Prologue: Dinner Without Strings

Autumn had come early to Ankh Morpork that year. This particular evening was an excellent example. The darkness had slunk in mid-afternoon, surprising those working at their desks in the city leaving them squinting at their ledgers. A chill fog had crept up from the river, filling the streets and loitering around impolitely, long after it had more than outstayed its welcome. The streets were full of hunched figures hurrying home, collars turned up against the cold, dank, miserable air. Swirling up from the Ankh, the mist tapped at the lighted windows along the restaurant mile, the tableau of warm glowing images drawing the wistful attention of those scurrying past.

None of the escaping commuters, catching a glimpse of the two women sitting so calmly in the window of the unassuming curry restaurant on the corner, could have known the truth. Known that the calm was only a thin veneer that both were skating over, struggling to maintain the light conversation whilst gingerly negotiating the great sucking holes of past hurts. Magda envied them. Reluctantly she withdrew her attention from the stallholders making their way home along the darkening streets and turned back to that oh-so-familiar figure sitting across the table.

“So, where did you go?”

It had taken Magda two days, eight hours and twenty three minutes to pluck up enough courage for that; to finally broach the subject of the four missing years.

The simple four word question had kept her company every day of those four years. At first the not knowing had been torture, but over time Magda had come to welcome the moments when her mind turned to wondering on what Tilda might be doing right now. The question, carried without complaint through the years, had become an old friend that gave amiable company in her quiet moments.

Until that morning, two days ago, when everything changed. When, as Tilda herself might have said, the theoretical became measurable and therefore real.

Since then, over a long drawn out 56 hours, Magda seemed to have been dragging round an increasingly heavy sack containing all of her mixed-up thinking about that unasked and unanswered question. Magda had felt it heavy on her shoulders as she had waited at the bar for Tilda to arrive, tapping impatient fingers along the slightly sticky surface, wanting a drink but not having one. Even when Tilda arrived punctually on time, the not asking of the question had sat solidly between them, hanging heavy over their polite attempts at small talk. Tilda hadn't seemed to notice.

Magda had just been about to bravely get the issue out in the open when the waiter had come to guide them to their table. Foiled she had swallowed back her words but the question remained, seeming to weave its way through their stuttering attempts at light conversation as they examined the menu. Ignoring it, they had both quickly ordered, Tilda showing a surprising familiarity with Ankh Morpork's view on foreign cuisine. Silence had then fallen as they waited with an assumption of patience for the starter to arrive. Having screwed her courage to the sticking point for nothing, Magda had naturally been unwilling to take responsibility for broaching the subject. But by a simple law of averages, one of them had to break eventually and in the end she had succumbed to the gaping silence.

Having at long last been asked, the question still waited for its answer.

Tilda looked up from the patterns one long finger had been tracing distractedly on the cloth and met Magda's eyes.

“I was...” She paused, choosing her words carefully. “I was trained. As an alchemist. The Engineers Guild took me in.”

Someone bumped against Magda's chair with a short apology, interrupting her concentration. Her head snapped round, paying sudden attention to the surroundings she had stupidly allowed herself to forget and she realised that the restaurant was filling up; couples sliding into small corner tables, groups bustling in, their cheeks flushed in the sudden warmth. Magda scowled, shuffling her chair around to enclose their bay in some semblance of privacy. Damnit. Her fingers thrummed a short tense ditty on the edge of the table. It wasn't supposed to be this busy tonight. She had planned a quiet little dinner. She had been prepared for a quiet little dinner. But now suddenly there were all these people. All these people making noise and re-arranging furniture and being unpredictable.

“They were interested in things blowing up.” Turning to look out of the window Tilda added quietly, “I was good at making things blow up then.”

Magda waited, aware of the background noise of the now busy restaurant but allowing it to fade away behind her. That was another thing she had never really forgotten. You couldn’t push Tilda to talk; you had to wait for the sentences to be ready to come out. It hadn’t always been that way, there had been, long long ago, a time when words had tumbled easily out of that expressive face. The problem then had been to keep the kid quiet, to teach her the importance of finding caution in her speech.

