(no subject)

[latin_doll]

Title: As simple as this

Notes: Polly and Mal have a bit of a break while on the run. Polly gets paranoid. Mal just gets intense. They still manage to have a fairly lengthy conversation on regret. Sort-of sequel to There'll be children and the thing with the butterflies, but not entirely consistent because these stories are like five years old. Can be read on its own.

Birthday present for naru_06 (who gets the most cheerful and also most punctual birthday presents from me).

Warnings etc.: Hurt without much comfort, post-trauma, guilt; mentions of past torture and consent issues, wrist injury.

Rating: T

Word count: 5325 (I would say it is complete but that's what I said the last two times)



As simple as this

Underneath her blanket, Polly has achieved complete darkness. The blanket is heavy, it's damp, and she's finally warm. She shouldn't even be awake but she just heard a door slam.

It must have been the wind.

Polly holds her breath. It must have been. No-one's here but them, and Mal's with her in the room. But does the wind turn keys and pull handles? She closes her fingers around the hilt of the stolen sword next to her, slowly pulls the blanket off her face. Can't see anything, or anybody, between her and the door, but what is beyond? She listens hard for the sounds of footfalls, anything. It's difficult to tell.

At the other end of the bed, Mal is sitting on the floor with her legs drawn up, head and arms resting on her knees. She looks uncomfortable. In the sharp moonlight, a shadow flickers across her, maybe from a tree moved by the same wind. Polly can hear it rustling out there. She can feel the draft through the cracks in the house. It must have been the wind.

"Mal!" she calls under her breath.

And then it's not just the wind anymore, because they are shouting inside this house. Now they're climbing the stairs, now they're on the landing, and the floor vibrates from their stomping feet. They've gone past their door, but how long till they find them?

Polly realises she can't move. Someone out there is laughing. Useless thoughts are spinning aimlessly in her head, thoughts like "they can't have followed us", followed closely by the simple observation "but someone is here". There is no conclusion except that yes, they have followed them. She understands this perfectly well, and she is furious. The voices are softer now, must be gathered somewhere at the other end of the house. She can't understand a word but of course Mal is the one who speaks their language.

Mal, who even now has not stirred at all, and Polly is getting suspicious, and that gives her some momentum back. As softly as she can, Polly straightens up on the sofa, extends a hand to shake her.

The vampire's arm shoots up to hit her hand out of the way and her reflexes are terrifyingly fast. But there's no force behind it, like she's swatting a fly. Polly's hand covers her mouth in a heartbeat as she shushes her, and then when she removes it, Mal knows better than to say anything. She just looks at Polly, her eyes wide.

Polly raises a finger to her lips just in case, but their seven days of good luck must have run out now. The voices have stopped talking, they must have heard something. Beyond the door there's nothing more than a menacing silence.

Polly makes a complicated gesture to somehow convey that there are several men outside of this door. Her chest is so tight she suspects it's going to burst soon. She can't go back there, she can't.

Mal curses under her breath, then gets up fluidly and without a sound, takes a step towards the door to listen for a little while. She shakes her head, than walks towards the window, and Polly follows her for something to do. The snow outside appears undisturbed, but of course, they could have got in through the cellar door on the other side of the house, like Polly and Mal did this late afternoon.

Mal stands by the window for a moment, thinking, while Polly wants to scream at her to duck because someone may see her from outside.

"No-one's here, Polly," says Mal, finally.

And now Polly wants to scream at her to shut up, but it's too late, they have already been heard. Haven't they? The men are taking an awfully long time to burst through the door.

"Go back to bed, Pol. We're all alone here," Mal adds. Then she yawns.

"Mal, they're here, I heard them," hisses Polly, still somewhat dumbstruck but figuring since they are in the deep shit anyway it won't matter if she talks now. Her fingers are still clamped around the hilt of that sword. She won't be good against more than one but she's still their best hope, because Mal can't hold anything heavier than a teacup and even that is up to debate. Her hands are still all kinds of messed up.

"It was a dream, Polly," says Mal.

