(no subject)
It's an itch, almost.
Almost, mind you, because she isn't particularly sure what it is exactly.
But it's rather persistently there. Somewhat like an itch you cannot find. And even when you think that you have, it manages to move itself to a different place altogether.
It starts a sort of hum - quiet and cheerful - at the back of her throat and has her spinning circles (up, over, on top of) on her toes and wondering, idly, how terribly hard mending the hems of her dresses would be. Even though she's well aware that she would only tug them back out again. (Habits are hard to break - especially when they are very terribly old ones.)
It's just - it would look better if she fixed them now that she thinks about it.
Oh, and now she's being utterly ridiculous.
It's not as though anyone is looking at her dresses anyhow.
__
It's quiet again and she's skimming her way about the leaning, teetering piles of the left-behind and yesterday-treasures.
The itch, she thinks, has found its way to her feet.
And to her fingers, perhaps, which seem - for some odd reason - to want to arrange things.
A flicker of some dim, dark light and the curve of something over there catches her attention.
They are lovely things when one takes the time to look at them - and there are places enough for them to fit, after all, if she wants to find them.
"As though I am expecting company," she murmurs, fingers continuing to flitter a particular something this way and to straighten a particular something else that way until she catches herself at it and her eyes roll, smile curling its way upward in an entirely unhelpful manner.
It's something, she figures, with an absent sort of shrug.
Something other than wondering what she seems to be waiting for.
It could not hurt, after all, to organize a bit.
__
It's just that one forgets just how many things make their way to her river.
A whole slew of swords - the soldiers that have passed through haven't exactly been small in number - and piles of coins, stones, bits of fancy shine (five chest-fulls so far) and for everything she fixes she knocks over yet another load of something else. Or she finds herself fascinated with some little thing and loses hours searching for the place where each of them fit into what she knows, into what she holds.
(their stories are still important)
She's dripping and flushed (and wearing an odd hat with a persistently floppy feather that she recalls had something to do with the dusty old chest that she had wrangled out, only to topple a tower of - and oh goodness was that just another mess) when she makes her way back to the waiting - always waiting - Line; startling the man standing at the front with a bright smile and a bow she borrowed from someone else entirely.
The feather rather adds to the flourish.
And this time itch is a laugh, caught in her throat, but free again when the man actually smiles back.
__
She's on her knees, a string of pearls wound around one arm and the edges (still tattered) of her dress caught up in the slow rippling of the river, sorting through some books with slightly waterlogged pages and she spares a moment - okay, more than a moment (but only just a little) - to wonder.
To wonder if -
("It ... shattered everything.")
Oh. Well that's a bit of a worry, isn't it?
Not that a worry, upon occasion, couldn't be a wonder just as much. Or that you couldn't worry in a wondering manner. Or, really, that she is worrying at all.
It's just - if she knew -
The thought skips a heartbeat, flutters her fingers and turns the pages - blurring the words in their race across the invisible lines they run (over, along, and down to start again) - and the motion pauses where it is.
Suspended for a moment before it flits downward, catching at a slightly rusted hinge somewhere to her left and spilling a slow trickle of music into the air.
On its tiny pedestal a painted ballerina spins in time and she smiles, leans closer.
Sometimes, she thinks, you manage to find such astounding things when you're not looking for them at all.