Original Fiction -- Dust and Water, Part IV
Story Master Post is Here
Art by skylar0grace is Here
Mix by pekori is Here
Type: Gen with undertones of femslash
Word Count: 25,000
Rating: R
Warnings: strong language, violence, character death, "offstage" M/M noncon sex
Part I // Part II // Part III // Part IV
Part 8
They had only a short time before nightfall. They pushed on as hard as they could, back across the sands that separated the City walls from the river. It was nearly dark when they stopped halfway to the main gates. “I don’t think we can make it any farther,” Ailith said. “I don’t want to risk missing the next shelter and end up lost and unprotected. We’ll have to stop here for the night.”
“What do we have to do to survive the night?” Aren asked as he sank tiredly to the ground, remembering his first night in the enkava.
“I’m not certain,” she replied with brutal honesty. “I’ve always made it a point to get back to the camp before nightfall.” She opened her pack, took out a waterskin and a loaf and took a bite, wincing against the pain. “I don’t think the winds here will be as strong, but we’re closer to the contamination. Whatever happens, It’s not going to be easy. The main thing is not to lose our minds, or to let each other wander off alone.” She grimaced. “Unless, of course, we both end up wandering off together.”
Aren sat next to her and reached into his own pack for bread and water. When he discovered that he needed to sit cross-legged in order to fit completely in the shelter, he knew he was in for an uncomfortable night. In the last glimmer of twilight, the swirl of sand and magic pressed against the unseen walls of their protected area, but thankfully, the air was too thick for it to build up the fury it had on the other side of the river.
They settled back to back, resting against each other in an uneasy alliance, the tension in Ailith’s back flowing into his own. Aren really didn’t sleep, he only managed a doze, always punctuated by the flashes of the magic through his eyelids. Even covering his ears didn’t help with the wordless voices, though instead of the frantic shrieking of the nightwinds in the desert, these were slower, more solemn and more ominous.
As the night wore on, the wind grew to a low throbbing, rhythmic pulsing like the prison trains he had been assigned to as a fresh-faced young graduate. Overlaid upon this riot of sound, just like on the trains, was wild, wordless, accusatory screaming. Disembodied and overcome, Aren could do nothing but wait helplessly until the winds began to die down as dawn approached.
He stretched uncomfortably in the cramped space. Ailith removed her weight from his back when she felt him move, and when he stood, she reached up a hand in a silent request for help. He grasped it and pulled her up. Her face was even more worn. Drained and exhausted, her eyes were ringed with spotty red bruises. He pointed at the crusted blood on her shoulder.
“We never took care of that, did we?” he asked.
“It’ll be fine, it’s stopped bleeding. Now, eat,” she replied, her voice rough and hoarse. Arms folded, she tapped her foot impatiently and waited for him to start eating.
He slowly drew out his bread and water, enjoying her impatience, but nearly choked on the bread. “Gah! It hurts!”
“Too bad,” she replied unsympathetically. “Suck it up and eat it. You need your strength.”
“You’re not eating,” he pointed out, gesturing at her with his half-eaten bread.
“I’m not hungry. It doesn’t matter. Now, hurry up.”
“Do all women have a martyr complex?” he asked rudely as he finished his bread and put his pack back on.
“Only those who have to deal with idiotic men. Are you ready?” Her pack was already on, and she began to push her way out of the shelter.
He gulped a few swallows of water and followed, stiff, achy and grumbling, until they reached the gates. They manged to slip through without injury, though Ailith wobbled a little and would have fallen into the metal had Aren not caught her arm and steadied her.
“Promenade.” She pointed down the street and began walking without waiting for him. He kept up easily with her, and thankfully the shadows on the walls were silent, though he didn’t press his luck by looking deliberately at them. At the halfway point, where the arch was at its highest, she stopped and pointed to the structure that led from the mountains to the center of town. “That’s where we’re going.”
“A bridge?” he asked, perplexed.
“Don’t be an idiot. It’s not a bridge, it’s an aqueduct. You do know what that means, don’t you?”
“Of course I know what that means,” he retorted. “Water. You think it’s still working?”
“It had better be, or we’re both dead.” She walked on, still talking. “I just haven’t been able to figure out a way to get to it. “Alone, I can only go so far and still have enough energy to extend the line of shelters, and then get back in one day.”
“Well, we don’t have to worry about going back now.”
“Or forming shelters. It’s going to be all or nothing,” she replied, then continued walking in silence.
Aren had to watch himself to keep from stepping on her heels, and he realized that she was going much slower than her usual pace. “Here,” he said impatiently. “I’ll lead for a while.”
