Away From Here- Chapter 23
<
Chapter 23.
Confrontation.
According to the techs, the rains have stopped. According to the experts, the world’s dual suns now shine down on the ground.
According to all of them- they can start moving things up to the surface.
Mara is not going to be one of those people.
She’s under the equivalent of house arrest- according to the head of the project, who had a very stern lecture with her, in which there was a lot of yelling on his part, and a lot of silence on Mara’s part. By the end of it Mara had been told not to leave her quarters, and to pretty much to never touch anything ever.
Mara doesn’t mind; she doesn’t want any of it anyway.
It’s been one week since she was released from the medical unit, after two weeks of intense medical surveillance.
Mara’s pretty sure that was for the medical personnel’s benefit rather than her own.
So, she’d been released, with strict instructions that she’d been told to follow without question on how to take care of herself.
She’d chuckle if she had the inclination to do so. She’s never been very good at taking care of herself; there were plenty of people to testify to that. She somehow doubts a few medical instructions would change that.
She curls up around herself in the small armchair set off to the side of the room; a clean, straightforward object, made of itchy plastic leather and bad stitch work.
Mara hasn’t really left it much these past few days.
After all, what’s the point?
She yawns and wraps her jacket tighter around her body, another itchy piece of plastic fabric, but it’s all she’s got. She hadn’t thought she’d need woolly jumpers. Her leg aches painfully underneath her body, from where it’s tucked up under her, but she ignores it.
She wonders, valiantly, if she ignores it’s existence for long enough, perhaps it will stop existing altogether.
She moves her hand to grab to cup of tea she’d made herself from the synthesisers in her room (and by god she hates the taste, but every time she tries to make a cup of coffee all she can see is the home that isn’t home anymore because this is home and blonde hair and blue eyes of people she can never touch) and as she does so her hand brushes something cool and hard that rests against the edge of the chair.
The long metal walking stick rests heavily against the fabric. A long line of metal and shiny chrome that they’d given her to help her keep her balance. It lies there, an ugly, constant reminder of the damage deep below the aching skin.
She buries her head in one of her hands, blocking it from view, unable to stand the sight of her own stupidity, reflected in that shining chrome as brightly as her own features. She flails a hand out, sweeping across the length of the arm, a frustrated scream escaping her lips.
The metal falls to the floor, clattering, metal against metal.
Moments later, the tea goes the same way.
The plastic of the cup bounces against the ground, tea soaking into the rough carpet, staining it a darker shade of blue.
She looks up and over the side of the chair to inspect the damage.
It’s not nearly as satisfying as it should be.
Mara sighs and looks back to her hands, twisting them together in her lap. She should clean that up, but that would involve moving.
Mara’s beginning to understand why lazy people are what they are. She’s beginning to understand why there’s no point to moving if you have no power to give that movement, if everything is simply going somewhere, and not really moving. Not being able to feel every joint and ligament stretch and flex around you, to just take one foot in front of the other until you reach you destination and nothing else.
She doesn’t like it as a feeling, but she can see why people get used to it.
There’s a sudden bleep that rings through the room, announcing the arrival of someone at the door, and Mara is started from her reverie.
She glares at the cool metal of the door, and the bleep rings through again. She looks away and doesn’t give it any reply.
There's a third set of bleeps after a moment and Mara sighs loudly and looks back to the door. She unravels herself, very slowly, from her position in the chair, her leg giving her a painful twinge as she leans down and picks up the slightly tea covered walking stick. She slowly limps over to the door, her steps careful and achy, pressing the door release catch.
It slides open to reveal Carl, who smiles at her. “H-hi,” he says, his professional demeanour lost along with his white lab coat.
“Piss off,” Mara replies, shortly. She makes to shut the door.
“Mara don’t be like that, I -I only want to help!” Carl exclaims, sounding much too affronted for a man who has had this same reaction for the past week.
“Well, I want you to piss off.” She makes to shut the door again, but he grabs her wrist.
“Mara, come on, I have to check your leg over, if nothing else,” he asks imploringly.
“My leg is fine! So fuck off, because I don’t want your damned help!” she yells at him, breaking her wrist free. “I want to be left alone, like your precious head of your petty little project told me to!” she shouts, before smacking her hand into the door catch and slamming it into his face, leaving her once again in the empty room.
