Down Time, Open

[PEACHES]

But all that's dead and gone and passed tonightPeaches was sweeping up the bar while it still wasn’t too busy. Eventually the brothel would be full of men and the girls would be wondering about and she wouldn’t be able to think. She was humming to herself as she did her work. The wood felt smooth from years of boots scuffing them. Peaches liked to walk around the place barefoot when there weren’t people around, otherwise her toes got tread on much too often and boots hurt bare toes. She moved to sweep the dust out of the front door and stood with her hands on her hips, watching the orange sun as it started to lower. She sighed, thinking about how if everything hadn’t gone wrong she would be walking to Jerome’s place to meet him before going home to help her mom with dinner.She shook her head. Peaches couldn’t afford to think about that anymore mainly because it hurt too much and she often found herself awash with guilt and crushing homesickness when she did. So Peaches shook it off and went inside, placing the broom where it lived when it wasn’t getting used and she pulled out a rag and a couple glasses and started wiping them down. If she didn’t watch things tended to get dusty around the place if things didn’t get wiped down regularly and no one liked dust in their whiskey. Peaches liked to stay busy so once she was done with the glasses she started moving tables and everything around. She was humming a little under her breath as she did. She was lucky that she had a job here in the brothel and lucky it was one that didn’t involve her having to sell herself especially since she didn’t know the details of the curse that had ruined her life. She was sure she had to actually feel something for whoever it was in order for it to cause death but she didn’t want to be in a situation to find out. Besides, it was nice to be able to work and not sell her body. Lu and the other girls had courage she didn’t and she was quite thankful for the protection Lulu provided her while she worked at the brothel. She’d been there for a while and her innocence was intact and she would stay there forever if she could. But she had a feeling she wouldn’t be able to. One of these days the witch who cursed her or the sheriff he owned would find her and she would find herself dragged back to the town she’d run away from a criminal or a bride. It made her sick to her stomach to think about it so she pushed it into the back of her mind. Right now she would focus on finding out a way to break the curse so if she had to go back home to her family she could at least tell her mother and father she loved them before being hanged or worse, married to William. tagged: open | word count: 508 | notes: lalalacassie at atf & caution.

[BRIYA LOVARA]

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CONCRETE GIRL, DON'T FALL DOWN
_{IN THIS BROKEN WORLD AROUND YOU}
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Briya stepped into the common room of the brothel, glad to see it relatively empty.

She and her sister had arrived in town hours earlier, and had immediately set about plying their trade as both fortune tellers and--in Sonja's case especially--spirited horseback performers. That was what her little sister was still doing, entertaining the masses and, no doubt, lining her pockets in the process. Briya, though, had found herself preoccupied.

It turned out that many of the people in town were open to her services, specifically the fortune telling. Briya was a very skilled practitioner of cartomancy, the divining of the future through the use of cards. Not tarot cards, or any other special sort of deck, but through standard playing cards. Unfortunately, though she'd managed alright at first, every time she employed her gift to read the cards, her psychic attention was drawn elsewhere. This wasn't necessarily unusual; in fact, there were many times when visions tried to force themselves on her while she practiced her cartomancy. Typically she ignored it and pressed on with her reading, but the visions were particularly vivid and demanding, and eventually she had given up any pretense of fortune telling and taken her leave.

After she'd wandered off on her own, Briya let the visions come. They were vague, despite their apparent urgency: she saw a young woman--little more than a girl, really--with an aura of distress, sadness, and desperation about her. The more she wandered, the clearer the vision became though, and she realized that as she neared her unknown destination, the vision was becoming stronger.

Briya was more than a little shocked when she found herself standing outside of Tanglefoots, a reputable brothel just outside of Carson City. She had, of course, heard of the place; it was a hunter safe house, and though she had never been there before, it had a very good reputation. Still, a brothel was a very dangerous place for someone with her peculiar gift of touch-reading. All it would take was one drunk customer to grab her thinking she was a prostitute, and things would go straight to hell.

Once she was inside, she let her eyes adjust to the relative darkness. There were lanterns glowing cheerily along the walls, and a large, roaring fire built up in the hearth The relative emptiness of the place caused her to relax a little, her eyes wandering the room until, finally, they stopped on a young woman who was very familiar to Briya, despite the fact that the gypsy had never laid eyes on her before.

Putting on a warm--if exhausted--smile, Briya nodded a casual greeting and made her way over to the bar, waiting to be served. She would have to ease into this, so as not to frighten the girl. One simply did not approach someone, say that they'd seen them in a vision, and expect everything to be okay. She would broach the subject of her presence here, but not just yet.

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_{TAGGED: Peaches/Open
NOTES: None
LYRICS: Switchfoot - "Concrete Girl"
CREDITS: Thanks to BUNNYA! at Caution 2.0}