"I wasn't asleep!" says Polly.

"We can take a look around if it makes you feel better."

There's a certainty in Mal that's never been more puzzling than recently. Then something clicks into place and Polly curses. She shouldn't be so surprised.

"You were supposed to keep watch," she says.

Mal regards her with a rather complicated expression on her face, reminding Polly that while her corporal used to be most reliable under even the most adverse conditions, she has also been pushed quite past even her generous limits and unfortunately that is how things are now. The vampire shrugs.

"Now are we going to or what?" she says.

"I need to be sure," says Polly.

"All right." Mal breaks the eye contact. "After you."

Maybe she really is sorry for falling asleep when she is supposed to keep watch, thinks Polly as she turns the key in the lock and pushes down the handle, somewhat apprehensively. But something else is rather more worrying. They found some stale leftover coffee grounds in a wooden grinder in the kitchen of the abandoned house, and there's still some dusty remains for tomorrow, but Mal's coffee supply has been severely restricted for almost five weeks now and judging by the contagious nightmare Polly just had the pleasure to witness, she's on a downward slope again.

They check in the other upstairs room. The check in the downstairs living room and in the kitchen and even in the stable. Mal says they needn't check the cellar because the door has been locked but after a brief internal struggle Polly insists that they check the cellar too.

Something is rustling down there. "Just rats," says Mal. "Yum," says Polly. "Breakfast." She can't see anything down here because the moonlight doesn't reach beyond a square bit at the foot of the stairs, so she is forced to hold on to Mal's upper arm while they quickly cross the ground. She has to trust Mal's word that no-one's hiding down here either.

Polly has almost convinced herself of it when the cellar door slams shut. She startles, almost drops her sword, slams into Mal. Mal whirls around to face her and at the same time takes a step back.

"It is imperative that you do not panic," she says.

"It's just the draft," says Polly urgently.

"I know that," says Mal, with a tone that seems to ask, do you?

"Look, the window over there, we must have left it open."

Mal takes a good hard stare at the window, possibly trying to remember how they left it, whether they ever paid any attention to it at all. The thin veneer of Polly's confidence acquires the first cracks.

"I assure you," Mal says, "that it's just you and me in this house."

She's said variations of this sentence a few times now, and they get less believable every time.

"I don't want to go back there," says Polly.

"I know," says Mal.

"I mean it," says Polly. This is by far the lengthiest discussion on the place they've left since they left the place.

"There really is no-one here," says Mal, and her tone is bordering on impatient.

"But if there were -"

"There aren't, and you should not be speculating -"

"That thing you did to the guard," says Polly.

"No."

Mal appears to know exactly what Polly is talking about, even though so far Polly hasn't even acknowledged that she noticed the thing that Mal did to the guard.

"Can you do it again?"

"No."

There is a pause. Polly imagines huge considerations going on, or maybe just a lengthy eyeroll.

"That was a very bad thing to do," Mal adds.

"So?"

"Don't tell the league I did that or they'll put me right back in rehab."

"That bad, huh."

Mal turns towards the stairs. "That bad," she says.

"So what exactly was it what you did to him?" Polly asks.

The vampire's voice is entirely non-committal. "Nothing much," she says. "Gave him a piece of my mind."

"So you could do it again is what you're saying?" Polly asks.

"No," Mal says, already climbing the stairs without looking if Polly follows.

"'Cos otherwise it'll just be me and my sword and we saw how well that one played out last time," says Polly.

Mal halts abruptly. Well, Polly thinks, some of the tension must come through one of these days.

"Riddle me this," Mal says. "What goes through your head when you make some poor bloke run into his own dagger?"

"Much the same as when you try to get past one with a pair of scissors?" says Polly. "And he wasn't some poor bloke," she adds, "he was the one who -"

"What I am trying to say here," says Mal, cutting her off without an acknowledgement of what the poor bloke did, "is that I am far too happy to even attempt it again. Open the door, will you?"

