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[It's easier said than done. Clara has been packing those emotions away for decades. Letting them out always feels like a messy affair, a burst dam that she needs to quickly patch up. Perhaps there was a healthy way to deal with it, or just a better way, but that requires-]
[-practice.]
[Clara looks at Ishmael as if she just grew a second head or threatened her with a stake.]
[Her mind races, trying to think if she had caught any other faces when she started speeding through the halls. Her memory is at least quick to remember the turns she took. She'd grown accustomed to navigating tight corridors in a few kindred's homes.]
[She glances down at the interface for her Watch before awkwardly tapping out:]
Alright.
[She turns to the door she came from, calculating the best route to take to avoid her most hated self and find one more palatable. She'll walk and only stop at an intersection to check and see if Ishmael is still behind her.]
[ nothing like a little exposure therapy to get some moxie rolling! that's how ishmael had done it all this time, and why her meek-looking self portraits of the past look virtually nothing like her current self now. she's just luckily the house is gracious enough not to display her most sopping-wet moments here for everyone to behold...
she watches clara fumble with her watch; it's apparent that her request has taken the other woman off-guard. but clara could just refuse her request and show her something else, or even get the fuck out of here before they both embarrass themselves. but she doesn't, and that in itself is a good start.
when clara starts moving, ishmael follows along like a shadow, patiently biding her time and nodding at the other woman when clara checks on her. nope, she's still here unfortunately. keep going. ]
[Ishmael is still following which means she is going to show her something. It might be nice to imagine the other ditching her. That impulse is definitely self-sabotage, though.]
[She catches glances of other moments of time in the portraits. So many that she felt shame about. Who amongst them was the least shameful? Her intent is to try and find her earliest memories. At least, when she was a child, it was someone else's fault. However, in searching for that portrait, another one's spectral hand brushes against her cheek and brings her to a stop.]
[She turns and looks, and sees herself from shortly after she was turned. Physically, they are the same. After all, she hadn't aged a day since that fateful night. The woman reaching out for her, though, was even more lost and adrift than Clara currently was. Her expression wavered and a tinge of red hung around the corners of her eyes. When Clara doesn't keep walking, the arm returns to the portrait and the painted woman wipes her eyes against her sleeve. A red stain remains on her sleeve before vanishing beneath the frame.]
[She cautiously types,]
You are not uncomfortable about blood, correct?
[She can kind of assume, based on the talks they've had about the long-haired woman's career, but...]
[ she wordlessly follows clara through the hallway, walls lined of self-portraits from an unknown time, from an unfamiliar place. it's not her place to comment for now, not until the other woman makes her choice. she does stop walking when clara does, waits with bated breath until the disembodied TTS voice disrupts the silence, providing the atmosphere with a more surreal, haunted vibe.
that question gets a wry smile out of her, though, and she shakes her head in response. ]
I'm no stranger to it in my line of work, yeah.
[ she's been covered with the stuff even when she was still sailing the stormy seas, along with viscera and oil and other bodily fluids from the Whales she'd hunted. she also remembers the time they had to donate blood just to gain entry to la manchaland recently, and she huffs out a chuckle at that as she turns to look at the portrait clara's standing in front of. ]
So... that's also you?
[ obviously. but there's more to that question than what meets the eye. ]
[There is a time delay between typing the words an hearing them echo in the corridor. It gives time for the expressions to melt from Clara's face, listening to the sound of her own words as if they were someone else entirely. She glances down at her wrist, trying to decide how much to write at a time. She didn't want the speech to last for too long, to leave no room for response. The figure in the painting seems to be patient, although pale fingers creep over the edge of the frame the longer Clara thinks.]
This is when I began working.
[A brief pause before the next sentence plays,]
I do not know the exact time she represents. The first year I began working for my family is a hazy memory to me. I completed every task assigned to me, returned to my room, and stared at the ceiling until I was needed again.
[Her description, combined with the digital voice, make it sound as if she were a robot. Every motion was mechanical. She does not describe it as being painful but the woman in the portrait is clearly pained. She is omitting details as necessary. She can be somewhat truthful, so long as she doesn't specify how morning would come and pull her into the void of daysleep. Omitting the supernatural elements doesn't change the fact that she did not know what she had survived for, nor had the courage to try and learn.]
[ it's an all-too familiar sight, the more ishmael lets the living portrait loop itself over and over. every task is done like clockwork before she retires for the day. lather, rinse, repeat. clara mentioning that she couldn't remember her first year with her family is a tad strange, but ishmael assumes that it was simply ennui from doing the same shit over and over and over. it would've driven anyone insane. ]
And that's... when you snapped one day?
