Chapter Text
Here is your per diem. Try to make it last. We’ll contact you.
This is what she hears in her head as she wakes.
She aches. She doesn’t know how long she’s been asleep. She’s not sure where she is. But she aches. Everywhere. Everything hurts. What happened to her?
She blinks, sits up with more effort than it should take, rubs her eyes. She smells old cigarettes, and past that, the sea, salty and fresh through a cracked-open window. Her eyes quickly scan the room: a don’t disturb sign hanging on the inside of the door, faintly yellowing wallpaper, framed paintings of gardens that she forgets the second her eyes leave them. Cheap motels are the same everywhere, she thinks.
Her scanning of the room stops at the second bed next to hers. A girl lays in it, sprawled out gracelessly, diagonal in the bed. Pretty. She makes herself stop looking and stares at the ceiling. Where is she?
The girl stirs. She groans a little, and then goes through some version of the same waking-up process. Their eyes meet. The girl sits up, startled, and scoots backwards in the bed. “Who… are you?”
This is the moment at which she realizes: she doesn’t know. “Well, who are you?”
She watches the same process as the pink-cheeked, dewy-eyed girl realizes: “I… don’t know.”
“Me neither.”
Panic crosses the girl’s face now. She scoots a little further back. “I don’t want to hurt anybody.”
“Neither do I.”
They sit looking warily at each other. A pair of leather pants sits on the floor in a crumpled heap. “I’m guessing those are yours.”
The girl frowns. “How do you know that?”
She points to a chair, where some black clothing is neatly folded over the back of it. “Because I’m guessing those are mine.”
“You don’t know your name, but you know you’re a neat freak?”
She shrugs. “Just a feeling.” She scoots backwards in her own bed, attempting to make the situation between them feel safer somehow. “Why don’t you check your pockets? Perhaps you’ve got some identification.”
The girl nods, then leans awkwardly out of the bed and retrieves the pants. “Nice pants,” she comments. “I have good taste. The decorative chainmail is a little much though.” She fishes through the pockets. “Nothing.”
The girl has been sleeping in a sports bra that is clearly working overtime. She turns around and leans over the other side of the bed. She has a perfectly round scar on her back; a ring of shiny, puckered flesh. “Does that hurt?”
The girl stops and turns around. “Huh?”
“The scar. It’s a perfect circle. On your back?”
The girl attempts to look over her shoulder. This yields little success. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I feel…something back there, but I don’t know what it is.”
“Well, nevertheless, it’s an identifying mark.”
The girl swings her legs over the side of the bed so that they’re face to face. “Well, maybe you’ve got something too.”
So she turns in the bed and gives the girl a view of her back. She notices now that she, too, is sleeping in very little. She wonders whether this is normal for her. She thinks not.
“Well,” the girl announces after a moment, “I don’t see a scar, but uh…”
“What?”
“It looks like you have a tat.”
“I do? Where?”
“Um.” An awkward pause. “At the small of your back, it’s kind of…I can’t read it. It’s kind of peeking out the top of your underwear.”
She sighs and reaches back, nudging the waistband down a little. “Can you read it now?”
“Yeah. It says… Peccatrix? Is that your name? Because if it is, that’s a rad name.”
She snorts. “I very much doubt it.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s Latin.”
“What does it mean?”
“Never mind that.”
The girl sighs. “All right. Well, Peccatrix is a mouthful anyway, do you mind if I call you Trix?”
“It’s as good as anything else, I suppose.”
The girl goes back to her own bed. “So you know Latin, but don’t know who you are.”
She turns around again. “Don’t you know anything?”
The girls gestures wildly. “Maybe I know things, but I just don’t know what I know! I know I definitely don’t know Latin.”
Trix. She tries the name out in her head. It stirs strange feelings in her. She wonders who she is that she chose to tattoo this on herself.
“Well, what shall I call you?” she asks the girl after a moment.
“I don’t know. Give me a cool Latin name. Nothing stupid though. I’ll look it up later and if you named me Sneaky Hoe, I’ll kill you.”
She raises an eyebrow. “How do you know you haven’t already tried to?”
The girl considers this possibility. “I guess we don’t know, do we?”
“No. We’re proceeding on faith at the moment.”
“Faith.” Something clouds the girl’s face.
“What?”
“I don’t feel like that’s a word that’s in my vocabulary a lot.”
She senses depths of trauma in the girl, skepticism. She senses no malice, but great caution, which is probably wise under their current circumstances. “Well, at present, we’re proceeding on trust. With that in mind, I suppose I’ll call you Fiducia until we figure out our proper names.”
“Fiducia,” the girl says, rolling it around in her mouth a little. “That’s badass. That’s like, a gladiator name or something.”
“So you know about gladiators.”
“I guess. I’m not sure it helps us, though.”
She gets out of bed, and scans the room. Feeling awkward with so little on, she tugs on the tight black trousers that are folded over the back of the chair.
“Hey, Trix?”
She doesn’t turn around right away. She’s not used to answering to it yet.
“Trix, I found a bag over here. A duffel bag…”
She goes over to where the girl –Fiducia, though it doesn’t quite suit her– is still in her underwear, kneeling in front of a large black duffel bag. “What’s in it?”