Ailith didn’t protest, but stepped aside to let him pass and fell in behind him. “My plan was to go off to the right, follow the slope of the aqueduct as it came down, and try to find a place to climb up onto it. Worst case, we’ve got to go into the center of Dracia itself and enter through the reservoir.”
“We won’t make it if we have to do that,” Aren replied morosely, pulling thin sheets of skin off his face.
“Then let’s hope we find something.”
They did, late that afternoon. Ailith stared up at a pillar, the remnants of a twisted, rusted, broken service ladder hanging just out of her reach. “We’ll have to find something to stand on, I guess,” she said in frustration.
He laced his fingers together. “Come on, I’ll boost you up.”
“I don’t know if I can climb the rest of the way,” she admitted. “I’m very tired.”
“You don’t have a choice.” His voice was uncompromising.
Sighing, she put her foot in the makeshift stirrup and let herself be boosted up to the ladder. She grabbed the sides and managed to hook a knee over the lowest rung and hung there, unmoving.
“Well, go on. I can’t come up until you clear out.”
“I can’t.” Her eyes were dull and he saw her grip slipping.
“Shit…” He leaped up at the ladder, pulling himself up by his arms until he was able to get a foot on the lowest intact rung. He squirmed past her, nearly stepping on her hands in the process, but she made no protest. At last, he was able to hook one arm over the top of the stone wall and reach down to offer her a hand. “Come on, take it.”
After a few moments she slowly took it, and together they fell over the stone lip into the trough of the aqueduct. There was a trickle of water in the bottom, and the relief it afforded, though minimal, was shocking.
They rested for a moment, then Aren pulled himself up to look over the eroded lip of the aqueduct. “It’s almost sunset. Go on a little, or stop for the night?”
Ailith didn’t answer, and Aren looked back to see if she had fallen asleep. She hadn’t, but the bloodstain on her shoulder had grown, and she sat unnaturally still. He knelt by her to examine the wound, and she hissed in pain as the protection of the cloth was removed. The blood-soaked cloth had grown brittle, and it flaked away under his hands. The wound itself looked larger than it had the day before. The edges were raw and inflamed, and bits of flesh sloughed away as he dabbed at the blood oozing from it.
“Are you going to make it?” he asked.
“Dunno.” Her voice was as dull as her eyes. Help me up, let’s get a little further on.”
He grasped her other arm and pulled her up. They walked single file up the narrow trough, Ailith in front, and though the grade was slight, debris in the bottom made steady progress a challenge. Aren placed an occasional hand on Ailith’s waist to keep her from falling.
Dark came early once again, with only a short period of twilight in which to prepare for the night. They lay in the thin trickle of water, placing their packs on top of their bodies to keep them dry. Exhausted, Aren ate his loaf of bread without rising, and each bite felt as if he were chewing broken glass. He didn’t make the effort to look at Ailith when he heard her faint rustling ahead of him.
“Tomorrow, continue up the aqueduct,” she said abruptly. “If I remember my geography correctly, it should end, or begin, I guess, in the Snow Mountains. From there you can orient yourself to the Forked Pass. If you take the right-hand side, you’ll end up at the ocean. You could try to take passage on a ship, I suppose. Or, if you took the left, you might want to go to the North Provinces. That might be better. Take the records to a Goddesses’ Temple. Any one. Mention Marit, they’ll know what to do with it. Please,” she ended with a rasping sigh.
“I’m not taking your damn records anywhere.” His harsh words hung in the dark for an uncomfortably long time, until he added as a half-apology, “Why is it so important to you to save those?”
“Many of these children were very young when we rescued them. We saved these kids’ lives, but we can’t save their memories. They’re not all going to remember who the were, and if they’re never reunited with their families, this may be the only record of where they came from. Everybody has the right to know that.” The flow of water around him changed as she shifted positions. “What do you remember from your past, Aren?”
“Some of it you know already,” he answered uncomfortably. “I got passed around a lot as a kid. Everybody who took care of me died, eventually. I found a home in the ranks of the Imperium, for a while, at least.”
“But what of your early past? When you were a young child, before your grandmother died?”
“Impressions, mostly. I remember my grandmother a little. It doesn’t matter, it was a long time ago.” He spoke with the world-weariness of a young man for whom fifteen years is a long time.
Do you remember your birth parents?
“No. Not now. Maybe I did, once.”
“You’re not curious?”
“Nah. Like I said, it doesn’t matter. This is who I am now.” He frowned then asked uncertainly, “What am I going to do after we get out?”