It’s a few hours later on in the day when the door bell next rings. Once again Mara ignores it, thinking it’s just Carl again, attempting valiantly to establish contact, but the comm system suddenly hums into life and the room is filled with a voice which causes Mara to look up at the ceiling from the PDA she was carelessly flicking through.
“Mara I suggest you open this door right now.”
Mara’s heart stumbles over a beat at the sound of that voice and she looks away, as though the other woman could see her.
“And what if I don’t?” she asks the room, knowing that the message is transferred through the comm system.
“Then I’ll go through the security lock outs and open it myself.”
“If you think you’re good enough,” Mara taunts, bitterness welling up in her throat.
There’s silence for a moment, and Mara almost says something, but then the doors hiss open, unpleasant in the silent room, and Shannon is stood on the other side of the now open door, hands on her hips, smugness twitching at the corners of her angry mouth.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Shannon asks, angrily, not commenting on the fact that she opened the door, taking a step towards Mara.
Mara looks herself up and down and looks back to Shannon. “Sitting,” she replies, dryly, glaring at her.
Shannon stalks up to her, angrily. “So I can see. Is that all you’ve done this week?” she questions, harshly.
Mara shrugs, dismissive. “What else is there to do?”
“Well you could start by not treating everyone who tries to help you like something that came out of the gutter!” Shannon yells at her, coming up in front of the chair.
“And what would you know about helping me?” Mara jabs at the woman she hasn’t spoken to before they got on the craft.
“Well, not much, seeming as you hiss and spit at everyone who comes anywhere close to you!”
Mara glares. “Why do you even give a crap?”
“Because Carl is a friend! And he’s trying to help you!” Shannon tells her, frustrated.
“Oh, well maybe you should go make out with him then!” Mara shouts back at her, raising her voice for the first time in what feels like an age. “You seem to do that a lot with people who like you!”
Shannon stops, stock still, staring at Mara. Mara just glares back at her; she’s had too much time to think about this, about what she’d say, about how she’d chew Shannon out, but she just wants to scream at her, to punch her because this is all her fault, because it was always her fault.
“So, what was he? Your boyfriend? Your husband?” Mara spits at her.
“Fiancé.” The other woman is completely toneless.
Mara giggles, and it burns her throat as it rips up her body, spilling out her mouth like bile. “Oh good, I kissed a woman who had a fiancé! Whatever will I do next?! Break my leg irreparably? Oh wait!” Mara’s chest is constricting painfully, but she refuses to let it show to Shannon. “I bet you were just pretending to like me so you could get me to do your bidding!”
Shannon doesn’t reply, her face completely blank.
Mara gets up of her chair, bypassing her walking stick, ignoring the pain flaring up her leg as she puts her weight on it. “Was that the only thing you lied about? Were you only pretending to be my friend too?!”
Shannon still doesn’t reply. “Well?” hisses Mara. “Are you going to reply to me?”
“I was sent by the Agency,” Shannon tells her, coldly, after a moment.
“So, it was just a lie?” Mara says, her voice quieting for a moment, before her voice comes back, renewed by this new piece of information, by this new confession. “Like everything else on this damned slag heap of a planet! It’s nothing but a lie?!”
“You didn’t have to join the team,” Shannon remarks, detached from his whole situation, as if she were no more than a bystander.
“Oh, but I did, because I thought you gave a fuck about me!” Mara encroaches in on the other woman’s personal space, glaring at her, matching Shannon's cold gaze with one that burns red hot. “I thought you wanted the best for me... But that was just another lie, wasn’t it!” It’s not a question, never a question anymore; she has all the answers now.
“I was doing what was best for the company.”
“No, you weren’t, you were doing what was best for you! But it backfired, and now you’re stuck on this hellhole of a planet in a life you didn’t want.” The laugh she gives is humourless and barking, before her voice softens, returning to almost normal parameters. “Well, at least for once we’re both in the same boat.”
There’s silence between the pair for what could have been an age, a stretching expanse of time where there is nothing but the clash of their gazes and the heaving of Mara’s breathing to match Shannon’s own. Finally the silence shatters like cracked glass under Mara. “Why did they want me here, Shannon?” she asks, her voice now quiet, still resonating with the same strength from before, but hushed, as though it’s a dirty secret between them both. Something that could never reach the outside walls of this room. “Why would they want me on this planet, there’s nowhere to run to, nothing to explore, what’s the point in a runner? What use am I to anyone?”
