Re: Wren + Ana: woods
It was no explanation, that 'I know it'. It was a truth, but it came with a smile that was practically a Gallic shrug. An acknowledgement that here was something unusual and so it was observed and the sharp-boned woman who stood smeared with clay in the middle of trees growing around her as if it were natural to live amid the woods - she understood that some things, they were unusual.
It still did not explain the note of familiarity, of sameness that hung in the air like expensive perfume blended for one person's skin, scented on another. But there was no way to ask that without revealing it was so. More things that lacked explanation.
No answer to explain whether she was made in France, stamped through with the blood that had poured into the fields during the war, or a softer, looser French that inhabited this world. But that, ah, Ana shrugged. It was so. Everywhere was a vast place. She had been on her own travels, no? Vast, and everywhere was too big for someone so young, so soft, but perhaps everywhere was not so great when you did not think you had forever for it.
"Wren." A small bird, unadorned but it suited the woman. "I am Ana." She took that soft hand that was made for smoothing foreheads, touching, holding, soothing and she clasped it in her own. Ana's hands, they were not calloused. You could not afford callouses, when you worked in skin, you see. Pottery was clay, malleable but there were old scars and burns that marked the skin of her wrist, the tips of her fingers. Shiny skin, remade.
No, if they were all the same, the world would be dull and time interminable. "I agree. What is it you do, in your carnival?"