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The next part of the crazy!Ed fic is very nearly done!
Until then, there is more Dogs: Bullets & Carnage fic, which is...probably not interesting to many of the same people.
AH WELL.
This is Nill-centric, with spoilers through, say, Ch. 31. Clearly DOGS does not belong to me. I just don't know that much about guns.
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“I don’t know what to do.”
Heine never knows what to do, and free will is the worst thing that ever happened to him. In this, Nill has always had the easier lot. All she ever had to do was survive. No moral dilemma there.
“If Badou dies…”
And Badou will die. It’s only luck that’s kept him alive this long.
“…Will you be okay?”
Ah, Heine. She knows better than to think he’s asking if she’ll be okay without Badou. He’s asking if she’ll be okay without him, because it’s the inevitable result of a world without Badou, and they both know it. Though Badou doesn’t.
Nill can’t answer him out loud, and it’s just as well. She rarely wishes for the ability to speak; is far more often grateful she doesn’t have it. She would say terrible things, she knows. She sees the world too clearly.
But she can’t speak, and so instead she runs her fingers through Heine’s hair, and he leans into her hand.
Good dog. I know it hurts.
* * *
The day she moved into the church, Heine came with her to inspect her new room.
“It’s a good lock,” he told her absently, inspecting not just the lock, but the hinges and the sturdiness of the wood. He paced the limits of the room and peered out the window. “There’s a fire escape outside. You could jump down to it, but I doubt anybody could jump up from it. I couldn’t.”
She stepped close and tucked her arm into his, looking out her new window at her new view. Knowing, now, that her room had a lock that would take a long, noisy time to pick, and that by the time someone got through it, she would have been able to escape out the window.
It’s good to be understood. But then they’re very similar, she and Heine-not so much human as fantasy design. Doesn’t everyone want a cute, angelic girl who can’t talk? A pretty boy, loyal as a dog, who can kill absolutely anything?
They grew up in cages because that’s where pets belong. And pets don’t talk, pets don’t remember, so there’s no need to hide anything from them.
Memories turned to dreams, nightmare images obsessed over and prodded at like open wounds.
The man who’d bought her, not for sex, but to hold her and cry into her hair and whisper, “I’m so sorry,” all night long until she thought she’d gone insane.
The dead girl propped against the wall of a rotting hallway with the words Out of Service carved into her naked, flat chest.
The closet full of ropes caked in blood she’d stumbled across in her first attempt at escape.
Things that stay with you: the terrible and the unexplained. And even more, that which is both. Which is Heine’s problem all over.
“You’ll like it here,” he said. “Well. Compared to before.”
She leaned her head against his shoulder, looked out her window at the view different from her nightmares and yet the same. She thought, Of course.
* * *
Badou pities her for not being able to speak, but that’s because he isn’t like the rest of them and doesn’t really understand. He doesn’t see the advantages to being mute, though some of them are obvious.
If you can’t talk, if people think you can’t spell anything more than your own name, no one will kill you for knowing too much. Surely someone in information should understand that. Or maybe that’s exactly why he doesn’t understand.
There’s a lot that Badou doesn’t see, and more that he misinterprets. He still believes in too many things that aren’t real: beauty, truth, a bright future. Change. She’s sure he’ll get himself killed, and she’s afraid for Heine.
Maybe Badou will live to grow old. Maybe he’ll prove her wrong. But she doesn’t think so.
“Hey,” he says. “How’s life in the congregation?”
She nods and smiles and lets nothing of her opinion of his odds of survival show on her face.
As to the question, it’s a life, and it’s more than she’s ever had before. She’s grateful.
Badou snorts, lights a new cigarette from the butt of his last. “It’s like he set you up to be a freaking nun.”
Her smile turns to a grin. A nun. Well then, she’s covered all her bases, hasn’t she? Or, on second thought, just the extremes. Maybe she’s an all or nothing kind of girl.
“You think nuns are funny?” Badou asks suspiciously.
She looks down at her dress. It is very…black and white. But she doesn’t think it would be right for a nun to have so much lace. And the shoes are surely not church sanctioned.
“It’s a lifestyle,” Badou insists, waving his hands. “You’re cloistered, face it!”
She raises her eyebrows and runs an explanatory finger across her throat.
“Yeah yeah yeah,” Badou says dismissively. “But we’ll kill those guys, and then you’ll be safe.”
She likes that he didn’t argue that being caught by someone like Melvin would be better than death.
That doesn’t make him right, though. There’s no end to ‘those guys.’ They’ll never be able to kill them all. But say that it was, theoretically, possible. If everyone in the entire sex trade were magically wiped out, she’d feel safe leaving the church, true. But she still wouldn’t want to.
Oh.
“That’s what I thought,” he says, crossing his arms. “Cloistered.”
She makes a face at him, and he laughs. He’s wrong again. She could leave if she wanted. She just doesn’t feel like it right now, is all.
Badou doesn’t talk to her often; he spends a lot of time pretending she doesn’t exist. But he never comes to the church without bringing her some small, inexplicable gift. Candy, a comb, a toy duck. He hands her these things on the sly, careful that Heine doesn’t notice.
Well. He thinks Heine doesn’t notice, and Heine lets him go on thinking that.
She likes Badou. It’s a shame he won’t survive.
* * *
“My name is Ernest Rammsteiner,” the priest said after Heine had left her. “But don’t tell anyone.”
Heine had said his last name was Rammsteiner, too. Did this explain a lot, or nothing at all?
“We’re going to have to come up with some way to communicate,” Ernest said, “because this won’t do. And we’ll have to think of something for you to do with your time-just until I find a home for you, of course.”