Shannon levels her gaze, her stance shifting, professional and neutral, when she speaks, she sounds like she’s reading a textbook. “Your physical and mental capabilities, mostly your physicals ones, give you a substantial evolutionary advantage, an advantage that on Earth was not needed, but on this colony would be useful to a diverse and powerful gene pool.”
It takes Mara a moment to realise exactly what the other woman has just told her, but when she does, she finds she can’t look at her. “So, you didn’t want me to help you, you wanted me to breed with someone, like I’m some god damned prize mare!” Mara yells, screams more like, and for the second time today, she throws her arm out, smashing a vase and flowers from the table to the floor. Water seeps into the carpet.
Shannon doesn’t even flinch. “In essence, yes.”
Mara whirls around, stepping back up to Shannon, practically spitting in her face. “And what if I chose not to? What if I decided that I didn’t want to pass on my genes, that I don’t want to fuck some random guy and have his children?”
Shannon doesn’t meet her eyes this time, looking just slightly away from her. “If you cannot find a partner of your own volition, one will be found for you. It’s the same for everyone here,” she adds, as though that makes it better.
“If that’s the case, then I can’t stay here,” Mara says, her voice quiet now.
“You know that we can’t do that... The rules say that...”
“Then change the rules!” Mara shouts at her former friend, all sense of propriety lost. “Get out of here and make them fucking change the rules!”
She spins around, unable to look at Shannon, her leg screams in pain, but she ignores it. She doesn’t look back, even as she hears Shannon walk slowly to the door, not even as the mechanism hisses open and she hears Shannon step through.
“It won’t change anything, you know,” Shannon says from the door, her voice quiet. “It won’t change for anything for either of us. No matter what you say or do, it doesn’t matter at all. It’s just one of those things you have to learn to accept.”
Mara doesn’t turn around, and the door hisses shut behind Shannon as she steps out.
Next Chapter>>
Chapter 23.
Confrontation.
According to the techs, the rains have stopped. According to the experts, the world’s dual suns now shine down on the ground.
According to all of them- they can start moving things up to the surface.
Mara is not going to be one of those people.
She’s under the equivalent of house arrest- according to the head of the project, who had a very stern lecture with her, in which there was a lot of yelling on his part, and a lot of silence on Mara’s part. By the end of it Mara had been told not to leave her quarters, and to pretty much to never touch anything ever.
Mara doesn’t mind; she doesn’t want any of it anyway.
It’s been one week since she was released from the medical unit, after two weeks of intense medical surveillance.
Mara’s pretty sure that was for the medical personnel’s benefit rather than her own.
So, she’d been released, with strict instructions that she’d been told to follow without question on how to take care of herself.
She’d chuckle if she had the inclination to do so. She’s never been very good at taking care of herself; there were plenty of people to testify to that. She somehow doubts a few medical instructions would change that.
She curls up around herself in the small armchair set off to the side of the room; a clean, straightforward object, made of itchy plastic leather and bad stitch work.
Mara hasn’t really left it much these past few days.
After all, what’s the point?
She yawns and wraps her jacket tighter around her body, another itchy piece of plastic fabric, but it’s all she’s got. She hadn’t thought she’d need woolly jumpers. Her leg aches painfully underneath her body, from where it’s tucked up under her, but she ignores it.
She wonders, valiantly, if she ignores it’s existence for long enough, perhaps it will stop existing altogether.
She moves her hand to grab to cup of tea she’d made herself from the synthesisers in her room (and by god she hates the taste, but every time she tries to make a cup of coffee all she can see is the home that isn’t home anymore because this is home and blonde hair and blue eyes of people she can never touch) and as she does so her hand brushes something cool and hard that rests against the edge of the chair.
The long metal walking stick rests heavily against the fabric. A long line of metal and shiny chrome that they’d given her to help her keep her balance. It lies there, an ugly, constant reminder of the damage deep below the aching skin.
