Follow Up, Part One. Sort Of. :-\
Okay.
Since I'm sure all of you have read Latin_Doll's beautiful and heartbreaking works ( There'll Be Children and No Butterflies Here, Except Maybe One), you must all be wondering what happens next.
At least, I was certainly wondering what happens next. To the point of pestering her madly and finding out that she did not want to write action.
So. I asked if I could write a follow-up (and by 'write', I mean "post somethign that I've already started writing"). Anyway. That was a couple of days ago, and now it's done.
In first-draft form, anyway. Please Beta. Help? :-)
It's something like 24-25 pages long, so I'm posting in three parts. Here is Part one.
Warning: Rated T for Torture (although it could, technically, be worse).
Butterflies are Free
Part I
“I’m so sorry,” Mal whispers against her throat, the brush of her lips a horrible parody of a kiss.
“Please,” Polly whispers back. “It’ll be alright.”
But she feels her skin rip, the muscle of her shoulder tear, just at the base of her neck, and the pain is crippling for a moment. She tells herself that she’s been through worse, and she has, but she’s never been this afraid, never known this bone-numbing terror, not even on the battle field. Not even at the sound of heavy boots outside their cell.
Her head is swimming from blood-loss, and she can feel herself slipping away-
Polly gasps in the dark, panting, her breath forming misty clouds in the chilly air.
“Pol?” a whisper comes from across the room, and Polly reminds herself that Mal never really sleeps these days.
“H-how much time do you have?” she asks, softly, fearing the answer.
When the guards had taken Mal away, they’d given her coffee. Polly had grasped at that fact like a straw when she’d heard it, but over the course of the next four days, when, mercifully, no guards had come for either of them, she had realized that it meant something else.
It meant they might know about the coffee.
“Mal?” Polly ventures, again.
Polly hears Mal swallow audibly in the tiny room.
“Another day? If I hold tight.”
“Do you think they’re waiting to see if you kill me?”
To that, there is no reply.
Not that Polly had expected one.
Mal had spent most of the last few days curled in on herself, just breathing, and Polly hasn’t been able to bring herself to get close. A cough rattles in her chest, but she suppresses it as best she can.
“That cough sounds bad.”
Polly laughs, hollowly.
“I’ve had worse,” she answers. Briefly, she wishes that she wasn’t so afraid, wishes that she could bring herself to crawl the short distance from her wall to Mal’s, to curl up beside her and share what warmth they have between each other. She swallows, hard, against the lump in her throat and asks, “How are your wrists?”
“I’ve had worse,” comes the answer, tinged with bitterness.
“I’m sorry.”
Sorry for what? she asks herself. For getting the shackles off? For being the one who was left behind.
She already knows the answer to that.
“I can bend my fingers again,” Mal informs her, and this time her voice is almost cheerful.
The better to hold you down with, my dear…
“Oh,” she answers. “That’s good.”
Polly goes over what they have.
1) Two military issue uniforms, somewhat threadbare
2) One set of silver shackles that only one of us can touch
3) One short length of scrappy, but remarkably strong rope, cut in two and fraying badly at the cut ends
4) One pair of hard-won scissors
Hard-won indeed. That time, it had been Mal paying the price to buy them more time. Polly can hear the sound of Mal’s bones, cracking under the pressure of the heavy boots, but she pushes the memory away.
She hesitates a moment more before adding
5) One vampire, going through dangerous levels of withdrawal
to the list.
“Mal?”
She waits, wondering if there will be an answer this time.
“Ask,” Mal says, after almost too long a while, her voice resigned. “Ask whatever you want.”
Polly closes her eyes, and the darkness gets a little darker, though not much.
“Can… Can you get out…?” she asks, trying to swallow the hundred questions lurking below that one. If you can, why are you still here? If you could... would you take me, too?
A sigh in the dark.
“Not yet,” she answers, finally.
This had been the other half of their plan - their stupid, suicidal famous-last-stand. There was a hatch, big enough to slide a half-empty tin plate through, in the bottom of the door. The stolen scissors, whatever Mal had endured during those endless hours while Polly sawed through her own bindings thread by thread, picking the locks on Mal’s shackles… it had all been for this. Bound by silver, Mal couldn’t transform. Free, she could. She could get herself through the hatch in the door, reach back through and take whatever sharp implement Polly had managed to take, and pick the lock of the cell. Or at least, that had been the plan.
High, high above them, the grey of false dawn begins to filter through the cruel joke of a window.
“What do you mean?” Polly asks.
Silence, again.
Then, “In case you hadn’t noticed,” Mal answers, “they haven’t fed us in a while. It’s not exactly helping the healing process.”
It was true. There had been water, because prisoners are no fun when they shrivel up and die, but there hadn’t been any food since Mal got brought back to the cell.
“I don’t think,” Mal went on, “that I could pull myself back together again if I let myself go.”
If I let myself go...
Polly shudders in the dark, her hand creeping to the scabbed over wound on her neck. What if Mal let herself go? She felt her hand close reflexively around the scissors, still lying by her side. Could they work as a stake?
Gods, she thinks, realizing what she’s contemplating. She forces her fingers to relax. A week ago - only a week ago - Mal had rested her head in Polly’s lap and Polly had run her numbing fingers awkwardly through Mal’s hair. I know I loved you once. I remember.
“Was this for nothing?” she wonders, aloud.
She hears Mal scoff, listens as she struggles into a sitting position, the hiss of her breath signalling the brush of her still-raw skin against the stone floor.
Polly turns her head enough to see Mal, her arms draped across her knees, her ravaged wrists hanging free. Her eyes are bleak.
“Was it, sarge?”
Sarge, she thinks. Not Polly. That hurts, even after this much pain.
In all the time they’ve been here, Mal has only cried once. When she had bitten Polly. A treacherous part of Polly wants to see Mal cry again, wants to see her cool-as-a-cucumber composure, what’s left of it, crack just a little.
Maybe that’s why she sits up, and looks at Mal.
Maybe it’s because she knows they’ve only got one day left, if that, before Mal does this anyway, and that’s why she reaches for her collar and begins unfastening the buttons, exposing the angry welts that remain from the last time she let Mal anywhere near her.
Maybe it’s because a little part of her thinks that, possibly, if she felt guilty enough, Mal might come back for her if she got out.
Maybe that’s why she bares her throat and asks, “Will this help?”
Or maybe there’s another reason, but Polly can’t see what it is anymore.
“You don’t want to do this,” Mal says, but her eyes fasten on the healed-over gash in Polly’s neck.
No, Polly thinks. I don’t.
“Can you think of anything else?” she asks, instead.
Mal doesn’t answer, but stares at the crusted blood, unblinking.
Polly sees her swallow, sees her force herself to look away, staring at the stone walls.
“Maybe,” Mal says eventually.
Polly watches her chew her lip, then stop suddenly, to reach up tentatively, pressing her fingers to her mouth, checking, perhaps, for traces of her own blood.
“What if I can’t stop?” Mal asks. “You remember last time,” she continues. Her mouth quirks, bitter and ironic, “I know you do.”
“I could stop you,” Polly offers.
Mal’s hollow, dismissive laugh is an answer all on its own.
“Do you really think you could, Polly?” Mal turns her head, to meet her eyes. “Did you think, even for one moment, that those scissors could stop me? Even if you did get them into my heart?” She shakes her head. “It needs to be wood, Polly. Nothing else works on a vampire.”