Polly passes her on the stairs and turns the doorknob. Happy, huh? In the faint light of the corridor, she sees Mal examining her hands for a short moment, still finding them as useless as before.

"Maybe. If they really piss me off," Mal says softly.

Back upstairs, Polly motions for Mal to take the bed. It's not really Polly's turn to take watch, but she feels she can't sleep right now anyway and Mal has already proved she can. She settles down on the far end of the room, her back to the door, so maybe the dreams won't catch her, the sword securely in her hands.

She watches Mal lie down uncomfortably, shuffling until the blanket is covering her whole. Hands awkwardly over the edge so they won't catch on anything. After they got here the day before, Polly has removed the makeshift bandages for the night so maybe they can heal better now, but her wrists are still raw, and her fingers are purple in places, barely mobile and never warm.

Despite what Mal says, Polly doesn't feel safe here. It's a few hours at least until dawn, and every little sound startles her. She is extremely awake now, because the beams are creaking in the wind, and sometimes things go crack in the wood outside. She almost wishes to be outside once more, wandering through the snow, because then at least she'd be putting more distance between herself and the fort they'd managed to leave via sheer luck and apparently a very unhappy vampire.

She doesn't want to think about the place. She's spent a whole week not thinking about it, and in the absence of her attention, it has grown bigger and now it towers the here and now, consumes it whole. She tells herself to look forward. They've taken a wide detour but it should be only a couple more days until they reach the border after all.

And then, of course, there's the guilt that caught up with her out of nowhere. She watches Mal sleeping.

The moon shines so very bright. Maybe she should sit at the window, maybe she will be able to see them before she hears them, because they are coming, she knows, there is no room for doubt. But to move, now? She'd make noise. She can't.

She doesn't want to think the thought, but can she avoid it for hours on end? She envies Mal because her conscience is clear. Mal had proved more resilient than either of them had expected.

Of course, Polly had hoped for more than even that, and it feels unfair now. She raises her hand gingerly, slips it underneath the tight shawl she is wearing at all times, to check on the twin wounds on her neck. They're getting better. Just a little prick, she tells herself. Turns out it was harmless after all. Turns out Mal didn't revert from it, or from any of the things they did to her. To them.

To her.

Polly really doesn't want to follow that particular trail of thought. Because it's a bit silly if you think about it. There are the things that were done to Mal, and then there are the things that were done to Polly, only the latter happened mostly in her head, right? Then what justifies the pain?

She thinks of the place now. This does, it has to. The other side. She's spent four weeks locked in a cell with a vampire quickly losing her mind. Hungry and cold and unwashed and never quite sure what they wanted from her. She'd been hungry and cold and confused before, of course, but never like this. She was convinced she would die there, at the hands of her friend.

Friend. She's spent so many days being terrified of Mal that she isn't sure what to call her anymore, her friend, her lover, her cellmate. Can't she let any of that count?

Only maybe she was safe all the time. They watched. They knew about the coffee. She told them about the coffee, to make sure. They gave Mal some after the first breakdown so she wouldn't do it again. They wouldn't have let Polly die. She'd been safer in that cell than out on the battlefield with the rest of their army.

Why?

They'd targeted Mal instead, maybe because she'd last longer, maybe because she's a vampire and no-one likes a vampire. Maybe because they figured being in the same cell as the vampire would sort out Polly soon enough.

She wonders if Mal resents her now, for having to take all this while Polly looked on, for all that time in silver shackles that, while they may have been the only thing between Polly and a messy death, turned out to be quite a big obstacle. She wonders that if Mal resents her for all that, whether she has any right. It wasn't as if Polly had chosen it to be this way.

But she would have.

Polly curses inwardly. This is the thought she tried to avoid, and turns out she merely zeroed in on it. There is still no sign of dawn.

It must be the Nugganatic upbringing, she thinks wildly. Four weeks in hell and somehow she'd still drawn the long straw, sounded like excellent fuel for guilt to people like Father Jupe. It's something that Mal would never dream of.

But then, the Nugganatic upbringing never kept Polly from cutting off her hair and running away with the army in the first place, so it's not a terrible convincing explanation.

