Remnants

Alpaca Socks

"Alright, apprentice Journeyman, it's time to wake up," Anya told herself as she looked at her tired face in the mirror above a basin of water in her small room.

Spotting traces of green and black face paint on the edges of her face and around her ears, she soaked a wash cloth in the water. Wringing it out, she scrubbed her face, using the cool water to attempt to revive her bleary eyes. Although Anya had never tried coffee before, she wished she had some now. Absentmindedly, she stared into the mirror as she gently ran her forefinger down the length of her crooked nose. Liza, Jack, and Evan had done all they could for her nose but it had still obviously been broken and she seemed to only ever be able to breathe through one nostril. It would take a skilled plastic surgeon, which would be impossible to find, to fix the damage but at least it didn't hurt and looked good enough.

She used a worn toothbrush and an improvised toothpaste made of baking soda, finely ground charcoal, and water to clean her teeth, rinsing with a bottle of well water and spitting the black colored water into a cup. Weary but refreshed, she looked at the mirror again. The unfamiliar green eyes stared back. They were not the eyes she was born with. They were not the eyes that had looked so much like her mother's, a deep, warm twinkling brown. They were strangers on her face, a prize and constant reminder of the morning that still haunted her dreams.

Anya was not exhausted this morning because of the late night training exercise. She had done her best to sleep in that morning, just as she was sure Jack, Brian, Henry, and Matt had as they had all been up well past midnight in the dark woods surrounding their village. Instead she was tired after a restless night thanks to the nightmares that continued to plague her attempts at sleep.

It was always the same dream. She was back in the pecan grove, being chased down by Eric. She was unarmed, bleeding from the bullet wounds in her left arm and right calf and from her shattered nose. Her legs felt like they were filled with sand as he finally caught up to her. When she reached out to the trees around her in the same way she had so desperately done that autumn morning, the branches did not wrap around the cruel mercenary. Instead, they wrapped around her wrists and ankles as they lifted her into the air. Each night she screamed in horror, desperately trying to stop the branches as they stretched. As she screamed, Eric would stand before her, laughing a terrible, wicked laugh at her terror. Then Gabe would join them. He did not look like the sly and smooth man that she had fallen in love with, instead he looked like he did the last time she saw him. Frothy blood gurgling from his mouth, chest heaving, he would point up at her. Rather than panic, his face was stretched into a macabre grin, blood staining his once perfectly white teeth. His right arm was always stretched up, pointing at her. His left arm, the one the bullet had passed through, hung limp and mangled at his side. She always awoke in a cold sweat just before the branches ripped her into pieces in the same way she had torn her attacker apart.

She had been so tired when she came in the night before, she had hoped that maybe she wouldn't have the nightmare. That she might be able to get a few hours of peaceful sleep. Stumbling into her small private room that had been partitioned off in what had once been the garage of Jack's home turned inn, she collapsed into bed after pulling her shirt up and rubbing off most of her face paint and kicking her still laced up boots off onto the floor.

Her face and neck now free of paint and teeth clean, she pulled the ties from her braids and worked her fingers through the hair, rubbing her sore head. It wasn't her day for a shower but her head was pounding from her lack of sleep and even the thought of keeping her hair in the tight braids only made her head pound more fiercely.

Now loosened from the braids that had contained her hair for well over twenty four hours, her white blonde hair fell just above her shoulders in wild curls. Her natural dark hair color had never begun to grow in leading her to assume that the potion that Liza had given her had actually changed the color of her hair rather than just dying the existing hair. She didn't mind; after the master Journeyman and friend of her father, Evan, had told her how much she looked like her mother, she wanted to keep it that way. The loss of the eyes that looked so much like her mother's only deepened that desire to retain some semblance of her appearance.

She removed her long sleeved shirt and, wetting her rag again, attempted to scrub off the residue of the face paint she had removed the night before. It had probably not been the best idea to use the high quality, form fitting base layer to remove the paint which she only realized as she struggled at cleaning the paint off. The weary apprentice looked around her small but messy room and sighed. It needed to be cleaned, desperately. Somehow she had found a way to clutter the tiny room with her meager belongings.

She hung up her wet shirt to dry and looked around the room, hands resting on her hips. Her rifle, the AK-47 she had inherited from her father, was mounted on the wall above where the sawed off Mosin Nagant, called an "Obrez," also hung. Her pistol belt and chest rig full of loaded magazines hung on hooks on either side. On her small nightstand sat her finely crafted, German made, Heckler and Koch pistol. It was loaded and had a round of .45 ACP chambered alongside her father's Marine Corps Ka-Bar knife in its leather sheath. Littering nearly every square inch of floor space and a small wooden chair in the corner were the clothes she had been wearing over the last several weeks, all in varying degrees of cleanliness based on the piles in which they sat. Her wooden chest that she used to hold clean clothes sat open with a pair of athletic shorts hanging out. Next to the wooden door, her boots lay on their sides, still laced and muddy from the night before. Her window was open to let the cool breeze flow into the otherwise stuffy room, the dark curtain flowing gently.

She grimaced at the thought of the frustratingly tedious chore, scratching the scar on her left arm with her opposite hand distractedly. She decided it would be a job for another day as she stripped off her remaining dirty clothes and replaced them with comfier, clean counterparts. She wore a pair of old gray sweatpants given to her by Chuck's widow, Sherry, and one of Jack's old black sheriff's department hoodies. Most of her clothes had been given to her by others, but not all of them. In place of shoes she wore a thick pair of comfy socks made from alpaca wool that she bought from a local farmer. Jack had given her the task of keeping the inn's larders full of meat, a difficult job during a harsh winter, and even paid her a small wage to do so, allowing her to actually buy or trade for things from the local farmers. The comfy socks were her first major purchase and she was always proud to wear them.

Looking at herself in the mirror one last time, she smoothed down the braid-curled hair with her hands as best as she could. She then bared her teeth at the mirror to ensure there were no traces of the black left from her charcoal-infused toothpaste. Next to the mirror was an old frame photograph of her family, from when she was a little girl. Back before her mom got sick. Before Anya even knew the word "cancer." Before she ever could have imagined losing even one of her parents. She touched the simple wooden frame before turning away. Breathing in unevenly through her nose, she let out a sigh through pursed lips before plastering on a fake smile and emerging to the common area of the inn to start her day.