[ clara hasn't given her enough pieces to this puzzle, but ishmael's able to deduce with the ones she has on hand. the mention of blood had clued her in, for one. but again, it's hard to tell what emotion the other woman is feeling at the moment if her robotic voice isn't letting her emote -- if there are even any emotions left at all. ]
Feel free to correct me, though. Or to tell me that I'm prying into it too much. I just want to say that you are hardly the only person who had killed before coming here, if that's any consolation.
[Ishmael takes the next step, to guess what would happen to a person put under that stress. Clara smiles with that same distant, abstract emotion, as if she were describing some historical event that had no connection to herself.]
It was not anything so dramatic. I did not snap for a very long time.
[She will admit to snapping eventually. Even that snapping, though, had hardly felt like a triumphant turning point. It was a moment when all the apathy drained from her body, filled with high-tension and a need to guarantee that at least one thing she cared about was protected.]
However, yes, I did kill people.
[She turns back to the portrait as the rest of her long-typed message plays. It's difficult to tell if she feels guilt for what she admits in the words. It seems like something she had long come to terms with. The woman in the portrait is too deep in her sadness to feel guilt. If she were to think about all the things she was doing, she would not last.]
It was an aspect of that job. I would rewrite charts, forge documents, and change medication so that bodies became available for the Family's research. I ensured that threats to our organization were silenced on the hospital table. I received bloodied and bruised people and ended their pain.
[ she did not snap, until she did. ishmael was able to fill in the blanks in her mind anyway, and it didn't matter if it was dramatic or not. certain people aren't built to explode right away under pressure, after all. ]
I figured that is what most morticians do. Receive bodies, prepare them for a burial or a cremation, depending on the clients' wishes. Sometimes you'd have to forge papers in case said client's circumstances are too complicated. But...
[ she turns to raise a brow at clara's curious choice of words. ]
[Thankfully, most morticians don't decide it's a person's time to die for them. She can't say if she even knew the wishes of the people she transferred from one place to another. Her eyes shift slightly, looking a bit more focused, as she types out the next response.]
"When does a wraith become separate from their body?" "Can a wraith be implanted in an unrelated body?"
There is much to study about death naturally. Many people die. In order to conduct experiments, though, the time and method of their deaths may need to vary.
[Clara now does seem grim remembering these moments. She does not, however, looked wracked with guilt or self-loathing. She is not the shell of herself in the portrait. A preoccupation with death was all she had to anchor herself back in those times. While she knows it may be distasteful she cannot abandon it.]
[ yeah, that's all pretty suspish, with every automated word from clara's TTS making ishmael squint even harder. ]
And I assume most of these were done without their families' permission, were they.
[ hence the forgeries, she thinks. ]
Shady businesses like those are pretty common where I'm from, so I can't really say I'd turn my nose up at that. Except when you're harvesting organs without consent, I guess. Even I know that's messed up.
[ another pause, before she sighs through her nose and takes a step closer towards clara, both hands shoved into her pockets. ]
But I'd be a hypocrite if I say that any of that bothered me after all my talk about how the past doesn't matter in this place. Because they still don't. And as far as I'm concerned, you're a pretty okay person. That's more than enough in my book.
[ she's harmless, basically. for now. just because she seems tame doesn't mean ishmael shouldn't underestimate her, but thankfully she knows how to fight and defend herself if need be. she can take her. ]
["Even I know that's messed up." Both Claras look at her, the one in the hall and the one in the portrait. The one in the portrait has her hands tightly knotted in the fabric of her dress. The one in the hall, the current Clara, stands rigid still as usual. Ishmael takes a step forward and there's the scrape of Clara's shoe as she seems to want to take a step back.]
[There's a few strange bleeps as Clara hastily types words and the text-to-speech struggles with her typos.]
I mayhh ave ben complicxxt [a harsh buzzing sound as it can't parse "complicit" from that] but undwrstand I did nt want to do that. [The simpler words at the end are easier to not fumble her fingers on.]
[Ishmael is right that Clara herself isn't a threat. Her sins were committed inside a system. The system gave her power over the bodies that should have gone to families or at least been given a proper burial. The system told her to turn a blind eye to people suffering like she had. In a fight she was barely anything.]
