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Lyuda has finished her choring and the animals are all warm and fed in the barn. She's drawn a bath for herself and is presently lying in it, legs hanging over the sides, arms on the side of the tub, a wash cloth draped over her eyes. There's a bottle of vodka nearby, a lit cigar in her mouth, and the radio is playing the news from Odessa on the shorwave. Occasionally she blows some of the bubble motes out across her bath. Not that anyone but her (or Fox) can see what she's up to. It's weird never being alone, but she's adapting to it pretty well.
A portal opens, and Fox steps through. She knows that Lyuda is alone, and so thus she arrives. Four little soft paws pap pap pap on the floor, and then there's a soft sigh sort of sound before the water level starts to rise because Fox is climbing into the bathtub with Lyuda, like you do. It's not really the biggest of bathtubs, but she's not the biggest of girls. So far there's only her feet in it, as she weasels herself in next to the Acanthus, standing in the water. It's too cold for her, apparently, because her fingers stretch, and the water reheats itself until it's deliciously toasty once more. All this without saying a word, because sometimes you don't have to.
Fox will never have Wisdom 8.
Lyuda's hand rises to the wash cloth on her face, peeling up one corner to peer at Fox as she makes all the necessary adjustments to the water and the heat. Once she's all settled, she takes the cigar from her mouth and exhales some smoke up towards the ceiling. "Just resting some sore muscles. I know you can just boop them away, but that's always better after a hot bath. How are you?" She squirms down into the warm water again, letting out a delighted sigh.
"I can boop them away, but sometimes the experience is better if you do things the old-fashioned way." Speaking of doing things the old-fashioned way, Fox gestures in the air with her left hand once more, and all of the actual dirt on her disappears. She was pretty grubby, so that's just a kindness done to Lyuda. Slinging one leg over the Acanthus, she slowly settles down into the hot water, straddling her wife and laying forward, draping herself on boobs. This is always a good and wonderful thing, and so, she lets out a long, slow sigh, too. "I am... I am. I'm just... a little duck."
When one's spouse is an Orphan of Proteus it sometimes does to remind them when they say they're being things they're not. "I hope you're being a metaphorical duck at the moment, because if you're being an actual duck, I have some very bad news for you regarding the efficacy of the spell." Lyuda does have boobs. And they're big soft milky white slavic farmer tiddies, too. She grins wide as she starts to pet through Fox's hair with wet hands.
"I don't need spells to be a little duck anymore," mumbles Fox into those big soft farmer tiddies, turning her face into them and looping her arms around Lyuda's ribs under the water. "My soul does it." She wiggles a little bit to get herself settled, butt against the Acanthus' thighs and hips resting on her lower belly. "But I'm not actually being a duck, I'm being a metaphor duck. Just... " and she lets her hands go from around Lyuda's ribs, pawing at the water beneath her wife's back rapidly in a way that she can't see, but can feel via the motion of the water. "Everybody needs me to be calm and I'm just... " she keeps her little hands going in the water, paddling furiously.
"Have you ever considered that this is a story you tell yourself because you are afraid of what will happen if you're not paddling furiously? I realize I am the last person on the planet that should be speaking to you about letting go and letting love in, and falling into trust? But in the end, that is what I had to do to reach where I am now. To be who I am for you now. Who told you that you had to be calm for everyone? Did someone need your help again?" Lyuda gets to petting the hair, lifting water to get it wet slowly, but thoroughly. She'll take her time with it, not wishing to get any in Fox's eyes if she can help it.
She sits up then and tilts her head to the side, giving Lyuda a mildly confused expression. "My Heart, a Hearthmaster who isn't calm in the face of a crisis isn't doing anybody any good," she points out quietly. "You need my help. This relationship has a strict 'one person at a time having an existential crisis where they sometimes turn into an amoeba of essence' limit." Fox reaches up and cradles her cheek. "But also, like, yes, always. Everyone always needs my help." She lays back down and lets her hair be pet. "I accepted that when I became an Orphan. That's what being a shaman is. You show up when needed."
"I will have you know I have been having a crisis of the self my entire adult life and that hasn't prevented me from operating at a high level of effectiveness in times of crisis. I am very good, Fox, at compartmentalizing my problems. Not the least of which reason being I can comparmentalize my problems, or quite literally tear them out of myself for a time and leave them to play games with my familiar." Lyuda adds, just to make it clear this isn't idle. "He smoked my distate of cleaning the stables at Mario Kart the other day. But the stables got clean."