The words sting, suggesting that she should have known better.
She should have.
“No,” she lies. “I thought I could appeal to your better nature.”
Mal’s mouth quirks, but it’s more of a grimace than a smirk.
“Not much of that left, I’m afraid,” she answers, quietly.
“Better some than none,” Polly says, trying to swallow her fear.
“I don’t-” Mal begins, then tries again. “I don’t want to kill you, Polly.”
Polly blinks at that. Ever since the last time, she hadn’t really been sure. She still isn’t sure. But a little part of her has to admit that it’s nice to pretend it might be true.
“You don’t?”
“No.” Her mouth quirks and she raises an eyebrow, briefly. “Are you suggesting that I should?”
Polly can't answer that. In fact, she finds that she can’t even look at Mal anymore. Not right now, not with her own guilt swimming in her mind.
She turns away, looking at her knees, instead.
"If it's going to happen anyway," she murmurs. "I'd prefer you to do it while you've still got some control left."
She hears Mal sigh, heavily.
"If it's what you want."
"Oh, fuck you," Polly answers, echoing Mal's own words, twisting them bitterly. What the hell had happened to them here?
Polly hears Mal stumble to her feet, hears her ragged breath, her uneven steps as she moves closer, and then Mal is beside her, and Polly can’t suppress the shudder of terror that rockets down her spine any longer.
She gropes for the scissors, suddenly needing them very badly.
“Looking for these?”
Mal has them in her hand already.
Polly closes her eyes, not wanting to look at Mal’s expression. She nods, mutely.
"Can't say I blame you," Mal murmurs. "It’s okay to be scared."
Polly feels Mal peeling back the collar of her shirt, exposing her flesh again. She feels her heart racing in her chest, painfully aware that Mal can hear it flinging itself against her ribs, she can’t seem to get enough air.
And then there’s only pain. Not the tearing touch of Mal’s teeth this time, but the unexpected edge of a blade against her flesh.
Polly gasps, her eyes flying open in shock. She sees the bloody scissors in Mal’s hand.
“I-I thought it would be easier for you than the alternative,” Mal explains, before lowering her mouth to Polly’s pierced and bleeding shoulder.
Mal doesn’t touch Polly while she’s drinking. A hand out to steady her, but nothing more. Polly wonders if this is meant to make her feel better. She might have wondered for longer, but, too soon, the waves of dizziness begin washing over her, and Polly feels herself slipping out of her own body again.
Maybe she’ll kill me, after all, Polly thinks, feeling the pull of Mal’s mouth on her shoulder, feeling her own body growing weaker.
But then she feels Mal’s lips press hard against her shoulder and experiences the strange sensation of her own blood clotting, her flesh healing over once more. When Mal pulls away, she licks her lips carefully, not wasting a single drop, avoiding Polly’s eyes again, even though she can’t hide behind her dark hair any longer.
Polly puts her fingers to her shoulder, searching for a wound that isn’t there.
“What did you-?”
“I told you,” Mal says, meeting her eyes. She isn’t crying this time, Polly notices. “I don’t want to kill you.”
Polly looks away, still breathing hard. Somehow that thought isn’t as comforting as she thought it would be. She notices Mal’s hand, still holding the blood-stained scissors, her wrists which bear the heavy traceries of scar tissue, but nothing more.
“It worked,” she breathes.
Mal drops the scissors, examining her own wrists.
“It worked,” she confirms, relief in her voice. She sighs. “It would have been a bloody waste if it hadn’t,” she comments, and Polly can’t swallow the hysterical little laugh that wells up in her throat.
“Yeah,” she answers, a little breathlessly. “Lucky thing, that. Um.”
“Um.”
“Okay.” Polly forces her mind to think. “Okay,” she says again. “Can you do it?”
“I think I can,” Mal answers. Polly watches as Mal’s hand slowly dissipates, turning to mist in the gloom, and then re-condensing once more. The scars are still there, but Mal wiggles her fingers experimentally. “I can do this,” she confirms.
Polly nods, allowing herself a brief moment of hope. This might work, after all.
But, then, it might not. Hope is such a fragile thing.
She sighs.
“We have no idea,” she points out, “when the guard changes around here.”
Mal glances up and up, towards the faint light of the window.
“Dawn,” she observes. “The night watch will be going off duty around now,” she continues. “Stands to reason, doesn’t it?”
Polly shrugs.
“As good a guess as any,” she concedes, her hand feeling its way over the cold, stone floor. Her fingers close on the scissors.
She forces herself to stand, as Mal shuffles back, getting to her own feet, her eyes on Polly’s hand.
“Come on,” Polly says, her head spinning. She takes a step towards the door, stumbling on legs like jelly, and is surprised when Mal puts out an unexpected arm to catch her, steady her.
“I’m- I’m fine,” Polly says, pulling away, as shaken by the touch as she was by Mal’s need for her blood. “I’m okay.”
“I’m sorry,” Mal murmurs. “I didn’t think-”
“No, it’s alright. Really. I’d have fallen, otherwise.”
Mal nods, tightly.
"Let’s... Let’s get on with this."
Polly takes a step towards the door, then another, willing herself not to stumble again. The door is not far, but when she reaches it, Polly sinks to the ground gratefully.
She forces the tip of the scissors under the flap of the hatch, prying it inwards and up.
“That’s far enough,” Mal murmurs. She glances at Polly, briefly, already starting to dissipate. “Thank you,” she whispers, before the mist claims her entirely. Polly watches as the mist that is Mal flows slowly through the hatch, leaving her alone in the cell.
She waits for a moment, listening, then:
“Mal?” She strains her ears for Mal’s reply, waiting expectantly for Mal’s pale hand to reach through the hatch for the scissors. “Mal?” She tries again, feeling a chill seeping into her body that has nothing to do with the cold cell. She forces the hatch open as wide as she can, peering through the inch-high slot. All she sees is the opposite wall. Not even a trace of mist remaining.
No, she thinks, her heart almost forgetting to beat for a moment. No!
She throws the scissors to the ground, the hatch napping shut, and slams her fist against the door.
“Godsdammit, Mal,” she whispers. “Godsdammit all!”
Alone, maybe permanently this time, in the bare stone cell, she feels the hurricane come, gulping one ragged breath after another, as her eyes blur with tears and the sobs fill her throat, choking her.
She thinks of Lofty and Tonker and wonders, not for the first time, if there were times in the grey house when they wished their own pain on each other, just to keep from being hurt again. Maybe there were enough other girls in the Working School that they never had to do that, that they could always be there for each other.
She thinks of Mal - Mal, who must be long gone by now - and wonders if it's possible to love someone again after you’ve wished crushed hands and broken ribs on them because it would mean it wasn’t happening to you.
Maybe, she considers, maybe the reason Mal didn’t want to kill her was because, in this place, killing her would have been a mercy. And maybe Mal had decided that Polly didn’t deserve such a thing.
She digs her nails into her palms as her body shakes, wracked with weeks of unshed tears. It is a few seconds before she realizes that the sound her ears are picking up is the tread of boots on the stairs.
Too heavy to be Mal.
Fuck! she curses, mentally, wiping her eyes angrily with her palm. She shoves the scissors down the side of her boot, wincing as the blades scrape against her skin through her thinning socks, but not stopping. She crawls over the stone floor, huddling on her right side in the corner to conceal the small heap of rope, the silver shackles, that had been piled there. It is, perhaps, a sudden strange fancy that makes her reach for the silver chain and clasp both of the shackles around her right arm.