[ she slightly raises her brow at the vocalized keysmashes, but otherwise makes no further comment. or rather, she's a little taken aback by clara's earnest words just now.
she wanted to live too, huh. ]
Mm. Same here.
[ not then, when she'd wanted to die so badly yet stubbornly clung on to dear life. but now... things are different now. and not just because this place can provide a certain kind of pleasure that cannot be simply sought after in their respective worlds, she muses.
she then turns on her heels, facing the nearest exit. ]
Let's start living deliciously first and foremost, then. Wanna go and get something to eat?
[ all these heavy topics and posturing is making her hungry. ]
[Clara had always wanted to live. She accepted the chains of subjugation with the hope that someday they might be lifted. However, even here, where the chains are in another world entirely, she clings to them in comfort. She is alive. She is still not free.]
[Clara blinks rapidly, surprised at the acceptance and lack of criticism.]
[She pauses, looking to herself in the portrait. They both don't understand but the one in the portrait spares Ishmael a wary look before looking back to her modern self. Like, are you gonna say anything? Still, the simple acceptance makes her wonder if she couldn't say something a bit more wild and have it be accepted so simply. Her fingers somehow shake less doing this than before,]
My body rejects most normal food. I cannot share a meal but I can be company. Unless that is too strange.
[An unthinkable admission for the woman in the portrait but- not an unwelcome one. The upside of apathy was that even acts that might be life-ruining are met with an ultimate thought of "fuck it, why not?"]
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peacockstop2025-07-15 09:00 pm
no subject
[-practice.]
[Clara looks at Ishmael as if she just grew a second head or threatened her with a stake.]
[Her mind races, trying to think if she had caught any other faces when she started speeding through the halls. Her memory is at least quick to remember the turns she took. She'd grown accustomed to navigating tight corridors in a few kindred's homes.]
[She glances down at the interface for her Watch before awkwardly tapping out:]
Alright.
[She turns to the door she came from, calculating the best route to take to avoid her most hated self and find one more palatable. She'll walk and only stop at an intersection to check and see if Ishmael is still behind her.]
no subject
she watches clara fumble with her watch; it's apparent that her request has taken the other woman off-guard. but clara could just refuse her request and show her something else, or even get the fuck out of here before they both embarrass themselves. but she doesn't, and that in itself is a good start.
when clara starts moving, ishmael follows along like a shadow, patiently biding her time and nodding at the other woman when clara checks on her. nope, she's still here unfortunately. keep going. ]
no subject
[She catches glances of other moments of time in the portraits. So many that she felt shame about. Who amongst them was the least shameful? Her intent is to try and find her earliest memories. At least, when she was a child, it was someone else's fault. However, in searching for that portrait, another one's spectral hand brushes against her cheek and brings her to a stop.]
[She turns and looks, and sees herself from shortly after she was turned. Physically, they are the same. After all, she hadn't aged a day since that fateful night. The woman reaching out for her, though, was even more lost and adrift than Clara currently was. Her expression wavered and a tinge of red hung around the corners of her eyes. When Clara doesn't keep walking, the arm returns to the portrait and the painted woman wipes her eyes against her sleeve. A red stain remains on her sleeve before vanishing beneath the frame.]
[She cautiously types,]
You are not uncomfortable about blood, correct?
[She can kind of assume, based on the talks they've had about the long-haired woman's career, but...]
no subject
that question gets a wry smile out of her, though, and she shakes her head in response. ]
I'm no stranger to it in my line of work, yeah.
[ she's been covered with the stuff even when she was still sailing the stormy seas, along with viscera and oil and other bodily fluids from the Whales she'd hunted. she also remembers the time they had to donate blood just to gain entry to la manchaland recently, and she huffs out a chuckle at that as she turns to look at the portrait clara's standing in front of. ]
So... that's also you?
[ obviously. but there's more to that question than what meets the eye. ]
no subject
This is when I began working.
[A brief pause before the next sentence plays,]
I do not know the exact time she represents. The first year I began working for my family is a hazy memory to me. I completed every task assigned to me, returned to my room, and stared at the ceiling until I was needed again.
[Her description, combined with the digital voice, make it sound as if she were a robot. Every motion was mechanical. She does not describe it as being painful but the woman in the portrait is clearly pained. She is omitting details as necessary. She can be somewhat truthful, so long as she doesn't specify how morning would come and pull her into the void of daysleep. Omitting the supernatural elements doesn't change the fact that she did not know what she had survived for, nor had the courage to try and learn.]
no subject
And that's... when you snapped one day?
