It was a lively place. Bathed in red silks and braided weaved patterns and paintings on the walls. Gilded in golds and silvers, and the floors of every room carpeted with something soft and comfortable to lay on. Meraki had the day off today, but all her art supplies were here because the lighting of her room was too perfect to paint anywhere else. She avoided all the rooms she knew her regular clients attended when she wasn't in. Most of them had a rather unhealthy attachment to her- and while it worked out well for money making, it didn't exactly bode well in wanting privacy in her suite on her off-days.
The front counter on her level was being run by a younger new-hire. He wasn't one of the sex workers, but he did know all the directions and goings on, so that Meraki knew who was where. Charilaos looked up from the workbook as he sent a client down the opening to the right and behind the desk, then found Meraki walking in.
"My, my, Mera," he mused, "Hard at work, even on your paid leave? Such devotion."
Meraki gave a soft laugh into her sleeve-covered hand. She stepped up to the desk with a smile at Charilaos.
"Oh no, dear. Simply here to paint today- I have someone in mind who makes an incredible muse."
Charilaos inclined his head slightly, "That woman the other gals here said you were hanging off of the last visit to the temple?" he teased.
Meraki flushed and waved her hand in his face for a second before sighing and shaking her head.
"Not exactly. Of course, she was… is, ah- ethereal but no, no this painting is only loosely based on her. It's just someone in my dreams I keep seeing," she managed out between moments that she seemed a little out of it. Charlaos made the kind of look that implied he thought she was talking out her ass. To be fair, it made Meraki almost believe that she was. Charilaos let her go after that, informing her of the whereabouts of her clients if they'd been in for a while to ensure she didn't find them on their way out.
As she pushed aside the curtain into her suite and let it drape gracefully behind her, she took a deep breath in. The scent of honey and lavender incense burning filled her head and lungs, and she relaxed. Her paints and canvases were stacked to the side, behind a small cupboard for her own sakes of not having any pigments stolen. The set up was muscle memory at this point. Meraki was glad, though, because her mind kept feeding her images of the woman from her dreams, and mixing the image with one of 'Erin' from the temple. 'Erin' really had looked so similar to the dream. It was uncanny. Eerie, if she thought too hard about it. But oh, 'Erin' had just been so pretty.
She hummed a tune, light and summery, as the paint on her brush began to line over the charcoal sketch she'd done the night after the visit to the temple. Meraki didn't quite know the song. She was making it up as she went, but it sounded like the taller woman, like the dream, like the both of them. It did occur to her to gift the painting to 'Erin' once it was done, but Meraki really didn't know her that well and- being honest- she wasn't sure 'Erin' had even liked her all that much. She'd had a half-apprehensive look on her face the whole time, and looked somewhat taken off-guard by the fact that Meraki and her coworkers were even there. Maybe she simply hadn't been told.
Either way, Meraki let the paint drip down the canvas, and watched as the tip of her brush and her spatula and her fingers painted the face of the woman her mind couldn't rid the thought of. She was upset that she couldn't seem to capture the dream woman's enormity. Couldn't seem to scale her correctly, to give her the feeling that she so desperately felt the woman needed, to be presented as perfectly as possible. The dream had been abstergent.
She barely noticed the sun setting behind her until she could no longer see her brush strokes correctly. Her mouth let out a sigh before she could stop it, and she packed away her easel and brushes, and laid the painting against the wall to dry without falling over in the night. On her way out, she found that the shifts had already changed. Already being used quite loosely there, though, as Meraki had no real concept of how much time had passed nor how late it really was. She managed to slip past the regulars unnoticed, as most were at least the tiniest bit too distracted.
While the streets were dark, leading into the town centre, it was peaceful a walk that Meraki often enjoyed. The trees swayed with a rustle. The birds were making sleepy chirps as they settled on branches. The moon was slowly rising in the sky, and Meraki finally felt like she'd had a good day.
What she didn't expect to find though, was 'Erin', wandering around in one of the gated farmland areas, smelling the flowers with a concerned look on her face. The taller woman startled enough to stab her hand on the roses she had been about to smell when Meraki walked over to tap her shoulder.
