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.

Waves of nausea broke over Lucy, the edges of her vision were dark and fuzzy, vignetted; and what she could see of her surroundings appeared as if through a gauze-covered tunnel, growing further and fainter with every passing second. Her lungs strained in her chest as, arching her back, she clawed frantically at her throat as if trying to dislodge some deep-seated and ultimately terminal blockage.

But it was no good, however much she tried, she simply could not draw enough breath.

Niamh looked first at Lucy, then round the encircling forest in wild-eyed fear as she desperately sought for something, anything, to resolve the current and completely bewildering crisis which confronted the two of them. SO close on the heels of their recent escape and the terrifying events that directly preceded it, her own brain was struggling to process this latest calamity. Standing up on legs still wobbly as a newborn colt's, she hopped drunkenly from one foot to the other, almost wringing her hands in an agony of helplessness.

The world drifted further away, and darkness descended upon her finally. The tingling in her limbs faded, and her scrabbling hands fell to the grass, moist and distant as it was now. Drawing one last, desperate, useless breath between her quivering lips, Lucy finally lost consciousness and was still, her body splayed out upon the slope overlooking the Imperial City on its island in the lake, the sweat drying and cooling upon her blue-tinged skin.

"F**k!"
NIamh, realising with a choked sob that she was now literally out of time, dropped once more to her knees by Lucy's now-still body.
"Think Niamh, think!" She berated herself, thumping her forehead with a hand balled into a tight fist. "Wut's wrong wi'ye, ya stoopid wumman?!" Shouting at Lucy's rapidly-cooling form would do no good she knew, but short of climbing inside her and squeezing her lungs between her fingers...

With a gasp, she sat back on her haunches, staring first at the view down the hill, then down at Lucy, then around her.
"O' course!" Niamh, her feet in two worlds, had become so used to one, she had since all-but forgotten the differences inherent in the other. "Hurry, ye stoopid b*tch!"

Bending over the other woman, she ripped open the rest of Lucy's blouse, sending the few remaining buttons pinging onto the grass. With the merest pause, as if remembering some lesson she had once had, she placed her hands flat on the others chest, between her breasts. Drawing a breath herself, she began to pump rapidly at Lucy's chest, as if the other woman were a pair of bellows and she herself was attempting to reignite a long-extinguished fire.

"...1...2...3...4..."

Stop, breathe.

"...1...2...3...4..."

Stop.

Lowering her face to Lucy's, she listened intently for any sign of breathing, hoping against hope to feel even the faintest brush of air against her cheek from between Lucy's now almost completely blue lips.

"...1...2...3...4..."

Stop.

She pressed her ear against Lucy's chest, the other woman's skin unpleasantly clammy and cold.
Nothing.
"Breathe! Breathe ye f***ker!!" She cried, beating her fists against Lucy's ribs.

Another moment of desperate searching around her, as if inspiration might appear suddenly from her surroundings. Then, back to it once more: pump, pump, pump, and all the while a growing weight in her belly, a certain knowledge that Lucy, so soon found again, was now gone; forever this time.

"No!"

Lowering her face once more, Niamh clamped her mouth over Lucy's and, inhaling through her own nose, exhaled sharply into Lucy's mouth. Once, twice, she did this and then pulled back, placing her cheek against the other woman's lips.

"Could it be...?"

Sudden hope surged within her breast and she set to with renewed vigour, alternately pummeling Lucy's chest and blowing into her mouth; stopping to listen and feel for breath. The reality was that maybe only seconds had passed, yet to Niamh it felt like an eternity; another day, a sunrise away perhaps, such that when finally and with a sudden choking and violent gasp Lucy finally came round, it was all Niamh could do to sit back on her calves, her own body shaking and running with sweat, her own breath rasping in her throat.

After that first gasp, Lucy shivered mightily, and coughed - a harsh, wracking hack. Turning her face to one side she spat stringy phlegm onto the ground.

As she watched Lucy come round and recover, listened to her breathing stabilize itself, Niamh allowed what control she had left to slip from her.
"So close..." She whispered, her voice cracking as she burst into tears.

At the sound, Lucy looked blearily round, reaching out to Niamh with a shaking hand. Wiping at her eyes to clear them, Niamh took Lucy's fingers in hers.
"Hallo..." She whispered.
Lucy smiled lopsidedly. "I think you broke a rib..." She replied hoarsely
Niamh could not help but laugh.

-x-

It was maybe forty minutes later.

Lucy was sitting against the trunk of an enormous tree, belonging to a species that she had never seen before. She'd tied what remained of her blouse more-or-less closed, using a knot across her belly, covering herself as best she could. A cool breeze was blowing up from the lake below; it felt good upon her skin, although the scents it brought with it were at once familiar and yet oddly alien. It was all strange, in fairness - too strange, in fact.

Below her was a gleaming marble city, centred around an impossibly high tower that shone strikingly bright in the sunlight. The sun itself was... sort of the wrong shade of yellow, and the sky in which it sat was of a shade of blue that was subtley different from what she was used to.

Beyond all of that though, was the air itself. Although more recovered now, and even allowing for the pounding that Niamh had given her, Lucy's chest ached when she breathed and she still felt nauseous and light-headed. She sipped warily at a cup of water that Niamh had filled from a nearby stream. The cup found in the small pack which was all Niamh had been able to bring with her. The water tasted fresh enough, but had an odd tang to it that Lucy couldn't place.

There was more too, much more: a massive, almighty elephant sat in the room with her. It was one that she was finding it increasingly difficult to ignore. So many questions...

"How're ye feelin'?" Asked Niamh softly, squatting a little distance from her, her head to one side. She was looking intently at Lucy and Lucy could not help but think that there was something very different indeed about her recently-found... "Companion".
Nevertheless; "Better..." She replied, drawing in a shallow breath. She pressed the fingertips of one hand to her chest. "Feels... feels like I'm up a mountain..." she gasped, "...like... like I'm breathing in a paper bag..."

Niamh nodded, was silent for a moment.
"Aye." She said eventually. "Took me a minit tai werk it oot masel'" She sat down on the grass, crossing her legs. "Oxeejen." She said simply.
Lucy found she was having trouble working out what the other woman was saying. "Oxee...?" The penny dropped. "Oxygen?"
"Aye. Ther's less'n heyar then back in ur wurl'." Said Niamh. "Wun we cam' thru an' all, twas a shock tae ur system, so it wuz, an' ye choked..."
Lucy nodded slowly. "Less oxygen..." She said almost to herself, then looking squarely at Niamh she said: "And... where, exactly... is here... Niamh?"

-x-

This post has been edited by PhonAntiPhon: Apr 29 2016, 08:04 AM