Restless Soul - The New Adventures of Niamh & Looch Options

[PhonAntiPhon]

A Word To The Wise:
This story continues directly on from the end of what was the final tale: 21/09/13 - "From Darkness" - HERE. For anyone reading this who isn't familiar with the adventures of a certain Bosmer, a little background reading might help - (check my sig, or the link above) - for those of you who are, well it's nice to be back.
And yes, I *know* it's not Cyrodiil, but it will be, we just have to get there, be patient...
======================================================

-RESTLESS SOUL-
.I.

A soft lambency filled the apartment, from outside and far below the muted hum of early morning traffic filtered in through a half-open window. Lucinda awoke slowly, lay for a time under the covers, her head resting on the soft pillow, staring up at the smooth white ceiling. Beside her the woman from the night before slept peacefully on, her breathing slow and regular.

She'd said her name was Niamh E., just that and nothing more. She was the singer in one of the bands that played at weekends down at the waterfront bars. Luciana herself had worked in a grill bar on the front and had seen her about from time-to-time, had even stopped in Gracy's on the way home to hear her band once. Not really her thing, a bit too punky but none too shabby nevertheless. She had found the woman herself though more than a little intriguing; all tight leathers and colourful hair woven with red linen strips; piercings and heavy black makeup completed her look.

She'd come across as sassy onstage, giving hecklers and fans alike as good as they gave her, all the time following whisky with whisky, cigarette with cigarette. By the last song she'd stripped to her bra and knickers, skinny body jerking and weaving to the jittery beat of the music, hair lank about her face and shoulders, her liberally tattooed porcelain skin running with silvery sweat. As the final chords jangled out she was laughing and bouncing, dark eyes glinting under the stage lights, her body a blur as she spun around and around, arms stretched out, screaming at the top of her voice before finally collapsing onto the stage and crawling off on hands and knees to cheers and whistles and applause from the crowd. Lucinda remembered how jealous she had felt of Niamh's energy and life and how she had wished, and did still, that she too could be more like her.

Lucinda was not naturally attracted to women, but even she'd had to admit to herself that there was undoubtedly something about Niamh, she was a force of nature for sure and mysterious also, somehow, not just her manner or her looks on stage but, something, there was something about her that Lucinda could not quite place her finger upon; a look or an expression that betrayed something deeper maybe. Life moved on however, her job changed to another part of town and with it came a relationship with a guy who seemed - as they always do - to be The One.

He was not, as it turned out, and six months later she found herself single and alone, feeling sorry for herself in her apartment on the the tenth floor of a low rent block on N- Street. It was already dark and she had perhaps had a little too much wine when she found her thoughts turning once again to a certain mysterious and intriguing woman, in a band, on the waterfront.

-x-

So she found herself once again in Gracy's, standing at the bar sipping a gin and tonic and watching a whirlwind of life spin and dance across the stage and thinking, "why am I here? For the life? For the energy? Or for her..." in truth she did not know, but regardless clapped and cheered with the rest as once more, quivering with nervous energy, the real reason for her coming out crawled from the stage, a strange and spindly thing, dripping wet in dark underwear.

The performance over, the rest of the band left the stage and the audience drifted back to their seats and into their booths. A growing sussuration of whispered conversation and piped songs replaced the live music of only a few moments earlier. Around her the long bar began to fill up and Lucinda, still on her first drink and rapidly feeling more and more out of place and alone despite the crowded space, finished up and turned to go, placing the empty glass on the counter.

"Buy me drink?" Came a voice directly behind her. Lucinda froze, her blood draining into her feet. Heart hammering, she turned around. She was standing there, right there. Nodding her head slightly, she raised an eyebrow at Lucinda. "Hi, I'm Niamh E., just that." Lucinda froze for a moment. "Whu..." She said, her mind working furiously. Niamh chuckled, chewing at the silver ring that passed through her lower lip. Turning to the bar, she signalled the barman. "Whisky." She looked at Lucinda, grinned again. "She'll have the same, so she will."
The drinks duly arrived, and Lucinda numbly handed over the money. "Keep the change." She croaked when the barman brought back a handful of coins. "You have a voice, then." Said Niamh with a smile. "Don't mind if I do..." So saying she pocketed the change.