She buries her head in one of her hands, blocking it from view, unable to stand the sight of her own stupidity, reflected in that shining chrome as brightly as her own features. She flails a hand out, sweeping across the length of the arm, a frustrated scream escaping her lips.
The metal falls to the floor, clattering, metal against metal.
Moments later, the tea goes the same way.
The plastic of the cup bounces against the ground, tea soaking into the rough carpet, staining it a darker shade of blue.
She looks up and over the side of the chair to inspect the damage.
It’s not nearly as satisfying as it should be.
Mara sighs and looks back to her hands, twisting them together in her lap. She should clean that up, but that would involve moving.
Mara’s beginning to understand why lazy people are what they are. She’s beginning to understand why there’s no point to moving if you have no power to give that movement, if everything is simply going somewhere, and not really moving. Not being able to feel every joint and ligament stretch and flex around you, to just take one foot in front of the other until you reach you destination and nothing else.
She doesn’t like it as a feeling, but she can see why people get used to it.
There’s a sudden bleep that rings through the room, announcing the arrival of someone at the door, and Mara is started from her reverie.
She glares at the cool metal of the door, and the bleep rings through again. She looks away and doesn’t give it any reply.
There's a third set of bleeps after a moment and Mara sighs loudly and looks back to the door. She unravels herself, very slowly, from her position in the chair, her leg giving her a painful twinge as she leans down and picks up the slightly tea covered walking stick. She slowly limps over to the door, her steps careful and achy, pressing the door release catch.
It slides open to reveal Carl, who smiles at her. “H-hi,” he says, his professional demeanour lost along with his white lab coat.
“Piss off,” Mara replies, shortly. She makes to shut the door.
“Mara don’t be like that, I -I only want to help!” Carl exclaims, sounding much too affronted for a man who has had this same reaction for the past week.
“Well, I want you to piss off.” She makes to shut the door again, but he grabs her wrist.
“Mara, come on, I have to check your leg over, if nothing else,” he asks imploringly.
“My leg is fine! So fuck off, because I don’t want your damned help!” she yells at him, breaking her wrist free. “I want to be left alone, like your precious head of your petty little project told me to!” she shouts, before smacking her hand into the door catch and slamming it into his face, leaving her once again in the empty room.
It’s a few hours later on in the day when the door bell next rings. Once again Mara ignores it, thinking it’s just Carl again, attempting valiantly to establish contact, but the comm system suddenly hums into life and the room is filled with a voice which causes Mara to look up at the ceiling from the PDA she was carelessly flicking through.
“Mara I suggest you open this door right now.”
Mara’s heart stumbles over a beat at the sound of that voice and she looks away, as though the other woman could see her.
“And what if I don’t?” she asks the room, knowing that the message is transferred through the comm system.
“Then I’ll go through the security lock outs and open it myself.”
“If you think you’re good enough,” Mara taunts, bitterness welling up in her throat.
There’s silence for a moment, and Mara almost says something, but then the doors hiss open, unpleasant in the silent room, and Shannon is stood on the other side of the now open door, hands on her hips, smugness twitching at the corners of her angry mouth.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Shannon asks, angrily, not commenting on the fact that she opened the door, taking a step towards Mara.
Mara looks herself up and down and looks back to Shannon. “Sitting,” she replies, dryly, glaring at her.
Shannon stalks up to her, angrily. “So I can see. Is that all you’ve done this week?” she questions, harshly.
Mara shrugs, dismissive. “What else is there to do?”
“Well you could start by not treating everyone who tries to help you like something that came out of the gutter!” Shannon yells at her, coming up in front of the chair.
“And what would you know about helping me?” Mara jabs at the woman she hasn’t spoken to before they got on the craft.
“Well, not much, seeming as you hiss and spit at everyone who comes anywhere close to you!”
Mara glares. “Why do you even give a crap?”
“Because Carl is a friend! And he’s trying to help you!” Shannon tells her, frustrated.
“Oh, well maybe you should go make out with him then!” Mara shouts back at her, raising her voice for the first time in what feels like an age. “You seem to do that a lot with people who like you!”
Shannon stops, stock still, staring at Mara. Mara just glares back at her; she’s had too much time to think about this, about what she’d say, about how she’d chew Shannon out, but she just wants to scream at her, to punch her because this is all her fault, because it was always her fault.
