Going Home
Ok, surprise everyone, I wrote some cheerless Polly/Mal sadfic as well.
Title: Going Home
Rating: Feels like T, but I can't say why (no sex, little swearing and hardly any violence). I just think it's too heavy for the kiddie ratings.
Summary: It's a long way down to Munz, and Mal carries heavy things. Polly/Mal, Betty/Paul
Word count: 4693
Warnings: Death (character death, OC child), one joke (or something) about suicide
Associated Stories: Let Them Drop Dead, To Pieces (not required reading)
Going Home
She's walked down the mountains in silence and she's singed her coat at a camp fire since she never could get warm. Not anymore. She has not had a thought that counts, but her body remembers: the weight that is still in her arms, that pulls at her shoulders, the weight that is left after the most important thing has gone. Her body knows the shape that is missing even when she sleeps.
Through the snow, and then the mud, and then the dust as a long winter turns into spring. Now she's in the barracks, now she boards a coach, now she is on the move again.
Munz is pretty in the springtime, at least Polly has said so, and truly you can't find better flowers to steal for your love than those that grow in Father Jupe's garden, planted by one girl or another. Mal has passed through here once before, and now the apple trees are in bloom, but her love is the passing of a season away so what can one do.
She walks the last bit and four weeks come to their end. Now she's only a corner away, now she turns, now she finds the shade underneath an apple tree, stops, and takes out her tobacco and rolls a careful cigarette. Ignites. They last longer when she doesn't share.
Funny how the last few yards present a resistance that is hard to put into words. But what isn't, these days.
The burning tobacco puts up a fight against the scent of the trees, and wins. It is noon, and Mal has decided a long time ago that she is not afraid of anything, so she sets to move again. She is a very old vampire and she is damn well coordinated enough to smoke and walk at the time. And then the cigarette is gone and she wills her hand still so it does not reach for the arm of someone who isn't there.
She walks around the house, towards the kitchen door, and knocks. She can't help but hear the voices inside,
Mum, look what I found in the yard the other day!
Put that away, you're scaring Tilly,
even though she turns her head away. Do they sound like they know?
Let's see who that is, eh? says Betty, and, "Let me, let me!" comes a high-pitched child's voice. A stool is produced, and as a child crawls onto it to peer through the keyhole, Mal fails to turn on her heel and leave. She lights another cigarette since the whole procedure seems to take a while, feeling like an intruder in this happy family. She brings the ghosts. One small eye examines her.
"I dunno," says four-year-old Jack.
"Silly," says Betty, who can probably see the red of her coat through the frosted window. "It's them! Say hi to your auntie!"
And just when Mal feels it can't actually get any worse, there's an obliging chorus of "Hi Auntie Polly!" and then and only then is the door opened. She takes a deep drag.
It is amazing how fast a face can fall, and Betty's does now, right after saying "Maladict?" and discovering she came here alone. Behind her, Mal catches a glimpse of a small table holding plates with half-finished child-sized portions of something or other.
"'s not Auntie Polly," Jack states, and Mal surreptitiously drops the cigarette end and crushes it under her boot. She's supposed to try and be a good influence - or at least less of a bad one - to the children she never met, Polly has said so. Polly, who planned this occasion.
"Where is Polly?" asks Betty, a very relevant question. It's been a few years, and she looks pretty different with long hair and in a dress.
Mal closes her eyes for a little moment, why is she even here, while Tilly stares at her, round-eyed.
"You were supposed to get a letter," she says, finally.
"We got one," says Betty. "From her. Said she'd be bringing you along this time." What she doesn't say out loud is This better be the letter you're referring to. Mal knows which letter she means, it was the one that also said that Polly had something to tell them.
This actually stings her through the numbness, the meaningless thoughts, but she stands there unflinching. "There was supposed to be another one after that," she says.
The children just stare at her, blinking, not comprehending the sudden silence. "Oh dear god no," says their mother, holding on to the back of a chair as if she needs the support. "Oh no!"
Funny, thinks Mal, inappropriately, last time they got the letter with the black rim Polly turned up in their kitchen a week later, and this time they didn't get the letter and now this. Funny, haha. Hopefully Betty realises on her own it hasn't been her intention to spring this on her at the kitchen door, because the task of formulating an apology seems too daunting.
"Can't you just put the kids to bed or something?" says Mal.
Betty covers her mouth with her hand for a moment, then lets out a held breath, turns to her children and Mal can almost hear the forced smile. "How about you take your naps now and you can have dessert in bed? What do you think?"
"Tilly didn't finish her veggies," Jack pipes up, but Betty sweeps them both. "She can have them for dinner," she says, and Jack seems satisfied that veggie justice has been restored.
To Mal she says, "Can you wait here for me? You can help yourself to coffee or whatever. It's in the pantry. We have cream, in the blue jug. On the counter. Over there. And sugar on the shelf. Silly me, of course, you drink it plain. But there's honey if you like." She sounds helpless.
The water has long been boiling when Betty returns, not looking at Mal, who, leaning back on her chair, is hypnotising the ground coffee at the bottom of the mug she found and then the small portion of cubed boiled carrots on a tiny plate, and Betty is taking two little bowls of canned pears off a shelf that is out of her children's reach, and then she puts them back and instead takes the mug out of Mal's hands and pours the water into it, then puts it on the table in front of her.