"Ghach- shit- Hey, hi, hello Meraki!" 'Erin' fumbled over herself to stand, hiding her hand behind her back as she did. Her robes were a little messy, with dirt on her knees and some on her chin, and pollen on her sleeves.
Meraki wanted to laugh, but she was a little concerned by the gash on 'Erin's hand.
"Evening, Ms. Erin. What exactly are you… doing?"
'Erin' sighed and rubbed under her nose with her injured hand before she realised and attempted to hide it again. Meraki caught it, her gaze falling to the cut between the joint of 'Erin's forefinger and thumb. It wasn't big, but the woman didn't pull back, nor did she say much else. Instead she just watched as Meraki searched her clothes for her emergency bandages.
She wrapped it, and 'Erin' finally spoke when she had finished, "You carry those with you?"
"Mhm. Scrapes and bangs are usual in my profession," Meraki responded, dropping the hand and finishing with slightly surprised amusement at the fact that 'Erin' barely seemed to register it for a few seconds. When she did, she raised it to her eyeline for a moment, running her thumb over the seam between wraps.
"I was just smelling the flowers. Had a lingering… vile stuck in my nose for a few days," 'Erin' said, slipping her hand into her pocket.
"Lingering vile doesn't sound pleasant at all," responded Meraki. She took in the fact the tall woman looked tired, and had clearly been outside all day. She looked more like the dream now then she had in the cleansed cathedral. Like the rattiness of the spinney area and the grime caked into her clothes, it dug itself into a kind of beauty that Meraki couldn't quite place.
'Erin's hands, despite the cut itself, had stains all over them, and things caught under her fingernails as if she'd been digging. Meraki could see the tired tremble to them, and wondered exactly how bad a scent needed to be to make someone look this kind of ill. 'Erin's face was sunken, ever so slightly, the skin stretched over bone and fat and muscle in ashen flushes, and the slight freckles smattered across her cheeks were more and more resembling red and brown pores then they were stars.
"No. It's not," 'Erin said after a few short eternal moments of silence between them. She lifted her hand to her face to look over the bandaging, tracing a finger up and down it in thought. Her nose wrinkled and she rolled her eyes- more at herself, though, since she tossed her arm to her side with a windy ' swish ' and looked into Meraki's eyes.
"It's late, Ms. Meraki. What are you doing out here all alone?"
Meraki stopped attempting to slip the bandages back into her pocket to look up at 'Erin' again. She didn't answer. Not immediately. Mainly because informing the woman that the reason that she was out so late was because she had been painting 'Erin' as if she were some kind of eternal being wasn't exactly the best thing to tell someone she'd only known for a day's worth of time. So instead, Meraki rolled her lips together and lolled her head to the side.
"Work ran late," she said. She didn't miss how 'Erin's eyes narrowed. She didn't say anything. She couldn't. There was a pressure on her tongue, all of a sudden. 'Erin's gaze was iced over, staring into unreal, and the taller of the pair clearly wasn't paying attention so much as she was staring at Meraki as if she were some kind of marked beast. Not to imply that it was fear upon 'Erin's face, no. More like she was preserving something. Thinking too hard about too much with too little time to truly find and answer. As if that answer was blazed in scorched skin across Meraki's brows.
But then 'Erin' blinked, and she was back.
"Mn," she hummed.
It was only then– when Meraki watched the woman's knees buckle beneath herself– that the true sense of vile became clear. 'Erin' landed with a harsh thump in the grass. She winced as a rock burrowed into her knee. Meraki sat herself beside her, dragging fabric bunching around her legs into placid pale layers over her legs. It's ironic, she thought, that somehow between a commune member and a brothel worker, I'm the one who looks put-together.
Silence settled around them, dragged by the nape to their sides and hung from the branches of the trees surrounding the fenced off foliage. Hands came to 'Erin's face to push the dirt around, maybe to make her cheeks redder with life instead of duller with deteriorating esteem. Meraki saw how different 'Erin' was from The Woman. The Woman was built of grace. Built of eternal sound, of whistles and weeds and chirping birds. Of dirt and corpses and rot. It was a gorgeous maelstrom of a being, one that would look just as beautiful dredged in blood and muck as it did cleaned and flowing in the breeze.
