restinglichface

In this place? No. I've taken great lengths to avoid it, as I've experienced that unpleasantness before I ever came here. More than once.

[She pours the tea, her expression mild but tight around the eyes and lips. It's impossible to mention her experiences with death without remembering them in too-vivid detail.]

It's never easy, it never happens without leaving its mark. Sometimes quite literally.

[One of Lust's hands lifts to briefly cover the orobouros on her chest - what most assume is simply a tattoo, some claiming of her own serpentine being. But it's no more tattoo than the colors along her tail.]

[Lup's had such a strange relationship with death over the last hundred years, it's almost surprising to see Lust's reaction to her deaths before this place, her expression beautiful as ever but tight and tense from the topic. Lup watches the way her hand drifts, where it lands and obscures her marking, the elf's mouth pressing into a tight line.

Death before this place had been a joke, something her and her friends laughed about, a certain air of invincibility to their lives. But Ryslig is different. And so are all of Lust's former experiences. It's obviously been so different for her than for Lup.]

Is that from dying? Your ouroboros?

[Maybe it's rude to ask such a personal question, but they are friends, and Lup knows Lust will tell her to shove it if she's uncomfortable.]

From being brought back.

[Lust takes her own cup of tea and drinks long and deeply from it. She needs calming herbs herself. She doesn't find it rude, it's relevant to their conversation. She expected this conversation to be difficult for them both, it's a difficult topic.]

[But she trusts Lup, she's opened up in ways to the other woman before.
It's safe to talk about these things with her.]

It's taboo, to perform human alchemy. The most forbidden thing in my first world. Humankind tried to wipe the knowledge from existence, but few things remain lost forever. And there are always those desperate and foolish or power hungry enough to overstep the laws of nature if they find a way. And it is unnatural, to return from death. It breaks the cycle, shifts the balance in more than one plane of existence. And it costs a great price, to both the one bringing back and the one brought. This place is like that...there's a price to dying and returning from the Unknown Land.

Fuck.

[The trust built up between the two women over the last year and a half is something Lup would never take for granted, a friendship she never expected or wanted but now treasures more than anything. Lup never thought another woman could come into her life and mean as much as Lucretia had to her, but here Lust is, the kind of beautiful-hearted friend and confidante that she so needed in this place, slithering in and solidifying herself as a constant and trusted presence in Lup's life. The trust there is comfortable and real, solid, not at all shaky or uncertain.

Lup knows this is significant. The kind of significant reflected in how Lup even came to her with a heavy heart in the first place.

Lust doesn't need to be coddled and Lup isn't the type to. But that doesn't take the bitter taste off of Lup's forked tongue.]

That's fuckin' sick.

[The necromancy her and her husband practice in is different. It isn't like this. Those corpses are only temporarily reanimated, it doesn't involve fucking with the soul. It isn't bringing someone back against their will.]

Do you know who did it? Was it someone you knew?

[Lust shakes her head, holding up a hand. It's important to her, for some reason, that Lup understand the context of her transmutation. She's luckier, she feels, their master hadn't made her.]

No, it wasn't like that, not for me. He wasn't power hungry, he was broken and desperate. Among my people, any form of alchemy was forbidden. Those caught practicing it were outcast. But he didn't care, he just wanted to give the woman he loved a longer life. I was young, when I died, barely twenty. He did mean well, it was done out of love by a man in mourning who didn't understand how dangerous it was, or what it cost. And he lost whatever was left of his mind in doing so.

[Among other things, but there's no need to get into all of that. But Mattias had gone mad, from pain and horror and glimpsing the Truth. The poor man.]

And I can't be angry with him. I loved him, and I...prefer existing. But I don't think any of us return from that place without it changing us somehow.

[It helps to have those pieces connected, to hear about the experience directly from Lust's mouth, instead of Lup being left to assume the worst at every angle. So this helps. Even if it doesn't right the awful wrong done to the other woman.

She lets Lust finish, grateful that she did, because the context changes everything.

If she lost her brother or her husband, Lup knows she'd go to incredible lengths to get them back. It's different when it's love, when the unforgivable action is tinted through affection instead of horror.]

To be fair, yeah, gotta say I'm def in the camp with having you exist, so hard to be pissed about that.

[How different would Ryslig be for Lup if Lust was never here? If she'd been the only lady naga, left to navigate these waters all on her own?]