Mal doesn't look up over this breach of distance, this lapse in concentration. She came here with a goal in mind.
"Shufti -" she says. She must convey that this is urgent, but another thought slips her mind, into nonimportance.
"I'm back in a minute," says Betty, who has turned away from her and is awkwardly, bowls in hand, wiping at her eyes with a sleeve. She heaps a spoonful of sugar each on the pears, then leaves for a second time, and Mal gets out her tobacco to have another go at rolling a decent cigarette, but they're not the same anymore. She lights up at the hearth fire, inhales the coarse smoke deeply, then remembers about the coffee. Takes a sip and it is still boiling and she stirs it with one of the dessert spoons that Betty has forgot. She figures the children will probably be happy to eat with their fingers.
She wonders what she is doing here. The letter will arrive in time, there is no reason why she should play a role in this at all. She is aware that she could leave right now, close the rickety kitchen door behind her, but nevertheless there are some things she is carrying that she'd better put back before she leaves and never returns. And somewhere underneath it all there is a sort of tired curiousity, left from before; this place has been elusive for so long.
From inside the house, she hears talking. Betty returns after a long while, closes the door softly behind her, then crosses the kitchen in small steps to sit down opposite of Mal, who doesn't look at her.
"Shufti -" says Mal. A glance warns her to not call Betty that.
"I've sent for Paul," says Betty, as if Mal hadn't overheard that. "He's at the fair, over in Burg. He should be able to make it here by tonight."
"I'm not sure if I'm staying that long," says Mal, and Betty nods, looking tired. She wipes at a strand of hair that has escaped the bun at the back of her head, then wipes at it again, frustrated.
"Where is she, Mal?" asks Betty.
The question appears so patently absurd that Mal struggles for a moment in order to not blow it off, until she remembers that there is still a where and also a when attached to this emptiness.
"Groning plateau," says Mal. "Near the south side of Mount Groning. Access is restricted and we're not supposed to talk about it."
Suddenly she remembers thinking it's probably going to be a nice site, once the remnants of the army camp have washed away, the trampled mud, the ashy remains of hundreds of camp fires. A thought passes through: she remembers she must go back to see if the seeds have taken off.
Polly had taken to carrying a clattering tin of wildflower seeds back when diplomacy had first failed. Now some of the gravesites had more flowers than were statistically likely. She'd confessed to Mal once that she had hoped to make a rather bigger difference than that and was going to throw the tin away. But she hadn't.
Mal becomes suddenly aware that she has been asked another question, and decides to ignore it until it is repeated, and it is. She stirs her coffee and lets Betty nod along to a shameful lie. That Polly didn't have to suffer, that it was over quick. The truth is that Polly died alone among enemies, that Mal didn't know until she set out to find her the night after.
And then, of course, there is the other truth: that she has the sick image of a Borogravian sergeant, the enemy, struggling and falling and standing and falling again, forever burned into the back of her eyes, and Mal has it because of what she did to that man when she had to find Polly. That she knows Polly called out something right before she went down, but the man didn't care for it, and now it's lost to memory forever.
And Betty is still throwing glances at the kitchen door as if she is expecting her back. Then she gets up to make a cup of coffee for herself, and Mal notices with something resembling interest that she drinks it strong and black.
Betty focuses on that murky coffee like an addicted vampire at her best, excuses herself, and wipes her nose. Comfort may be in order, but Mal fails to deliver it.
"I brought some things," says Mal, because she suddenly remembers why she is here in the first place and, at the state she's in, it is best to put these thoughts to action as soon as they occur, because who knows when they'll swing by for another visit. She struggles through the strap of the pack at her feet and takes out the leather map packed, with improbable foresight, at the top. She loses the thread again, flicking through a bunch of sealed envelopes. Realises in another lucid moment that this will take much, much longer than she had anticipated. She lays them on the table.
"Can't we leave the will for later," says Betty, and then covers her mouth with her hand, and Mal is ready to agree that this is neither the place nor the time for a will. Till she remembers.
"I think they're letters, actually, but they rationed away postal service up there and I figured I may just as well deliver them," she says, a pretty long sentence under the circumstances. Until she found the letters, she hadn't known exactly what Polly had been writing, on and off, in the months leading up to the attack, but Polly wasn't the diary type and anyway nothing much had been happening. She wonders if Polly had had a feeling.
"I'll be off then," says Mal, after the letters haven't been met with any obvious reaction at all and anyway she's too distracted for a subtle one. "Thank you for the coffee."
"Please stay the night," says Betty, suddenly and with such urgency that it goes through the first time.
That's what she said is what unfortunately pops up first, courtesy of a brain that is more exhausted than Mal has ever experienced.
"I can't," she says instead. I don't want to would be more like it. "Why?"
If she paid any attention, she could have sensed a multitude of reasons, most importantly the wish to not be alone with this new knowledge, half of it lies.
"We don't even know how you've been," says Betty, "I mean, you can't just up and leave after a quarter hour. Paul isn't even here yet. I mean, obviously you can." She sighs. "No-one else will be able to tell us anything, will they?"
It has all the marks of a rhetorical question, but Mal racks her brain anyway. Private Smith, maybe, but he's spending his time visiting relatives in the capital and in any case she can't stand him. Igor? Chomsky and Klein are out of the question, even though Klein liked Polly a lot, but they share a gravesite up in the mountains...
