She wasn’t far.

It was just up the path a little, at the top of the hill and underneath the trailing leaves of a dappled, flowering tree. Red had their back to them, facing its trunk as she hunched over herself and hid her face against her knees. She still had her hands pushed against that shattered mask, keeping it close to her skin, but Sláine could still see the glow from beneath it, lighting up the edges of her hair and painting the puffy pink flowers around her with an ethereal white light.

“Don’t look at me,” the woman said as she heard their approach. “You’ll go blind.”

The strangeness of the situation really hit Sláine in that moment, but also with it was a sense of overwhelming relief. Breaking away from the Ailís doll that had been helping her, she limped the last bit of the way herself before easing down to sit beside Red. The woman flinched, but didn’t — couldn’t — turn around, and Sláine shifted so she wasn’t facing her, but instead had her back parallel to hers.

She let out a long breath, before looking back up at the puppet. “Is there anything else you want?”

There was a slow shake of its head. “Not at the moment. Unless you have further need of me, I’m going to direct my focus elsewhere. Please, try not to aggravate your injury,” it gestured to her leg. “I can’t give you time to heal forever.”

“Alright, fine.” Sláine let out a small, dissatisfied huff. “But even if you’re not paying attention to it, you are not allowed to just have that standing there.”

“Oh,” she said. “I understand. Very well.”

Jerkily, the doll moved to the other side of the trunk, which was broad enough that Sláine couldn’t see it anymore. It was honestly not very comforting, but she figured it was the best she could hope for at this point.

Red was silent behind her.

“So,” Sláine said, conversationally. “Crazy day, huh?”

Given Red’s lack of reaction to things so far, and keeping in mind how short of a walk it’d been to this place, Sláine could only figure that she’d overheard the earlier conversation. It wasn’t like she’d tried to be quiet, and she was familiar enough with this place to know how easily sound carried here. She probably should have waited to agree to Maximus’s request until after she’d gotten Red’s approval, but… what was done was done. She’d already given her word to the girl, and Sláine wasn’t the type of person that liked to break a promise once it was made.

Besides, Red seemed to have other things on her mind.

“You should have just let me be.” Sláine could hear the small little scrapes of the mask fragments bumping against each other as Red curled further inward. “Why didn’t you go when you had the chance?”

“…Does that honestly seem like something I’d do? Really?”

There was a long pause.

“…No. No, it doesn't,” Red admitted, laughing in a way that conveyed absolutely no joy at all. “I’d just sort of… hoped that you’d go along with it. I don’t even know what’s going to happen now.”

“Well, we’ve got Maximus helping. So that’s a plus?”

Red didn’t have a reply to that, and Sláine watched the way the sunlight flickered through the wind-blown leaves.

“Are you… okay?” She finally asked. She knew as soon as it’d come out of her mouth that it was a dumb question, but she didn’t know what else to say, not really.

“Do you think I’m okay?” Red replied, and it seemed like it should be sarcasm, but there was still something… cold about it. Empty and lifeless.

Sláine didn’t like it.

“No, but more specifically, I meant…” She trailed off as she made a vague gesture towards Red’s current condition, but then realized that, yeah, she wasn’t looking at her, so it wasn’t like Red would even be see it. Sláine clarified. “Your mask breaking. And that… burst of light? You’re not dying or anything, right? Your head isn’t going to explode?”

Red snorted. “You’ve got some imagination there, buttercup. No, it’s nothing like that. I’m just.” Her tone shifted as she struggled with what to say next, voice going a bit higher and more pained. “It’s just — uh, it’s always kinda… like this. The mask just kept it under control.”

“Was it a magic item?” Sláine asked. She’d heard of enchanted objects like that, and that’d make the strange… phenomenon she’d noticed with Red’s skin earlier make a hell of a lot more sense.

“Yeah. Still is, I guess, keeping it together like this is sort of working, even if it’s not working well. Dad gave it to me.”

“Huh,” Sláine muttered, and then thought about how it had been present in those memories, even when everything else had changed. She supposed an obvious conclusion to make was that Red had always had the mask, wasn’t it? That she’d always needed to hide her face from the world.

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

There was a silence.

“You’re not going to ask?” Red asked, tentative. Sláine tilted her head in confusion, and rested her cheek on one raised knee.

“Ask what?”

“About — this! Any of this! My weird glowing face that will absolutely burn your eyes out if you look at it for too long! My mother being a wacko cultist who also almost convinced me to follow in her footsteps! Everything about — about, about Janus, since I guess you met him, and how I was missing a heart for a huge portion of my life! My dad, who people still won’t stop talking about, even though he left a long time ago, and just…”

That was the most emotion she’d heard in the woman’s voice in awhile. Bitter sarcasm, a curl of disgust… it made Sláine smile, because she definitely preferred this to that empty, emotionless defeat from earlier, even if it was only marginally better.

But it didn’t last, and Red’s shoulders slumped as she sighed. “Just… everything I guess. Aren’t you going to ask about any of that?”