Niamh's long black hair was tied up in a high ponytail, and Lucinda could now see it was shot through with streaks of dark red and burgundy. "You have a name?" Niamh turned to face Lucinda as she asked, and it occurred to the latter later that it was quite possible that she had genuinely expected her to not actually have one. "Lucinda." She replied. "...Lucy for short."

Just for a moment, something passed behind Niamh's big chestnut eyes. "Lucy." She repeated the name slowly, turning it over in her mouth as if it reminded her of something. Then she blinked and gave a brief little half-smile; raising her glass she said, "I'll call ya Lucy, then." Lucy nodded. "If you like." Niamh paused, her glass halfway to her lips, regarded the other from under furrowed brows. "I might, at that..." Lucy felt herself blush.

-x-

It was impossible not to get on with Niamh. It was like fighting with some inexorable maelstrom; no matter how hard you struggled, you just kept getting drawn in. Not that Lucy was doing a great deal of struggling mind, on the contrary, another whisky later and Lucy, who had already had two glasses of red wine before leaving the flat, found herself close in a booth with Niamh, who seemed almost totally untouched by what she had drunk, and regarded the other woman across the table with wry amusement as Lucy flubbed her words and giggled behind her hands.

Back in the present, Lucy smiled, and cast a glance to her side at Niamh's still sleeping form. From out of the window the street down below had grown busier and the room was definitely lighter. Never mind, she was content. Closing her eyes she let her mind drift back to the evening before, it already seemed so far away.
One thing she did remember was that, before the evening got a little... hazy, she had sat and looked at Niamh as they talked, taking her in, as if wanting to record every detail of that first time they had met, as if it were the first time she had ever met anyone.

They'd downed the first shot in one, in silence, and Lucy had somehow ended up paying for another and Niamh had again taken the change. Lucy, feeling like some awkward teenager on a first date instead of a thirty-five year old divorcee, stumbled over further introductions and obvious questions about Niamh's band. Somewhere along the way though the answers and the conversation drifted away to be replaced by a silence that seemed to enclose the two of them in a comfortable isolating sphere and cut off all sound, leaving only vision and that, it felt to Lucy, was enhanced, somehow.

Niamh's face was long and angular, yet somehow delicate, "elfin" might have been the way to describe it; full lips and a small nose and two widely-set eyes, large and chestnut coloured, set in deep and shadowed sockets. Within the pupils though there was depth, like they were two unfathomable pools. Her eyes were captivating and seemed to drag Lucinda's attention back to them every time she moved her own gaze away. Around her left eye a horseshoe of multicoloured circles had been tattooed, with a small blue star just beneath. Her ears seemed overly large in comparison to her head, and they were heavily pierced through with rings; in addition to these there was a ring in her lip and another through her nostril, they were all thick bands of silver, and she was constantly chewing at the one in her lip.

Lucinda remembered that her gaze had looped lazily downwards, past Niamh's mouth; her lips, coated in black lipstick, moving silently it seemed to Lucy as she spoke, and down over her shoulders. It occurred to her now, here in bed with sobriety once more crystallising her thoughts, that the other woman had been watching her, Lucy, looking at her, all the time...
Niamh had been wearing some kind of tight black leather affair that left little to the imagination, it was unzipped to just below her chest and left her long, slender yet surprisingly muscular-looking arms bare - (and she was indeed, as Lucy was to find out later, considerably stronger and more sinewy than she seemed) - her skin was porcelain white, and unmarked but for numerous swirling tattoos of many colours, consisting, it turned out, exclusively of various shapes; circles and squares, stars and crescents. The effect was to make it seem like she was wearing some kind of dazzle camouflage, like the ships that Lucy had read about had been painted with in the war. Later, in the flat, it had been difficult to keep track of her movements, or perhaps that had just been the whisky.