Her arm that is now a club.
You never know, she thinks, wildly, as her heart pounds in her chest and her stomach lurches. It might buy me a minute.
She curls around the scraps of rope, the scissors pressing against her right calf, the shackles heavy on her arm. She hears the key turn loudly in the lock and fights the urge to vomit, wondering which of the many, many painfully uncreative methods the guards will use to ask her where Mal had disappeared to.
“Oh, this is interesting,” and Polly flinches, involuntarily, at the sound of the guard’s voice, speaking a mountain dialect common to a dozen countries around Polly’s own. The voice is half amused, half threatening, and one hundred percent malicious.
“Where ever did your vicious little friend get off to?” the guard continues, and his subtext sniggers like a Strappi and says ’I’m going to enjoy making you tell me’.
Heavy boots on the stone floor, and Polly knows he’s right behind her. She wonders how many are watching from the door, but she doesn’t hear anyone else.
“Where is he?” the guard asks, and his voice is almost reasonable while, at the same time, carrying a note of warning that isn’t reasonable at all.
“Maybe he finally got tired of your hospitality,” Polly suggests, bitterly, still facing the wall.
Her breath hisses hard between her teeth when his boot connects with her kidney. She had expected it, and gritted her teeth against it, and it still hurts as much as it had the last time they’d taken her out for questioning. She swallows hard against the bile in her throat, knowing that, if she gets out of this, she’ll be pissing blood for a while.
“Try again,” the guard suggests, casually, his boot pressing lightly against her tailbone, telling her where the next blow will connect. Probably.
“I don’t know,” Polly answers, tightly, waiting for the pain to explode along her spine, unprepared when, instead, the blow cracks against her ribs.
“Where is he?” The guard growls, all amusement gone.
Polly considers, briefly, the foolishness of lying down. If she’d been waiting, scissors in hand, when he came in - but, no. His friends would have out numbered her, even if she’d been able to get one down, even if she'd been able to steal his sword. Polly curls in on herself, not answering, waiting for the next blow to land.
“Now what have we here?” the guard asks. His boot lands heavily on her left shoulder, pressing down, offering her the choice of turning over or ending up with a dislocated shoulder.
She fights it for a moment, knowing that, since this is going to end worse than it began, she may as well delay things as long as possible. Eventually, though, she feels bone grating on bone and has to turn onto her back. Polly glances furtively towards the door and is surprised to see that there is no-one there.
How- They always come in groups-
The guard nudges her jaw, almost but not quite gently, with the toe of his boot. She can feel the grit against her skin as he presses his sole against her cheek.
“Your friend left you something to remember him by,” he continues, casually, taking in the shackles on her arm.
He kicks her shoulder, hard, and Polly feels the bones crack under the force of the blow, pain lancing through her body, before numbness settles in. She won’t be using that arm for a little while.
“Why ever would he want to leave? After all,” the guard continues, settling his boot on Polly’s chest and leaning his weight heavily on her. “We’ve been so nice to you.”
Polly closes her eyes, swallowing hard. They've done this one before, it's as familiar as being kicked, but so much worse. Her ribs scream under his weight, and she can't get enough air, she may never be able to get enough air.
Nice, he’d said. Despite all the evidence, Polly knows that it’s true, after a fashion. They have never taken her clothes off, for example, even though she’s a woman. They have never gone nearly as far as they could go.
She wonders, briefly, if voicing her awareness of this will change anything. She wonders, almost numb with terror, if they intend to stop being nice now that Mal has gone.
The thought is enough to make her struggle, flailing her good right arm, heavy with silver, against his knee.
She hears the bone crack, registers the knee giving, just before she feels his weight come down hard on her ribs, driving the air out of her lungs. Polly claws at him, fighting for breath. Her fist drives hard between his legs, but not before his own hand cuffs her heavily across the jaw, and she tastes blood again.
“Bitch,” he gasps, hoarsely, as her fist connects and his eyes go wide in pain, and his head pitches forward, and there is blood dripping from his mouth. Polly struggles, wriggling against his weight. Dead weight, she realizes, and turns her head sharply towards the door.
The open door.
Mal’s right hand is still raised, frozen. In her left, there is sword.
The spell holds for no more than a moment, before Mal is crossing the room on hasty steps, helping to drag the guard’s body off of her. Polly sees the dagger buried in his neck.
“You came back,” she comments, gulping air, trying to keep the surprise out of her voice as she struggles to her feet.
“I can’t bloody well fight my way out of here alone,” Mal tells her, hurrying her out of the cell, careful of the clinking, silver chains.
Alone, you wouldn’t have had to fight, Polly thinks, and feels a wave of something - not love, but maybe gratitude? - wash over her.
“That’s the third bloody guard I’ve killed this morning,” Mal points out. Her eyes, Polly notices, are glowing faintly in the dim hallway. There is a second sword leaning against the outside wall of the cell. “I don’t fancy being around here when the corpses start getting noticed.”
Polly grips the hilt of her newly-acquired sword, almost but not quite shocked at how remarkably happy - happy? - she is to have a weapon in her hands again.
“Right,” Polly says, agreeing fervently. “Have you found a way out?”
Mal’s mouth quirks, grimly.
“In a manner of speaking,” she answers, turning towards the stairs. “Come on,” she continues. “Follow me. And watch it with that silver.”
Polly follows, her ribs still on fire, thinking about the dead guard in the cell. Whatever it is, she thinks to herself, it has to be better than staying.
Polly follows Mal up the narrow, winding stairs, moving as silently as she can, stifling the coughs that threaten to burst from tortured lungs. Mal stops at the top of the staircase, going unnaturally still. It is a moment before Polly realizes that she is listening.
“Two heartbeats,” Mal reports in a whisper Polly can barely hear, and gestures to the right. Mal’s body blurs, then, the way she did only a few days ago, when she distracted the guards long enough for Polly to get the scissors. She is back before Polly fully comprehends that she had stepped out from their cover.
“All clear,” Mal whispers. “Come on.”
All Polly can do is follow wondering, again, why Mal was risking so much when she could have gotten out on her own so much more easily. She wiggles the fingers of her left hand, bends her elbow, gingerly. Well, she thinks. At least I’m getting some feeling back. Granted, much of what she can feel in her left arm is pain, throbbing from her shoulder all the way to her fingertips. She knows that her shoulder would be blue-purple before the morning is out, but at least she can use her arm again.
They creep along one narrow, disused corridor after another, Polly griping the chains in her left hand to keep them from rattling, until she stops bothering to remember where they’ve been. Noticing the distinct lack of blood and corpses, she wonders, briefly, how Mal went about killing the other two soldiers she’d mentioned.
Polly pushes that thought out of her mind, not really wanting to know.
“Wait here,” Mal hisses, just once, in an alcove outside a door. She blurs again and, when she’s back, she is wearing a grim, if somewhat more self-satisfied, smile. “Come on. Not much farther.”
“Are you serious?” Polly asks, when they reach what appears to be a dead end.
“Yep.”
Polly looks dubiously at the three-hole latrine - surprisingly not unlike the urinals back at the Duchess - that they are standing over, and suppresses a shudder. It’s not as if she’s exactly clean right now given that the last time she had anything remotely like a wash had been two days before they’d been shaved, and it had, in actuality, meant being pissed on by one of the guards.