She looks down on the sword, and realises she still has it in that stupid tight grip. Something's going to cramp if she carries on like this.

-

Unexpectedly, the place looks better in the first light of day. It's been snowing since the early morning hours. Polly can hardly make out the tracks in the snow from last night when she goes out to check on the weather. The mountains where they came from are still hidden by low-hanging black clouds. Maybe they did get lucky after all.

The urge to crawl into a bed and sleep for a year fades with the crunch of her boots in the snow when she walks back to the kitchen door. She expects it back as soon as she sits down somewhere.

Earlier this morning, Polly had liberated some dusty preserves at the back of a cupboard in the cellar, and an even dustier bottle of sharp-smelling rotgut in a kitchen cabinet where it had been stored together with the rest of the cleaning utensils. Now breakfast is a choice between an eight-year-old jar of cherries and an unlabelled jar of cherries.

It's not entirely easy to work up an appetite because one of the first things Polly has done today is clean and re- bandage Mal's wrists using the aforementioned booze and strips of fabric she'd torn from a moderately clean bedsheet. She's no Igor. She knows this. Mal knows this. Mal's no Igor either. Over time, Polly's become rather good at patching up humans, but neither of them know what to do about a vampire. The issue has simply never come up.

Polly has hypothesized that the wounds would probably heal better without all the dirt, and whatever Mal's thoughts on cleaning burns with something you found in a kitchen cabinet are, she hasn't voiced them. Maybe because the unsaid truth is that they've not been healing at all in the last seven days.

After that, she's left Mal upstairs to stare at the wall in peace for a little while (her exact words) to go outside and check on the weather.

Now Polly decides to take her chances with the eight-year-old cherries, leaning against the stove, and between the clink-clink of the soup spoon against the glass and the howling of the wind in the roof she must have missed Mal coming down the stairs.

Distracted by syrup. When the guards get to them, she won't stand a chance.

When Polly finally looks up, she finds the vampire watching her calmly from the doorframe with what can only be called considerable attention. The spoon that is already halfway to her mouth sinks. She feels in her bones that something is wrong, but what is it this time?

She looks down on her spoon and the cherries and tries to see the world as it appears to Mal. She's getting better at this. As thick red liquid drops back into the jar and from her fingers to the light wooden floor, Polly curses.

She must act quickly, distract her.

"I was wondering, Mal," she says, and after a moment Mal acknowledges that she has spoken with a tiny nod of her head. "What would it feel like to die?"

She has first done this in the cell. Distract Mal with questions out of the blue and hurt her feelings because feelings are human and unfortunately there have been situations in which Mal needs reminding. Polly'd probably find a better strategy if she weren't always pressed for time whenever the situation turns up.

It takes Mal too long for comfort, but finally she turns away. "You ain't old enough to be told," she says softly. Polly hears the kitchen door close.

That one time Polly watched her die she thought it was over but it wasn't, and that was just a couple weeks ago. They'd killed her and then they made her come back, to find that she she was still in the very same place.

Ok, Polly Perks, you're an arse and you should probably go apologise, she thinks, and she feels a little better for at least thinking about it. But Polly's spent entirely too long with very little food to leave her breakfast even for a moment. After she's spooned down the remaining red syrup, she gathers some of the things on the table into her coat pocket and steps outside. She's not sure if it's the sugar that makes her feel so light-weighted.

Typically of Mal to go sulk out here, trusting that Polly wouldn't follow before she absolutely had to, because they have honestly spent enough time out in the snow lately.

Mal sits on the stone steps leading up to the kitchen door. She's very very still. Polly's breath clouds in the frosty air, Mal's doesn't. She's dragging her fingers lightly through the snow, apparently still on a mission to find a sensation that registers through the numbness.

"I made you some coffee but it got cold," Polly says. It was right in front of you on the kitchen table!, she thinks. How could you miss it?

There is a long stretch of silence. "Put it down," Mal says finally.