But then, a lot of things had been different back then.

Images leapt into life behind her eyes but Magda forced herself to take a deep controlled breath. One steady intake of air and then another, that was the way. It was no use thinking on those long ago days, it did no good. The warm air of the restaurant tasted faintly of spices against her tongue and she welcomed the odd sensation, using it to anchor her to the present. One couldn't go around being being angry all the time. Not any more.

Magda concentrated on the shimmer of her cutlery, relaxing each tense muscles one by one, until the memories were safely back in the box and she could once again raise her eyes.

It was at this auspicious moment that the starters arrived, their waiter efficiently spreading the dishes between them before vanishing back into the hubbub. Magda blinked, grateful beyond worlds for the interruption and then had to apologise for the sudden rumbling of her stomach. Tilda, still looking out of the window, didn't acknowledge either her apology or the arrival of the food. Magda left her to her thoughts and turned her attention to the dishes before her. The selection looked delicious, after an awkward conversation they had decided to order a mixture to share to save them making a decision. Having selected a few tempting items, Magda began her meal, nibbling distractedly at the crisp delicacies while her thoughts returned to the dark haired woman opposite.

Tilda. She looked just the same.

It had been such an incongruous meeting. Magda allowed her mind to drift, the scene replaying as the flickering candle-light cast a shadow play of images onto their shared reflection in the window.

It had started out as a normal day, the café crowded as usual with the mid morning rush. Magda's mind had been merely ticking over, her concentration focussed only on getting the orders out on time. The morning had been scurrying on by, giving no reason to suspect an impending hiccup, when she'd looked up in frustration after calling an order twice to find Tilda, pale faced with shock on the other side of the counter, hand outstretched for the mundane cardboard cup. They’d both stood there frozen in time until Tilda, visibly pulling herself together, had snatched the cup from her hand and hurried out of the door, the little bell jangling in her wake.

Magda had, of course, got back to work immediately. She was much too busy to allow her thoughts to wander. Her attention was solely committed to the task before her as she had reached for the next order and got straight onto it. She had a job to do and if the rush provided a certain level of distraction, well, that was just an unfortunate side-effect.

But when the peak of caffeine addicts had passed by and she had looked up again, hands on her hips to stretch out that stubborn kink in her back, her eyes had found Tilda sitting at the corner table. Waiting.

The restaurant was getting seriously crowded now, the evening crowd filling table after table, calling for the harried waiters and laughing too loudly at poor jokes. Magda forced down her rising discomfort with yet another set of calming breaths as she spooned a little more mango chutney onto her plate. There had been no other option. It was too cold to walk the streets and she had adamantly refused to take Tilda to a pub. Not yet. Not this time. Swallowing her mouthful with difficulty, Magda forced herself to relax back into her chair. It would be fine. They had booked the table and were therefore bona fide customers, they could stay as long as they wanted. Everything would be fine.

She wished she could have a drink.

“We were developing a new method of refining explosives to improve precision.”

The scent of the food had apparently invaded the far off place that Tilda had retreated to. Reaching for miniature package of spiced vegetables she took a polite nibble and then, as her hunger raised an interested head, set about loading up her plate.

“It was quiet there, out of the city. Safer to do that away from people.” Tilda paused, the tug of past memories insistent. “I liked being away from people then.”

“You were safe?” Magda had no right to ask, but the fear had haunted her for too long for her to stop the words now. “I was afraid, when I couldn’t find you, I thought…”

“No.”

The response was quick and very firm. In a gesture of reassurance, full of echoes from the past, Tilda reached forward and squeezed Magda's hand.

“I wouldn’t do that. You should have known I wouldn’t do that.”

The contact became awkward and both leant back, the space opening up between them again.

“I just went away for a while.”

Her attention once again back in the restaurant Tilda seemed to realise she was falling behind in the eating stakes and lifted her fork to dig in. Together they finished the small selection in silence. Almost immediately their waiter fluttered past and removed the plates, leaving them for a few precious quiet minutes before he brought the main course to the table.