She tries this again.
"Everyone needs everyone else's help. You can't forever give if you don't take Fox. Be it time to yourself, a breath in, a vacation. I don't know. But one thing I do know is that you will be no use to anyone burned out. A ten minute tantrum, a two day hedonistic bender. A week long trip to Acapulco. We can manage, Fox. You are not the only Life and Matter master in the world. You all got by with me when I needed to step back, didn't you?"
"Who's been wearing on you, though? You didn't say."
She tips her head up, peering up at Lyuda. "It's not a person, it's an everything. I realized the other day that I think the Seers are -- or were -- somehow killing off people in the past so they can put them into Mark IIs? Either that or The Creator got a whole batch of souls bottled up where some other Seer had the foresight to murder a bunch of people and put their souls in bottl-- "
Sitting up, she literally screams at the tops of her lungs.
"FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!"
Lyuda has had all of these nervous breakdowns already, more or less. And she had them when she was more or less alone. More or less. So the screamig is borne with a wince, but it is a fully understanding wince. "Yeye, mang," she says in an unnerving parody of her Familiar. That was loud.
Once it's over, though, Lyuda grabs some shampoo and starts to scrub at her hair and massage at her scalp. Matter or no, this will feel good.
"If all of this is really having to do with that tree, Fox, then I don't see why they shouldn't have been harvesting souls a long time back. Who knows how long they've been at this, or how long Creator has been at it. They're barely even human looking any longer, you know? I'm not entirely sure the rules apply with that one." She scrubs with her blunt fingernails, massaging into her scalp and around at the stress points behind her ears.
"Do you want me to talk to Creator? I can." It would be super awkward for all kinds of reasons, but she'd of course offer. "I used to do interrogations, you know. It'd be nice to do some the right way for once."
Her hands slap over her face, and she wails, "There were soul jars in the lair of the beshilu underneath the Odd Fellows Cemetery in Centralia," Fox wails. Lyuda knows that wail. That's the I'm supposed to be smart, why didn't I see that before now Fox wail. The oh my G-d it was so perfectly obvious wail. "There were soul jars. We broke them all. I broke them all. I should have -- "
She slumps forward onto Lyuda's boobs and groans. "Someone should. And maybe we should see if we can get ... fuck, it'll be too long for any resonance to remain. Unless we can scry back in time remotely, it's just too dangerous."
"I'd go back to Centralia. If anything it is my obligation to go back to Centralia. That thing down there answered to me once. And now we're on an even keel. I can go in there and look that thing in the eye and we can have a little chat. City to City. And while we're having that chat, you all can sneak in and gather up all the jars you can find. All the pieces you can find. We've got people with psychometry, automatic readers, menders. I'm an Acanthus. Maybe there's something we can glean. Either way, if I'm having a chat with old foulguts, people could be timewalking the location. It's not too dangerous. It wasn't even too dangerous for me two years ago."
"Oh, I got the fuck beaten out of me by paradox. But it was okay in the end." She just sort of slumps down on Lyuda's chest and stays there, quietly moaning. Poor Fox. Sometimes things sneak up on her. "There was a whole plane full of people murdered when they took Mary," Fox says quietly, in a way that her lover will know means I am going to burn them all someday. I am going to fucking burn them all for this. She rubs her hand over her face, letting Lyuda scrub her hair, and sighs. "Yeah. We should do that." A puffed out breath. "Shikata ga nai." It can't be helped. It needs to be done.
"Shikata ga nai," Lyuda agrees quietly, in perhaps the most slavic delivery possible for those words.
"I am either doing this or I am not doing this. And a giant massive spirit that I left behind as a giant unfinished blemish on my conscience? Yeah. That speaks of old baggage I really should clean up. For myself. For the area. Maybe once I get Myrne fully on its feet, we can move back to Philadelphia. I can take a new territory. We can start this again." That is, after all, the entire point of her legacy. "Or not. Maybe I can fix things from here without having to rule the court. I've never... tried. Baldur might be able to help us, too. In the recovery."
