I was half the way through my job home when I had a sudden weight appear at my side, throwing me off balance, followed by the warm feeling of soft fur and some odd crunching sounds. The mysterious fox-like phenomenon that Viktor had evidently named 'Steeve' had suddenly reappeared, and was either trying to or eating something on my person. An odd vocalization that sounded to my ears like a dog begging, an en en en sound, was emitting from her nonperson as the crunching continued.

I stopped, as I needed to figure out what was going on. I pulled my shirt aside and realized the little miscreant was in the bandolier of Artifacts I'd been given by István, ones I'd forgotten to return to him in the rush of activity at the end of what had become my longest workday ever.

I'd caught 'her' just in time to witness her gobble up the last remaining one.

"Hey those were…" I started saying, reaching out to grab Steeve. She blinked out of existence nearly as fast as she had appeared with a kekekee and I felt the now-familiar weight of her return to my soul. I wasn't sure if she was actually in there or if she simply wasn't in physical reality and this was her way of letting me know she was around.

Mysterious fox be mysterious, I guess.

Gran took one look at me when I walked in and just handed me her wash towel. No admonishment, no Gran-standing, no nothing. It was a little creepy, so much so I felt I had to speak up about it.

I had my mouth about half-way open when she stopped me.

"I can tell just by looking at you that you've had a time of things, my dear," she said. "I assume you had a very good reason to not be home sooner and that you would have let us know if you could have."

I nodded, before tears formed in my eyes and suddenly I was crying. Just bawling my eyes out with big sucking breaths, heaving chest, the whole shebang.

I'd been suppressing everything, tamping it down so far that Celistar probably had to duck. My worry about my family, concerns about my future interactions with the Umbral Veil, frustration with my Nebula not working how it should, and the utter exhaustion I'd been holding off. There was probably even some trauma in there from that freaky wall eye thing, because why not.

She wrapped me in one of her world-famous hugs until I felt a bit better - well, at least until I stopped crying as much, anyway. "Believe it or not, somehow we managed without you," she said, a bit of a sly grin on her face, handing me a handkerchief to clear my face up a bit with. It came away noticeably dirty. I probably was something else to look at. A dust and tears and snot covered waif of a girl if there ever was one.

"Now look at what you've done, you've ruined my favorite one," Gran said, tossing what was probably a cleaning rag in the general direction of the garbage pail, obviously not intending to actually throw it away. I smiled in spite of myself, her having succeeded in cheering me up a little. "Go and clean yourself up, you'll ruin my pristine white carpets at this rate," she said, patting me on the hind end to shoo me out of the kitchen in the same way she had since I was too short to see over the table.

It was somehow reassuring to know that no matter how much the rest of my life changed, that Gran never would. She'd always be the same sort of crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside that she had always been, come hell or high water. It helped ground me somehow.

I went into the bathroom, and stared at myself in the cracked mirror. I had reverse raccoon eyes, a dusty face with two clear spots where my tears and rubbing my eyes had washed away the dirt. My clothes were effectively stained black on the front, gunk from the stringy side of beef I'd tenderized. Perhaps the reason I hadn't garnered more attention on my return was that there were occupations our neighbors held that required them to return home even more repulsively covered in gunk than I had.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

The shower shrieked to life with a hard turn of the handle, arguing the whole time with the sort of gurgling sputter you'd expect from a water system that probably had more leaks than pipe. It'd wind up spitting and coughing at least two or three times during my shower, usually when I was trying to wash my hair, if my luck held.

It was somewhat disturbing to watch the water run black for the first few minutes. There was no pressure to speak of, just this anemic drizzle of water that was unfortunately quite cold - somehow defying the consistently hazy, swampy weather to be the approximate temperature of my mother's frosty fingers.

Worse yet was trying to get through the tangled, matted mess that was my locks. My hair was normally this fairly fine, frizzy mess, but this was a whole new hell I'd managed to descend into, with seemingly every strand desperately clinging to every other one in one single, monolithic block.

I was kind of surprised that even all the way back, no one had mentioned how I looked. Not once. It was as though they had unilaterally decided I just didn't need to know.

We won't even address the fact that István was effectively spotless when we got back, somehow. Did the man steam clean himself when we weren't looking or something? It was no fair. Viktor had made me feel a little better by being nearly as dirty as I was, though in his case it was his arms from the punchy parts on up that were a mess, unsurprisingly.

All of it went down the drain, which then clogged. I may or may not have cried again in frustration at this point before going through the motions of unclogging it. I will say watching all that filth go down the drain was very satisfying, it felt like the ugly bits of my feelings went with them at well.

"I'm a new woman," I said to the shattered version of myself in the mirror. I left the bathroom, and caught Liam giving me the strangest look. "What?" I asked.

"Who are you?" he said, the question having a sing-song quality in his little voice. He was kind of half hiding around the corner as he said it, but not doing a very good job.

"Say huh?"

"If you're not Char, who are you?" He repeated himself.

"Why would you think I'm not me?"

"Cause you said so," he said, and it finally clicked. At this point I was quite tired, so I was able to forgive myself for a not being able to parse a little kid's ramblings well.

"It's an expression bud," I told him. "I was so dirty that it didn't feel like I was even me!" I was about to ask him if he'd ever felt that way, but little boys were just noise with some dirt on it so he probably wouldn't be able to empathize.

"Well, I'm glad you are still you. I would miss you if you weren't you." He ran forward and gave me a big hug, wrapping his short arms as far around me as he could.

"Thanks bud," I said, "I needed that."

Turns out Gran had held back some supper for me, since I was back home later than we'd normally eat. She had held some from the night before, but without a way to preserve it, it wasn't looking so hot. We were originally going to throw it out, but a neighbor who would otherwise have went hungry was able to take it from us, so that made me feel better.

Even on the cold side, the rice dish she'd made was very tasty, and I wolfed down the whole thing like it never existed.

I only choked a little, it was nothing life-threatening.

After the meal, I hung around with Gran and Liam, making small talk. Eventually Alessa heard my voice and wandered in from wherever she had been. Turned out the answer was a nap she was forced to catch after staying up nearly all night worrying about me, which wasn't the answer I wanted to hear, but was still the answer anyway.

"In the future, please don't," I said.

"Don't worry, or don't stay up worrying?" She asked, her hands on her hips in classic 'ain't-taking-none-of-your-shit' Alessa mode.

"Can I maybe have both?" I questioned, already ducking.

She rapped me on the head anyway, with just enough knuckle for me to feel.

"Maybe you should just come back sooner." She said, pretending to be cross more than anything. I think she had some idea of what I'd went through just looking at me, since even with the shower I still felt utterly wiped. I was going to sleep like a brick, and pretty soon at that, I could already feel the sleepies creeping up on me.

"I would love to say I will, but it wasn't like I intended to be gone as long as I was," I said in my defense.

"They aren't making you do anything weird, are they?" She asked.

"No," I replied, likely leveling up my poker face at least five times in one go. Technically correct is the best kind of correct after all - 'they' weren't making me do shit, the Umbral Veil was.

While she didn't entirely seem like she'd bought my little white lie, at least she seemed to realize that my employer wasn't out to get me the same way hers had been. One could argue I brought István and Viktor more trouble than they brought me.

The conversation carried on afterwards, before I eventually excused myself to go to bed.

I was out before my head even hit the pillow.

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