“I'm glad you were safe.”

Their waiter was back, his tray piled high and Magda swallowed the rest of her words for the time being, preferring to bend her attention to the many good things now on the table. They had ordered individual dishes for this course and Tilda separated out the thick stews and rice efficiently. Both began to eat without further need for conversation. Hunger was a pragmatic need even in the face of deep emotional turmoil and it had been a long day.

Eventually however, Tilda reached the point where hunger was reasonably balanced with satisfaction. Swallowing a piece of bread she picked at her meat for a moment before finally managing to ask her own question.

“How are you?”

Her words fell into the space between them like the ubiquitous stone into a millpond and the ripples of painful silence ran out across the table to jut up against a hostile shore. Magda didn't answer immediately, her eyes hidden as she carefully returned the glass she had been just about to take a drink from to the table. Searching for but finding no help in the slightly soiled tablecloth her gaze wiggled away to the more interesting spectacle of a couple walking arm in arm along the opposite pavement outside. She reminded herself that this was only fair. She had been allowed to ask her question, therefore Tilda had to be allowed to ask hers. And to be answered with the truth.

“Better than I was,” Magda produced eventually.

The admission stuck in her throat. Tracing a food stain on the cloth she took a deep breath of courage and continued.

“After you left I... it wasn’t great.”

Magda halted, fighting a wave of sickening memories and felt a hand lightly cover hers for a moment. Sitting there, trapped by the table in front, a large gentleman in the chair behind and a waiter with an overly large tray beside her, Magda watched her plans for the evening go up in smoke. The idea had been to keep conversation light, impersonal. Topics such as “what Magda had done during the past four years” had not been part on the list of possible things to talk about. Very firmly not on the list in fact. All she had wanted was to say hi, check that Tilda was okay, and maybe catch up a little if it wasn't too much of an effort. Instead Magda had ruined everything. Again.

Yet that hand was still resting lightly over hers.

Casting her eyes about desperately, Magda spotted her salvation and, pointing her fork at a bowl of steaming vegetables, she asked lightly,

“Are you gonna eat all that?”

Tilda smiled, withdrew her hand to push the bowl across the table and the tension washed out of the moment on gentle waves. Digging her fork into the potatoes Magda felt the need to reply to Tilda’s generous gesture and pushed over her own highly spiced dish. They shared the remainder of the assortment between them. Some went together better than others but Magda wasn't complaining. Their exploration created an easy ground for neutral conversation and they managed to pass the rest of the meal in companionable experimentation.

“So, you’re back in the wonderful place that is Ankh Morpork?” Magda sopped up the last of the sauce on her plate with some bread. “What brings you back here then?”

“I’ve only been back a short while, I came down a few months after Alls Fallow. ^[1] They’ve been having problems with the Undertaking.”

“The Guild dragged you into that mess? Oh dear.” Magda sat back in her chair, attempting but failing to hide the look of pity that flashed across her face. “They’ve really stitched you up, you know that?”

“Hey!” Tilda’s annoyance was partly genuine but mostly exaggerated. “It’s a good idea in theory.”

“In theory, yeah. In practice it’s a colossal cock-up, half the roads in the city are closed due to massive holes in the pavements, and the rest are clogged solid from sun-up to sun-down with “Undertaking” traffic and dirt movers. The noise of the work is driving the whole population mad, not to mention the dust that gets everywhere in summer and covers the roads inches deep in mud in the winter. It’s a damned waste of time.”

“Not that you hold strong feelings on the matter at all.”

Across the table Tilda had folded her hands delicately before commenting. The familiar gesture dragged a rough bow over Magda's heart strings, producing a discordant harmony of memory. Unaware of her effect, Tilda sat patiently upright, serene as a monk in her superiority.

