There had been no end to Anja’s clinic shift. One minute she’d been watching a film and sketching in a book, mind wandering and unfocused, and the next real awareness she had was of being terribly uncomfortable.
Anja blinked her eyes in an attempt to gain focus, but all was dark. She lay on a cold metal floor with her arm hanging from a piece of cold metal on her wrist. These realizations brought a surge of adrenaline, and she was then very, very much awake.
She sat up quickly, the world spinning around her as a result of the too-fast movement. She had the briefest sensation of not knowing which way was up or down, even though her bottom still remained firmly on the cold floor. Yanking at her wrist, she heard the rattling of chains and the uncomfortable scrape of metal against metal. She tried to rub at her eyes, but there was a large device on her head covering them. In the same moment Anja realized she was wearing it, she also became aware of how very uncomfortable it was. “What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck,” she hissed, volume raising with each word as she attempted to pull the contraption off her head. It would not budge, and the attempt only caused more discomfort. “HELLO?!”
Eunmi’s introduction to wakefulness came with Anja’s screaming, which made her start and pick her head up with her own shriek. She looked around, already big eyes growing wider as she realized she was not in her room. Nor was she any place she’d ever seen before. Mouldering shelves, horrible smells, icky-looking water, and…a flailing companion?
A strangely silent companion, despite all of her yelling. Eunmi couldn’t hear even a whisper of her thoughts.
“HELLO?” she shouted back, both out of spite and because she wasn’t sure she’d be heard otherwise. “YOU SHOULD STOP TRYING TO PULL AT THAT THING. IT DOESN’T HAVE A LATCH.”
Hearing another voice did at least startle Anja into silence, for a few moments anyway. Somehow she’d assumed that she was alone; she’d been by herself in the clinic, and then they’d moved her to some foul smelling freezing place, and she was probably still alone. Finding out someone else was in this hellpit - and could apparently see - changed things. The urge was still to yell right back, but greater than that was the desire to try to figure out where the fuck she was, if she was in danger, and how great of a disadvantage she was at.
“You can see?” Anja asked, her voice at a normal, cautious level this time. “Who are you? Where the fuck are we?”
“MY NAME IS EUNMI,” she replied, still shouting, then paused. When it became apparent that Anja was done yelling she quieted down and crept closer to take another look at the visor.
“We are in a room filled with water and trash down below. And we are stuck to a railing. There is, hm, hold on.” Chancing a look behind Anja’s head and hoping she wouldn’t swing wildly, Eunmi spied a keyhole. “There is a place for a key behind your head. And some on the floor.”
She tilted her head, gaze sweeping over the stinking, fetid looking water and slovenly shelves. A mote of understanding dawned the longer she looked. The keys were probably in there. But how were they meant to reach them?
“I believe this is, as the kids say, some bullshit,” she drawled, and turned to Anja again. “Who are you?”
At the mention of a keyhole Anja first felt along the back of her head, and then over her person, hoping in vain to find a key dangling somewhere. She checked her neck, then her pockets, then her wrists, as that had been where the communicators had appeared when they were all blind. She was unhappy she didn't find anything, but not exactly surprised.
"Anja," she answered with a defeated sigh, slumping back against the railing. Bullshit sounded appropriate. She'd heard of the weird things people went through here, but she'd been relatively lucky with minimal experience of them so far. Anja liked to think the terror of the werecat her first night here was enough to tide her over for a long time, but it seemed her luck had run out. "You’re the scalpel girl.” No judgment or curiosity in the statement, it was just the first thing about Eunmi she could remember. “I don’t suppose you’re also a lock picker.”
“Yes, it is I, scalpel girl,” Eunmi continued to drawl, shooting Anja a deadpan look she couldn’t see. “Of course I do not know how to pick locks. That would be too convenient for one of these situations, would it not?”
Before she could continue to be unhelpful, an unseen speaker came to life.
