Madre de Servus
Characters: Seborga, Fem!Spain, mentions of the Itabros, Hutt River, Australia, Kegelmugel, and Turkey.
Pairings: None.
Rating: PG-13.
Warnings: Slavery, character death, angst.
Carlino’s mother gives him a name he’s not supposed to have. She gives all three of them the names they’re not supposed to have, and smiles and puts her finger to her lips, shh, secret. Shh, secret,, Lovino-Feliciano-Carlino, and they nod and put their fingers to their own lips, shh, secret, even if the men who own them don’t care what they call each other, because it’s not like real people will ever use their names.
When Carlino is this old, they take Lovino out of their mother’s cage. The rest of them see him when they’re all fed, and they whisper their names to each other, shh, secret. When Carlino is this old, they take Feliciano out, too, and it’s just Carlino and his mother to cuddle under the blankets, but at least maybe Lovino has someone to hold him at night, too.
When Carlino is eleven, they take him out of his mother’s cage, and as he walks out he sees Sadiq leading a tall, sleepy-eyed slave in behind him. There’s a prod in Sadiq’s other hand.
He goes to work in the field or the house during the day, because if he’s there they might as well get some use out of him. It’s all right, though, because his brothers are there, to help show him what to do.
Not long after Carlino leaves his mother’s side, it might be a few days or it might be two weeks but not very long, Lovino vanishes. One day he’s there at mealtime, one day he isn’t.
Feliciano stays a year. Then he’s gone, too. One day here, one day not, and Carlino’s a slave, he knows how it works. But. The last he sees of Feliciano is a glimpse, a glimpse through the fence of his brother being led away, and that evening the only shh, secret name his mother whispers is his. One day here and singing quietly next to Carlino, one day gone to a place further away than death, because there’s an easy way to see those taken by death, you know where they’ve gone.
He works. He grows taller. His mother’s belly starts to swell, and in the evenings Carlino and his mother smile with the sheer joy of being together, and whisper shh, secret names for when the baby is born.
He never does find out which one she chooses.
The boy who picks him out is only maybe a year older than he is, and the man who buys him is tall and impatient. Sadiq calls him into the line-up in the late morning, when his stomach is starting to rumble just a little. Twenty minutes later Carlino is bought-bargained-sold, and he doesn’t get to say goodbye to her. He doesn’t get to hear her say I love you or I’ll always remember you or Stay safe, the last thing she says to him is I’ll see you tomorrow, and you’d better have thought of a girl’s name by then! and the last thing he says to her is But Madre, girl’s names are hard!
(They are. He comes up with ‘Elena’, halfway through the too-hot, too-long journey to his new owner’s home, and far too late to tell her.)
They take him to a place very far away from the only home he’s ever known, and they strip him to the waist and hold him down and heat a brand in the fire and press it to his skin, and it burns, it burns. Carlino screams his voice away and chokes on the smell of his own burning flesh, and they just hold him down. Even after they take the iron away, long after the pain has dug itself a home in his arm, they hold him down so that he can’t move and blur the mark.
When he wakes up the next day, weak with pain, there’s a dressing over the throbbing brand on his upper arm, and his mother isn’t there. Nobody he knows is there. Carlino has never in his life seen the slave who wakes him. There’s nobody he knows, not Maria-who-had-twins or her pale-haired son, not Frances or her daughter Monique, none of them. There’s only his master, looking at him expectantly even though they only met the day before, and it doesn’t matter if Carlino is alone for the first time in his life. He has been a slave all of his life. He knows to obey.
His master calls him Seb, and Carlino wears the name obediently; it’s not really a name, more of a handle, because his master needs something to address him with. He keeps his shh, secret not-real name underneath, written across his breastbone, and carries out the work asked of him even though the pain in his arm threatens to overwhelm him. He guesses he must do all right, because in the evening his owner’s father glances at the tools in his hands and says We got a bargain out of that one.