Actually Mal is supposed to report back in Plün tomorrow. But with the war progressing the way it does she is not sure if she wants to, and maybe it is more important to deliver a few more of Polly's letters. Has the decision to desert ever been made more casually? she wonders. She'll miss the ceremony, of course.
"Maybe for another day," she says. Until they start looking for her.
-
Later, after Betty had gone up to wake her children and talk to them, after Paul was back, after a late dinner in which no-one ate much of anything and Mal felt the raised glass for Polly was the heaviest thing she ever lifted and in which there was the general consensus that it was a good thing Polly's father hadn't lived to see this, and after Mal had failed to drown in the bathtub, she is watching her bare feet on the wooden floor, utterly perplexed by the task of going to bed that lies in front of her.
And it's Polly's bed, too. It's the only free room they had at The Duchess and she thinks she can smell her still.
She's come pretty far, though; her nightshirt is on and her teeth are meticulously brushed and her hair is wet and combed and it smells like soap and herbs. She feels cleaner than she has in months, it's like a patina over all the grime that had accumulated.
She's going to bed, she decides, and naturally it follows that she opens the window to attempt another cigarette. Sooner or later, one of them has got to calm her down.
The roll-up is uneven and it burns strangely and she realises it's a beautiful night outside, cool, cloudless, just so hard to appreciate.
She knows there were other nights like this, bright with stars. They were different though. Nights these days aren't what they used to be, she thinks, and almost chokes on the thought. She didn't always share them, and they were okay before.
She puts the ciggy out in the flower box hanging outside of the window. Bed now? She rolls another, puts it in her mouth and sets it on fire, and, thinking of something, her hands reach up to the back of her neck, and she unclasps the chain that holds a locket, because it tends to catch on things when she sleeps, and then she re-clasps it, because she can't. Stupid.
There's a knock on the door.
She freezes out of habit, but really there's nothing to worry about. Her body has always been hard to read and the long cold winter has left her with no evidence. She'd always thought her calves looked a bit feminine, but not anymore. And really, who will care; Polly can't. Mal never did.
Betty sticks her head through the door, apologises for the disturbance, and Mal waves it away.
"There was one for you as well," says Betty. "Didn't you see it?"
Mal isn't so sure what she's supposed to reply to that. No way, what a surprise, I totally didn't look at the letters I carried around for weeks, it only has my name on it?
"I did," she says, progressing in her mission to poison the night air with tobacco and tar.
"You haven't even opened it yet," says Betty.
"Shufti, honestly, I've got the time," says Mal.
Betty, for some reason, takes this as a hint to advance on Mal, who turns. She lays the letter on the windowsill, adressee facing up. Mal'd alawys thought Polly had a nice clean handwriting, letters nice and separated because she learned writing out of books, not at a school.
Betty watches her, like a woman on a mission, and Mal feels she must look up to meet her eyes.
"Funny," Betty says finally, "I remember Polly wearing a locket just like it."
Great, thinks Mal- Now I'm being accused of grave robbery. She says, "It's just a huge coincidence, I guess."
"Can I see it?" says Betty.
"You're being awfully nosy," says Mal.
Betty, unexpectedly, apologises profusely. Maybe Mal has spent too much time in the army. She changes her mind, shrugs. "Why not," she says.
She unclasps the chain at the back of her neck and, without looking at her, hands the ensemble to Betty, who is taking it gingerly.
Betty works the locket open with a fingernail, and her face grows soft. She grabs the windowsill as if she needs the support, and Mal finds this unfair. It is not Betty who walked down the mountains on her own. Not Betty who held a small, cold hand until sunrise. It is not Betty who shovelled a hole into the frozen ground, then filled it again until she was shaking with exhaustion. Mal finds her bold emotions strangely invasive.
"Nice one of Polly," says Betty, while Mal drags a finger through the crumbly soil in the flowerbox outside the window. Perspective. It is Betty, who lost a small son last year.
They got the saddest little card two months later; she remembers how Polly went on her day as she always did, and then spent the evening kicking a pebble all over the drill ground until the sun went down and she broke her toe on a rock.
Mal sighs. "She iconographs well, I always thought." Unlike she, who'd sat there with sunglasses and a hat and still turned to dust at the fifth take. It had still turned out a very interesting, if somewhat overexposed picture. "Funny," Polly had said, "I can't make out a single facial feature, but it still looks a lot like you."
There are a handful of other iconographs of Polly that she knows of, starting with the one taken by Otto Chriek of their regiment, Mal has them all somewhere except the one that she noticed hanging above the mantlepiece in The Duchess. And there used to be a painting of her in Duchess Annagovia's old palace in the capital, but they took it down when it all went to hell again.
"I'm sorry," says Betty. "I didn't even know -" Mal knows that this is actually a question, and that it actually says, "Why did you never tell us?"
Mal realises there is some comfort in this and that she should accept it and probably try and provide some of her own. Maybe humanity has left with Polly - but then, why should she hurt this much? So Mal blows some smoke into the room, shrugs. "It was a bit of an abomination, that's why," she says.
"Yes," says Betty. "Obviously. All the worthwile things are. But the kids are a bit hard to hide."