[ clara hasn't given her enough pieces to this puzzle, but ishmael's able to deduce with the ones she has on hand. the mention of blood had clued her in, for one. but again, it's hard to tell what emotion the other woman is feeling at the moment if her robotic voice isn't letting her emote -- if there are even any emotions left at all. ]
Feel free to correct me, though. Or to tell me that I'm prying into it too much. I just want to say that you are hardly the only person who had killed before coming here, if that's any consolation.
no subject
It was not anything so dramatic. I did not snap for a very long time.
[She will admit to snapping eventually. Even that snapping, though, had hardly felt like a triumphant turning point. It was a moment when all the apathy drained from her body, filled with high-tension and a need to guarantee that at least one thing she cared about was protected.]
However, yes, I did kill people.
[She turns back to the portrait as the rest of her long-typed message plays. It's difficult to tell if she feels guilt for what she admits in the words. It seems like something she had long come to terms with. The woman in the portrait is too deep in her sadness to feel guilt. If she were to think about all the things she was doing, she would not last.]
It was an aspect of that job. I would rewrite charts, forge documents, and change medication so that bodies became available for the Family's research. I ensured that threats to our organization were silenced on the hospital table. I received bloodied and bruised people and ended their pain.
no subject
I figured that is what most morticians do. Receive bodies, prepare them for a burial or a cremation, depending on the clients' wishes. Sometimes you'd have to forge papers in case said client's circumstances are too complicated. But...
[ she turns to raise a brow at clara's curious choice of words. ]
What do you mean, the Family's research?
no subject
"When does a wraith become separate from their body?"
"Can a wraith be implanted in an unrelated body?"
There is much to study about death naturally. Many people die. In order to conduct experiments, though, the time and method of their deaths may need to vary.
[Clara now does seem grim remembering these moments. She does not, however, looked wracked with guilt or self-loathing. She is not the shell of herself in the portrait. A preoccupation with death was all she had to anchor herself back in those times. While she knows it may be distasteful she cannot abandon it.]
no subject
And I assume most of these were done without their families' permission, were they.
[ hence the forgeries, she thinks. ]
Shady businesses like those are pretty common where I'm from, so I can't really say I'd turn my nose up at that. Except when you're harvesting organs without consent, I guess. Even I know that's messed up.
[ another pause, before she sighs through her nose and takes a step closer towards clara, both hands shoved into her pockets. ]
But I'd be a hypocrite if I say that any of that bothered me after all my talk about how the past doesn't matter in this place. Because they still don't. And as far as I'm concerned, you're a pretty okay person. That's more than enough in my book.
[ she's harmless, basically. for now. just because she seems tame doesn't mean ishmael shouldn't underestimate her, but thankfully she knows how to fight and defend herself if need be. she can take her. ]
no subject
[There's a few strange bleeps as Clara hastily types words and the text-to-speech struggles with her typos.]
I mayhh ave ben complicxxt [a harsh buzzing sound as it can't parse "complicit" from that] but undwrstand I did nt want to do that. [The simpler words at the end are easier to not fumble her fingers on.]
[Ishmael is right that Clara herself isn't a threat. Her sins were committed inside a system. The system gave her power over the bodies that should have gone to families or at least been given a proper burial. The system told her to turn a blind eye to people suffering like she had. In a fight she was barely anything.]
I wanted to live. Then and now.
no subject
she wanted to live too, huh. ]
Mm. Same here.
[ not then, when she'd wanted to die so badly yet stubbornly clung on to dear life. but now... things are different now. and not just because this place can provide a certain kind of pleasure that cannot be simply sought after in their respective worlds, she muses.
she then turns on her heels, facing the nearest exit. ]
Let's start living deliciously first and foremost, then. Wanna go and get something to eat?
[ all these heavy topics and posturing is making her hungry. ]
no subject
[Clara blinks rapidly, surprised at the acceptance and lack of criticism.]
[She pauses, looking to herself in the portrait. They both don't understand but the one in the portrait spares Ishmael a wary look before looking back to her modern self. Like, are you gonna say anything? Still, the simple acceptance makes her wonder if she couldn't say something a bit more wild and have it be accepted so simply. Her fingers somehow shake less doing this than before,]
My body rejects most normal food. I cannot share a meal but I can be company. Unless that is too strange.
[An unthinkable admission for the woman in the portrait but- not an unwelcome one. The upside of apathy was that even acts that might be life-ruining are met with an ultimate thought of "fuck it, why not?"]