Not a Bad Woman

Writers: Jane, Bree
Date Posted: 31st October 2006

Characters: Shalai, Delen
Description: After Shalai has an outburst at the mindhealer hall, her healer, Delen, tries to sort through his thoughts by writing in his journal
Location: Elsewhere on Pern
Date: month 13, day 19 of Turn 3

Shalai was sketching when _he_ showed up.

She enjoyed sketching, and it was an easy enough way to pass the time.
The healers wouldn't let her have needles for sewing, not anymore.
They'd offered to teach her how to read, but the marks on the pages blurred together whenever Shalai stared at them too long. If she didn't give up, her father would appear and mock her for trying to step outside her place.

Today she'd been drawing a picture of her husband. Her real husband, the only one she ever thought about as her husband in her head. The part of her that was still sane enough to recognize irony laughed when she acknowledged that Yanthi was the only one of her three husbands who had never, actually, been her husband.

Just that thought was enough. Her fingers tightened around the dull stub of charcoal as the laughter started, quiet at first. Mocking. Smug.
Shalai ignored it and concentrated on the fine lines making up Yanthi's hair in her sketch. The fall of it over his forehead, and how the ends sometimes fell into his eyes...

"My eyes," Thian's voice retorted, and a gnarled old finger came down on the paper. "And they're too close together. I should know, since I see them in the mirror every morning."

"No, you don't," Shalai replied calmly, ignoring the presence of her second husband. He wasn't _really_ there, after all. Like the voices and everything else, he was her punishment for the immoral life she'd led.
"You don't see them because you're dead," she said calmly, setting her pencil to the paper. "And even when you weren't, you never looked in the mirror. You liked to pretend you weren't old and decrepit."

Thian laughed again, pulling up a chair to sit down next to Shalai. "Oh, I was never as old as you pretend, you silly, dirty little girl. That's what you tell yourself so you can pretend that it wasn't wrong to run off with my son."

Shalai's eyes slid up to look at him, at those brilliant green eyes in the middle of his old, tired face. Her lover's eyes. His son's eyes.

"I was not a bad woman," she said firmly, but her voice wavered as he started to laugh again. "I _wasn't_!"

Thian was still laughing, laughing so sharding loudly... so it wasn't his voice that drifted past her next. "I'm going to sit in the sun while I wait for you."

Shalai's head whipped around, but the speaker was already gone. Maybe they'd never been there at all. The nice ones never seemed to stay... it was only people like Thian, or Rolayn, or her father. They came. And they laughed. And they taunted her for thinking she could escape justice.

Her fingers tightened on the tiny stub of charcoal until it snapped in two, and she flung the pieces at Thian. He ducked them easily, and his laughter only increased when one of the healers started towards her.

"I'm _not_ a bad woman!" she screamed, ripping the portrait she'd drawn of Yanthi out of her book and crumpling the paper up into a ball. Before the healer could reach her, she threw it at Thian. "I'm not!"

~*~

Delen sat down at the small desk beside his bed and pulled his journal toward him. Everything he did during his day was recorded in some way on patient records or on the diary for the wing of the Mindhealer Hall in which he worked. And yet he felt compelled to record more – to go over some things that happened in his day just once more, in a different, more personal way.

--Month Thirteen, Nineteenth Day--

"S. was in a state of agitation for about a candlemark again today.
What brings on the crises is a mystery but during this one she talked a lot. The usual themes – immorality and punishment appeared. It certainly sounds as if she's having conversations with people who aren't there. Perhaps people from her past, perhaps people who never existed.
This wasn't one of the worst crises but it wasn't pleasant for her or for us. At least this time nobody got hurt and she settled down quite quickly."

He paused to read over the words. They weren't technical because that was already covered by the report. This was a record of the things he thought about during his day. Sometimes the entries followed a single patient for a while, sometimes they dealt with the complex professional relationships between the healers he worked with. Whatever was most memorable about the day for _him._

He leaned back in his chair, mulling over his shift. Anything else of note? Not really. Shalai's crisis had been the main feature of an otherwise quiet day.

He blew onto the page to make sure the ink was dry and closed the journal.

Last updated on the November 1st 2006

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Not a Bad Woman