He whispers his family’s secret names when he lies down to sleep, breath-quiet so that nobody will hear him, and it’s only then that he realises he doesn’t know what his mother’s name is. He gets Lovino-Feliciano, and Marco-Elena for the baby just in case it’s either sex, and then he has to say Madre because he doesn’t know what she called herself, and the sense of loss hits him like a hollow shock under his breastbone. Suddenly he has to fight to breathe, let alone to keep his breathing steady. He never paid attention to what other slaves called her, because to him she was always Mother, so the only other name he knows for her is what Sadiq called her, Spaniard, and that’s a label, not a name…
He puts a smile on his face, wearing his easygoing nature like a shirt (which makes it hard to hold onto when he has to take his shirt off, and maybe he should have made it like his underwear instead, but he manages), and he lives. He tries to find a little happiness when he can - in food he sneaks off his owner’s plate, in slow-growing friendships with the other slaves, and when Matilda turns eleven and Master Jake comes back with someone he knows, Seb-Carlino can take a little comfort in Angel-Johan’s vaguely familiar face.
A little comfort only, because he’s forgetting things. Maybe the branding drove them out of his mind, maybe the pain shattered his ties to before, maybe it’s only now that Johan’s here that he realises how much he’s forgotten.
He can’t remember much about his family. Lovino is dark-haired and bad-tempered and tall, impossibly tall, even though when Carlino thinks about it he knows that he must be as tall now as his brother was when he vanished out of Carlino’s memories. Feliciano is only a little clearer, cheerful and friendly and red-haired, because their mother used to say that they were so alike, but even with an extra year there’s not much left of him in Carlino’s head.
And he’s losing their mother. He knows that her hair was dark and long, and that her eyes were green, and he knows she used to smile and call them cute and sing them to sleep, but he can’t remember her smile or the tunes, and when he digs in the sand-filling vaults of his memory, he can’t see her face. The only scraps of her he has left are his name, and his eyes, and his accent, and two of those never really belonged to her.
He’s lost everything about his family except for their shh, secret names, and he doesn’t know the most important name of all.
(He tells Johan ‘Maria’ while he can still remember it.)
But there’s work to do - so much of it, and much of it back-breaking - and he has little time to wrack his mind, and he’s almost never alone, so he can’t cry. He just. Settles into his new home, which is mostly the same as his old home in what it asks of him, and smiles when he can and remembers what he can. It could be worse. Carlino has no illusions about that: It could be worse. He isn’t beaten much, there’s enough food, he has friends among the other slaves, and he isn’t a girl so he won’t end up pregnant. It’s as good as he can expect.
So he gets on with his life, until one day when his master goes to town for business, and Carlino follows him past the creaking stage of heat-warped boards where the slaves are auctioned off every month. His master skirts the crowd, and the crowd jeers suddenly, and Carlino looks up and she’s standing on the stage, and he knows her, he remembers her face at once, she’s older and she’s wearing rags but she’s there, impossibly, she’s there.
“Mother!” he calls out, and he runs toward her, or tries to - the crowd is in his way and he has to shove past dirty, heavy bodies, but Carlino doesn’t care, he’s too busy screaming and forcing his way through, and on the stage his mother lifts her head.
“Lovino? Feli?” He elbows past a tall man in a black coat, his master’s curses meaningless noise behind him, because his mother’s voice is everything in his mind. “Feliciano -- no!” He sees her wrestle against the auctioneer who grabs her, fighting to get to the front of the stage, and Carlino ducks through a gap in the press of people while his mother struggles against the auctioneer and scans the crowd and shouts the names of the brothers he barely remembers, and then she must catch a glimpse of his hair because she screams, “Carlino, Feli, Carlino!”
“Madre!” and someone tackles him to the ground, strikes him savagely across the back of his head. His mouth is full of dust. “Madre!” He fights against the weight pinning him and the hands on his arms, he has to go to her, he has to, he has to touch her and hold her and learn her name, but there are too many hands holding him down, and he can’t even see her with all the people blocking his way. The blows rain down across his head, his back, and Carlino doesn’t even care, he keeps on shouting to her until his voice goes out along with his consciousness.
He gets the worst beating of his life when he wakes up back at his master’s house, bad enough to lay his whole back open, but it doesn’t hurt nearly as much as the dulled, sharp ache deep inside.
Things happen. Time passes. Sickness runs through the country and passes through the town, and all the while, Carlino cradles a tiny, flickering spark of hope. It’s a foolish, wild hope, but hope often is. Most real people wouldn’t even call it a proper dream, because all he wants is the chance that he will see his mother for a few seconds, close enough to speak, and he can say goodbye.
And he gets his wish, in a way.
The last time Carlino sees his mother is three years after the auction.
