Morning

She washed her hair, carefully, running soap through it with her fingers, then combing her hair with it. Rinsing the comb, then brushing through again. Rinse, brush. All of the soap came out eventually. Then she started all over, soaping roots to tips, combing roots to tips, rinsing roots to tips with her comb.

"The first virtue is resilience," passed through her lips. Voiced or not, it hardly mattered. She was alone; she thought them. They were solid with or without her; that was the point. "Life will pick at you, slam into you. You cannot simply be hard enough; you will shatter. You cannot simply move with it; you will never make anything new. The first virtue is being."

Roots to tips. Rinse. It had been too long since she'd washed her hair, really washed it, and much had happened. Diet, stress. Hormones. Hair came out, enough to catch in the drain, enough for the soles of her feet to be warm in half an inch of water.

Her breath broke.

Soap. Roots to tips. "The second virtue is critique. It is easy to believe. You must pick at ideas. If you pick at all equally, the good ones will stand where the false ones fall. The second virtue is thought."

Rinse. Roots to tips. Rinse. No more hair was coming out by now. Her hair was still reasonably thick. Good.

She leaned her head under the current of water, hair falling in front of closed eyes, water touching her lips, her nose. "The last virtue is curiosity. We are born with this. We want to know." That was aloud, loud enough to bounce back to her above the sound of rushing water. "Resilience gives you the ability to ask; critique gives you enough knowledge to know what to ask. Curiosity is your drive.

"The last virtue is life. Remember it."

In her room lay sketches of patterns: squares within squares, fractal leaf veins. In her office lay papers she would come back to, soon, tomorrow. Because people needed her, because she could bounce back, because she wanted to understand.

For the moment, she allowed herself the luxury. One day. Showering with too much water, too much soap, and giving her life to the conversation. It had started with a mantra, too, a script that let you start somewhere when saying something no one ever wanted to say.

"Ms. Anderson, we regret to inform you that on the morning of the nineteenth..."

One Day

Her voice kept the cadence, and she didn't look at him.

"One day...when the Earth burns cold and fire is a distant dream, when warmth is rarer than diamonds and burning is indescribable, perhaps I will lie down to rest. Perhaps I will have that respite, will have gone long enough and have no more promises to keep. Nothing to keep me clawing back up."

Her eyes closed.

"My little ones will be grown--unless they don't, and I end up spending my life hunting who hurt them. But, should life work out as I would have it, they will grow. They will live. They won't need me anymore. I'll be here and find that no one calls for me to save them from dark creatures they barely understand"--without opening her eyes, she nodded towards the two, though one had moved--"and I'll be done."

A dark, genuine smile touched her lips.

"Perhaps it will be death. Given how I live, I would guess that I'll see it coming, if only by a few seconds. Have a moment to myself when I simply know there's nothing left to do, no one left to save, nothing to do to extend a life or a helping hand. Just feel it...end."

A few people shivered. She opened her eyes, glittering with a sun-bright smile.
The hearth crackled, and the usual hum of background conversation gradually started back up. Everyone could figure out how much she dedicated. Very few liked to think of it.

"But not today, I think."

Painting and Whitewashing

EDIT for those who don't share my lexicon of idioms: There's a saying that goes, "Too poor to paint, too proud to whitewash." That means the person/group being described cannot do something properly and therefore refuses to do it at all, even if there is another alternative available. A family can't afford to paint their house with white paint, and is too proud to use whitewash instead, even if it would look better than leaving the place to wear down.

I'll admit it; I have a certain amount of respect for someone who, when faced with the prospect of whitewashing, absolutely refuses to do anything but paint, and then proceeds to make that work. I have respect for that level of determination.

-That, by the way, is my line between determination and stubbornness: can you make it work?-

But what really makes me smile, and something that I'd want in an ally as much as a friend, is when someone looks at all the options, notes that it would be most efficient to whitewash, and then proceeds to whitewash without another word. No complaints, no seeing if this will work when painting would be harder or whitewashing better or even, just doing it.

Pride is a deadly little vice. It says, "Look, you could do this...but you could do so much better." Of course, given that this is the verbal embodiment of pride, it's probably doing something like purring or smiling or laughing. Because what good's a voice representing pride if it doesn't have a bit of cockiness behind it?

What got me thinking about this was the following exchange, which I found on the Ain't Too Proud To Beg page on TV Tropes, which is, you guessed it, going to suck your time away into the shiny vortex that is Wiki Walk.

From Farscape
Crichton: Beg.
Scorpius: [instantly] I beg you.
Crichton: That's not good enough. Say please.
Scorpius: Please.
Crichton: Pretty please.
Scorpius: Pretty please.
Crichton: With a cherry on top.
Scorpius: [only one word behind] With a cherry on top.
Crichton: [Beat] Happy Birthday. Now, get out of my sight.

That just makes me smile. And think of an Eleanor Roosevelt quote, "No one can make you feel inferior without your permission." The idea behind making someone beg in that situation is--and forgive me if I miss some of the context, I don't watch the show--either power for the person demanding, or embarrassment for the person begging, which is really just a specific fashion to gain the former.

And then...he decides it's worth it, and proceeds to do it. It doesn't hurt him, because he doesn't let it. Anyone who trots out the sticks and stones line is so naive as to be thoughtless, but the thing about words is that they don't need to hurt any more than hits do. One can dodge, one can block, one can turn the other people's momentum against them and suddenly have the upper hand. It's all in how one decides to deal with it.

Of course, wailing on the other person is a perfectly acceptable method if it works.

What? I said I had a great deal of respect for people who could whitewash, I didn't say anything about preferring it myself. Nor even being able to do it, really... It would be a nice skill. I'm trying.

Incidentally, this has been in my head for a while, and what finally got me to finish was this Harry Potter fanfiction, specifically this chapter (search "I have changed today's lesson plan in the light of recent events", and read to the bottom of the page.)