"She has a lot of enemies in HQ," says Mal, daring her to notice the present tense. "It just was never a good idea and then it became a habit." And in this army, where there was no privacy, only solitude, maybe the secret they shared - or maybe even the secrecy itself - saved their lives. For a little while. She's not sure Betty accepts this, but at least she doesn't challenge the reasoning.
Then she recalls Shufti and how observant she was, after all, she did find out about Lofty and Tonker and Wazzer with no nudges from a vampire. "Did you guess?"
"No," says Betty. "I mean, obviously I teased her a little."
"Obviously." With some amazement, Mal notices that one of her eyebrows attempts a little climb.
"Yeah," says Betty. "But I stopped years ago cos she always got so sad and then it wasn't very funny anymore -"
There is another unspoken question right there, but this time Mal isn't going to answer it aloud. Because she'd been a self-centered bastard at the time, keeping Polly at a casual arm's length, and sometimes at much shorter distance, because she was so worried about her own immortality even when it was aeons too late for both of them. Wasting both their time, only she had so much more of it than Polly did. And didn't she turn out to be right in the end?
Yet, she regrets it now.
And then she'd plunged in heart-first, because bright flames shine quickly, and she invested so much, was so sure this fire must burn out long before that terrible threat got real, but suddenly everything was flammable. Now she's ash, consumed. And it had been such a clever plan.
"Well, anyway. I brought you a letter opener, in case you needed one," says Betty. That's not very subtle.
"Depends," says Mal, "is it wooden?"
Betty gives her a look as if she's one of her children, misbehaving. At this moment, Tilly begins to cry for her mummy from the other room. Mal wonders if the children understand that there's a difference between their auntie not visiting for long stretches of time and her not visiting ever again. They probably do, she thinks; they're children, not rocks.
"Sorry," says Betty again, distracted, already turning to the source of the noise and obviously relieved about the chance to flee.
"I'm sorry," says Mal. Such words, unheard of under any other circumstances.
"Good grief," says Betty. "What for?"
Now a door opens, there's footsteps on the corridor, another door, then Paul's voice speaking in low tones to his daughter as he picks her up to comfort her. Paul who she is sure has cried himself to sleep that evening, damn her ears.
Mal thinks about Betty's question, then shrugs. She doesn't particularly want to expand on the topic on how she couldn't find Polly in the carnage. "Good night," she says.
Betty sighs. "Night, Mal," she answers. "See you in the morning."
Betty is very polite and soft in closing the door, and Mal is on her own.
Her toes are burning with the cold now, and she makes a few tentative steps towards the bed. Sits down on the bedframe, notices she's still holding the letter and the letter opener in her left hand, and lets that hand sink. Breathes out, still tasting tobacco. Sleeping is the hardest task of them all.
With her right hand she pulls back the covers, and her knuckles, almost accidentally, brush the surface of the mattress, find that slight dent that must have been left by the weight of Polly's sleeping body over the years. The idea of curling up in there, in Polly's space, pulls her in, suffocates.
It was in here that Polly cut off all her hair. Here that she made the decision to go and find Paul. Here, actually, that she made the most historic of departures.
It is all coming down. She thought she'd missed Polly before, well, she misses her now. She is in the heart of where Polly went home and oh, she misses her, she misses her, she misses her.
Mal hardly has attention left to notice she is shaking with cold, but draws her legs in underneath her, her feet feel like solid ice.
Polly, these games were rigged, she thinks, this isn't fair, and now she draws a deep breath, her hand flies to her mouth, and she caves. Behind her eyes, Polly falls forever, and to distract herself from this thing, which is not grief yet but raw, she counts on her fingers:
I brought: one, a laundered and starched shirt, and two, a pair of trousers, and three, a box of medals and hairpins and four, a shaving mug, and five, half ofa a bar of soap, and six, a sword that just may become the Perks' new fire poker, and seven, a tin of flowerseeds that used to contain 82 seeds and now contains none. I hung the clothes up in her closed and put the box and the mug and the soap and the tin on her nightstand.
That leaves eight, a locket, nine, a dent in this mattress, and ten, six letters not delivered. To the Duke, to Jackrum, to Clogston, to Froc - twice -, to me.
And beyond that, nothing.
Mal straightens up, unclenches her fingers one by one. She must get up from the bed one more time so she can read by the starlight, at the window, and suddenly she is so tired.
The letter openener flashes almost like a wielded knife in the night. The letter has a date and it starts with Dear Mal and Mal remembers that date and puts the letter away for good, she must, and sits down again on the bed. She remembers, she can't not, the inside of that tent that was so small for two people and so big and empty for one. Polly lying on her stomach, writing long letters front to back by candlelight as if she was running out of time. She knew.
Somewhere in Mal's vivid memory, Polly, still writing, reaches out her left hand to Mal, brushes Mal's sleepy fingers with hers as if to check, as she is wont to do, if her companion is still there. Mal catches her hand, breathes a kiss on her fingers, and before she rolls over to go back to sleep she tries to meet her eyes, too. Rare in such moments, and only for short little second, Polly is unsmiling, her expressive face so full of the sadness that sometimes swings by. It feels like goodbye, ninety-six days before the fact. She knew.
"To whom are you writing?" Mal says then.