He follows his master into town again. (His master trusts him. Carlino has always obeyed, except for the one time it really mattered.) It’s a rare rainy day, the light dulled and grey, and water trickling down the walls and the horses and the people. His master meets a man under an awning in a certain part of town, and while they talk Carlino drifts around behind the brothel. And there she is, lying on the trash heap.
There’s a red infertility stamp on her hip. He can see this because she’s naked. There are plague pustules on her tanned skin, open sores over her thighs and breasts. Her dark hair is streaked with grey and matted with dirt, tangled around her shoulders and stained with rotten fruit. Her face is lined and blank, lips slack and crusted with sores, and it doesn’t look like hers without the expressiveness she showed so freely. Her lively green eyes are clouded, gone misty with the sickness and empty of joy, of love, of life.
She’s dead. Carlino doesn’t even hope otherwise, not even for a second.
She’s dead and they threw her out with the trash. She’s dead and naked because the rags she wore were worth more to the brothel than her dignity, because a dead slave doesn’t have dignity, a dead slave has nothing and is worth less. They threw her out on the trash because the world doesn’t care that she was Carlino’s mother and that she laughed and hugged him and taught him how to walk and kissed his bruises better and sang to him in lilting Spanish with her dark hair tumbling down her neck. It doesn’t matter that she raised three sons and loved them fiercely, because she is a dead slave and dead slaves are nothing more than the garbage she lies on.
Carlino doesn’t realise that he’s fallen to his knees until he’s dragged to his feet, doesn’t realise that he’s choking out her name until people come running to the noise, doesn’t realise that he was touching her, stroking her hair and her fingers and cradling her face, until his hands are pried away. He digs his feet in and tries to stay, but he’s never been strong enough to do what he wants, not even when it matters more than anything should matter. He can’t stay and give her anything, not even after her death.
Nobody will give her anything after death. She won’t get a grave or a headstone or even a cross made of twigs. They’ll take her away with the trash and maybe they’ll burn her, but they won’t scatter her ashes in the wind so that she can dance above the earth the way she wanted.
He’s taken back and beaten and scrubbed down with lye (by one of the field slaves, not Matilda’s beautiful, precious Johan-who-isn’t-called-Johan), and then he’s put in isolation for three days.
It’s the only time in his life that he’s been allowed to weep.
Pairings: None.
Rating: PG-13.
Warnings: Slavery, character death, angst.
Carlino’s mother gives him a name he’s not supposed to have. She gives all three of them the names they’re not supposed to have, and smiles and puts her finger to her lips, shh, secret. Shh, secret,, Lovino-Feliciano-Carlino, and they nod and put their fingers to their own lips, shh, secret, even if the men who own them don’t care what they call each other, because it’s not like real people will ever use their names.
When Carlino is this old, they take Lovino out of their mother’s cage. The rest of them see him when they’re all fed, and they whisper their names to each other, shh, secret. When Carlino is this old, they take Feliciano out, too, and it’s just Carlino and his mother to cuddle under the blankets, but at least maybe Lovino has someone to hold him at night, too.
When Carlino is eleven, they take him out of his mother’s cage, and as he walks out he sees Sadiq leading a tall, sleepy-eyed slave in behind him. There’s a prod in Sadiq’s other hand.
He goes to work in the field or the house during the day, because if he’s there they might as well get some use out of him. It’s all right, though, because his brothers are there, to help show him what to do.
Not long after Carlino leaves his mother’s side, it might be a few days or it might be two weeks but not very long, Lovino vanishes. One day he’s there at mealtime, one day he isn’t.
Feliciano stays a year. Then he’s gone, too. One day here, one day not, and Carlino’s a slave, he knows how it works. But. The last he sees of Feliciano is a glimpse, a glimpse through the fence of his brother being led away, and that evening the only shh, secret name his mother whispers is his. One day here and singing quietly next to Carlino, one day gone to a place further away than death, because there’s an easy way to see those taken by death, you know where they’ve gone.
He works. He grows taller. His mother’s belly starts to swell, and in the evenings Carlino and his mother smile with the sheer joy of being together, and whisper shh, secret names for when the baby is born.
He never does find out which one she chooses.