So of course Mal is as bad with early mornings as Polly is with nights. Only Polly gets paranoid. Mal just gets intense. Figures. Polly shrugs, puts down the cup like an offering of peace, then sits down next to her.

"Thanks," Mal says, finally. She reaches for the coffee, and Polly watches her. Her arms are shaking as Mal strains her muscles, struggling to bring her hands and fingers under control. The cup shakes in her grip. Polly really hopes she won't drop it, they really can't waste the coffee; but if she needs help she's free to ask, thinks Polly, who just watches.

"I found some tobacco in the kitchen drawer," Polly says.

"Oh dear sweet Nuggan up in heaven," Mal says, "I thought I was dreaming when I smelt that," and Polly supplies her with a scraggly rollup, then lights up with matches that she found next to the tobacco pouch. There'd been hardly enough for two cigarettes, but she had the other one already.

Mal smokes in silence for a minute or two as, somewhere behind the cloud cover, it is getting a little lighter. They should really get going soon to make the best out of the day, but if they're lucky the snowing will subside first.

Polly watches her own fingers that she taps on her knees to keep warm. She'll have to have another forage into the house to see if there's anything else they can take, gloves, shawls, thick socks; maybe some cleaner clothes. Hell, she'll wear the rest of the bedsheet if she has to.

Polly's spent half the night with her back to that door and the cold has slowed her thoughts somewhat, so maybe that's why she hasn't been able to voice the question that arose, in principle, when she watched Mal sleep last night. Now it just bubbles up from hidden depths. No-one's more surprised than her.

"Mal," she says. "I've got to ask you something but it's probably better if you don't say anything."

The slight figure next to her gives a tiny shrug. Given with what Mal has to work with here, Polly thinks, that's probably a sign of encouragement. Or a plea for more information.

"Do you regret following me?"

Her intent could probably have been formulated a little clearer, she thinks, but Mal is just the person to pick up on these kinds of subtleties.

Mal does not look up as she lifts a hand and slowly, purposefully, in an incredibly controlled movement, plucks the cigarette from between her lips and drops it into the snow. She can lift small things. There is a tiny hissing sound, then nothing.

"No," she says.

This is somewhat hard to believe, Polly thinks. Mal needn't have come to get her after she'd been captured. Mal's life would have been a lot easier, that's for sure. Polly waits in case there is more, and of course there is.

"I probably wouldn't do it again, though," says Mal. "Considering. With what I know now, I mean. But that I would regret until the end."

Polly exhales slowly. "As simple as this?" she says.

"It's not simple," says Mal.

Yes, thinks Polly. "Yes," she says. With Mal, it has never been simple.

"It's actually rather complicated, if you think about it," Mal says.

Out here on the steps, Polly is cold and exhausted already before the day has even started. Today is the first day she thinks they're actually going to make it home. Two more days to the Borogravian border if the weather holds up and no-one bites anyone.

"You once asked me why I signed up for the army," says Mal just before Polly almost manages to doze off with her head on her drawn-up knees.

"Not once," says Polly. "At least every other week. Everyone else had a good reason but you."

Mal groans under her breath. "Everyone else had a simple reason."

"It was probably complicated from their point of view," says Polly.

"I'm not saying it was simple-minded," says Mal. "Just simple. Clear. Marginally consistent? I got their reasoning. The only reasoning I ever questioned was mine."

"I think Jade just went for the hell of it, though," says Polly.

"And yours," adds Mal.

Polly, the enigma? She feels uncomfortable in that role. "I went to get my brother home," Polly clarifies. How the hell did Mal miss that?

"And then you got him home and went back," says Mal. "Say, did I tell you the gripping tale of the big bad vampire who lived in the highmoor?"

"Alluded to it," says Polly. "And that was the most consistent thing I ever did!"

"Have you tried questioning it?"

Polly almost replies something, then stops short in her tracks. Of course she hasn't questioned it, that's because it was so bloody obvious. "I thought we were talking about you," she says. "Highmoors, big bad vampire, castle full of books and wonders, as I recall."