"...another." The sound of the bar and its occupants crashed back in on Lucy. Feeling as if she were falling forwards, she snapped suddenly upright on the seat. Niamh waited patiently for her to compose herself, her head cocked on one side, long fingers steepled before her, the nails painted a deep black. "I said, get us another, I have to pee." Except Lucy heard it as: "...Ai harv t'pee..." Niamh's accent had a curious Gaelic quality to it, neither Scottish nor Irish, but some strange mixture of both. There was an odd sing-song quality to it also, a kind of underlying musicality present in every word she said. It was a little weird but rather pleasant at the same time - (a lot like Niamh herself, Lucinda thought). "Whisky?" Asked Lucy. Niamh winked. "Aye, that's my drink." She got up from the table but then paused, looking at Lucy with that same curious half-smile, and again Lucinda had the oddest feeling that Niamh recognised her somehow. After a moment Niamh said, "Don't worry, you're doin' just fine." So saying she leant quickly across the table and kissed Lucy once on the lips, before moving off and away, smoothly disappearing into the crowd.

Lucy raised her fingers to her mouth, the impression of Niamh's lips fading only slowly. Her touch, her closeness at that moment, her scent; cinnamon and sweat, whisky and something... exotic; Lucy took a deep breath, her heart was beating way too fast and for a moment she felt sure that the other woman had drugged her. "She's clearly not your type." Said her stern inner voice. "You've paid for the drinks all night and now she's poisoned you! walk away Lucy..." Nevertheless she found herself at the bar once more, and her second thoughts grumbled into silence, ignored for the moment at least.

It was very late by now and the bar, though still certainly lively, was nowhere near as full as it had been previously in the evening, and as such Lucy was able to get herself served fairly quickly. "I see you've got something goin' there with Niamh." Said the barman as he came over and took her order. He was a large man with a green mohican, a wide nose and a wider mouth, his name tag identified him as Boris. Lucy smiled and shrugged in a kind of "Maybe, sort of" way. "This is it." She thought. "This is where he tells me she's no good." Deep in her mind, her inner Lucinda sat up and grinned smuggly. Boris poured the drinks and waved away her money when she offered it. "Nah, keep it, it's on me. She'll fleece you that girl will, and you'll still love her for it." He raised a stubby finger. "Word to the wise though, be careful with 'er, she's more fragile than she looks, is Niamh." Lucy raised an eyebrow, squinting slightly from the whisky she'd drunk. "How do you mean? " Boris looked around him, then leant forward conspiratorially. "Just that she's been through a lot, that's all. Acts all tough and brash she does but she ain't as hard as she thinks that she is, I know." He pointed a finger at himself. "I've been like a father to 'er these past few years..." Lucy wanted to ask more, and it seemed Boris was about tell her something further, but other customers had by then arrived and, with a final glance at her and a brisk nod, he left to serve them.

Lucy was, as far as was possible given her increasing level of inebriation, somewhat more thoughtful when she returned to the booth. Niamh had already returned, and was slouched nonchalantly on one of the bench seats, toying with the silver ring that pierced her nostril. As Lucy sat down and passed her the whisky, Niamh gestured with her chin to the barman. "Boris collared you, did he?" She asked. "Yeah, he did..." She paused for a moment, took a sip of whisky. "He said, um..." It was her fourth or fifth of the night and the words in her head came only reluctantly to her lips. "I know what old Boris says." Interjected Niamh. "Now though, now's not the time for serious talk."

"What... is it now the time for?" Asked Lucy, suddenly breathless, her voice catching in her throat. Very deliberately Niamh drained her glass and placed it on the table. She licked her lips and stared directly at the other woman. "Well," she said, her curiously accented voice lilting musically, "I suppose we'll just have to see, won't we?"

-x-

This post has been edited by PhonAntiPhon: Jul 22 2015, 11:36 PM

[PhonAntiPhon]

.II.