The boy who picks him out is only maybe a year older than he is, and the man who buys him is tall and impatient. Sadiq calls him into the line-up in the late morning, when his stomach is starting to rumble just a little. Twenty minutes later Carlino is bought-bargained-sold, and he doesn’t get to say goodbye to her. He doesn’t get to hear her say I love you or I’ll always remember you or Stay safe, the last thing she says to him is I’ll see you tomorrow, and you’d better have thought of a girl’s name by then! and the last thing he says to her is But Madre, girl’s names are hard!
(They are. He comes up with ‘Elena’, halfway through the too-hot, too-long journey to his new owner’s home, and far too late to tell her.)
They take him to a place very far away from the only home he’s ever known, and they strip him to the waist and hold him down and heat a brand in the fire and press it to his skin, and it burns, it burns. Carlino screams his voice away and chokes on the smell of his own burning flesh, and they just hold him down. Even after they take the iron away, long after the pain has dug itself a home in his arm, they hold him down so that he can’t move and blur the mark.
When he wakes up the next day, weak with pain, there’s a dressing over the throbbing brand on his upper arm, and his mother isn’t there. Nobody he knows is there. Carlino has never in his life seen the slave who wakes him. There’s nobody he knows, not Maria-who-had-twins or her pale-haired son, not Frances or her daughter Monique, none of them. There’s only his master, looking at him expectantly even though they only met the day before, and it doesn’t matter if Carlino is alone for the first time in his life. He has been a slave all of his life. He knows to obey.
His master calls him Seb, and Carlino wears the name obediently; it’s not really a name, more of a handle, because his master needs something to address him with. He keeps his shh, secret not-real name underneath, written across his breastbone, and carries out the work asked of him even though the pain in his arm threatens to overwhelm him. He guesses he must do all right, because in the evening his owner’s father glances at the tools in his hands and says We got a bargain out of that one.
He whispers his family’s secret names when he lies down to sleep, breath-quiet so that nobody will hear him, and it’s only then that he realises he doesn’t know what his mother’s name is. He gets Lovino-Feliciano, and Marco-Elena for the baby just in case it’s either sex, and then he has to say Madre because he doesn’t know what she called herself, and the sense of loss hits him like a hollow shock under his breastbone. Suddenly he has to fight to breathe, let alone to keep his breathing steady. He never paid attention to what other slaves called her, because to him she was always Mother, so the only other name he knows for her is what Sadiq called her, Spaniard, and that’s a label, not a name…
He puts a smile on his face, wearing his easygoing nature like a shirt (which makes it hard to hold onto when he has to take his shirt off, and maybe he should have made it like his underwear instead, but he manages), and he lives. He tries to find a little happiness when he can - in food he sneaks off his owner’s plate, in slow-growing friendships with the other slaves, and when Matilda turns eleven and Master Jake comes back with someone he knows, Seb-Carlino can take a little comfort in Angel-Johan’s vaguely familiar face.
A little comfort only, because he’s forgetting things. Maybe the branding drove them out of his mind, maybe the pain shattered his ties to before, maybe it’s only now that Johan’s here that he realises how much he’s forgotten.
He can’t remember much about his family. Lovino is dark-haired and bad-tempered and tall, impossibly tall, even though when Carlino thinks about it he knows that he must be as tall now as his brother was when he vanished out of Carlino’s memories. Feliciano is only a little clearer, cheerful and friendly and red-haired, because their mother used to say that they were so alike, but even with an extra year there’s not much left of him in Carlino’s head.
And he’s losing their mother. He knows that her hair was dark and long, and that her eyes were green, and he knows she used to smile and call them cute and sing them to sleep, but he can’t remember her smile or the tunes, and when he digs in the sand-filling vaults of his memory, he can’t see her face. The only scraps of her he has left are his name, and his eyes, and his accent, and two of those never really belonged to her.
He’s lost everything about his family except for their shh, secret names, and he doesn’t know the most important name of all.
(He tells Johan ‘Maria’ while he can still remember it.)
But there’s work to do - so much of it, and much of it back-breaking - and he has little time to wrack his mind, and he’s almost never alone, so he can’t cry. He just. Settles into his new home, which is mostly the same as his old home in what it asks of him, and smiles when he can and remembers what he can. It could be worse. Carlino has no illusions about that: It could be worse. He isn’t beaten much, there’s enough food, he has friends among the other slaves, and he isn’t a girl so he won’t end up pregnant. It’s as good as he can expect.