“How far down is it, do you know?”
“About ten feet?” Mal hazards.
Polly sighs. It’s not as if she won’t be landing on something soft.
Eugh.
“Alright,” she says. “See you down there.”
She hands Mal her sword, climbs onto the latrine box and, carefully, trying not to breathe, lowers herself into one of the holes.
The drop, once she’s lowered herself as far as she can, is still about five feet. Or so her knees suggest when she lands, squelching messily, in a good two feet of... er... softness.
Eugh.
Gods, I need a bath, Polly thinks. A steaming hot bath full of water, with mountains of soap and a bloody fucking loofah sponge-
“Hey,” Mal hisses, from above. “Get out of the way.”
Polly stumbles a few steps into the noisome dark, as two swords drop, one after the other, down the hole, landing point-first in the thick muck.
“Grab ‘em, will you?”
Polly nods, and her hands close, gratefully, around the twin hilts. A small part of her tells her not to give them back, to find her way out on her own.
She tells it to shut up.
A moment later, chilly mist starts pouring into the dark below the latrine and drifting around Polly’s knees. A moment more, and the mist fountains up, coalescing back into Maladict.
“I am never going to get used to you doing that,” Polly comments, forcing herself to hand back one of the swords.
“You’re not required to,” Mal answers, possibly shrugging, although Polly can’t really see much in the gloom. “Follow me.”
“Wait, what? I can hardly see down-” Polly gropes in the darkness, listening for Mal’s squelching footsteps. She finds a shoulder, at about the right height, with her hand.
“Mal?” she whispers, bringing her sword up.
There is an annoyed silence, broken only by the squelch of boots in muck.
“No,” Mal answers, finally. “It’s you’re fairy fucking godmother.”
“Oh,” says Polly. “Good.”
They are walking steadily down hill, Polly notices. She assumes this is a good thing as, presumably, the latrines in a Keep actually have to drain somewhere. Slowly, she becomes aware of a dim light suffusing the gloom. She can make out Mal’s shape ahead of her, first, although she isn’t sure if that’s merely because her eyes are growing accustomed to the darkness. Then she feels the movement of air, faintly, against her face, not quite as foul as it has been up until now.
“Do you think they know we’re gone, yet?” Polly whispers.
“Almost undoubtedly,” Mal answers, quietly.
Which means they’ll be looking for us, now, Polly finishes, silently. And we’ve just killed a few of their mates, so they’re not going to be happy with us. She feels her stomach clench with familiar fear. Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck.
And then there is light - a blindingly bright, uneven column of it - ahead of them. Polly feels hope flair, briefly, painfully, inside her before she realizes that the column is probably far too narrow for a human to squeeze through.
Shit, she thinks. And then, mentally groaning at herself, How bloody appropriate of me...
The crack in the stone is, Polly judges, just under five feet high. It does, however, get a bit wider towards the bottom, where a steady stream of yellow-brow glop is flowing sluggishly through it. She can see the gully, running across the stone-littered strand, where it joins the river, although she can’t see much else because the light is glittering off the water in a way that makes vision impossible.
Polly blinks hard, pulling back from the crack in the wall. She considers the gap and decides that, if she lies down on her side, she can probably wriggle through it.
“Wait,” whispers Mal, as Polly gets to her knees. She leans her sword against the damp wall, dissolving quickly.
Polly wonders, as she watches Mal re-constitute herself on the other side of the wall, whether Mal can see - or even sense - anything much when she’s in her mist form.
“All clear so far,” Mal whispers, urgently. “Pass me the swords and get through, fast.”
Easy for you to say, Polly thinks, handing their weapons through the gap. She rolls onto her right side and, reaching through the gap, forces herself through.
“Gods,” she chokes, trying to scrape herself clean against the rough stone of the keep. “That’s bloody disgusting. And this is a soldier talking.”
They are under what appears to be an overhang of the keep. Polly notes the smoothness of the stones littering the ground, the nearness of the river which, despite being relatively narrow, is still running fast. She decides that the overhang must be due to centuries of wear from the river rising during spring flooding.
A month ago, she realizes, we wouldn’t have been able to get out this way.
“Okay,” she whispers. She looks around, trying to think. There are, she sees, shallow rapids not too far away. But Polly is fairly good at the more survival-prone type of military thinking, and knows that if she thinks it’s a perfect place to ford a river, someone else will have thought that, too. She looks down the other way and sees, to her dismay, that the river has a rather cut-off look to it at this end.
“I didn’t realize there’d be a waterfall,” Mal murmurs.
“Doesn’t matter,” Polly answers.
There is a wide, open field across the river, because no-one with a keep to defend is going to make it easy for the enemy to sneak up on them, but beyond the field is thick forest, and that’s where she knows they need to be.
“Look,” she says. “They’re looking for us already, right?”
Mal nods.
“And it’s broad daylight.”
Another nod.
“I think,” she says, slowly, “that I’ll have to wait until nightfall.”
“You?”
“Well,” Polly falters. “You can do your dissolving thing and get out of here now,” she points out. “I can’t do that.” She sighs. “I figure if I leave the bloody red jacket here, I can wait inside-” Not that I want to, “until it’s dark enough that I can sneak out.”
Mal gives her a look.
“Your attempt at noble self-sacrifice is very flattering, sarge,” Mal informs her. “But if I’d had any intention of just leaving you here, I wouldn’t have gone back to the bloody cell in the first place.”
Polly swallows.
“Oh.”
It’s all she can think of to say.
“You're right, thought," Mal points out. "We’re less likely to be found if we go back under.”
She doesn’t sound as though she likes the prospect any more than Polly does.
Polly thinks of the trenches they’ve shared before, of the stink of rotting bodies half buried in the mud, of sleeping, and more than sleeping (although her mind skirts that memory, not sure if she can go there anymore) with the foul, inescapable, reek choking every breath, and bearing it because, well, that was life.
This is life, she thinks. Or something like it, anyway.
“Okay,” she answers, lying down again, and wriggling back into the filthy darkness.
They squat together in the... well, if Polly thinks of it as ‘mud’ she can stomach sitting in it a little better, leaning their backs against the damp stone wall. Polly digs the scissors out of her boot and begins to pick the locks on the shackles again. She watches the light gleaming through the gap, watches as it changes, turning from the silvery light of dawn to the glaring gold of noontide. The shackles drop from her wrist landing, without so much as a clink, in the foetid mud. She lets the scissors drop beside them.
“Here,” Mal whispers, almost too softly to hear. She presses something small and hard into Polly’s hand.
“What is-”
“Food. Sort of.”
Polly looks at the tiny, dark oblong in her hand.
“Where did you-”
“Just before we left.”
Polly puts the coffee bean in her mouth, sucking on its bitterness. The stink around her is so strong she can barely taste the coffee, but it helps.
“I take it,” she whispers a moment later, “that this is all you brought?”
“’Fraid so,” Mal answers, and Polly curses inside her own head.
“Does that mean you’re a bit more stable now?” she ventures, instead. She can almost feel Mal smirking.
“I assure you, sergeant, you’re perfectly safe,” she answers, with a sigh. “From me, at least.”
After that, they fall into silence once more.