A mature and respectable Magda Halter would have accepted this as the ideal moment to incline her head graciously and take the higher road as she accepted her companions light censure. As it was, she took the opportunity to vent the last remnants of her irritation by flicking a small remnant of bread over the expanse between them and muttering gracelessly “me and the rest of the city.” Tilda laughed, startling Magda so much that she knocked her fork onto the floor. She ducked for it quickly, glad to have the opportunity to hide her expression. Magda hadn't heard that soft chuckle for such a long time and yet, as she sat back up again, she couldn't regret the memories it had brought with it. When the bread came back at her at high speed, she didn't try to hide her smile, even as she shook her head at such behaviour.

Ignoring her censure, Tilda chased the last grains of rice around her plate before sitting back in her chair with a sigh of enjoyment.

“My work isn’t really anything to do with the tunnels you know. I’m more… specialised.”

Magda leant forward, her interest suddenly caught.

“Are they really going to blow up the Patricians Palace so that they can put a track down to the river? I thought that was just a rumour.”

Tilda had to hide a smile behind her hand.

“I can’t really say. It’s sort of classified.”

They were interrupted by the hovering waiter and his desert menus. Dropping the subject of civil engineering and public transport for the moment, they turned their attention to the choices available for the discerning diner in the way of desert. When they had made their selection, Magda tried to return to the topic, but it seemed that Tilda really was unable to discuss anything about her work. After a couple of questions were carefully turned aside, Magda got the idea and gracefully allowed the subject to drop. This was meant to be a dinner, not an inquisition and she didn't want to make it any harder on Tilda than it already was.

Surprisingly it was Tilda who switched the conversation back into the darker woods of the past that Magda had so artfully been avoiding. Digging into her ice-cream she calmly commented:

“It was odd to bump into you again. I thought perhaps you’d moved on.”

“Surprising, wasn't it? In a city this big.” Magda carefully sidestepped the moving on comment. “I didn’t think you drank coffee.”

“All engineers drink coffee,” Tilda smiled again and this time it stayed. “It’s where we get our best ideas, and our craziest! You’ve seen those new Clacks towers, right? Born out of an all-night coffee buffet at Joe's.”

Ah, coffee. Magda could talk about coffee for hours. Four months as a Barista had provided her with a detailed introduction to the world of caffeination. She settled more comfortably into her seat and prepared for a discussion on the benefits of double filtered and the problems associated with the new steam-driven system found in the most expensive coffee houses. Their chatter drifted amicably from random topic to random topic as they finished up their meal.

Later, walking through the streets with a familiar dark head keeping pace at her side Magda felt something missing and realised she had been waiting for a small hand to creep into hers. For that dark head to drop into her shoulder, for a slim arm to entwine itself within hers and hold her fast.

Even after all these years.

She thought she'd got over the ache, got over the feeling of being only half a person. True, it had been difficult. It had taken a while. But she'd done it. She'd even managed to get used to sleeping alone.

Magda sighed. Wasn’t it enough to know that Tilda was alive and happy? A week ago, wouldn't she have given anything have the answer to the question that accused her from morning until night? And yet now here she was, Tilda at her side, having been given abundantly more than she'd ever dared to wish for. Couldn't she just be satisfied that they were able to walk through the city without too many awkward silences?

Apparently not.

Their path took them into a quieter side street and, coming to a decision, Magda stopped suddenly.

“Til, wait a minute.”

Drifting to a halt in the middle of the pavement just a few steps ahead of her, Tilda looked back.

“Did you know I tried to find you?” Magda closed the gap between them. Just a little. Not too much. You couldn't crowd Tilda. “Not... not then. Not that day. But after.”

Tilda was still waiting, faint incomprehension drawing a line between her brows. Standing there, Magda welcomed the old frustration rising out of her inability to ever find the right words. Oh, she remembered this situation well.

“I wanted to apologise. It’s part of the programme. Step Nine: Make Amends.” She broke into a wry smile. “Of course, I still don’t know what I would have said. There aren’t really any words…“ Her voice tailed off, the many things unsaid and un-sayable clogging her throat.

“You found me now.”

That was all Tilda said and after she said it, she shrugged, collapsing the barren years between them into a few weeks absence that though annoying, could be paid for by a reasonable amount of negotiated reparations.