Hidden on the shelves below you are three keys. One of you, the seeker, must find all three to release yourselves and leave this room. The seeker must rely on the directions of the seer. If you can find all three keys and free yourselves in an hour, you have a chance at being rewarded. If not, you may be punished. Each key is in a small ball that will occasionally omit a red light. Good luck. Time starts now.
“What if I were colour blind?!” she snapped at the air, exasperated. “How would I see this stupid ball?”
Frustration was making her bristle, her normal rapt focus on problem solving dissolving with irritation at finding herself in their position. She couldn’t feel anyone else’s mind, couldn’t hear Anja’s thoughts, and she didn’t even have socks. Her feet were freezing.
She let out a noise of disgruntlement and slouched against the railing Anja had been chained to. “Well, I do not think you should go out there right now. It looks very gross and dangerous and I do not see this blinking yet. By the way, what are you? I cannot hear your mind.”
For a moment, Anja was just distracted by having her wrist free. Handcuffs had been a very familiar part of her life for a while there, and she’d been very happy to be free of them for the past month here. It was an unhappy reminder of the world which awaited her on the outside, if they were ever free again.
Wringing her wrists, Anja still moved her head around as if trying to see. It was instinctive, not something she meant to do. She quirked her head at Eunmi’s question, her brain really still turning over the instructions they’d been given. She was supposed to hunt for stuff blindly? That… sounded like a bad time.
“What?” she asked, blinking stupidly, before she realized what she was being asked. “I’m hardly anything here, just what they call feytouched. You hear thoughts? But you can’t hear me?”
“Feytouched,” Eunmi repeated. “Like the loud one. Gwen.” Maya had not liked being paired with her, she remembered. But this was not Gwen, so Eunmi was not beholden by ancient friendship law to be rude to her. “I am a telepath,” she said simply. “If it worked as if it was supposed to, I could hear all of your deepest, darkest secrets as easily as listening to you now.”
Though Anja couldn't see her, Eunmi shrugged. “Oh well!”
If it were another strange punishment that took her ability away, she would simply resume burning the town down as a way of delivering their captors an ultimatum. Let Theo complain about that. As she contemplated all the ways she could set things ablaze, a flash of red caught her attention.
“Oh! I see one of the balls. Time for you to begin fetching, yes? I would like to be out of here soon.” Before speaking any further Eunmi held up both hands, each forming an L with thumb and forefinger. Left and right were always so tricky. “You have to go…left. Down the stairs. There is water you must stand in. It looks deeply unpleasant.”
’I could hear all of your deepest, darkest secrets..’ Well, that wasn’t creepy at all. Anja recognized Eunmi’s name from the network; she had always seemed to be a bit of a bear-poker. A shitstirrer. Anja wasn’t sure how much of that trickster nature was just ‘people are dicks on computers.’ Now she was certain, she was dealing with a full trickster spirit.
Honestly, she respected that.
“Fucking hell,” Anja muttered, pulling herself to her feet. “How deep is the water?” She didn’t really wait for an answer, but stripped free of her leggings, revealing sleeves of ink beneath. She still wore a long-sleeved grey thermal, and as it was baggy Anja briefly considered ditching that as well but decided against it. Then she started working her way to Eunmi’s left, feeling along the railing and poking out with her toes to find the stairs.
“I don’t know. Some depth. I cannot leave this godforsaken platform either.” As if to emphasize her point, Eunmi rattled the shackles preventing her from moving too far either way. As Anja tottered past her Eunmi remained still, biting the inside of her cheek to fully resist the urge to lick her finger and try and rub off any of those tattoos to see if they were real.
Maybe another time.
“Yes, those are steps.” Eunmi watched Anja edge her way forward carefully and felt herself become instantly bored. That was probably why They hadn’t made her the blind one. She’d have already been in the water, tearing at whatever she could get her hands on. Truly, she’d have been Too Good at this.