A pause. "Home." A smile, at last. Mal still finds no tears for it.
Title: Going Home
Rating: Feels like T, but I can't say why (no sex, little swearing and hardly any violence). I just think it's too heavy for the kiddie ratings.
Summary: It's a long way down to Munz, and Mal carries heavy things. Polly/Mal, Betty/Paul
Word count: 4693
Warnings: Death (character death, OC child), one joke (or something) about suicide
Associated Stories: Let Them Drop Dead, To Pieces (not required reading)
Going Home
She's walked down the mountains in silence and she's singed her coat at a camp fire since she never could get warm. Not anymore. She has not had a thought that counts, but her body remembers: the weight that is still in her arms, that pulls at her shoulders, the weight that is left after the most important thing has gone. Her body knows the shape that is missing even when she sleeps.
Through the snow, and then the mud, and then the dust as a long winter turns into spring. Now she's in the barracks, now she boards a coach, now she is on the move again.
Munz is pretty in the springtime, at least Polly has said so, and truly you can't find better flowers to steal for your love than those that grow in Father Jupe's garden, planted by one girl or another. Mal has passed through here once before, and now the apple trees are in bloom, but her love is the passing of a season away so what can one do.
She walks the last bit and four weeks come to their end. Now she's only a corner away, now she turns, now she finds the shade underneath an apple tree, stops, and takes out her tobacco and rolls a careful cigarette. Ignites. They last longer when she doesn't share.
Funny how the last few yards present a resistance that is hard to put into words. But what isn't, these days.
The burning tobacco puts up a fight against the scent of the trees, and wins. It is noon, and Mal has decided a long time ago that she is not afraid of anything, so she sets to move again. She is a very old vampire and she is damn well coordinated enough to smoke and walk at the time. And then the cigarette is gone and she wills her hand still so it does not reach for the arm of someone who isn't there.
She walks around the house, towards the kitchen door, and knocks. She can't help but hear the voices inside,
Mum, look what I found in the yard the other day!
Put that away, you're scaring Tilly,
even though she turns her head away. Do they sound like they know?
Let's see who that is, eh? says Betty, and, "Let me, let me!" comes a high-pitched child's voice. A stool is produced, and as a child crawls onto it to peer through the keyhole, Mal fails to turn on her heel and leave. She lights another cigarette since the whole procedure seems to take a while, feeling like an intruder in this happy family. She brings the ghosts. One small eye examines her.
"I dunno," says four-year-old Jack.
"Silly," says Betty, who can probably see the red of her coat through the frosted window. "It's them! Say hi to your auntie!"
And just when Mal feels it can't actually get any worse, there's an obliging chorus of "Hi Auntie Polly!" and then and only then is the door opened. She takes a deep drag.
It is amazing how fast a face can fall, and Betty's does now, right after saying "Maladict?" and discovering she came here alone. Behind her, Mal catches a glimpse of a small table holding plates with half-finished child-sized portions of something or other.
"'s not Auntie Polly," Jack states, and Mal surreptitiously drops the cigarette end and crushes it under her boot. She's supposed to try and be a good influence - or at least less of a bad one - to the children she never met, Polly has said so. Polly, who planned this occasion.
"Where is Polly?" asks Betty, a very relevant question. It's been a few years, and she looks pretty different with long hair and in a dress.
Mal closes her eyes for a little moment, why is she even here, while Tilly stares at her, round-eyed.
"You were supposed to get a letter," she says, finally.
"We got one," says Betty. "From her. Said she'd be bringing you along this time." What she doesn't say out loud is This better be the letter you're referring to. Mal knows which letter she means, it was the one that also said that Polly had something to tell them.
This actually stings her through the numbness, the meaningless thoughts, but she stands there unflinching. "There was supposed to be another one after that," she says.
The children just stare at her, blinking, not comprehending the sudden silence. "Oh dear god no," says their mother, holding on to the back of a chair as if she needs the support. "Oh no!"
Funny, thinks Mal, inappropriately, last time they got the letter with the black rim Polly turned up in their kitchen a week later, and this time they didn't get the letter and now this. Funny, haha. Hopefully Betty realises on her own it hasn't been her intention to spring this on her at the kitchen door, because the task of formulating an apology seems too daunting.
"Can't you just put the kids to bed or something?" says Mal.
Betty covers her mouth with her hand for a moment, then lets out a held breath, turns to her children and Mal can almost hear the forced smile. "How about you take your naps now and you can have dessert in bed? What do you think?"
"Tilly didn't finish her veggies," Jack pipes up, but Betty sweeps them both. "She can have them for dinner," she says, and Jack seems satisfied that veggie justice has been restored.
To Mal she says, "Can you wait here for me? You can help yourself to coffee or whatever. It's in the pantry. We have cream, in the blue jug. On the counter. Over there. And sugar on the shelf. Silly me, of course, you drink it plain. But there's honey if you like." She sounds helpless.
The water has long been boiling when Betty returns, not looking at Mal, who, leaning back on her chair, is hypnotising the ground coffee at the bottom of the mug she found and then the small portion of cubed boiled carrots on a tiny plate, and Betty is taking two little bowls of canned pears off a shelf that is out of her children's reach, and then she puts them back and instead takes the mug out of Mal's hands and pours the water into it, then puts it on the table in front of her.
