soaps in the shower: the room itself refused to let her ignore the other girl’s presence. Ryuko sighed and studied her own face. It was almost a foreign look to her. What was she thinking, letting Euphrasia tag along with her? Destiny, or whatever she had called it, be damned, Euphrasia was old enough to know better. Even so, she seemed happy. The glass shower door began to gather steam and Ryuko took her eyes away from the face beneath her familiar eyes.
Hot water soothed her tired back and she closed her eyes. Dirt and sweat left her behind as she washed her hair. She looked over the line of hair products Euphrasia had picked for herself. On seeing the sorry state of Ryuko’s own choice of product, or lack thereof, Euphrasia had taken to offering her to use some over and over again. At last, it seemed Euphrasia had worn her down. She caved and let herself take her up on the offer.
It was strange.
She let the dirt and worry wash away until the water ran clear. After a job, the first chance she got to bathe always made her feel clean in its own kind of way. It was the kind of clean that made her seek dirtier and dirtier jobs. The water would wash it all away in its steady flow. Euphrasia had said that the wind made her feel the same way. Ryuko hummed a few notes at random. She wished she had a song for this sort of occasion.
Ryuko stood under the water until she felt innocent again, and then a little longer. She took it as her sign to take herself from this little pleasure when she heard the doorbell ring. Euphrasia got the door as Ryuko stepped out of the shower and dried her hair, then her body. She tied her damp hair back without much care and wrapped the towel around her waist. If she had treated herself once, she might as well go all the way. She opened the cabinet and found the shaving cream shoved all the way to the back by more important things. On a normal day, she would drag the razor over dry skin and call it a day. She wore a mask anyways, and that would cover up anywhere she fucked it up. She spread the shaving cream over her cheeks and chin and carefully shaved her face. The water ran warm out of the tap as she wet a washcloth to clean her face. She took some of Euphrasia’s lotion— she insisted that they should share this, too— and soothed her skin.
All of Euphrasia’s things smelled pleasantly of different things: lavender, roses, midnight— whatever that was supposed to smell like. Ryuko sniffed her hand as she felt along her cheeks. She smiled at herself in the mirror. Perhaps Euphrasia had been a little right. Perhaps it was not Ryuko who was the mentor here, after all.
Ryuko dressed herself in the clothes she had taken without much care: a dark blouse, high socks, a long skirt. She let her hair down and dried it as well as a towel could. Euphrasia had made her buy a hair dryer before the elemental master of wind realised she could do a better job by her own hand. Ryuko had used one before and didn’t care much for it. She put her coat over her arm and left her usual mask behind in the bathroom as she let the steamy air escape into the corridor.
Euphrasia was waiting for her, takeout boxes lined up neatly across the coffee table where they usually ate. Their kitchen table was all maps and pictures, of targets and bosses and potential work. Lately, it had turned into a place for Euphrasia to do her writing, whatever she got up to, at night before she went to sleep on the couch where she made a bed. They ate at the coffee table or on the balcony if the weather was fair, to watch television or the cars go by. The sort of things they found entertaining after the excitement of their day jobs never failed to amuse Ryuko in a wry sort of way. She sat on the other side of the soft sofa. During Ryuko’s shower, Euphrasia had put little plaits in her hair. Her nimble fingertips worked three small strands together by her waist.
“What did you order?”
“I have rice for both of us, and there’s beef dumplings and orange chicken, fried rice, and chow mein,” Euphrasia said, pointing at each box. She plaited the very tips of her hair until she couldn’t find purchase on the fine ends anymore. “And fortune cookies.”
She giggled as she took a fortune cookie and split it open.
“I like fortune cookies,” she said, “it’s cute. A little piece of paper in a cookie might tell you your future.”
“Of course, Writer of Destiny,” Ryuko said sarcastically, sideways, through a mouthful of rice and chicken. Euphrasia shrugged and read the paper happily before slipping it into the bag bound around her hips. She smiled. Ryuko caught her eyes studying her. She finished her bite and pursed her lips. “What is it, Euphrasia?”
“Nothing!” She exclaimed, though she had that same expectant expression in her eyes again. She took her half-cleared plate from the coffee table. “You look pretty.”
“I used your stuff,” Ryuko muttered.
“I can tell,” Euphrasia said triumphantly.
Ryuko looked around the bright flat.
“Euphrasia,” she began. The Writer, exiled from the hallowed halls, hummed. “If your Writers of Destiny… if destiny is controlled somewhere, by someone, what’s…”
She hesitated. She searched for the words. She sighed and gestured flippantly towards herself.
“Why?”
And Euphrasia, who had a way with words, understood.
“I’m not sure,” she admitted. She drew the black robes, the mark of an exile, about her body. “I don’t think it’s really destiny that we write. Well…”
Euphrasia played with the ends of her plait.
“It’s not like we write fortune cookies,” she joked drily. “We write… they’re like riddles. Destiny isn’t one thing, it’s like… a river. We write the riverbanks, and everything that happens happens within them. And something the river floods, and sometimes it’s dammed. I think.”
“So I don’t have a personal Writer I can go and strangle?” Ryuko joked. Euphrasia earnestly shook her head. She sighed resignedly. When she had finished her plate, Euphrasia collected an armful of her new clothes and hurried into the vacant washroom. Ryuko laid her head back against the cushions and watched the clouds pass by as they shrouded the sun. A cool breeze flowed into the room. Euphrasia insisted that they keep a window open, to feel the breeze. The breath of the Cloud Kingdom intermingled with the clouds so closely that the scent of the wind was in their blood. It was a wonder they hadn’t produced a Master of Wind before, and a shame, Ryuko thought, that they had banished their Master of Wind so quickly. Euphrasia always seemed so chipper, so cheerful, so happy and so polite that Ryuko wondered if she felt any sadness at all. She carried herself with such an air of destiny, Ryuko could barely believe she was still a child. Ryuko supposed that she wasn’t, really. A teenager. Ryuko had been on her own since she was a little younger than Euphrasia. Even so, it had taken a little while after that for her to become Ryuko. They were both like children, she supposed, in this world.