Part II
Comments? Please? They would be most appreciated - Especially since I haven’t actually edited this in any way. Er. :-\
Since I'm sure all of you have read Latin_Doll's beautiful and heartbreaking works ( There'll Be Children and No Butterflies Here, Except Maybe One), you must all be wondering what happens next.
At least, I was certainly wondering what happens next. To the point of pestering her madly and finding out that she did not want to write action.
So. I asked if I could write a follow-up (and by 'write', I mean "post somethign that I've already started writing"). Anyway. That was a couple of days ago, and now it's done.
In first-draft form, anyway. Please Beta. Help? :-)
It's something like 24-25 pages long, so I'm posting in three parts. Here is Part one.
Warning: Rated T for Torture (although it could, technically, be worse).
Butterflies are Free
Part I
“I’m so sorry,” Mal whispers against her throat, the brush of her lips a horrible parody of a kiss.
“Please,” Polly whispers back. “It’ll be alright.”
But she feels her skin rip, the muscle of her shoulder tear, just at the base of her neck, and the pain is crippling for a moment. She tells herself that she’s been through worse, and she has, but she’s never been this afraid, never known this bone-numbing terror, not even on the battle field. Not even at the sound of heavy boots outside their cell.
Her head is swimming from blood-loss, and she can feel herself slipping away-
Polly gasps in the dark, panting, her breath forming misty clouds in the chilly air.
“Pol?” a whisper comes from across the room, and Polly reminds herself that Mal never really sleeps these days.
“H-how much time do you have?” she asks, softly, fearing the answer.
When the guards had taken Mal away, they’d given her coffee. Polly had grasped at that fact like a straw when she’d heard it, but over the course of the next four days, when, mercifully, no guards had come for either of them, she had realized that it meant something else.
It meant they might know about the coffee.
“Mal?” Polly ventures, again.
Polly hears Mal swallow audibly in the tiny room.
“Another day? If I hold tight.”
“Do you think they’re waiting to see if you kill me?”
To that, there is no reply.
Not that Polly had expected one.
Mal had spent most of the last few days curled in on herself, just breathing, and Polly hasn’t been able to bring herself to get close. A cough rattles in her chest, but she suppresses it as best she can.
“That cough sounds bad.”
Polly laughs, hollowly.
“I’ve had worse,” she answers. Briefly, she wishes that she wasn’t so afraid, wishes that she could bring herself to crawl the short distance from her wall to Mal’s, to curl up beside her and share what warmth they have between each other. She swallows, hard, against the lump in her throat and asks, “How are your wrists?”
“I’ve had worse,” comes the answer, tinged with bitterness.
“I’m sorry.”
Sorry for what? she asks herself. For getting the shackles off? For being the one who was left behind.
She already knows the answer to that.
“I can bend my fingers again,” Mal informs her, and this time her voice is almost cheerful.
The better to hold you down with, my dear…
“Oh,” she answers. “That’s good.”
Polly goes over what they have.
1) Two military issue uniforms, somewhat threadbare
2) One set of silver shackles that only one of us can touch
3) One short length of scrappy, but remarkably strong rope, cut in two and fraying badly at the cut ends
4) One pair of hard-won scissors
Hard-won indeed. That time, it had been Mal paying the price to buy them more time. Polly can hear the sound of Mal’s bones, cracking under the pressure of the heavy boots, but she pushes the memory away.
She hesitates a moment more before adding
5) One vampire, going through dangerous levels of withdrawal
to the list.
“Mal?”
She waits, wondering if there will be an answer this time.
“Ask,” Mal says, after almost too long a while, her voice resigned. “Ask whatever you want.”
Polly closes her eyes, and the darkness gets a little darker, though not much.
“Can… Can you get out…?” she asks, trying to swallow the hundred questions lurking below that one. If you can, why are you still here? If you could... would you take me, too?
A sigh in the dark.
“Not yet,” she answers, finally.
This had been the other half of their plan - their stupid, suicidal famous-last-stand. There was a hatch, big enough to slide a half-empty tin plate through, in the bottom of the door. The stolen scissors, whatever Mal had endured during those endless hours while Polly sawed through her own bindings thread by thread, picking the locks on Mal’s shackles… it had all been for this. Bound by silver, Mal couldn’t transform. Free, she could. She could get herself through the hatch in the door, reach back through and take whatever sharp implement Polly had managed to take, and pick the lock of the cell. Or at least, that had been the plan.
High, high above them, the grey of false dawn begins to filter through the cruel joke of a window.
“What do you mean?” Polly asks.
Silence, again.
Then, “In case you hadn’t noticed,” Mal answers, “they haven’t fed us in a while. It’s not exactly helping the healing process.”
It was true. There had been water, because prisoners are no fun when they shrivel up and die, but there hadn’t been any food since Mal got brought back to the cell.
“I don’t think,” Mal went on, “that I could pull myself back together again if I let myself go.”
If I let myself go...
Polly shudders in the dark, her hand creeping to the scabbed over wound on her neck. What if Mal let herself go? She felt her hand close reflexively around the scissors, still lying by her side. Could they work as a stake?
Gods, she thinks, realizing what she’s contemplating. She forces her fingers to relax. A week ago - only a week ago - Mal had rested her head in Polly’s lap and Polly had run her numbing fingers awkwardly through Mal’s hair. I know I loved you once. I remember.
“Was this for nothing?” she wonders, aloud.
She hears Mal scoff, listens as she struggles into a sitting position, the hiss of her breath signalling the brush of her still-raw skin against the stone floor.
Polly turns her head enough to see Mal, her arms draped across her knees, her ravaged wrists hanging free. Her eyes are bleak.
“Was it, sarge?”
Sarge, she thinks. Not Polly. That hurts, even after this much pain.
In all the time they’ve been here, Mal has only cried once. When she had bitten Polly. A treacherous part of Polly wants to see Mal cry again, wants to see her cool-as-a-cucumber composure, what’s left of it, crack just a little.
Maybe that’s why she sits up, and looks at Mal.
Maybe it’s because she knows they’ve only got one day left, if that, before Mal does this anyway, and that’s why she reaches for her collar and begins unfastening the buttons, exposing the angry welts that remain from the last time she let Mal anywhere near her.
Maybe it’s because a little part of her thinks that, possibly, if she felt guilty enough, Mal might come back for her if she got out.
Maybe that’s why she bares her throat and asks, “Will this help?”
Or maybe there’s another reason, but Polly can’t see what it is anymore.
“You don’t want to do this,” Mal says, but her eyes fasten on the healed-over gash in Polly’s neck.
No, Polly thinks. I don’t.
“Can you think of anything else?” she asks, instead.
Mal doesn’t answer, but stares at the crusted blood, unblinking.
Polly sees her swallow, sees her force herself to look away, staring at the stone walls.
“Maybe,” Mal says eventually.
Polly watches her chew her lip, then stop suddenly, to reach up tentatively, pressing her fingers to her mouth, checking, perhaps, for traces of her own blood.
“What if I can’t stop?” Mal asks. “You remember last time,” she continues. Her mouth quirks, bitter and ironic, “I know you do.”
“I could stop you,” Polly offers.
Mal’s hollow, dismissive laugh is an answer all on its own.
“Do you really think you could, Polly?” Mal turns her head, to meet her eyes. “Did you think, even for one moment, that those scissors could stop me? Even if you did get them into my heart?” She shakes her head. “It needs to be wood, Polly. Nothing else works on a vampire.”