“So, what was he? Your boyfriend? Your husband?” Mara spits at her.
“Fiancé.” The other woman is completely toneless.
Mara giggles, and it burns her throat as it rips up her body, spilling out her mouth like bile. “Oh good, I kissed a woman who had a fiancé! Whatever will I do next?! Break my leg irreparably? Oh wait!” Mara’s chest is constricting painfully, but she refuses to let it show to Shannon. “I bet you were just pretending to like me so you could get me to do your bidding!”
Shannon doesn’t reply, her face completely blank.
Mara gets up of her chair, bypassing her walking stick, ignoring the pain flaring up her leg as she puts her weight on it. “Was that the only thing you lied about? Were you only pretending to be my friend too?!”
Shannon still doesn’t reply. “Well?” hisses Mara. “Are you going to reply to me?”
“I was sent by the Agency,” Shannon tells her, coldly, after a moment.
“So, it was just a lie?” Mara says, her voice quieting for a moment, before her voice comes back, renewed by this new piece of information, by this new confession. “Like everything else on this damned slag heap of a planet! It’s nothing but a lie?!”
“You didn’t have to join the team,” Shannon remarks, detached from his whole situation, as if she were no more than a bystander.
“Oh, but I did, because I thought you gave a fuck about me!” Mara encroaches in on the other woman’s personal space, glaring at her, matching Shannon's cold gaze with one that burns red hot. “I thought you wanted the best for me... But that was just another lie, wasn’t it!” It’s not a question, never a question anymore; she has all the answers now.
“I was doing what was best for the company.”
“No, you weren’t, you were doing what was best for you! But it backfired, and now you’re stuck on this hellhole of a planet in a life you didn’t want.” The laugh she gives is humourless and barking, before her voice softens, returning to almost normal parameters. “Well, at least for once we’re both in the same boat.”
There’s silence between the pair for what could have been an age, a stretching expanse of time where there is nothing but the clash of their gazes and the heaving of Mara’s breathing to match Shannon’s own. Finally the silence shatters like cracked glass under Mara. “Why did they want me here, Shannon?” she asks, her voice now quiet, still resonating with the same strength from before, but hushed, as though it’s a dirty secret between them both. Something that could never reach the outside walls of this room. “Why would they want me on this planet, there’s nowhere to run to, nothing to explore, what’s the point in a runner? What use am I to anyone?”
Shannon levels her gaze, her stance shifting, professional and neutral, when she speaks, she sounds like she’s reading a textbook. “Your physical and mental capabilities, mostly your physicals ones, give you a substantial evolutionary advantage, an advantage that on Earth was not needed, but on this colony would be useful to a diverse and powerful gene pool.”
It takes Mara a moment to realise exactly what the other woman has just told her, but when she does, she finds she can’t look at her. “So, you didn’t want me to help you, you wanted me to breed with someone, like I’m some god damned prize mare!” Mara yells, screams more like, and for the second time today, she throws her arm out, smashing a vase and flowers from the table to the floor. Water seeps into the carpet.
Shannon doesn’t even flinch. “In essence, yes.”
Mara whirls around, stepping back up to Shannon, practically spitting in her face. “And what if I chose not to? What if I decided that I didn’t want to pass on my genes, that I don’t want to fuck some random guy and have his children?”
Shannon doesn’t meet her eyes this time, looking just slightly away from her. “If you cannot find a partner of your own volition, one will be found for you. It’s the same for everyone here,” she adds, as though that makes it better.
“If that’s the case, then I can’t stay here,” Mara says, her voice quiet now.
“You know that we can’t do that... The rules say that...”
“Then change the rules!” Mara shouts at her former friend, all sense of propriety lost. “Get out of here and make them fucking change the rules!”
She spins around, unable to look at Shannon, her leg screams in pain, but she ignores it. She doesn’t look back, even as she hears Shannon walk slowly to the door, not even as the mechanism hisses open and she hears Shannon step through.
“It won’t change anything, you know,” Shannon says from the door, her voice quiet. “It won’t change for anything for either of us. No matter what you say or do, it doesn’t matter at all. It’s just one of those things you have to learn to accept.”
Mara doesn’t turn around, and the door hisses shut behind Shannon as she steps out.
Next Chapter>>