That makes more sense, I get it. Love makes you do dumb shit. Bar an' I've proved that a million times over. But - [Lup slips closer, not so much out of a need to reassure the other woman, more for her own comfort. She likes to be close to others, to feel their presence solid beside her. She has yet to live through her imprisoned decade, but the need still remains.]

You talk like she was a different person than you. The you before you died. S'that how it feels?

I don't remember that life much at all.

[Lust shrugs her upper arms.]

Just bits and pieces... moments, a handful of names, nothing more. The human woman I used to be is a stranger.

[The memories are there, somewhere, she believes it, but...nowhere she can bring them forward from. And maybe there are parts of her lost forever, that never returned from The Gate. She doesn't know. But she remembers things, and she knows they were real and that that life was real.]

I was found and taken to be raised by my master almost immediately. I didn't even know where I'd come from or how I'd come to be until...not long before I came here.

[Her eyes remain downcast, looking in front of her rather than at Lup. It's still difficult to share so much of herself, the things she keeps close and rarely speaks on, even to someone she trusts so dearly.]

[Funny this is Lup's first experience with memory, with it's transformative properties, how it can take a person that you love more than anything and turn them into someone you don't even know anymore. Lup's whole future deals in memory loss, in the loss of the self, of the horror of missing something you don't even know you are missing. But for now, this just feels fresh and new, like Lust is opening Lup's eyes to the possibility of just what memory can build or destroy.

But she thinks that she understands, at least a little, even if she hasn't lived through it.]

Makes sense. [So much of the self is tied to memory. If you didn't remember who you were, the people you knew, the experiences that made you you, then wouldn't that be a whole new person?] Kinda weird to think about, but I get it. She was a totally different person. Different life.

[And Lust is Lust. Just like that.]

Did this place return some of those memories? I've heard so much about it takin', hard to think it would just freely give them away too.

Or she may have been very much like I am now, I don't know.

[Lust can only shake her head, her human past some mystery she can't close her fingers around.]

But I do remember some things. Have remembered things since coming here. They're brought forth with triggers. I saw a display of flowers once, in a window shop, and a memory came flooding back of flowers in the desert. Wearing one in my hair. A red one.

[Her words are slightly stilted, sharing so much still so unfamiliar to her. But there are so few left who know much of her beyond the surface, beyond the woman she presents herself to be outside of closed doors.]

And when Adam and I were planning our wedding. I don't remember what he said or did, but...suddenly I remembered planning another wedding with another Hebrew doctor. Just a few little moments, not even a proper memory, but... he laughed, that man who loved me decades ago, and he called me 'Isobel' and that was the first time I learned what my name is. My name, not the name I've chosen to keep.

[And there was no one else who knew that, none left who'd been given the gift of Lust's true human name, the name inscribed on the inside of the small locket she never took off. A gift from Adam.]

[But someone else should know. And if she can't share this part of her with Lup... who in god's good name could she share it with?]

[The significance isn't lost on Lup, she can hear it pronounced in every word to slip from Lust's lips, in every inhale she takes, behind that look in her eyes. This doesn't come easily to the other woman, she is as used to sharing as Lup herself is, maybe even less than the elf, so every single fact that she opens up with about herself is so damn important.

But could anything really prepare Lup for that namedrop? Of, perhaps, the most crucial thing to be shared with her tonight?

For a woman like Lup, a name means so much more than it might to anyone else. The name she was given at birth was wrong, all wrong, and so the significance of changing her name had been such a huge piece in the woman's life, one of those defining moments where Lup became Lup.

So even if she's known Lust as Lust for the whole of their time together, being able to get this glimpse of her other life, this intimate peek into something so private, Lup feels the heaviness of this moment. It's trust between them, whole and real, one that Lup will never take for granted.]

Isobel. [Lust feels so fitting, this new name so foreign on her tongue, but Lup can see how easily it works for the other woman. It's beautiful, just as much as she is, feminine and strong, regal-sounding.]

I get that. The names we pick for ourselves, the ones we share with others, those are what matter.

[Just because she goes by Lust to the rest of the world, doesn't mean that Isobel is gone. Not at all.]

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WELCOME TO YOUR PRIVATE CHANNEL, LUP. FOR SECURE COMMUNICATION, USE 025.90.004.712 * HotterTwin has joined 018.07.154.55 <HotterTwin> hey fam <HotterTwin> its chagirl lup <HotterTwin>** leave me the deets or whatever