Lucy was up and making coffee and toast by the time Niamh awoke. She'd boiled the kettle and sliced bread, and was rummaging in a cupboard for some aspirin to assist with the surprisingly low-level hangover she had from the night before - ("That's because you wore most of it off..." Her inner voice commented rather primly) - when she suddenly became aware of someone standing behind her. Turning, she saw Niamh in the doorway.
"Oh!" She exclaimed, reflexively tightening her dressing gown around her. "Niamh, how long have you been there?" The other woman raised an eyebrow, "Ya weren't so keen tae cover up last night, Lucy-Loo..." Lucinda blushed and coughed, and an awkward moment of silence followed.

Niamh broke it. "I borrowed one o' yer T-Shirts. Figured you'd not want me wanderin' yer flat with ma bits out." She picked at the material, Lucy was hardly a large woman, but on Niamh the T-shirt hung shapelessly like a sack. "Ye don't seem the type..." Again there was silence between the women, Niamh stood in the doorway of Lucy's little kitchen and surveyed the room, her expression unreadable. Lucy chewed at her lip, still holding the packet of aspirin. To her, Niamh seemed different from last night, and not in a way that could be defined by the abscence of alcohol; and further, not in a good way, either.
It was as if...

"I'll have a coffee." Again Niamh broke the silence, and with it derailed Lucy's train of thought. "Black, wi' nae sugar..." Lucy nodded, inwardly sighing. She could see where this little encounter was going and whilst it wasn't somewhere nice. This woman, so passionate the night before, so... Real, was this morning distant and aloof, but there was something else, something Lucy could not put her finger on. "I was going to do eggs and toast, if you'd..." Niamh shook her head. "Na, jus' coffee." So saying, she turned and wandered off into Lucy's living room on delicate feet that seemed to make no noise at all on the laminated floor. Shaking her head, Lucy prepared coffee, going about the task with methodical concentration entirely out of keeping with its simplicity. She would realise later that it had been simply an effort to prevent herself thinking too hard about the very obvious conclusion to the night's "entertainment". it was like being strapped to the rails and seeing the train approach, and being entirely and completely unable to do anything at all about it.

Niamh was sitting cross-legged on the sofa when Lucy came through with two mugs full of Finest Filtered. Steam curled lazily up from the hot black liquid. She placed the mugs on the table in front of the sofa and looked across it at her guest. Niamh had pulled the T-shirt up to her waist when she sat down, leaving her long, dancer's legs exposed. They were, like the rest of her, heavily tattooed, with brightly coloured geometrical designs curving and weaving their way up from her feet and over her calves and thighs to...
Lucy looked away, suddenly finding the view not to her liking. She was feeling an increasingly bitter taste in her mouth that had nothing whatsoever to do with the strong coffee she now sipped, cradling the mug in both hands. It was too hot really, but there seemed little else to do, Niamh was certainly turning out to be the very definition of taciturn; if she was honest, she was not in the mood for small talk either, her good feeling from earlier had long since evaporated.

Niamh made no effort to take the mug, only stared into the liquid it held, her chestnut eyes focused intently it seemed on the sparkling reflections of the ceiling lights in its surface. finally she looked up at Lucy and regarded her, just as thoughtfully, flicking her tongue back and forth over the ring in her lip. Despite her mood, Lucy still found Niamh's eyes strange and irresistably alluring. They seemed somehow even deeper and more mysterious this morning, like portals or doorways, only they were closed to her.
"I hae somethin' to tell ye." Said Niamh, finally. "Here it comes." Thought Lucy. Was it her or did the other woman's accent seem thicker and more pronounced this morning? "I'll be leavin' after ma coffee." She continued, shaking her head for emphasis. "I'll no' be back."