"Indeed," says Mal. "A wealth of opportunities for a wee Borogravian lass in trouble with the Nugganites. The army hadn't really been much of an option then, I was younger than you were when you first signed up and not quite as hard-boiled."

"So you rather took it up with the vampires," says Polly, because that part has always puzzled her, not even commenting on the fact that 'hard-boiled' is not the first word that comes to her mind when describing her younger self.

"So I did," says Mal.

She's seen the twin scars on the side of Mal's neck, the last ones that her body took that will never, ever fade. They're like a mark, an imprint of someone who has crossed all lines. Polly has the same scars now, and they won't fade either, but she's still human and Mal isn't so maybe someone Polly got lucky.

"You said you let her," Polly says.

"Yep," says Mal. "She asked, I said yes but I don't think I was even beginning to understand the question until well afterwards. So it all got a bit more complicated than it had to. Not that it wasn't complicated before."

"And do you regret that?" says Polly. "In as far as you are responsible, I mean."

"Oh, that's not simple," says Mal. "There are upsides, there are downsides. But if I hadn't done it, I wouldn't be around to regret that, for once, so every time I think about it I end up in infinite loops and in any case I was going to talk about the army, so."

If any of that has been supposed to clear that army thing up, Polly is sure it flew right past her.

"So I gave this some thought," says Mal. "They do encourage a high level of navel-gazing at the League. I'm sure some of it is bullshit but it was certainly nice to be able to think a thought through from beginning to end, considering the castle turned out to be the place ideas came to die. She claimed she made me, but that's not what I was. I became what I was because of what I did in revenge. Eventually I made myself."

"What did you do to her?" says Polly. She's heard bits and pieces of this story before, but not framed like that. Not as if it is supposed to explain something about Mal. Just as a story that she needed to know in order to make up her mind about Mal, and about this thing that maybe doesn't exist anymore.

"Not to her," says Mal. "Are you out of your mind? She's scary. I took my revenge out on the world."

"Ah," says Polly.

"I never did anything to her in the first place, but then again they never did anything to me either," says Mal, and that is as far as she ever goes into this kind of detail. "And with all the time that passed I became more terrified that, if I ever chose to do something else, I'd realise how easy it was. And then I did join the League, and it turned out that indeed it wasn't the hardest thing I've ever done and apparently I did have that choice all along so I felt a bit embarrassed and joined the army."

Polly is at that point pretty sure she got lost somewhere. "Why?" she says. "To get revenge on the world in a more organised manner?"

"To give the world the chance to get revenge on me," says Mal. "A fighting chance." There's more to this, Polly knows, there always is. There is purpose in the army, even if you almost never agree with it. Whatever it was about, it is never just about you.

"And are you even now?"

Mal regards her for a moment, then laughs. "I'm glad we didn't meet until we did, Pol," she says.

Polly breathes out. These are the things that, throughout their relationship, she has avoided to know. "So what you're saying is," she says, "in an albeit rather wordy fashion, that you deserved all this? Sounds a bit like -"

"No. I'm not a Nugganite," says Mal. "Just temporarily in a state of mind that allows me to notice an evident cosmic balance."

Strange. It has never occurred to Polly that Mal may regret something that she did. She's not the type. Sure, Polly has been aware of the lengthy bloodthirsty vampire episode in Mal's life, but Polly'd treated that as sufficiently abstract and besides, she is in the army and life there certainly comes in a variety of flavours. Polly has been under the impression it is a past life that you put away and do not examine again, that reform is a kind of rebirth you undergo. Like going bankrupt.

Like what she wants to do with that time in the cell, if she can.

The snowing is trailing off a little. They really should get going if they want to cover some ground before nightfall. Her eyes fall on the other things she brought out, the unlabelled jar of cherries, the spoon. Oh Nuggan help her.

"And I don't care what you think it looks like," she says out of nowhere, "you've got to eat or we'll never get anywhere."

Of course Mal is wrong about everything, but Polly is surprised to find that her corporal still listens to logic.