Mal doesn't look up over this breach of distance, this lapse in concentration. She came here with a goal in mind.
"Shufti -" she says. She must convey that this is urgent, but another thought slips her mind, into nonimportance.
"I'm back in a minute," says Betty, who has turned away from her and is awkwardly, bowls in hand, wiping at her eyes with a sleeve. She heaps a spoonful of sugar each on the pears, then leaves for a second time, and Mal gets out her tobacco to have another go at rolling a decent cigarette, but they're not the same anymore. She lights up at the hearth fire, inhales the coarse smoke deeply, then remembers about the coffee. Takes a sip and it is still boiling and she stirs it with one of the dessert spoons that Betty has forgot. She figures the children will probably be happy to eat with their fingers.
She wonders what she is doing here. The letter will arrive in time, there is no reason why she should play a role in this at all. She is aware that she could leave right now, close the rickety kitchen door behind her, but nevertheless there are some things she is carrying that she'd better put back before she leaves and never returns. And somewhere underneath it all there is a sort of tired curiousity, left from before; this place has been elusive for so long.
From inside the house, she hears talking. Betty returns after a long while, closes the door softly behind her, then crosses the kitchen in small steps to sit down opposite of Mal, who doesn't look at her.
"Shufti -" says Mal. A glance warns her to not call Betty that.
"I've sent for Paul," says Betty, as if Mal hadn't overheard that. "He's at the fair, over in Burg. He should be able to make it here by tonight."
"I'm not sure if I'm staying that long," says Mal, and Betty nods, looking tired. She wipes at a strand of hair that has escaped the bun at the back of her head, then wipes at it again, frustrated.
"Where is she, Mal?" asks Betty.
The question appears so patently absurd that Mal struggles for a moment in order to not blow it off, until she remembers that there is still a where and also a when attached to this emptiness.
"Groning plateau," says Mal. "Near the south side of Mount Groning. Access is restricted and we're not supposed to talk about it."
Suddenly she remembers thinking it's probably going to be a nice site, once the remnants of the army camp have washed away, the trampled mud, the ashy remains of hundreds of camp fires. A thought passes through: she remembers she must go back to see if the seeds have taken off.
Polly had taken to carrying a clattering tin of wildflower seeds back when diplomacy had first failed. Now some of the gravesites had more flowers than were statistically likely. She'd confessed to Mal once that she had hoped to make a rather bigger difference than that and was going to throw the tin away. But she hadn't.
Mal becomes suddenly aware that she has been asked another question, and decides to ignore it until it is repeated, and it is. She stirs her coffee and lets Betty nod along to a shameful lie. That Polly didn't have to suffer, that it was over quick. The truth is that Polly died alone among enemies, that Mal didn't know until she set out to find her the night after.
And then, of course, there is the other truth: that she has the sick image of a Borogravian sergeant, the enemy, struggling and falling and standing and falling again, forever burned into the back of her eyes, and Mal has it because of what she did to that man when she had to find Polly. That she knows Polly called out something right before she went down, but the man didn't care for it, and now it's lost to memory forever.
And Betty is still throwing glances at the kitchen door as if she is expecting her back. Then she gets up to make a cup of coffee for herself, and Mal notices with something resembling interest that she drinks it strong and black.
Betty focuses on that murky coffee like an addicted vampire at her best, excuses herself, and wipes her nose. Comfort may be in order, but Mal fails to deliver it.
"I brought some things," says Mal, because she suddenly remembers why she is here in the first place and, at the state she's in, it is best to put these thoughts to action as soon as they occur, because who knows when they'll swing by for another visit. She struggles through the strap of the pack at her feet and takes out the leather map packed, with improbable foresight, at the top. She loses the thread again, flicking through a bunch of sealed envelopes. Realises in another lucid moment that this will take much, much longer than she had anticipated. She lays them on the table.
"Can't we leave the will for later," says Betty, and then covers her mouth with her hand, and Mal is ready to agree that this is neither the place nor the time for a will. Till she remembers.
"I think they're letters, actually, but they rationed away postal service up there and I figured I may just as well deliver them," she says, a pretty long sentence under the circumstances. Until she found the letters, she hadn't known exactly what Polly had been writing, on and off, in the months leading up to the attack, but Polly wasn't the diary type and anyway nothing much had been happening. She wonders if Polly had had a feeling.
"I'll be off then," says Mal, after the letters haven't been met with any obvious reaction at all and anyway she's too distracted for a subtle one. "Thank you for the coffee."
"Please stay the night," says Betty, suddenly and with such urgency that it goes through the first time.
That's what she said is what unfortunately pops up first, courtesy of a brain that is more exhausted than Mal has ever experienced.
"I can't," she says instead. I don't want to would be more like it. "Why?"
If she paid any attention, she could have sensed a multitude of reasons, most importantly the wish to not be alone with this new knowledge, half of it lies.
"We don't even know how you've been," says Betty, "I mean, you can't just up and leave after a quarter hour. Paul isn't even here yet. I mean, obviously you can." She sighs. "No-one else will be able to tell us anything, will they?"
It has all the marks of a rhetorical question, but Mal racks her brain anyway. Private Smith, maybe, but he's spending his time visiting relatives in the capital and in any case she can't stand him. Igor? Chomsky and Klein are out of the question, even though Klein liked Polly a lot, but they share a gravesite up in the mountains...