“Okay, now go left. No, your other left.” Frowning, she held up her hands again. “No, kidding, the other other left.” Sighing heavily, she threw herself down on the platform with dramatic flair. This was going to be torturous. “There is shelves in front of you. Feel for the…fuzzy one. I think it is fuzzy, anyway. Mold, or possibly the fur of an animal.”
There had been no doubt in Anja's mind that the water would be cold. The room they were in was cold, it stood to reason the water would be worse. So she'd taken a deep breath, tried her best to channel whatever viking ancestors she had to have down there somewhere, and hopped into the water. The regret was instant. She'd let out a thousand curses in at least three different languages, and tried her best to follow Eunmi's instructions.
Anja had a lot of childhood memories of being in the water, the odd man out while all her siblings were connected by their shared element and having fun. This was slightly akin to that, somehow.
"Mold?" Or fur. Great. What the fuck were you supposed to hope for in that scenario? "Shit, shit, fuck, faen i helvete-!" -Anja's hand closed around something, and she was entirely alarmed with the knowledge that touching it made no difference. Fur? Mold? She honestly couldn't tell. She continued spitting out cursewords as she yanked whatever it was off the shelf and held it as far away from her body as possible while standing in water up to her tits. "WHAT AM I HOLDING?"
Perhaps it was best Eunmi couldn’t hear Anja’s thoughts. They were likely a loud, furious echo of what she was spitting out now. Things Eunmi assumed were curses, threats, and otherwise unhappy words. She respected this on the vibes alone.
Brows knit, she leaned forward as far as the shackles would allow to squint at the thing in Anja’s grip. “I think…I think it may have been a sandwich, once. Now it is a community. Be a benevolent god and drown it quickly. The ball is to the left of where it was.”
While Anja was left to contemplate what sort of bacterial ruler she’d become, Eunmi drummed her fingers against the platform. “Tell me what some of those words you are muttering mean. What language is that? Where are you from?”
Eunmi's answer brought a truly inhuman sound from deep within Anja's throat, and she hurled whatever the thing was away from her. Anja heard a spat against what she could only assume was a nearby wall, and she went feeling along the shelf for a ball. Her hands closed around something round, its texture smooth and artificial. "Is this it?" she asked, holding it up.
At Eunmi's question she actually had to think about what the hell she'd even said. In her own head Anja had a habit of mixing and mingling various languages, mainly English and Norwegian, since her dad has still been more comfortable with English than with Norwegian by the time Anja was learning to speak. She'd grown up with a constant co-mingling of both, and that was how her thoughts had formed. "I am from Norway," she said. "I think I probably said faen i helvete, yeah? That's a common one. It's like... well, it doesn't translate directly but it's kind of like fucking hell. Which feels appropriate in the moment, yeah? Holy shit I am freezing. Faen is everything from hell to the devil, we use it like the English use fuck. Or like I use fuck. They're great words."
“It is!” If Eunmi had more motivation to be happy she might have gotten up from where she lay. Instead she propped her chin in one hand and kicked her feet behind her. “Do not dare throwing it towards me. You will miss and then we will both be very cross with one another. Put it in your shirt.”
Norway. It was in a clump of countries Eunmi was never really sure how to classify besides ‘probably very cold’ and ‘stroopwaffel’. She listened with interest, carefully tucking away new swears for later. “I think I like the Norway version better.” She couldn’t let Americans have everything.
What were they doing? Right, getting out of the room. Eunmi let her eyes wander over the shelves, preemptively shushing Anja as she let her gaze unfocus and look forrrr—yes, there it was. “I see another ball. Maybe you should have kept your pants on. Where will you put the third one?” Without waiting for an answer, she continued. “Go right.”
After a moment's thought, Anja wrapped the ball in the bottom hem of her shirt and tied it into a knot around it. It was a baggy enough shirt, the hem coming halfway to her knees, so she thought she probably had enough fabric to work with. Her shirt was soaked almost to her chest anyway, so at this point it was better served as storage than a useable garment.
