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Post by Ylanne on Oct 9, 2019 17:36:32 GMT -6
Drulović looked intently at the hand Aerilyn had placed on the table. She reached forward her own, touching fingers to fingers, the two slightly different shades of skin pressed to one another. "No contact, inmate," the guard said, warning. The old woman withdrew her hand slightly across the table's surface, metal scraping on plastic, only inches from Aerilyn's hand. She let her gaze linger, eyes traveling from Aerilyn's hand back to the younger woman's face.
"I am glad for your company, Aerilyn, and I will welcome Mr. Fazari's companionship again, too," said Drulović. Her brows furrowed and she frowned deeply. "I am never alone, anymore. I am haunted by ghosts borne of my own damned handiwork, ghosts of those I was sworn to protect and ghosts of those whose deaths I caused. I hear their screams, and their voices, entreating, whispering in echoes across time and memory. I am perhaps somewhere different now than I have been in some time, but I have never left these places. They have not left me."
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Post by demikara on Oct 9, 2019 17:47:36 GMT -6
Aerilyn pulled her hand back an inch or so as well, hating the ridiculous no contact rule. Why would such a thing even be enforced? It didn't make sense. She frowned as well and thought on her own demons. "I don't envy you. I never have. Ahmad and I, we got to flee the worst of it. But you stayed behind." She had stayed through it all, had been tortured and beaten and treated callously by even those who should have her back.
"I hope they'll move to trial swiftly then. The sooner to make certain you have warm blankets and more permanent pictures than the printer paper I was able to get you." Neither thought the other would be let out. But Aerilyn was determined to make a more permanent cell at least a little bit of comfort.
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Post by Ylanne on Oct 9, 2019 17:57:03 GMT -6
"As well you ought to have fled the bombardment," said Drulović, head quirked slightly to the side, "as I wished for you and prayed fervently you would be safe away from it. I would not have wished what any of us suffered on anyone, and particularly not those for whom I have cared." She tilted her head back a bit, gaze raking over Aerilyn, unreadable as ever but that her face was wrought with pain and aches that never quite vanished or faded, only waned for a time before returning in screaming agony. "I'll confess I can't know Ms. Olson's intentions, but I suspect trial will be soon. She's proffered the springtime at earliest, or perhaps the advent of summer. I do not look forward to what trial will bring." What miseries, what confessions, what revelations. She deserved it, perhaps, but she had no eager anticipation. And judging from the hearings that had taken place so far, the Justice Ministry's Special Prosecutions Office intended to give no quarter.
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Post by demikara on Oct 9, 2019 18:00:34 GMT -6
"We contacted you as soon as we were able. To make sure you knew we were safe." that they had escaped that nightmare scenario. "It's one of my demons, that we ran away. That I didn't stay with the resistance." How different her life would look if she had. How much less of a coward would she feel? "I don't look forward to the trial. But in the aftermath, maybe they'll let us give you more permanent items, something to make it more...just more." It wasn't a home, it would never be a home.
But it could be at least a little gentled.
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Post by Ylanne on Oct 9, 2019 18:25:43 GMT -6
"I doubt there's much any material object can do to lessen the meanness and misery of prison," said Drulović, her tone flat with a hint of despondency and dismissiveness all at once. "The Aschen destroyed near everything I owned of any value or import to me in that same time. They destroyed my home, one of the few I've ever had fortune to occupy - and with the walls and roof and foundation, everything inside it too. I have little to want or need in my life, I think, here or outside, but a cup of good tea and something pleasant to read. I do not like it here. I find it cold and wanting. I suspect the next place I will go will be the same or much like it. I have no need of comfort, for it only reminds me of other things best forgotten." What love she had once found in Colombia, in Priština, in Washington. At home.
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Post by demikara on Oct 9, 2019 18:32:35 GMT -6
"Then books to read and a blanket to keep you warm and some of the teas you favor." Aerilyn knew there wasn't much she could do but she could try. She planned on trying. "The Aschen...they destroyed damn near everything. But I can still try and make things better, even if here is not...not home." There would be no returning home. But they kept circling around and around the same subject.
She changed it, abruptly. "I went to see Natalija. She seemed...well." Not happy, but at least healthy.
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Post by Ylanne on Oct 9, 2019 18:52:43 GMT -6
Something flashed in the old woman's eyes at mention of her younger daughter's name. "I haven't heard her voice in years," she murmured. "I've written her letters, you know, once a week, for the past ten years. I never stopped sending them. I doubt she's ever bothered to open and read the damned things." Drulović looked directly into Aerilyn's eyes. "Did my daughter tell you that she hates me or only that she will feel nothing when I finally wither and die entirely?" Her voice was empty and despairing. Her daughters did not love her. She did not blame them. "I miss her."
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Post by demikara on Oct 9, 2019 19:01:20 GMT -6
"Something like that." Aerilyn admitted. "She's bitter. I should have been a better friend than I was. She mostly seemed lonely." It was possible to be surrounded and be alone. Natalija wasn't surrounded though. She was simply alone. Aerilyn sighed. "I don't think writing her letters is harmful though." Even if she would never open them and they all knew it. "She had some letters there. Marked inmate mail at least, so I assume they're from you."
she could be wrong, but she doubted it.