She starts to rinse Fox's hair with cupped hands of water. It is, as the wetting was, slow going. "Nothing really surprises me any more. About what the do. Have done. Or willd do. Or are willing to do. Once you've stared down at a Grigori writhing on your floor, you are a fundamentally changed person. I've seen... a lot of Grigori. Part of me is upset that a plane full of innocent people dying in the past doesn't really register as a horror anymore, and part of me is kind of relieved? Because relatively speaking, it genuinely isn't. I'm sorry for that, too. I am. I know that doesn't really... imply I'm a healthy person. I constantly marvel at your capacity for empathy."
The Thyrsus listens to her talk, just slumped against Lyuda's chest. She puts on, as well the Acanthus knows, a facade of endless energy, boundless capacity to take on everyone's fears and terrors, and a bottomless well of healing. It's not always a facade, but sometimes, it's worn so well that her weariness shows through, just for a minute. "I've seen them too," she says quietly. "It hurts, but the pain means I know they're people. Each one a perfect, whole and complete universe."
"I shaped myself for it, My Heart. It is both a gift and the price I pay. There's no turning off the feelings. There's no not knowing how fucking precious each life is."
"Not more precious than the whole. The only thing more precious than one life, Fox? Is two." Lyuda leans in to press a smooch to her forehead, continuing the slow rinsing of her hair. Once it's mostly clean, she reaches for the conditioner and starts to massage that in, too. You have to treat the Fox hair periodically when they slow down enough to be scrubbed down.
"As I said, I understand it. I'm just... emotionally stunted. And perhaps that's not so bad a thing right now, as we're doing things that will need doing. I will need to be more careful with my mental health, however. And I'm seeing to that. Looking into getting some therapy, just plain old therapy. To work out some of my issues."
Her mouth opens and closes again. "I could argue the philosophy of that with you for hours, I am sure." And that she doesn't probably speaks to just how fucking exhausted she must be. She just lets Lyuda have that one, lets her make the point she is trying to make about the value of both of their lives together, and the value of the lives of all humanity, without countering at all. Instead, she just makes a small sound in the back of her throat, and starts to quietly cry into Lyuda's boobs. The last bit does somewhat remove a bit of the pathos of it all, but such is life.
It might be because Lyuda is going to therapy, and talking about her issues, and looking after her mental health, something Fox has wanted for ever so long. It might be just because she's tired and being taken care of. Or it might be that she slowed down for a moment, and the incredible sadness of some of the realizations she's had over the last few days, putting pieces together.
"You could," Lyuda answers, continuing to pet at her hair as she begins to weep, "it wouldn't make it better, though." And so the most nihilistic woman to ever drink vodka in a bathtub tries to comfort the cheerful bright center of her universe. With mixed results. She loops her arms around Fox and rests her cheek atop their slimy, semi sudsy head, letting out a small sigh.
She has nothing more to say or do, really, until Fox is done getting it out of her system. Lyuda, for her part, just keeps petting and soothing.
It wouldn't make it better, no. And that, it seems, is the bit of the Jenga tower that, when removed, makes the whole thing come tumbling down. She keeps trying to make it all better. She tries so hard to make it better for everybody, and every time she turns around, here's a fresh horror, here's something else from three years ago that she just realized is yet another terrible implication. And so her quiet crying turns into loud, heartbroken sobs. The world is broken and there is no solid place to stand, and sometimes Fox just has to cry about it until she's all done crying and now rests quietly on Lyuda's chest, her arms curled up against her chest like a sleeping infant, and hiccups sharply.
"Stop making waves," Lyuda jokes once the crying is all done, reaching down to the floor beside the tub basin to pick up her bottle of vodka, "you'll get shit on your tie." Her delivery is positively deadpan, harkening back to her slavic joke of a few weeks prior. She tilts back the bottle to hide her little grin, has a swig, and then winces at the burn, offering it to Fox as something of a holy sacrament.
"This might? Eh? Na zadrovye."
She snorts, then, and snuggles in against Lyuda. Her fingers trail through the water again, bringing it back to comfortably steaming and disintegrating the slime of soap and grime washed out of her hair. "Na zadrovye, My Heart," she answers, reaching to take the bottle in the same manner it is given. She takes a swallow and pulls in a sharp, smooth breath, inhaling through the burn before handing back the bottle.
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