Lucinda smiled ruefully, took in a breath. "For good?" She already knew the answer but she figured it couldn't hurt to ask anyway. Niamh looked away briefly then looked back at her again, scratched the side of her nose with a long finger. From outside came the faint drone of a plane as it cleaved its way through the clear blue sky of an early summer day. "I'm... I hae things I need to do. It's best."
A wave of anger flowed suddenly over Lucinda, indignation, and frustration at the turn of events and the hand she'd been dealt, even though or perhaps because of the fact that she could see it coming. "Best? Best for who Niamh?" She hissed, slamming her mug down on the table. Drops of coffee escaped over the rim, splattered onto the smoothly reflective surface of the table. "You ha... You spent the night with me and now, what?" She stood up. "Oh I got things to do." She mimicked Niamh's voice as best she could, a limp parody of her accent. "Well you can just, you can just..." As swiftly as it had risen, her anger died away once more. She sat down on the floor, held her hands out towards Niamh. "I don't know why I care so much. You're just a woman I picked up in a bar."

Niamh shook her head. She'd watched Lucy's outburst seemingly dispassionately. "No, Lucy, you're just a woman I picked up in a bar." She pointed at herself with a thumb, her voice was harsh. Silence, heavy and awkward once again descended on them both. When Niamh spoke again it was with a softer tone. "I hae ta go, Lucy." Lucy felt her anger growing once again. What made it worse was that she did not even really know why. Their call and response was entirely true, Niamh had picked her up. Neither of them should by rights feel any loyalty at all to each other.
The fact remained however that she herself had gone to that bar - (and picking anyone up in a bar, let alone a woman, was something she would never normally have done) - specifically for Niamh and then they had... Until last night she had never been with a woman and she knew in her own mind that she would not be with another. What should have been an oddity, an experience borne of too much wine and maybe her feeling a little lonely and sorry for herself clearly was not that; somehow this woman had got under her skin, since even before last night and she, Lucy, was now only just coming to realise that, although in no way did she understand; it felt almost like destiny, or something.

"So what was I to you? Just a bit of something different to you, not one of the usual girls you go with?" Lucy could feel her eyes moistening, and fought to keep her composure. "You... You did something to me, Niamh!" Eyes sparkling with unshed tears she glared at the other woman, Niamh met her gaze and just for a second Lucy thought that something passed behind her eyes, a shadow, just like the night before. "What are you not telling me, Niamh?"
Niamh stood up, unfolding smoothly from the sofa in a single lithe movement. "I cannae do this, I hav tae go." Without another word she padded into the bedroom. Lucy, still sat on the floor, could hear her dressing, could hear her moving back and forth grabbing her clothes from where they had been left (thrown) the night before.

By the time Niamh had dressed and re-entered the living room, Lucy had got up from the floor and was clearing the mugs away. "Can I at least have a phone number, something?" She asked as Niamh reappeared in the doorway. "Ai dinnae have one." She said flatly, avoiding Lucy's gaze. "So nothing? I... I mean that's that, then?" Asked Lucy, desperately trying to keep a note of pleading from her voice.
Niamh finally looked at her. "Lucy, it wuz fun, it wuz, but ai cannae stay here wuth ye." She placed a hand on her chest. "Ai should never have spoke te ye, never have... come here, ai should have let it go." Was there a note of desperation in her voice, of something she wanted to speak of but could not? "Ai just wanted... Ai jus'... Ai cannae put ye through this agin, an' ai cannae do it masel' neither, it's too much."

She headed for the door, her long hair, still lose about her shoulders, seemed to flow about her as she moved, ripples of deep blacks and dark reds. Lucy spread her hands out to either side of her body. "Niamh! I don't understand! What do you mean you can't put me through this again? Niamh!" Niamh opened the front door, paused. Lucy took a step forward as if to come after her. "Niamh you're confusing me, we've never met... Have we...?" Niamh turned to her, Lucy held out a hand to her. "I don't understand..."
"It's best this way." Said Niamh. "Don't ye follow me, Lucy."

And then she was gone, the front door shut, and Lucy standing in the hallway of her small apartment alone once more, with one hand stretched out, the fingers grasping, as if trying to capture a memory before it faded utterly. "What has she done to me?" She asked herself out loud, her voice thick with emotion. "I don't understand..."