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Post by Ylanne on Oct 9, 2019 19:10:38 GMT -6
"We share that loneliness, then," Drulović said with smothering despondency, and she laughed bitterly. "She takes after me much more than she'd ever like to contemplate, I'm sure." The old woman leaned back in her chair, still staring unblinking at her friend. "I've sent her letters while I've been confined here, so I suppose you were looking at Natalija's trash. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that she throws my letters away. I wish it were not so." She made an open handed gesture, languid, then let her hand rest again on the table. "I wish her life were lighter and she had more to enjoy in it." She'd written the same things to Natalija as she had in years past - asking after her grandchildren, updating on her garden, wishing her daughter well, expressing her love for a daughter who could not return it. And Drulović thought she knew why. Natalija had learned the circumstances of her birth. She must believe she was unwanted herself. The old woman had never known how to convey otherwise.
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Post by demikara on Oct 11, 2019 16:10:54 GMT -6
"They were bound together, on her table." Aerilyn said simply. "Not in the trash." She could provide that kindness at least. She would provide that kindness at least. Aerilyn offered a wan smile. "It sounds like your grandkids are doing okay. We talked a little about them." Mostly, Natalija had seemed bitter and alone. Arianne at least never seemed bitter, though she could simply be hiding it. She had been an excellent spy after all.
The aeromancer considered what else to say, to do. "Ahmad is doing better. Not as nervous. Still broken hearted though." That would take tim for that to be addressed. Time and them being allowed access to Arianne.
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Post by Ylanne on Oct 11, 2019 16:37:25 GMT -6
"My grandchildren sometimes speak to me, you know," said Drulović, her look drawn and distant. "I worry for them, as I worry for you and Mr. Fazari. I'm glad he's better now than he was a few weeks before." She thought of Aerilyn as her third daughter, really, the only one of them who would speak to her now. "How did Natalija receive you?" The old woman asked keen and to the point. "She's always so quick to assume betrayal and abandonment from those around her, I'm afraid. I know it too well. If you should ever have children, you might one day feel the same from them or they might feel the same toward you, though I pray you'll be spared that misfortune." Drulović's eyes crinkled a bit. "Through what all you've lived to see, you still have some bit of innocence about you in that way." Her smile was sad and wanting.
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Post by demikara on Oct 11, 2019 19:25:51 GMT -6
"Not well. She was upset I hadn't been by sooner. More upset I was there for you." Aerilyn admitted. "I was a terrible friend to her. She had a good reason to be upset with me." She had been a truly terrible friend. They hadn't been close, but she still could have done so much better than they had. "We shared a beer on her back porch." Aerilyn, like most magic users, wasn't actually very big into alcohol. She sighed and closed her eyes, thinking it through. "I regret not being there for her, through it all."
They hadn't been that close, that was all. And with all the chaos that was Terra, the friendship fell to the wayside. "And less innocence and more forgiveness. I don't think I could ever be called innocent. Not after the war." The first one she had been in. The one that cost her hearing, all that time ago.
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Post by Ylanne on Oct 11, 2019 19:41:59 GMT -6
"We've all surrendered our innocence and failed each other in some way or another, I suppose," Drulović said, her head tilted ever so slightly to the side, pensive. "And all we have left to us is our penitence. They used to call prisons the penitentiary, you know, and some still do. They thought that time inside ought to be for self-reflection and perhaps some move toward atonement, if it might even be possible to achieve, depending, of course, on one's particular crimes and transgressions." The old woman's gaze seemed fixed now on some point on the wall past Aerilyn's head. "I worked tirelessly for Natalija's freedom. I could never see her there. She would not let me, I'm afraid, though I think I couldn't bear the thought of her imprisoned, just as I cannot bear the thought of your dying. I fought for her release, and I'm grateful that she finally won it. Perhaps you disappointed her, but I know that she needs friends like you, Aerilyn, strong and knowing friends, especially while she will not answer my entreaties. I pray you won't let her push you from her life." Those had been long nights, and sometimes she'd waited outside that prison in the parking lot hoping that her daughter would change her mind and agree to see her, just as she'd sometimes tried to stop in the neighborhood only for the door to either slam in her face or stay forbiddingly shut. She'd mostly stopped trying years since, and turned instead to the letters, which she knew her daughter would refuse to read. They both did.
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Post by demikara on Oct 14, 2019 9:14:03 GMT -6
"I'll do my best Arianne." And she would, too. She just didn't have high hopes of anything coming of it. Aerilyn offered a smile. "I suppose being here does offer plenty of time to think." She said and considered what else they could even talk about. There was depressingly little. "So I've thought about it, and I don't think I'm going to become a field agent. I think that would only worry Ahmad more, and I don't want that." Besides, disregarding how he felt like that was just bad practice for a marriage.
"Of course, that still leaves me at square one. Do you have any other suggestions?"
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Post by Ylanne on Oct 14, 2019 10:56:40 GMT -6
"You know that Mr. Fazari would worry about you no matter what it is you choose to do," said Drulović. She rested her fingers lightly on the edge of her chin, resembling a contemplative statue like the many sculptures of older, wiser thinkers and statesmen that dotted the halls of Government Center and the universities in Van Leugen. "Perhaps I was too quick to suggest life in the Bureau. Espionage and clandestine operations aged me too quickly. I would not wish that on you for any offering or temptation. I was about your age during those years in Lipljan, you know." Too old to suffer what she had. "Perhaps you'd find your respite and danger in a middle school classroom, or a mine excavation site, or a Wing City public bus route. Or perhaps you and Mr. Fazari ought to consider the life of travel and wanderlust, away from this damned earth, exploring among the stars. Now that might be what rescues you - or frees you."
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