“Live.” The word was almost to faint to hear over the now-overwhelming throbbing of the night.
Part 9
When he woke in the morning, Ailith was dead.
Aren had slept long, not waking until the sun shone over the lip of the trough onto his face. He sat up in surprise, the pack on his chest rolling to the side. Ailith was unnaturally still, her pack lying limply next to her. He’d seen enough dead people to know instantly that she was gone, but he still felt obliged to check, grimacing as he clambered over her cold body to crouch by her head.
He was oddly disturbed at the thought of Ailith dying alone, right next to him. She had to have known she wouldn’t make it, yet she chose not to wake him for comfort, or a goodbye, or any words of explanation. And now he was the only one who would remember what she and the others had tried to do, and how they had died, and where their bodies lay. But like he and Ailith had done with the others back in the camp, he had no choice but to leave Ailith where she lay, and continue on.
After closing her eyes, he reached back over her to grab his pack, nearly dropping it from the unexpected weight. Frowning, he opened it and looked in. During the night she had placed all of her supplies into his pack, the uneaten loaves and waterskins shoved in alongside extra cloth and tools.
His feeling of disquiet increasing, he closed the top flap, pausing at the odd rustling sound it made. He opened the small pocket with a sinking feeling and pulled the papers out. “Oh, no,” he told the body next to him. “I’m not going to be your delivery boy. You wanted them saved, you should have stayed alive to do it yourself.”
He threw the sheets down onto her chest. They were folded strangely, with the writing unprotected on the outside. Flinging the top flap of the pack closed once more, he was about to rise when something on the paper caught his attention.
It was his name.
He sat frozen for several seconds, caught between curiosity and the compelling urge to just get the hell out of there. At last curiosity won out, and he slowly took the papers from the body and read.
Aren Fontes (Tyrun Center; parents Josu and Indara, mother’s mother Evanthe) - Found as orphan on streets capital 15th Sunmonth, taken 32nd Sunmonth Bragi and Nini Krasny, Eastern Province…
He touched the coarse paper, his dirty fingers lightly smudging the names. Josu and Indara. His parents. His name had been Aren Fontes, once. He frowned in concentration, but even seeing the names couldn’t bring back any memories of them.
He remembered wandering the streets after his grandmother had died in the bombing raids, crying from hunger, but no one sharing because there was nothing to spare. He remembered a dark-haired woman taking him by the hand and leading him somewhere warm, to a bowl of soup by an old stove. He remembered being peppered with questions about who he was, who his parents were, who his grandmother was, about the mark on his wrist.
He lowered the paper and stared at the face of the woman next to him, but his memories of that time were dim and fuzzy, and he couldn’t be certain if the woman who found him was Ailith or not.
He remembered the train ride to a farmhouse in the country, and being engulfed in the warm embrace of the woman he would call Mother. And Papa teaching him to whittle, and mend fences, and tend livestock. And slowly forgetting who he was and becoming more and more Tyrunian, so that when once more he found himself orphaned after the greatpox swept with grim regularity through the province, it was only natural that he would transfer his loyalty to the next authority figure he met. And though the General had a certain reputation where young men were concerned, he had at least loved Aren in his own way, had given him food and clothes and a home, and eventually secured him admission to the Tyrunian military academy.
He had all those memories, the ones that made him who he was in the present, but all he had of his birthright were names on a page, preserved by a stubborn woman who drove herself to death to save them.
He stuffed the papers back into the pack. “Damn it. All right, but only as far as a Temple. Then my duty to you is over and I’m not looking back.” He rose stiffly and started down the aqueduct, and true to his word, did not look back.
* * *
It took him the entire day to walk the length of the aqueduct, soaking in the slowly-increasing trickle of water as he needed to, and painfully forcing down the bread although he wasn’t hungry. The aching in his joints made him clumsy, and he stumbled many times over the ever-increasing debris caught in the bottom. Fortunately, the pain he felt from the magic was lessening, and though he didn’t know whether this was from the increase in water in the trough or from his travel away from the city, the relative relief was a blessing.
As he traveled further toward the beginnings of the aqueduct, the destruction grew less, the walls of the trough and parts of the roof still intact. He was forced to travel on his hands and knees for these spans, and poked his head up with relief every time he was able to find a broken area in the cover.
The sun was nearly down when he stood in the last opening in the roof that he could see before the aqueduct disappeared into the mountain itself. He leaned his elbows against the edge of the rock and ignored the pain of the bread as he ate. From here, he had no choice but to crawl through the mountain, and if there was an obstruction, or a rockfall, or if the flow of water suddenly increased, then it would be all over - he would be stuck there under the earth, with no one knowing or caring what became of him.