The newly-christened Fiducia pulls out a sword sheath. “A sword. Whoa. Are we ninjas?”
Trix’s senses immediately go to higher alert, on instinct. When the girl slowly draws it out of the sheath, the blade seems to glow blue. Fiducia jams it right back into its sheath.
“I don’t think swords are supposed to do that.”
But that’s not the only oddity now. “Er, Fiducia?”
A light radiates from the girl’s back, pure and golden, and Trix feels suddenly pulled toward it. Something in her aches to draw closer to it. Logically, she must assume it to be a trap until they know more. “Huh?”
“Your back?”
“It’s…” She can turn her head just enough to perceive the light radiating from her back. “What the hell?” She drops the sword and jumps up. She points at Trix accusingly. “What is this? What’s in my back? Did you do this to me?”
“I wouldn’t know it if I did!”
The glow becomes brighter.
“What’s happening to me? This is not normal. I don’t remeber a lot of things but I know this is not normal.” She’s panicking.
Trix sees that as Fiducia gets more panicked, the glow gets brighter. That can’t be good. She puts her hands up, moves a step closer to her. “Listen. We don’t know. We’re going to find out, alright? I feel something too, that light, it pulls me…” She breaks off.
“But what is it?”
Trix still doesn’t trust this girl or the light radiating from her back. But it’s all they have now. Each other, a black bag, and this dingy motel room in… well, they haven’t figured that out yet. That and trust. “Listen,” she says, edging closer and keeping her voice soft and even, “I don’t know who we were before this, but right now, I’m not someone who wants to hurt you, and I’m trusting that you’re not someone who wants to hurt me.”
Fiducia looks at her, her big, dark eyes wide and her frame shaking.
Trix steps closer. “It’s going to be okay, but I think you need to calm down, because it gets brighter when you get upset.”
The radiance from behind her throws her face into a kind of backlit shadow. “I’m scared.”
“I know. I am too. But I think if you can calm down, it’ll go back down.”
Fiducia takes a step back. “But why?”
Trix steps closer again. “I don’t know. But we’ll figure it out. I’ll help you.” She holds her hands out. “Take my hands. Squeeze them. Hang on to them. It will ground you to hold on to something.”
After a moment more of shaking violently, Fiducia lets Trix step forward again, and takes hold of her hands. They’re soft and sweaty. Her grip is like iron. When their hands grasp each other, a current of warmth flows into her. Waves of something benevolent.
When Trix looks into her eyes, she sees that Fiducia wants to trust her. That though they’re strangers to each other in this particular moment, that whatever history they have is begging her to trust.
Trix keeps talking. “See? It’s all right. My hands are real. The floor under your feet is real. We’re here, and I don’t mind letting you hold on to my hands until you’re not so frightened anymore. When you calm down, we can figure out where we are, and maybe find some food if you’re hungry, and then try to solve our mystery.”
“What if we can’t?”
“No no, we’re not entertaining that. We have to take this one step at a time, but we will unravel it together, but you have to breathe deeply, and calm down, and trust me. Can you do that?”
Fiducia’s face is cast in shadow still, her sandy colored hair outlined in the gold light coming from her back. She closes her eyes.
“You should keep them open,” Trix suggests. “I think it’s better for you to stay grounded if you look at me. We don’t want you getting lost in your own head. Who knows what anxieties lurk there.”
So she breathes deeply, stares at Trix earnestly.
“Good,” Trix encourages her.
After a few minutes of breathing, she calms down. The light fades. Fiducia suddenly looks down awkwardly at herself in her underwear, and the entire little tableau of them standing here, holding hands, in a strange motel room. She releases her grip, somewhat reluctantly, backs up a few steps, and leans back against the wall. “Thanks,” she pants.
Trix kneels down and hunts through the bag. Frowning, she finds more dark clothing, a few more knives of various sizes wrapped in a leather band, and a wad of multicolored euro notes.
This is your per diem. Try to make it last.
“Whoa, jackpot,” Fiducia says.
“Yes, well, I think we have to be cautious with it. We have to try to make it last. We don’t know why we have it or what we’re supposed to do with it.”
But now Fiducia is looking around with purpose. “Okay, well, did you say something about food?”
“I did. Are you hungry?”
“Oh my god, I just noticed that I’m starving.” As if on cue, Fiducia’s stomach rumbles.
Trix smiles. “I’m quite hungry as well. Let’s go figure out where we are, and find something to eat.”
Fiducia seems relieved at this idea, and starts pawing through the bag for something that looks like clothing. Eventually she finds a black tee shirt with a cross on the chest and slides into it. “Well, one of us is religious.”
Trix points to a little silver cross around her neck. “I think it’s me.”
Fiducia seems amused by this.
Trix takes one of the sheathed knives out of the leather band and slides it into the waistband of her dark trousers.
“What are you taking that for?”
“I don’t know. We might be in danger, and I think that sword would be a bit conspicuous.”
The other girl accepts this, takes another small knife and slides it into her leather pants once she slips back into them.
They don’t know who they are. They don’t know what they mean to each other. And they don’t know what waits on the other side of that motel room door.
“Ready?” Fiducia asks.
“Not really. But let’s go.”