He trailed off hopefully. Nill stared at him, at a loss.
“Why can’t he ever do anything the easy way?” Ernest sighed. “Right. Do you know how to cook? Wait, wait-I’ll put my hand on your head. Nod if yes, shake if no. No. Of course no. What are your feelings on composing sermons, then? Nod if you feel like composing sermons.”
At least, Nill thought, this experience was going to be entirely new.
* * *
Naoto envies Nill for not being able to speak. That may be Nill’s favorite thing about Naoto, though there’s plenty to choose from. She’s wary of words, seems to find them foreign and untrustworthy. Not that there’s much she does find trustworthy.
Naoto is like Heine, and yet nothing like. Heine constantly regrets the past and thinks of how he wishes his life had been. From the look of it, it’s never occurred to Naoto that her life could possibly have been different. She doesn’t want to change the past.
Even so, her past controls her. This is how she and Heine are the same.
“You don’t want Badou to teach you how to sew?” Naoto asks gently. She never speaks to anyone as gently as she does to Nill, which Nill is proud of for reasons she doesn’t entirely understand.
Nill shakes her head. She’s still on buttons, which is embarrassing. It’s nothing like as easy as Badou makes it look.
It would be one thing to learn from Naoto or Heine (if they could teach her, which they can’t, because the very idea of either of them being domestic is absurd), but Badou…
Maybe it’s just that Badou, of all people, shouldn’t know how to sew. The image is too weird. She can’t cope with the idea of sitting in a haze of cigarette smoke while the guy in the wrinkled camouflage jacket teaches her to sew. It’s contrary to reason.
Naoto is scowling at her hands, calloused like any good swordswoman’s. Nill is pretty sure Naoto’s never held a sewing needle in her life, unless she ever tried to kill someone with one. “I can’t teach you,” she admits, like this will be a surprise.
Nill leans her head against Naoto’s shoulder and silently laughs.
“Don’t laugh at me,” Naoto says, but Nill can tell she’s laughing at herself.
Nill wishes that Naoto and Heine were less alike, or alike in different ways, different in different ways. Naoto wants too much to stand alone, and Heine wants too much for people to be…his pack, for lack of a better word. But Naoto doesn’t understand, and Heine would never admit it, especially not to himself.
We’re the same, Heine says, and Naoto replies, I am nothing like you. Missing the point while proving it.
The only people in Heine’s pack right now are Ernest, who lies, Badou, who’s doomed, and Nill, who can only do so much.
Naoto would be so useful.
It’s strange that Naoto is the only one who envies Nill’s silence, and also the only one Nill would really like to talk to.
* * *
People come to the church every day, but Ernest almost never introduces them. Sometimes he explains who she is, but far more often he lies. She’s a cousin, a niece, the child of a friend. She’s here on holiday for a few days, a week, a month.
If he tells people the truth, it’s because he’s testing them, interviewing for her new family. He thinks he’s going to send her away, and she’s not sure how to explain that she won’t let him.
Well. He’ll find out eventually.
Her relationship with Ernest tends to the absurd. He’s blind and she’s mute and every conversation is a comedy of errors.
Their situation says a lot about Heine. He felt it was important for Nill to have a safe haven, a door with a lock, and a sure escape route. He evidently didn’t see the point of human companionship.
They do their best, though, and whatever Ernest thinks, their best is more than good enough for Nill.
Nill sweeps the church, because that much she doesn’t need to be taught. She helps with the services. Ernest is trying to teach her to cook, with questionable results. They take Mondays off, a day of rest a day late. They’re almost like real people.
Today is a Monday, and Nill is sitting on a pew, smiling at the light shining through the stained glass windows. Ernest is sprawled across the bench with his head in her lap while she combs her fingers through his long hair. Heine would kill him if he saw them like this.
It’s more innocent than it seems. Nill is a connoisseur of less than innocent behavior, and she knows. That’s the thing about Ernest. In some ways he’s much more benign than you’d expect, and in others, so very much less.
“I notice Heine was confessing to you again,” he murmurs. She taps the bridge of his nose once. Once for yes, twice for no, directly between the eyes to discourage him from asking stupid questions.
It doesn’t always work as well as she might like.
“Heine never confesses to me,” he whines. “I’m the priest, here! I should hear all the dirty secrets! It’s a perk of the job, you know.”
She shakes her head at him, but it does no good; he can’t see her. It probably wouldn’t do any good if he could.
“And it’s a downside of the job, too, Nill,” he says, switching abruptly to absolute seriousness. It’s his way. “You’re taking responsibility for him. With someone like Heine…that can be very dangerous.”
She knows that already. She’s known that since the first time she tried to touch Heine and he catapulted himself across the room and had a panic attack.
I know that, though, is a difficult concept to convey through hand gestures and touch. Nill settles for tapping a somewhat violent yes into the bridge of Ernest’s nose.
“Ow,” he says.
* * *
In the old days, she hadn’t been afraid of anything. She’d thought she was brave.
She knows better now. It wasn’t bravery, it was just that she’d had nothing to lose. Pain, humiliation, degradation-they’d been inevitable. Inevitable and commonplace. It had been deeply nasty, but not scary. She’d had no possessions, no friends, no family, no pride-nothing to hold onto. Nothing that could be used against her.
She’d known the dollar value of her life, and had found it quite high. They weren’t going to kill her or abuse her past the point of further use: that would be bad business. So why be afraid? She’d had nowhere to go but up.
Now that she has everything to lose, she’s afraid of everything, and afraid for so many people. It’s taken her fourteen years to discover that she’s a coward.
She wonders if this is what it’s like to be normal.