Smiling at the challenge, he lowered himself back into the tunnel, and prepared to disappear into the earth.
It was darker than night, and he crawled by feel through the chilly water, suffering scraped palms and knees in silence, too tired to curse. Several times unseen objects snagged his wraps. They were so waterlogged that they became more of a danger to him than a help, holding him back and exhausting him with their weight and bulk. He shed them at last, and apparently the earth was as good a shield as water, for only the faintest traces of the all-too-familiar pain leaked through.
He came to a point where the way was nearly blocked by a rockfall, and it took several minutes of careful feeling before he found a gap that he thought he might fit through. Pushing the pack in front of him, he frantically began working one shoulder through the opening at a time. The rough rock edges scraped his skin, and the slickness of his blood on the rocks helped him to slide through. The final struggle to pull his feet through dislodged part of the pile, and he heard and felt the rocks fall behind him.
Feeling the water rise about him, he ran his hands over the pile. The gap had disappeared, blocking the flow of water, and the tunnel would soon fill. Panicked, he thrashed forward, until an unexpected draft of fresh air startled him, and brought him to a stunned stop. He was unsure if his eyes were playing tricks on him, but he he thought he could see a dim patch of light up ahead.
He froze and stared even as the water continued to rise around him, and the light did not go away. With surging hope he pulled himself painfully over the last hundred feet, ignoring the scrapes and bruises from squeezing his tired body over sharp edges, sputtering and gulping to keep his head above water.
At last he burst out from the tunnel into the open air, right into a river, of which a portion had been diverted to feed the waterway. He splashed noisily, holding the pack above him as he dragged himself out of the water and fell exhausted onto the bank.
Above him, the light of the thin crescent moon, though faint, was still strong enough to sting his sensitive eyes. He lay limply, his legs and arms leaden, looking up at the unobscured night sky in stunned wonder. The evening star glowed through the branches of the tall trees about him, and as he gazed, more stars appeared, twinkling gently down at him. Unfamiliar sounds assaulted him from all sides, disorienting and frightening, until with a jolt normality slipped back into place and he realized they were birds and insects; all the normal night noises that he had forgotten even existed.
He was unable to restrain a broken sob as he pressed his cheek into the fragrant grass, stroking it with his sore and bleeding fingers, drunk with the pleasure of its rich fecundity. A few inches from his nose, an ant climbed one of the blades, and at the top, stared twitchily back at him, unimpressed.
Unexpectedly, he began to shake, and it took him several confused moments to realize that for the first time in he couldn’t remember how long that he was cold. Stripping off his drenched clothes, he lay upon a rock that still radiated warmth from the day’s sun. Unable to keep his eyes open, he fell asleep where he lay, the dew forming a blanket of healing over him as he slept.
In the morning, he dressed, put the sunrise to his right, and began walking again.
Epilogue
It was a heavy, sultry day, and the boy yawned as the sun shone down warmly on his back. A fishing pole rested loosely in his hands as he lay on his stomach on a large rock which overhung a clear, still pool. A sudden twitch at the end of the line roused him, and he jumped up excitedly, quickly pulling in a wriggling, shiny fish.
“Nice catch, kid.” An unexpected voice behind him startled the boy, and he nearly dropped the fish back into the water. He hadn’t heard the man approach, and the boy looked around in fear, but the man seemed to be alone. A short distance away, the boy’s friends were playing in the water, splashing and hooting, and he relaxed a little. If the stranger were going to kidnap him, there would be a lot of witnesses.
“It’s okay. I won’t hurt you.” The man sat on the rock, more than an arm’s length away, and began casting pebbles idly in to the fishing pool. The boy looked at him curiously. Although the others in his village took it in stride, the boy was painfully aware that with his fair hair and gray eyes, he looked little like the other boys in the village. This stranger was the only other person he could remember seeing with the same coloring, though his hair was more light brown, and his eyes a brilliant blue.
“Is that where you live?” the man asked, gesturing to where the roofs of several buildings could be seen over the hill. The boy nodded assent, still holding tightly to the now-still fish. “You don’t look like them.” The boy felt the heat rise to his cheeks, and was about to blurt something out when the fair man interrupted him, chuckling dryly. “It’s all right, don’t get worked up.” His tone shifted. “Do you remember your parents?”
The boy shook his head. “I was adopted when I was really little,” he replied shyly.
“Hmph. Well, listen up…”