The words sting, suggesting that she should have known better.
She should have.
“No,” she lies. “I thought I could appeal to your better nature.”
Mal’s mouth quirks, but it’s more of a grimace than a smirk.
“Not much of that left, I’m afraid,” she answers, quietly.
“Better some than none,” Polly says, trying to swallow her fear.
“I don’t-” Mal begins, then tries again. “I don’t want to kill you, Polly.”
Polly blinks at that. Ever since the last time, she hadn’t really been sure. She still isn’t sure. But a little part of her has to admit that it’s nice to pretend it might be true.
“You don’t?”
“No.” Her mouth quirks and she raises an eyebrow, briefly. “Are you suggesting that I should?”
Polly can't answer that. In fact, she finds that she can’t even look at Mal anymore. Not right now, not with her own guilt swimming in her mind.
She turns away, looking at her knees, instead.
"If it's going to happen anyway," she murmurs. "I'd prefer you to do it while you've still got some control left."
She hears Mal sigh, heavily.
"If it's what you want."
"Oh, fuck you," Polly answers, echoing Mal's own words, twisting them bitterly. What the hell had happened to them here?
Polly hears Mal stumble to her feet, hears her ragged breath, her uneven steps as she moves closer, and then Mal is beside her, and Polly can’t suppress the shudder of terror that rockets down her spine any longer.
She gropes for the scissors, suddenly needing them very badly.
“Looking for these?”
Mal has them in her hand already.
Polly closes her eyes, not wanting to look at Mal’s expression. She nods, mutely.
"Can't say I blame you," Mal murmurs. "It’s okay to be scared."
Polly feels Mal peeling back the collar of her shirt, exposing her flesh again. She feels her heart racing in her chest, painfully aware that Mal can hear it flinging itself against her ribs, she can’t seem to get enough air.
And then there’s only pain. Not the tearing touch of Mal’s teeth this time, but the unexpected edge of a blade against her flesh.
Polly gasps, her eyes flying open in shock. She sees the bloody scissors in Mal’s hand.
“I-I thought it would be easier for you than the alternative,” Mal explains, before lowering her mouth to Polly’s pierced and bleeding shoulder.
Mal doesn’t touch Polly while she’s drinking. A hand out to steady her, but nothing more. Polly wonders if this is meant to make her feel better. She might have wondered for longer, but, too soon, the waves of dizziness begin washing over her, and Polly feels herself slipping out of her own body again.
Maybe she’ll kill me, after all, Polly thinks, feeling the pull of Mal’s mouth on her shoulder, feeling her own body growing weaker.
But then she feels Mal’s lips press hard against her shoulder and experiences the strange sensation of her own blood clotting, her flesh healing over once more. When Mal pulls away, she licks her lips carefully, not wasting a single drop, avoiding Polly’s eyes again, even though she can’t hide behind her dark hair any longer.
Polly puts her fingers to her shoulder, searching for a wound that isn’t there.
“What did you-?”
“I told you,” Mal says, meeting her eyes. She isn’t crying this time, Polly notices. “I don’t want to kill you.”
Polly looks away, still breathing hard. Somehow that thought isn’t as comforting as she thought it would be. She notices Mal’s hand, still holding the blood-stained scissors, her wrists which bear the heavy traceries of scar tissue, but nothing more.
“It worked,” she breathes.
Mal drops the scissors, examining her own wrists.
“It worked,” she confirms, relief in her voice. She sighs. “It would have been a bloody waste if it hadn’t,” she comments, and Polly can’t swallow the hysterical little laugh that wells up in her throat.
“Yeah,” she answers, a little breathlessly. “Lucky thing, that. Um.”
“Um.”
“Okay.” Polly forces her mind to think. “Okay,” she says again. “Can you do it?”
“I think I can,” Mal answers. Polly watches as Mal’s hand slowly dissipates, turning to mist in the gloom, and then re-condensing once more. The scars are still there, but Mal wiggles her fingers experimentally. “I can do this,” she confirms.
Polly nods, allowing herself a brief moment of hope. This might work, after all.
But, then, it might not. Hope is such a fragile thing.
She sighs.
“We have no idea,” she points out, “when the guard changes around here.”
Mal glances up and up, towards the faint light of the window.
“Dawn,” she observes. “The night watch will be going off duty around now,” she continues. “Stands to reason, doesn’t it?”
Polly shrugs.
“As good a guess as any,” she concedes, her hand feeling its way over the cold, stone floor. Her fingers close on the scissors.
She forces herself to stand, as Mal shuffles back, getting to her own feet, her eyes on Polly’s hand.
“Come on,” Polly says, her head spinning. She takes a step towards the door, stumbling on legs like jelly, and is surprised when Mal puts out an unexpected arm to catch her, steady her.
“I’m- I’m fine,” Polly says, pulling away, as shaken by the touch as she was by Mal’s need for her blood. “I’m okay.”
“I’m sorry,” Mal murmurs. “I didn’t think-”
“No, it’s alright. Really. I’d have fallen, otherwise.”
Mal nods, tightly.
"Let’s... Let’s get on with this."
Polly takes a step towards the door, then another, willing herself not to stumble again. The door is not far, but when she reaches it, Polly sinks to the ground gratefully.
She forces the tip of the scissors under the flap of the hatch, prying it inwards and up.
“That’s far enough,” Mal murmurs. She glances at Polly, briefly, already starting to dissipate. “Thank you,” she whispers, before the mist claims her entirely. Polly watches as the mist that is Mal flows slowly through the hatch, leaving her alone in the cell.
She waits for a moment, listening, then:
“Mal?” She strains her ears for Mal’s reply, waiting expectantly for Mal’s pale hand to reach through the hatch for the scissors. “Mal?” She tries again, feeling a chill seeping into her body that has nothing to do with the cold cell. She forces the hatch open as wide as she can, peering through the inch-high slot. All she sees is the opposite wall. Not even a trace of mist remaining.
No, she thinks, her heart almost forgetting to beat for a moment. No!
She throws the scissors to the ground, the hatch napping shut, and slams her fist against the door.
“Godsdammit, Mal,” she whispers. “Godsdammit all!”
Alone, maybe permanently this time, in the bare stone cell, she feels the hurricane come, gulping one ragged breath after another, as her eyes blur with tears and the sobs fill her throat, choking her.
She thinks of Lofty and Tonker and wonders, not for the first time, if there were times in the grey house when they wished their own pain on each other, just to keep from being hurt again. Maybe there were enough other girls in the Working School that they never had to do that, that they could always be there for each other.
She thinks of Mal - Mal, who must be long gone by now - and wonders if it's possible to love someone again after you’ve wished crushed hands and broken ribs on them because it would mean it wasn’t happening to you.
Maybe, she considers, maybe the reason Mal didn’t want to kill her was because, in this place, killing her would have been a mercy. And maybe Mal had decided that Polly didn’t deserve such a thing.
She digs her nails into her palms as her body shakes, wracked with weeks of unshed tears. It is a few seconds before she realizes that the sound her ears are picking up is the tread of boots on the stairs.
Too heavy to be Mal.
Fuck! she curses, mentally, wiping her eyes angrily with her palm. She shoves the scissors down the side of her boot, wincing as the blades scrape against her skin through her thinning socks, but not stopping. She crawls over the stone floor, huddling on her right side in the corner to conceal the small heap of rope, the silver shackles, that had been piled there. It is, perhaps, a sudden strange fancy that makes her reach for the silver chain and clasp both of the shackles around her right arm.