Actually Mal is supposed to report back in Plün tomorrow. But with the war progressing the way it does she is not sure if she wants to, and maybe it is more important to deliver a few more of Polly's letters. Has the decision to desert ever been made more casually? she wonders. She'll miss the ceremony, of course.
"Maybe for another day," she says. Until they start looking for her.
-
Later, after Betty had gone up to wake her children and talk to them, after Paul was back, after a late dinner in which no-one ate much of anything and Mal felt the raised glass for Polly was the heaviest thing she ever lifted and in which there was the general consensus that it was a good thing Polly's father hadn't lived to see this, and after Mal had failed to drown in the bathtub, she is watching her bare feet on the wooden floor, utterly perplexed by the task of going to bed that lies in front of her.
And it's Polly's bed, too. It's the only free room they had at The Duchess and she thinks she can smell her still.
She's come pretty far, though; her nightshirt is on and her teeth are meticulously brushed and her hair is wet and combed and it smells like soap and herbs. She feels cleaner than she has in months, it's like a patina over all the grime that had accumulated.
She's going to bed, she decides, and naturally it follows that she opens the window to attempt another cigarette. Sooner or later, one of them has got to calm her down.
The roll-up is uneven and it burns strangely and she realises it's a beautiful night outside, cool, cloudless, just so hard to appreciate.
She knows there were other nights like this, bright with stars. They were different though. Nights these days aren't what they used to be, she thinks, and almost chokes on the thought. She didn't always share them, and they were okay before.
She puts the ciggy out in the flower box hanging outside of the window. Bed now? She rolls another, puts it in her mouth and sets it on fire, and, thinking of something, her hands reach up to the back of her neck, and she unclasps the chain that holds a locket, because it tends to catch on things when she sleeps, and then she re-clasps it, because she can't. Stupid.
There's a knock on the door.
She freezes out of habit, but really there's nothing to worry about. Her body has always been hard to read and the long cold winter has left her with no evidence. She'd always thought her calves looked a bit feminine, but not anymore. And really, who will care; Polly can't. Mal never did.
Betty sticks her head through the door, apologises for the disturbance, and Mal waves it away.
"There was one for you as well," says Betty. "Didn't you see it?"
Mal isn't so sure what she's supposed to reply to that. No way, what a surprise, I totally didn't look at the letters I carried around for weeks, it only has my name on it?
"I did," she says, progressing in her mission to poison the night air with tobacco and tar.
"You haven't even opened it yet," says Betty.
"Shufti, honestly, I've got the time," says Mal.
Betty, for some reason, takes this as a hint to advance on Mal, who turns. She lays the letter on the windowsill, adressee facing up. Mal'd alawys thought Polly had a nice clean handwriting, letters nice and separated because she learned writing out of books, not at a school.
Betty watches her, like a woman on a mission, and Mal feels she must look up to meet her eyes.
"Funny," Betty says finally, "I remember Polly wearing a locket just like it."
Great, thinks Mal- Now I'm being accused of grave robbery. She says, "It's just a huge coincidence, I guess."
"Can I see it?" says Betty.
"You're being awfully nosy," says Mal.
Betty, unexpectedly, apologises profusely. Maybe Mal has spent too much time in the army. She changes her mind, shrugs. "Why not," she says.
She unclasps the chain at the back of her neck and, without looking at her, hands the ensemble to Betty, who is taking it gingerly.
Betty works the locket open with a fingernail, and her face grows soft. She grabs the windowsill as if she needs the support, and Mal finds this unfair. It is not Betty who walked down the mountains on her own. Not Betty who held a small, cold hand until sunrise. It is not Betty who shovelled a hole into the frozen ground, then filled it again until she was shaking with exhaustion. Mal finds her bold emotions strangely invasive.
"Nice one of Polly," says Betty, while Mal drags a finger through the crumbly soil in the flowerbox outside the window. Perspective. It is Betty, who lost a small son last year.
They got the saddest little card two months later; she remembers how Polly went on her day as she always did, and then spent the evening kicking a pebble all over the drill ground until the sun went down and she broke her toe on a rock.
Mal sighs. "She iconographs well, I always thought." Unlike she, who'd sat there with sunglasses and a hat and still turned to dust at the fifth take. It had still turned out a very interesting, if somewhat overexposed picture. "Funny," Polly had said, "I can't make out a single facial feature, but it still looks a lot like you."
There are a handful of other iconographs of Polly that she knows of, starting with the one taken by Otto Chriek of their regiment, Mal has them all somewhere except the one that she noticed hanging above the mantlepiece in The Duchess. And there used to be a painting of her in Duchess Annagovia's old palace in the capital, but they took it down when it all went to hell again.
"I'm sorry," says Betty. "I didn't even know -" Mal knows that this is actually a question, and that it actually says, "Why did you never tell us?"
Mal realises there is some comfort in this and that she should accept it and probably try and provide some of her own. Maybe humanity has left with Polly - but then, why should she hurt this much? So Mal blows some smoke into the room, shrugs. "It was a bit of an abomination, that's why," she says.
"Yes," says Betty. "Obviously. All the worthwile things are. But the kids are a bit hard to hide."