Euphrasia peeked her head out from around the corner.
“Yes?” Ryuko called.
“I’m not sure,” Euphrasia said shyly. She stepped into the living room and stood up straight. The Writer of Destiny had exchanged her black robes for a black shirt and a tasteful black skirt, long black leggings, and a pair of short heels, also black. She looked down at herself in the strange and foreign dress. “It feels odd not to wear my robes.”
“Other than dressing like you’re on your way to a funeral, you look fine,” Ryuko said. Euphrasia huffed.
“You dress in all black, too.”
“I dressed in all black first,” Ryuko pointed out. “You can wear other colours, you know.”
“I know,” Euphrasia admitted. She looked at her hands and her arms. “I am still… I am not a Writer of Destiny anymore, but that does not mean I am a regular person. I am an exile. I want to wear that, still.”
Ryuko let her have the silence.
“I am not sure what to do.”
“If you want to wear the robes, you should,” Ryuko said. She searched hard for the right words to hold the solemn air between them. For all the ways she carried herself like somebody who saw straight down the path of fate, Euphrasia was still, beneath it, a girl without much experience of the world. No. She had experienced the world all the same as Ryuko. They had gone together into the wastes, the Crossroads, the foetid swamps and bubbling seas that marked the edge of civilisation in the world. It was the bright days that were strange to the two women who had not gotten a chance to be girls. It was this sort of thing, cheap takeout and casual dresses that they were unaccustomed to. Ryuko, alone, would have avoided the city entirely, sticking to the shadows and shady rooms by the roadside, letting her hair and her jacket gather ashes and smoke. She and Euphrasia would get used to this thing together.
Ryuko hummed.
“Show me what else you got.” She cringed as she said it, but Euphrasia’s eyes brightened and she took the other bags to disappear behind the wall. The next time she appeared, she was wearing a loose top with sleeves that flowed around her arms and gathered at her wrist with a long skirt buckled at her waist with a decorative silver clasp. She smiled, much more at home in this attire than the previous. Ryuko encouraged her and she spun to make her skirt dance around her. Neither girl knew the proper words of course, but theirs sufficed. At last, she came out in the last dress they had looked at, and she danced across the bright floor, casting off shyness. She laughed and Ryuko couldn’t help but laugh as well. Euphrasia hugged her arms and sat down, looking and feeling so different just from this.
“It is strange, you not dressed like a monk,” Ryuko said.
“I still don’t know if I like it,” Euphrasia admitted.
“That’s alright, I think.”
Ryuko let her have the silence.
“I bought makeup, too,” she said at last.
“I know that,” mused Ryuko. “I was there.”
“I’ll need someone to practice on,” she said proddingly. Ryuko shook her head.
“You can practice on yourself.”
“But that’s not as fun,” Euphrasia sighed. She raised her hand to run pinched fingers along the edge of the hood of her robe, but she would find nothing there now.
“Do you monks wear makeup?”
“No,” Euphrasia said. “That’s why I need to practice.”
“I’m not going to win an argument against a Writer of Destiny, am I?”
The exile ignored her former title with a grin.
“Nope.”
At least Ryuko could say she hadn’t gone down without a fight. Euphrasia happily opened the new makeup. She stood over Ryuko with a brush balanced as naturally in her hand as a pen.
“If you stab me in the eye, I will leave you behind in New Stiix the next time we’re out,” Ryuko warned. Euphrasia took it for the jest that it was.
“You wouldn’t,” she declared confidently. Her touch was soft as Ryuko flinched from the ticklish sensation on her eyelids. “You need the Elemental Master of Wind.”
“I don’t need an elemental master of anything,” Ryuko scoffed. “I had a good business going before I decided to let you travel with me.”
“Your business ended with you freezing your arse off and coming within an inch of death in the mountains under Shintaro,” Euphrasia quipped. Ryuko clicked her tongue.
“Who taught you those words?”
“You did.”
Ryuko tried to keep her face from flinching as Euphrasia gently lined her eyes with her usual care.
“You can open your eyes now, I think,” Euphrasia said. Ryuko squinted against the bright space at first. White tiles and white walls as the sun peeked out from behind a curtain of clouds made Ryuko realise why she spent her days away from here.
“Mirror,” she said as she stood from the sofa. Euphrasia trailed behind her as she walked to the washroom and flicked the light on. She locked eyes with herself and hesitated. Dark eyeshadow on her eyelids blended out to a sparkling silver edge, something simple to match either of their dark outfits. Euphrasia’s unpracticed hand still had a roughness to the experimental strokes necessary to apply pigment to something other than paper, but it didn’t look bad. Ryuko’s gaze drifted towards her nose and chin, but her eyes brought it back. She touched her cheek.
“I could have done better,” Euphrasia admitted.
“No,” Ryuko whispered. She nodded at the stranger in the mirror. “I… like this.”
She bit her lip. Her tossed hair made her look a little like the rough rebel women rockers she had seen all her childhood from afar, ladies who didn’t have anything to prove. Ladies like her, just a little more fortunate. The handsome woman staring at her gave her a sly smile. It felt…
Good.
Like putting on the dark leather coat that knew the shape of her shoulders well.
Like pulling her hair out of the collar of a blouse and feeling it fall just short of her shoulders on the sides.
Like the wind to her back on a warm summer’s day, taking her far away from Stiix.
Euphrasia smiled as she watched her friend smile, and she let her have the silence.