Her arm that is now a club.
You never know, she thinks, wildly, as her heart pounds in her chest and her stomach lurches. It might buy me a minute.
She curls around the scraps of rope, the scissors pressing against her right calf, the shackles heavy on her arm. She hears the key turn loudly in the lock and fights the urge to vomit, wondering which of the many, many painfully uncreative methods the guards will use to ask her where Mal had disappeared to.
“Oh, this is interesting,” and Polly flinches, involuntarily, at the sound of the guard’s voice, speaking a mountain dialect common to a dozen countries around Polly’s own. The voice is half amused, half threatening, and one hundred percent malicious.
“Where ever did your vicious little friend get off to?” the guard continues, and his subtext sniggers like a Strappi and says ’I’m going to enjoy making you tell me’.
Heavy boots on the stone floor, and Polly knows he’s right behind her. She wonders how many are watching from the door, but she doesn’t hear anyone else.
“Where is he?” the guard asks, and his voice is almost reasonable while, at the same time, carrying a note of warning that isn’t reasonable at all.
“Maybe he finally got tired of your hospitality,” Polly suggests, bitterly, still facing the wall.
Her breath hisses hard between her teeth when his boot connects with her kidney. She had expected it, and gritted her teeth against it, and it still hurts as much as it had the last time they’d taken her out for questioning. She swallows hard against the bile in her throat, knowing that, if she gets out of this, she’ll be pissing blood for a while.
“Try again,” the guard suggests, casually, his boot pressing lightly against her tailbone, telling her where the next blow will connect. Probably.
“I don’t know,” Polly answers, tightly, waiting for the pain to explode along her spine, unprepared when, instead, the blow cracks against her ribs.
“Where is he?” The guard growls, all amusement gone.
Polly considers, briefly, the foolishness of lying down. If she’d been waiting, scissors in hand, when he came in - but, no. His friends would have out numbered her, even if she’d been able to get one down, even if she'd been able to steal his sword. Polly curls in on herself, not answering, waiting for the next blow to land.
“Now what have we here?” the guard asks. His boot lands heavily on her left shoulder, pressing down, offering her the choice of turning over or ending up with a dislocated shoulder.
She fights it for a moment, knowing that, since this is going to end worse than it began, she may as well delay things as long as possible. Eventually, though, she feels bone grating on bone and has to turn onto her back. Polly glances furtively towards the door and is surprised to see that there is no-one there.
How- They always come in groups-
The guard nudges her jaw, almost but not quite gently, with the toe of his boot. She can feel the grit against her skin as he presses his sole against her cheek.
“Your friend left you something to remember him by,” he continues, casually, taking in the shackles on her arm.
He kicks her shoulder, hard, and Polly feels the bones crack under the force of the blow, pain lancing through her body, before numbness settles in. She won’t be using that arm for a little while.
“Why ever would he want to leave? After all,” the guard continues, settling his boot on Polly’s chest and leaning his weight heavily on her. “We’ve been so nice to you.”
Polly closes her eyes, swallowing hard. They've done this one before, it's as familiar as being kicked, but so much worse. Her ribs scream under his weight, and she can't get enough air, she may never be able to get enough air.
Nice, he’d said. Despite all the evidence, Polly knows that it’s true, after a fashion. They have never taken her clothes off, for example, even though she’s a woman. They have never gone nearly as far as they could go.
She wonders, briefly, if voicing her awareness of this will change anything. She wonders, almost numb with terror, if they intend to stop being nice now that Mal has gone.
The thought is enough to make her struggle, flailing her good right arm, heavy with silver, against his knee.
She hears the bone crack, registers the knee giving, just before she feels his weight come down hard on her ribs, driving the air out of her lungs. Polly claws at him, fighting for breath. Her fist drives hard between his legs, but not before his own hand cuffs her heavily across the jaw, and she tastes blood again.
“Bitch,” he gasps, hoarsely, as her fist connects and his eyes go wide in pain, and his head pitches forward, and there is blood dripping from his mouth. Polly struggles, wriggling against his weight. Dead weight, she realizes, and turns her head sharply towards the door.
The open door.
Mal’s right hand is still raised, frozen. In her left, there is sword.
The spell holds for no more than a moment, before Mal is crossing the room on hasty steps, helping to drag the guard’s body off of her. Polly sees the dagger buried in his neck.
“You came back,” she comments, gulping air, trying to keep the surprise out of her voice as she struggles to her feet.
“I can’t bloody well fight my way out of here alone,” Mal tells her, hurrying her out of the cell, careful of the clinking, silver chains.
Alone, you wouldn’t have had to fight, Polly thinks, and feels a wave of something - not love, but maybe gratitude? - wash over her.
“That’s the third bloody guard I’ve killed this morning,” Mal points out. Her eyes, Polly notices, are glowing faintly in the dim hallway. There is a second sword leaning against the outside wall of the cell. “I don’t fancy being around here when the corpses start getting noticed.”
Polly grips the hilt of her newly-acquired sword, almost but not quite shocked at how remarkably happy - happy? - she is to have a weapon in her hands again.
“Right,” Polly says, agreeing fervently. “Have you found a way out?”
Mal’s mouth quirks, grimly.
“In a manner of speaking,” she answers, turning towards the stairs. “Come on,” she continues. “Follow me. And watch it with that silver.”
Polly follows, her ribs still on fire, thinking about the dead guard in the cell. Whatever it is, she thinks to herself, it has to be better than staying.
Polly follows Mal up the narrow, winding stairs, moving as silently as she can, stifling the coughs that threaten to burst from tortured lungs. Mal stops at the top of the staircase, going unnaturally still. It is a moment before Polly realizes that she is listening.
“Two heartbeats,” Mal reports in a whisper Polly can barely hear, and gestures to the right. Mal’s body blurs, then, the way she did only a few days ago, when she distracted the guards long enough for Polly to get the scissors. She is back before Polly fully comprehends that she had stepped out from their cover.
“All clear,” Mal whispers. “Come on.”
All Polly can do is follow wondering, again, why Mal was risking so much when she could have gotten out on her own so much more easily. She wiggles the fingers of her left hand, bends her elbow, gingerly. Well, she thinks. At least I’m getting some feeling back. Granted, much of what she can feel in her left arm is pain, throbbing from her shoulder all the way to her fingertips. She knows that her shoulder would be blue-purple before the morning is out, but at least she can use her arm again.
They creep along one narrow, disused corridor after another, Polly griping the chains in her left hand to keep them from rattling, until she stops bothering to remember where they’ve been. Noticing the distinct lack of blood and corpses, she wonders, briefly, how Mal went about killing the other two soldiers she’d mentioned.
Polly pushes that thought out of her mind, not really wanting to know.
“Wait here,” Mal hisses, just once, in an alcove outside a door. She blurs again and, when she’s back, she is wearing a grim, if somewhat more self-satisfied, smile. “Come on. Not much farther.”
“Are you serious?” Polly asks, when they reach what appears to be a dead end.
“Yep.”
Polly looks dubiously at the three-hole latrine - surprisingly not unlike the urinals back at the Duchess - that they are standing over, and suppresses a shudder. It’s not as if she’s exactly clean right now given that the last time she had anything remotely like a wash had been two days before they’d been shaved, and it had, in actuality, meant being pissed on by one of the guards.