Sláine thought for a moment. “Nah, wasn’t planning on it,” she said, punctuating it with a shrug. “I mean, when we get back, you’d probably prefer if I forgot all about this, right? I can’t imagine this is how you wanted anyone to learn about your secret traumatic backstory.”

There was a pause.

“Even though I dragged you into all this, though? You don’t feel… owed, at least? For your trouble?”

Sláine couldn’t help but laugh, even though she was surprised her phrasing hadn’t gotten some kind of reaction from her. After everything, and Red was still fixated on ‘owing’ and ‘what’s owed?’ Where had she gotten all of these ideas in her head?

…Well, given what she’d seen, she probably had some guesses. But that didn’t really matter at the moment, did it?

“Don’t you remember? You’re the one who wanted to go back. You’re the one who kept telling me not to run on ahead. You’re the one who I dragged into this, you’re the one who had to jump down that hole after me, and when all is said and done, you’re the one who this affects most of all.” Sláine stared out at the Tree in the distance, and all of those bright buildings built around and within the landscape surrounding it. “You don’t owe me anything at all, Red. And… even if this was somehow all your fault? I wouldn’t want to ask anyway.”

“Why… not?”

“Because you wouldn’t like it.”

Strings. Stages. A woman who acted like she was watching a show at the theater. A lifetime of being stared at, observed even when she was in her own private space, and rituals that put everyone’s attention on her all the time. Red had implied that the mask was for other people’s benefit, but Sláine couldn’t believe that she didn’t also wear it for her own sake. The very first time she’d met her, Red hadn’t wanted to let anyone into her room, and with Yora, she’d absolutely given off the impression as someone who wanted to shut others out.

That’s why Sláine hadn’t wanted to think about any of this too hard, why she’d tried to keep herself from dwelling on everything that was happening around her. It wasn’t Sláine’s to see. And she hated that she had to, and that the woman behind her had to have been looked at like that.

She didn’t want Red to feel like she was on display — not around her, at least.

“Why does that matter to you? Even just this morning, you probably wouldn’t give a single shit about that, right?”

“…Even then, I still think people should be allowed to keep what’s important to them hidden. But what you have willingly shown me today… well, I told you that I thought you were a gentle person, didn’t I?”

“That’s… you’re… I really don’t understand you.”

“Well, it’s a good thing you don’t have to!” Sláine said brightly, and even she couldn’t tell if the aggressive cheer she put in her voice was real. “But really, you’re always glowing, huh? Kind of funny, you growing up in the Underdark then. What,” Sláine laughed, thinking about that entire place’s obsession with freaky space spiders. “Is your dad actually from the moon or something?”

Sláine meant that to get a laugh out of Red. She meant it to be such a ridiculous idea that it’d prove to the woman that she was too stupid to draw any serious conclusions about everything she’d witnessed, and help ease her worries about being known in a way she didn’t want to be. She didn’t expect the woman to stiffen up entirely and curl in on herself further.

Sláine opened her mouth. Closed it. “You’re kidding me,” she said without thinking. “You’re fucking joking.”

“…No,” Red mumbled, barely audible through her knees.

“You’re half space alien?!”

“It’s a bit more complicated than that,” she managed, and upon hearing the whine in her voice, Sláine forced herself to calm down.

Okay. Okay. So Red was some kind of moon person. This was normal and fine and totally not worth making a big deal about.

She took a very, very deep breath and said, “Well. I guess your mother had high standards, going for a guy that’s…” A beat. “Out of this world.”

Sláine had never experience a silence more deafening, more world-shattering than the one that passed between them at that moment.

“You did not.”

“I did.”

“You did not just say that.”

“I did!” Sláine smiled, the expression sharply determined. “I suppose if you want to turn around and burn my eye sockets out, I sort of deserve it.”

It was then that Red started laughing, pathetically and helplessly. She didn’t stop until she was left breathless and wheezing, and despite everything, Sláine found herself quite pleased with the reaction. “You find out that my father is a lunar being,” she said once she finally composed herself. “And the first thing you do is make a stupidly bad and horribly inappropriate joke about it. I cannot believe you, Sláine. You’re…”

The laughter stopped then, and Red began to sound so very sad. “Impossible, you know that? You’re absolutely impossible. I really don’t deserve you trying so hard for my sake.”

“And who decided that?”

“…What?”

“Who decided how much you deserve,” Sláine replied, a confident frankness to her voice that offered no quarter. “And how hard I should try? Aren’t I the one who gets to decide what I wish to do for you?”

“I — I…”

“We don’t get to control how the people around us feel, Red. We don’t get to control what sacrifices they make, or what is ‘worth it’ in their eyes. And it’s silly to feel guilt for it, because it’s the choices that they get to make. All you get to choose is what you feel like offering in return.”

There was silence as Red didn’t seem to know how to reply, and thinking about everything that had happened so far, everything that she’d learned and the unfairness of her current position, Sláine continued to speak. “We have some time until my leg fixes itself. How about I tell you a story? And at the end of it, you can decide whether or not you really think I’m an ‘impossible’ person, and if I should give up on trying to save you.”

>> Tell a story from a time long ago