'Erin', now, coated and shaking in loose dust and sickly breaths, was anything but beautiful. She was more of a corpse- buried and unburied and burned and salvaged from the wreckage. Her hair was loose, too. in the slightest curls at its tips. She'd been talking, Meraki realised, but Meraki hadn't exactly been listening.
"–ne. She's just a child, but Arion doesn't see it. I'm sure she has something wrong with her. There's no child strong enough at her age– with that flimsy a body– who could have a scar like hers and still be alive," 'Erin' rambled. Meraki believed it would be less incoherent if she had heard the beginning of the sentence. But her hand still reached out to cover 'Erin's, and her hands still felt the tremble beneath the other's skin.
"You look too tired to be thinking so fast, Erin," Meraki attempted. Her voice shook, just slightly, though she hadn't the thought to delve into why. 'Erin' dragged her hand away. She then immediately grabbed it back. Meraki thought that at least meant she liked her a little, enough to seek comfort despite the knee-jerk reaction, at least. 'Erin' squeezed. It hurt, just a little, but nothing Meraki couldn't brush away.
She watched the tracks lay waste upon pale cheeks, and as suddenly as 'Erin' had fallen, she was sobbing. Fullbodied, heaving sobs. Meraki hardly had a moment to react to it with anything but a cut off 'It's okay' before 'Erin' had wrapped her arms tight around her waist, and buried her face in her shoulder, and held on and inhaled so deep that Meraki was sure she was sniffing leftover drugs from her collar somehow. In this instance, Meraki wouldn't blame her.
eventually, after a long while of darkness and crying and sniffling, 'Erin' spoke.
"It's just so horrid," she said, "That fucking smell. And that thing it's coming from– I'm sure it's in the caverns. Those tombs that lay below my feet in that cathedral– I feel like I'm going crazy in there. I can smell it.
"Meraki, Meraki," she said, "Am I going crazy?"
Meraki rubbed her hand up and down 'Erin's back. She wanted to say no. Wanted to whisper that she wasn't crazy, she was sick. That she needed rest.
But she realised she hardly knew this woman. She hardly knew who was clinging to her, no matter her resemblance to The Woman. This woman was someone she'd only known a day of time. One she'd found and clung to without reason. This woman wasn't her Woman. And yet she was sobbing into the shoulder of a stranger– a brothel worker, no less– begging to be told she wasn't insane.
It wasn't even like Meraki could tell insanity from sanity herself. She was someone who walked dreams as she did reality, who loved something unreal and untrue and bigger than she could ever be. It wasn't her place to tell 'Erin' what she wanted to hear. So instead, she whispered low into 'Erin's ear and stroked her back and held her tight in the moonlight.
"No, no," Meraki uttered, "Poor baby. Poor poor woman. Shh Shhhh- oh dearest, poor baby."
'Erin' shrunk. Not physically but something shifted and she seemed so small. She shifted, and sat up. Her palms pressed into her eyes so hard Meraki was sure she was about to hear them pop, but nothing happened except deep hard breaths. Two in, one out, and 'Erin' nodded.
" 'M hardly a baby, duck," escaped her lips after a moment. Meraki laughed, just slightly. 'Erin' looked more alive, at least. Even if it was simply because the red on her eyes and cheeks had spread in such a way she couldn't be anything but.
The Brothel worker wanted to ask what it was exactly that was eating at 'Erin'. It couldn't just be a smell. There's no way. That quip about who Meraki assumed was Alcmene was nibbling at the base of her skull. She'd noticed the scar, yes, but assumed Alcmene was simply a war orphan of some kind. Plenty of skirmishes happened at the borders nowadays and Arion had told Meraki how he'd found Alcmene in the first place.
Meraki only managed to open her mouth and suck in a breath to speak before 'Erin's head snapped to the side, and she scrambled to her feet. Meraki followed– her jaw clenching shut hard enough it clicked and made her grimace. She followed 'Erin's gaze, and found nothing. But 'Erin' was staring so intently.
'Erin' sniffed in.
'Erin' then ran, leaving Meraki dazed in more questions then she ever believed she'd have about a woman she barely knew anything about.