In that moment, on that dismal street with the persistent tendrils of fog drifting past, Magda stood, rooted to the pavement and felt a weight drop from her shoulders. Tilda began to speak again, but as realisation swirled around Magda like a new cloak, all she could grasp was that despite everything that had happened: everything They had done; gods, everything she had done as well, despite all that, somehow Matilda Tewt had survived. Tilda, her Tilda, whom Magda had feared lost to the fire all those long years ago, was alive and free and standing on a wet street in Ankh Morpork.

Magda felt like someone had taken the top off her head and was blowing a cool wind over her brain. In all her ideas of a future, each one much too pragmatic to be considered hopes, she had never let herself even admit this as a possibility. Some things left you too far away to come back from. And she had been so afraid to hope.

Her lungs laboured, expanding to what felt like an enormous volume in her chest as bands that had been wound about her tightly for years, broke and fell away.

Ever since Magda had first set eyes on the dark haired kid who refused to drop her head, before she even knew what the ache meant, she had grieved for the beautiful girl who should never have come to that place. That kid had changed things, nudging Magda out of her isolation and in return Magda had given the only help she knew how, fighting against her intrinsic wariness to become a protector, finding a find a way of showing a love she didn't know how to give. She had been there through it all, grieving alongside the kid through the hard times, and then alone and silently through those awful months when Tilda had been locked away beyond Magda's reach, deep within her own mind.

When Tilda had begun to make those first fragile steps out of the darkness, Magda had welcomed her shaky shadow back with desperate relief. But she had had to keep her own grief hidden, only able to mourn in secret for the loss of that hopeful little girl she had once known. In those days, she seemed to be the only one who remembered the original Tilda who had been smart and intelligent and able to explain anything given enough of a run up and some dust to write in. A kid who had contained mountains of potential, who was sure of what she knew and unafraid to speak it aloud.

Back then Magda, ever the pragmatist, had made the decision to put every effort into helping Til with her difficult climb. She'd vowed to put away the burning rage against those of the Grey House who had so easily taken away everything from them. Those who had made rules and then broken them, who had been stronger and bigger and smarter and always, always won.

But unfortunately, as they'd found out only too soon in those terrible days before Tilda left, Magda wasn't that good at pushing away things she didn't want to think about...

“…those words will do to start with.”

Returning to the present, Magda abruptly realised she’d missed an important part of the conversation.

“I said:'an apology will do to start with.' And I hereby officially accept yours.”

Magda was lost for words and could only stand there smiling stupidly. She wanted to reach out and gather up her friend who had been so very lost and was now found, but the distance between them was still too great. Despite the reconciliation offered, she knew there were still actions that would have to be paid for, circumstances that would have to be explained. As Magda struggled with what exactly happened now she noticed Tilda shivering in the chill.

Glancing up and down the empty street, Tilda drew her scarf closer around her neck.

“It's getting late, I should go. I have a busy day tomorrow. Thank you for dinner.”

Tilda held out her hand, the boundaries obvious. Magda winced internally. But tonight wasn't the time to challenge those walls. She had learnt harder than anyone what happened when you pushed Tilda further than she was willing to go. She merely took the slender hand as it was offered, lightly holding it in both of hers like the precious thing it was.

“Don’t disappear on me again, ok?”

The words slipped out before she could swallow them back, her tone revealing so much more than she had meant to. However,Tilda didn’t react to the plea behind the words, merely smiling as she smoothly disengaged her hand.

“You make good coffee, I’m sure I’ll pop in sometime.”

Magda watched her until Tilda turned the corner at the far end of the street, then she shrugged, slipped her hands into her pockets and turned on her heel to make her own way home.

~X~

^[1] Lying in the middle of the second summer (due to the intrinsic difficulties of a flat world the disc has eight seasons instead of the more customary four), Alls Fallow is the switch side of our Halloween, when witches stay abed and enjoy a night snuggled up under the covers rather than having to be out-and-about freezing certain appendages off. In Earth terms, Tilda came down to Ankh Morpork at the end of the summer, toward the early autumn.