So he gets on with his life, until one day when his master goes to town for business, and Carlino follows him past the creaking stage of heat-warped boards where the slaves are auctioned off every month. His master skirts the crowd, and the crowd jeers suddenly, and Carlino looks up and she’s standing on the stage, and he knows her, he remembers her face at once, she’s older and she’s wearing rags but she’s there, impossibly, she’s there.
“Mother!” he calls out, and he runs toward her, or tries to - the crowd is in his way and he has to shove past dirty, heavy bodies, but Carlino doesn’t care, he’s too busy screaming and forcing his way through, and on the stage his mother lifts her head.
“Lovino? Feli?” He elbows past a tall man in a black coat, his master’s curses meaningless noise behind him, because his mother’s voice is everything in his mind. “Feliciano -- no!” He sees her wrestle against the auctioneer who grabs her, fighting to get to the front of the stage, and Carlino ducks through a gap in the press of people while his mother struggles against the auctioneer and scans the crowd and shouts the names of the brothers he barely remembers, and then she must catch a glimpse of his hair because she screams, “Carlino, Feli, Carlino!”
“Madre!” and someone tackles him to the ground, strikes him savagely across the back of his head. His mouth is full of dust. “Madre!” He fights against the weight pinning him and the hands on his arms, he has to go to her, he has to, he has to touch her and hold her and learn her name, but there are too many hands holding him down, and he can’t even see her with all the people blocking his way. The blows rain down across his head, his back, and Carlino doesn’t even care, he keeps on shouting to her until his voice goes out along with his consciousness.
He gets the worst beating of his life when he wakes up back at his master’s house, bad enough to lay his whole back open, but it doesn’t hurt nearly as much as the dulled, sharp ache deep inside.
Things happen. Time passes. Sickness runs through the country and passes through the town, and all the while, Carlino cradles a tiny, flickering spark of hope. It’s a foolish, wild hope, but hope often is. Most real people wouldn’t even call it a proper dream, because all he wants is the chance that he will see his mother for a few seconds, close enough to speak, and he can say goodbye.
And he gets his wish, in a way.
The last time Carlino sees his mother is three years after the auction.
He follows his master into town again. (His master trusts him. Carlino has always obeyed, except for the one time it really mattered.) It’s a rare rainy day, the light dulled and grey, and water trickling down the walls and the horses and the people. His master meets a man under an awning in a certain part of town, and while they talk Carlino drifts around behind the brothel. And there she is, lying on the trash heap.
There’s a red infertility stamp on her hip. He can see this because she’s naked. There are plague pustules on her tanned skin, open sores over her thighs and breasts. Her dark hair is streaked with grey and matted with dirt, tangled around her shoulders and stained with rotten fruit. Her face is lined and blank, lips slack and crusted with sores, and it doesn’t look like hers without the expressiveness she showed so freely. Her lively green eyes are clouded, gone misty with the sickness and empty of joy, of love, of life.
She’s dead. Carlino doesn’t even hope otherwise, not even for a second.
She’s dead and they threw her out with the trash. She’s dead and naked because the rags she wore were worth more to the brothel than her dignity, because a dead slave doesn’t have dignity, a dead slave has nothing and is worth less. They threw her out on the trash because the world doesn’t care that she was Carlino’s mother and that she laughed and hugged him and taught him how to walk and kissed his bruises better and sang to him in lilting Spanish with her dark hair tumbling down her neck. It doesn’t matter that she raised three sons and loved them fiercely, because she is a dead slave and dead slaves are nothing more than the garbage she lies on.
Carlino doesn’t realise that he’s fallen to his knees until he’s dragged to his feet, doesn’t realise that he’s choking out her name until people come running to the noise, doesn’t realise that he was touching her, stroking her hair and her fingers and cradling her face, until his hands are pried away. He digs his feet in and tries to stay, but he’s never been strong enough to do what he wants, not even when it matters more than anything should matter. He can’t stay and give her anything, not even after her death.
Nobody will give her anything after death. She won’t get a grave or a headstone or even a cross made of twigs. They’ll take her away with the trash and maybe they’ll burn her, but they won’t scatter her ashes in the wind so that she can dance above the earth the way she wanted.
He’s taken back and beaten and scrubbed down with lye (by one of the field slaves, not Matilda’s beautiful, precious Johan-who-isn’t-called-Johan), and then he’s put in isolation for three days.
It’s the only time in his life that he’s been allowed to weep.