"Right," Anja confirmed, and she started to make her way there before stepping on something both squishy and slippery. It alone wouldn't have been enough to make Anja lose her balance, but the shock of it caused her to jump. She grabbed the nearest shelf for balance and got a handful of something pointy, which she quickly recoiled away from. For a moment she was just splashing wildly in the water as she tried to correct herself, but she did eventually get moving again. "I REALLY wish you were a telepath right now," she shouted. "Could you just beam what I'm looking at into my head if you were?"
Had Anja hurt herself? Eunmi couldn’t tell. It wouldn’t matter anyway, if she had. There wasn’t much to do from her place except herd the other woman around verbally. And even in their few scant minutes together, Eunmi had gotten the impression that trying to lay on the soothing platitudes wouldn’t go over well. She pressed her lips together and watched Anja navigate blindly with new determination, trying to anticipate where Anja might find danger or harm.
“No, not images.” She shook her head even though Anja couldn’t see. “I am not Hiroki. I only hear thoughts. And I can tell them to you. Sometimes, when there is someone I am very mad at, I make songs stick in their head. Like, bay-bee shark doo doo do—wait, stop! Stop!”
Adrenaline made her heart thump against her ribs as she clanked herself into a sit again. “If you face the left, there is the most beautiful cat statue I have ever seen. I want it. Very badly.”
She let her absolute yearning marinate a moment before adding, “Except, it is wrapped in barbed wire save for the head. Perhaps you could help me get it after…?”
Anja didn't know who the hell Hiroki was, so it didn't make much difference to her. She liked the idea of getting songs stuck in peoples heads. She disliked the idea of having her mind broadcasted. That, she supposed, was a bridge she'd have to burn when she got to it.
The yelling made Anja freeze in her tracks, a terrible adult reinaction of red light, green light, but to hear what Eunmi was actually requesting made Anja look back in the young woman's direction. Was she for real? "Barbed. Wire," Anja repeated, voice reflecting how dead she truly felt on the inside. But she reoriented herself to what had been the left, and gingerly felt in front of her, bit by bit, until her hands touched a shelf. Part of her wanted to tell Eunmi to fuck wholly and completely off, but she also didn't see the wisdom in pissing off the person that was her eyes at the moment.
"Do you see a blanket I could cover it in, maybe? Something thick?"
“Wait, you are saying you want to get it now? After I have just mentioned the barbed wire?” Eunmi pulled a face and leaned back in disbelief despite Anja’s blindness. “And you did just say ‘barbed wire’, too, yes? Ha! No. You do not do that. Goodness.”
Was it actually funny that Anja had changed her mind so quickly? A little. Eunmi tried to keep her giggles in and maintain a stern tone, but it was difficult. “Maybe this is why they made you the walker, because you would do something foolish like that. You have to take care of yourself,” she chided from where she was on the platform. “I would have told you to, as the kids say, get fucked.”
Cursing in English really didn’t do it for her enough. She made a mental note to pull more fun Finnish curses from Anja’s head later.
“That is why I said we can both get it later, yes? Because we will be able to see, and be able to leave. And if somehow they do not let us go back in the water for me to claim this stunning art piece, I will add it to my list of reasons for why I will burn them alive one day.” Her feet kicked behind her lazily as she said this, tone perfectly conversational. “So you keep going right, and we will get the cat later. Deal?”
Anja had to laugh. A surprised, almost manic little burst of a surprised sound of amusement that she had to fight back into place, but a smirk still remained. "Actually I was thinking that I didn't want to piss off my eyes," she said. "But since you have chosen to be a benevolent overlord, yes ma'am, to the right it is."
So Anja made her way slowly, finding altogether they worked as a decent team. Anja's position of dependence helped her bite back cutting remarks, and the ones that did slip through were said with enough sarcasm that Eunmi seemed to receive well. Eunmi didn't seem to balk at Anja's remarks or strings of profanity, so all in all, she could have done much worse for a partner.
She still didn't know how she'd feel about being around the young woman when she could read minds, though. Time will tell.