“How far down is it, do you know?”
“About ten feet?” Mal hazards.
Polly sighs. It’s not as if she won’t be landing on something soft.
Eugh.
“Alright,” she says. “See you down there.”
She hands Mal her sword, climbs onto the latrine box and, carefully, trying not to breathe, lowers herself into one of the holes.
The drop, once she’s lowered herself as far as she can, is still about five feet. Or so her knees suggest when she lands, squelching messily, in a good two feet of... er... softness.
Eugh.
Gods, I need a bath, Polly thinks. A steaming hot bath full of water, with mountains of soap and a bloody fucking loofah sponge-
“Hey,” Mal hisses, from above. “Get out of the way.”
Polly stumbles a few steps into the noisome dark, as two swords drop, one after the other, down the hole, landing point-first in the thick muck.
“Grab ‘em, will you?”
Polly nods, and her hands close, gratefully, around the twin hilts. A small part of her tells her not to give them back, to find her way out on her own.
She tells it to shut up.
A moment later, chilly mist starts pouring into the dark below the latrine and drifting around Polly’s knees. A moment more, and the mist fountains up, coalescing back into Maladict.
“I am never going to get used to you doing that,” Polly comments, forcing herself to hand back one of the swords.
“You’re not required to,” Mal answers, possibly shrugging, although Polly can’t really see much in the gloom. “Follow me.”
“Wait, what? I can hardly see down-” Polly gropes in the darkness, listening for Mal’s squelching footsteps. She finds a shoulder, at about the right height, with her hand.
“Mal?” she whispers, bringing her sword up.
There is an annoyed silence, broken only by the squelch of boots in muck.
“No,” Mal answers, finally. “It’s you’re fairy fucking godmother.”
“Oh,” says Polly. “Good.”
They are walking steadily down hill, Polly notices. She assumes this is a good thing as, presumably, the latrines in a Keep actually have to drain somewhere. Slowly, she becomes aware of a dim light suffusing the gloom. She can make out Mal’s shape ahead of her, first, although she isn’t sure if that’s merely because her eyes are growing accustomed to the darkness. Then she feels the movement of air, faintly, against her face, not quite as foul as it has been up until now.
“Do you think they know we’re gone, yet?” Polly whispers.
“Almost undoubtedly,” Mal answers, quietly.
Which means they’ll be looking for us, now, Polly finishes, silently. And we’ve just killed a few of their mates, so they’re not going to be happy with us. She feels her stomach clench with familiar fear. Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck.
And then there is light - a blindingly bright, uneven column of it - ahead of them. Polly feels hope flair, briefly, painfully, inside her before she realizes that the column is probably far too narrow for a human to squeeze through.
Shit, she thinks. And then, mentally groaning at herself, How bloody appropriate of me...
The crack in the stone is, Polly judges, just under five feet high. It does, however, get a bit wider towards the bottom, where a steady stream of yellow-brow glop is flowing sluggishly through it. She can see the gully, running across the stone-littered strand, where it joins the river, although she can’t see much else because the light is glittering off the water in a way that makes vision impossible.
Polly blinks hard, pulling back from the crack in the wall. She considers the gap and decides that, if she lies down on her side, she can probably wriggle through it.
“Wait,” whispers Mal, as Polly gets to her knees. She leans her sword against the damp wall, dissolving quickly.
Polly wonders, as she watches Mal re-constitute herself on the other side of the wall, whether Mal can see - or even sense - anything much when she’s in her mist form.
“All clear so far,” Mal whispers, urgently. “Pass me the swords and get through, fast.”
Easy for you to say, Polly thinks, handing their weapons through the gap. She rolls onto her right side and, reaching through the gap, forces herself through.
“Gods,” she chokes, trying to scrape herself clean against the rough stone of the keep. “That’s bloody disgusting. And this is a soldier talking.”
They are under what appears to be an overhang of the keep. Polly notes the smoothness of the stones littering the ground, the nearness of the river which, despite being relatively narrow, is still running fast. She decides that the overhang must be due to centuries of wear from the river rising during spring flooding.
A month ago, she realizes, we wouldn’t have been able to get out this way.
“Okay,” she whispers. She looks around, trying to think. There are, she sees, shallow rapids not too far away. But Polly is fairly good at the more survival-prone type of military thinking, and knows that if she thinks it’s a perfect place to ford a river, someone else will have thought that, too. She looks down the other way and sees, to her dismay, that the river has a rather cut-off look to it at this end.
“I didn’t realize there’d be a waterfall,” Mal murmurs.
“Doesn’t matter,” Polly answers.
There is a wide, open field across the river, because no-one with a keep to defend is going to make it easy for the enemy to sneak up on them, but beyond the field is thick forest, and that’s where she knows they need to be.
“Look,” she says. “They’re looking for us already, right?”
Mal nods.
“And it’s broad daylight.”
Another nod.
“I think,” she says, slowly, “that I’ll have to wait until nightfall.”
“You?”
“Well,” Polly falters. “You can do your dissolving thing and get out of here now,” she points out. “I can’t do that.” She sighs. “I figure if I leave the bloody red jacket here, I can wait inside-” Not that I want to, “until it’s dark enough that I can sneak out.”
Mal gives her a look.
“Your attempt at noble self-sacrifice is very flattering, sarge,” Mal informs her. “But if I’d had any intention of just leaving you here, I wouldn’t have gone back to the bloody cell in the first place.”
Polly swallows.
“Oh.”
It’s all she can think of to say.
“You're right, thought," Mal points out. "We’re less likely to be found if we go back under.”
She doesn’t sound as though she likes the prospect any more than Polly does.
Polly thinks of the trenches they’ve shared before, of the stink of rotting bodies half buried in the mud, of sleeping, and more than sleeping (although her mind skirts that memory, not sure if she can go there anymore) with the foul, inescapable, reek choking every breath, and bearing it because, well, that was life.
This is life, she thinks. Or something like it, anyway.
“Okay,” she answers, lying down again, and wriggling back into the filthy darkness.
They squat together in the... well, if Polly thinks of it as ‘mud’ she can stomach sitting in it a little better, leaning their backs against the damp stone wall. Polly digs the scissors out of her boot and begins to pick the locks on the shackles again. She watches the light gleaming through the gap, watches as it changes, turning from the silvery light of dawn to the glaring gold of noontide. The shackles drop from her wrist landing, without so much as a clink, in the foetid mud. She lets the scissors drop beside them.
“Here,” Mal whispers, almost too softly to hear. She presses something small and hard into Polly’s hand.
“What is-”
“Food. Sort of.”
Polly looks at the tiny, dark oblong in her hand.
“Where did you-”
“Just before we left.”
Polly puts the coffee bean in her mouth, sucking on its bitterness. The stink around her is so strong she can barely taste the coffee, but it helps.
“I take it,” she whispers a moment later, “that this is all you brought?”
“’Fraid so,” Mal answers, and Polly curses inside her own head.
“Does that mean you’re a bit more stable now?” she ventures, instead. She can almost feel Mal smirking.
“I assure you, sergeant, you’re perfectly safe,” she answers, with a sigh. “From me, at least.”
After that, they fall into silence once more.
Part II
Comments? Please? They would be most appreciated - Especially since I haven’t actually edited this in any way. Er. :-\