-x-

Down below her, the front door to the apartment building opened and a slender, pale woman in a form-fitting black leather outfit with large black boots, her long hair, black with deep red highlights, pulled back roughly in a high, untidy ponytail, emerged and walked rapidly up the street, her gaze fixed upon the pavement. She moved smoothly through the morning crowds of commuters heading towards the city centre, a river of people flowing along the pavements and across the roads and down into the subways, a waterfall of bustling humanity.

And there was Niamh also, unobserved and ignored. Ordinarily that would have been just the way that she liked it, but not this morning, today for the first time since she could remember, she felt genuinely lost and alone. Halfway to the subway at the corner of J- and Lorde streets she stopped dead on the pavement, eliciting rush-hour outrage and assorted unpleasantness as those behind swerved to avoid running into her. Looking to the left, she spied a dark alleyway between two of the buildings. She darted into it, walked deeper into its shadows and finally stopped, leaning back against the damp brick wall in the musty gloom.

Looking up through the iron skeletons of rusting fire escapes she could see a bright blue strip of cloudless sky, the tops of the buildings silhouetted against it. Although it was a still morning, a breeze funneled through the alley, scattering old papers over her booted feet and carrying with it the potent scent of mouldering trash and other even less palatable things. Sighing, she pinched the bridge of her nose and shook her head. A look of anger settled upon her angular face.
"Stupid, stupid!" She berated herself. "It wuz her! It wuz and you couldnae leave well enough, ye eejit...!" She kicked the wall behind her with a boot heel. "But it wuz her, tho'..." Her inner voice was softer now, a yearning tone creeping into it. "It's been so long." She took in a deep breath, let it slowly out. It shook just a little. "Ai missed her..."

Sliding slowly down the wall until she was resting on her haunches, she folded her long arms around her knees and resting her forehead on them, closed her eyes. In her mind, what few memories of her past life she had retained fluttered in and out of reach, tantalising and frustrating her. Yet again she strove to capture and make sense of them, hints of another world somewhere far from this city, a place and time she had caught an occasional glimpse of, another life she knew had been hers, somehow, though more than that she could not remember. To all of that she could now add one certainty, that this woman Lucy - there could be no doubt about it - she was the woman that Niamh had known and had loved in that misty former life.

Maybe, she thought, finding her meant that she would now be able to find herself, and find her own way back, but the thought of that terrified as much as thrilled her. There was a big part of her that did not want to know how she ended up where she now was, and going back might provide an answer to a question that she did not want resolving. Be that as it may, this morning she had awoken in Lucy's apartment and she had known that beyond any doubt the woman whose bed she had shared last night was the same one whose life she had shared in that place beyond here.
"Shared... Niamh?" She laughed bitterly to herself. Ruined more like it. Though she had only the vaguest of memories, with the knowledge of this woman came the added clarity that yes, she had loved her, but that she had put her through the ringer, and ultimately somehow, brought her low, and ruined her. That much she did know, if not the how or why of it.

"Dammit!" She hissed under her breath. She loved her still, that much was clear, but like the joining of the ends of some vast circle, she knew that ultimately she would ruin her again despite that love, just as she felt certain that she had before. And Lucy would, when it came to it, gladly submit. If Niamh's clouded history had told her anything, it was that she no more belonged here than Lucy belonged in that far world beyond the limits of memory. When the time came though, and it would somehow, Lucy would go with her. Niamh knew this now, and she hated herself for the knowing and the doing.
She. Niamh, would return to her promised land and with her would go a woman who would become a ghost, inhabiting another's shoes in a world as alien to her as this one still was to Niamh, and that wasn't even taking into account the other option, the one she really didn't want to think about...

Lifting her head off of her arms, she tilted it back against the wall and gazed up at the sky between the buildings, her chestnut eyes gazing away at somewhere far from the city and the alleyway in which she sat. They were drawn, she and Lucy, one to the other, for better or worse it seemed.
"I'm sorry Looch..." She whispered. "I'm so sorry."

-x-