"She has a lot of enemies in HQ," says Mal, daring her to notice the present tense. "It just was never a good idea and then it became a habit." And in this army, where there was no privacy, only solitude, maybe the secret they shared - or maybe even the secrecy itself - saved their lives. For a little while. She's not sure Betty accepts this, but at least she doesn't challenge the reasoning.
Then she recalls Shufti and how observant she was, after all, she did find out about Lofty and Tonker and Wazzer with no nudges from a vampire. "Did you guess?"
"No," says Betty. "I mean, obviously I teased her a little."
"Obviously." With some amazement, Mal notices that one of her eyebrows attempts a little climb.
"Yeah," says Betty. "But I stopped years ago cos she always got so sad and then it wasn't very funny anymore -"
There is another unspoken question right there, but this time Mal isn't going to answer it aloud. Because she'd been a self-centered bastard at the time, keeping Polly at a casual arm's length, and sometimes at much shorter distance, because she was so worried about her own immortality even when it was aeons too late for both of them. Wasting both their time, only she had so much more of it than Polly did. And didn't she turn out to be right in the end?
Yet, she regrets it now.
And then she'd plunged in heart-first, because bright flames shine quickly, and she invested so much, was so sure this fire must burn out long before that terrible threat got real, but suddenly everything was flammable. Now she's ash, consumed. And it had been such a clever plan.
"Well, anyway. I brought you a letter opener, in case you needed one," says Betty. That's not very subtle.
"Depends," says Mal, "is it wooden?"
Betty gives her a look as if she's one of her children, misbehaving. At this moment, Tilly begins to cry for her mummy from the other room. Mal wonders if the children understand that there's a difference between their auntie not visiting for long stretches of time and her not visiting ever again. They probably do, she thinks; they're children, not rocks.
"Sorry," says Betty again, distracted, already turning to the source of the noise and obviously relieved about the chance to flee.
"I'm sorry," says Mal. Such words, unheard of under any other circumstances.
"Good grief," says Betty. "What for?"
Now a door opens, there's footsteps on the corridor, another door, then Paul's voice speaking in low tones to his daughter as he picks her up to comfort her. Paul who she is sure has cried himself to sleep that evening, damn her ears.
Mal thinks about Betty's question, then shrugs. She doesn't particularly want to expand on the topic on how she couldn't find Polly in the carnage. "Good night," she says.
Betty sighs. "Night, Mal," she answers. "See you in the morning."
Betty is very polite and soft in closing the door, and Mal is on her own.
Her toes are burning with the cold now, and she makes a few tentative steps towards the bed. Sits down on the bedframe, notices she's still holding the letter and the letter opener in her left hand, and lets that hand sink. Breathes out, still tasting tobacco. Sleeping is the hardest task of them all.
With her right hand she pulls back the covers, and her knuckles, almost accidentally, brush the surface of the mattress, find that slight dent that must have been left by the weight of Polly's sleeping body over the years. The idea of curling up in there, in Polly's space, pulls her in, suffocates.
It was in here that Polly cut off all her hair. Here that she made the decision to go and find Paul. Here, actually, that she made the most historic of departures.
It is all coming down. She thought she'd missed Polly before, well, she misses her now. She is in the heart of where Polly went home and oh, she misses her, she misses her, she misses her.
Mal hardly has attention left to notice she is shaking with cold, but draws her legs in underneath her, her feet feel like solid ice.
Polly, these games were rigged, she thinks, this isn't fair, and now she draws a deep breath, her hand flies to her mouth, and she caves. Behind her eyes, Polly falls forever, and to distract herself from this thing, which is not grief yet but raw, she counts on her fingers:
I brought: one, a laundered and starched shirt, and two, a pair of trousers, and three, a box of medals and hairpins and four, a shaving mug, and five, half ofa a bar of soap, and six, a sword that just may become the Perks' new fire poker, and seven, a tin of flowerseeds that used to contain 82 seeds and now contains none. I hung the clothes up in her closed and put the box and the mug and the soap and the tin on her nightstand.
That leaves eight, a locket, nine, a dent in this mattress, and ten, six letters not delivered. To the Duke, to Jackrum, to Clogston, to Froc - twice -, to me.
And beyond that, nothing.
Mal straightens up, unclenches her fingers one by one. She must get up from the bed one more time so she can read by the starlight, at the window, and suddenly she is so tired.
The letter openener flashes almost like a wielded knife in the night. The letter has a date and it starts with Dear Mal and Mal remembers that date and puts the letter away for good, she must, and sits down again on the bed. She remembers, she can't not, the inside of that tent that was so small for two people and so big and empty for one. Polly lying on her stomach, writing long letters front to back by candlelight as if she was running out of time. She knew.
Somewhere in Mal's vivid memory, Polly, still writing, reaches out her left hand to Mal, brushes Mal's sleepy fingers with hers as if to check, as she is wont to do, if her companion is still there. Mal catches her hand, breathes a kiss on her fingers, and before she rolls over to go back to sleep she tries to meet her eyes, too. Rare in such moments, and only for short little second, Polly is unsmiling, her expressive face so full of the sadness that sometimes swings by. It feels like goodbye, ninety-six days before the fact. She knew.
"To whom are you writing?" Mal says then.
A pause. "Home." A smile, at last. Mal still finds no tears for it.