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Fic: Guns and Pretty Girls and Other Things that Steal Your Soul
I’ve been working on this for so long that I can’t even tell if it’s any good anymore. But it’s time to post it.
So the thing we all love about Victor/Sierra is how sweet and innocent it is, right? Well, watch me turn them into angst-ridden cynics who hate each other as much as they love each other! (What is wrong with me?) I am already working on a much happier story to make up for the horrific angst I’m subjecting you to here.
Also, do you have any idea how hard it is to write a story in which you don’t know the main character’s first name? My respect for Daphne du Maurier has grown exponentially.
Title: Guns and Pretty Girls and Other Things That Steal Your Soul
Fandom: Dollhouse
Characters/Pairing: Victor-centric, Victor/Sierra(Priya), cameos by Adelle, Topher, Echo, and Ballard
Rating: R
Timeline: “Epitaph One”-era
Spoilers: Up through 2.04 “Belonging”
Disclaimer: Joss is boss.
Summary: The feel of her is as familiar as the weight of a gun in his hands
It’s the way she just looks at him. It’s been over for months now, even before all hell broke loose. The whole thing had started out so innocent: one person—one human body—drawn to another. Once he recovered enough of himself to have such a thought, he began to believe that what they had had to be real, had to be pure: if they knew they loved each other when they didn’t even know who they were, how could they be anything less than soulmates? But as personalities began to emerge, coalesce, so did the conflict, until the constant battle became too much to bear, and he remembered that he’d never believed in soulmates, anyway. And neither had she.
Still, ending it nearly killed him, and the way she looks at him now isn’t helping.
She knows what she’s doing. Knows how it tears him up, makes him burn, white phosphorous that scalds and scars, when she looks at him from under those long lashes (he still remembers how they feel, brushing butterfly-soft against his neck, the silk of her hair sliding across his shoulder), that knowing smile tugging at her lips. She knows, and she knows that it was that cynical game-playing that made him end it to begin with. When your life is one big game, one you don’t know the rules to, the little games stop being fun and just become another shade of torture (he can’t blame her for that cynicism, not after figuring out—again—how—and why—she ended up in this place).
Maybe that’s why she does it, because she knows when he looks at her that she’s still all he sees, the world around going fuzzy, the edges blurred and unable, for once, to cut and slice. On the days when, despite being eight stories underground, they can hear the explosions and screams, those are the days she shoots him that look, and for a little while, he can forget about where they are and why they’re here and how they got here and just remember the smell of her when he buried his nose in the hollow beneath her ear, the little hitch in her laugh that always hit him like a bullet in the gut (and he knows what that feels like from personal experience), the intensity in her eyes as she examined his face to find the shadows of his scars (even when no one else can see them anymore, he knows she still can).
--
He’s been on both sides of torture, but he never knew it could leave you this broken, this raw.
--
Being around the others is just too much. The three of them (it feels wrong without November—the real November—there with them, and he still has nightmares about what happened to her) take over Topher’s office (he’s long since abandoned it, as though the sight of the technology he perfected is too much for his shattered mind), holing up there with the guns and ammunitions (he doesn’t tell Priya, doesn’t tell Caroline that he feels at home surrounded by the weaponry in ways he never did when his life was all bonsai trees and koi in fountains, but he thinks they know anyway. Oh, yes. He feels right at home).
It’s the perfect size for three, but too small by far for two, and after Caroline leaves, he feels like he’s going to suffocate.
He focuses on teaching Priya and any of the others who are interested to shoot—there’s a shooting range in this complex; no surprise there (these people thought of everything, like they knew this was coming: stocking up on food, weapons, toilet paper and tampons, a thousand other mundane items)—on trying to convince her to take the medication. He never tells her that he respects the hell out of her for refusing them, for believing that knowing exactly who she is is far more precious than stopping the excruciating pain that is its side effect (she’s one of the strongest people he’s ever known).
DeWitt is the best shot, which doesn’t shock him at all, and he bounces back and forth between loathing her for what she is and admiring her for the way she takes care of Topher (he’s more of a child than any of the Actives ever were in their most pure tabula rasa state). But the shooting lessons—and the hand-to-hand and knife-throwing classes—don’t last nearly long enough, and he needs to fill the time so that he doesn’t grow so desperate that he reaches for Priya again.
He spends his time (so much of it, when before there never seemed to be enough) drawing up plans to defend this place (it feels like the perfect setting for massacre, and the irony isn’t lost on him), spending hours debating which defenses are best (this office, its glass walls overlooking the whole place, feels like high ground). He feels Boyd’s loss keenly; the man would have been invaluable if it comes to fighting. And it will. Sooner or later, he’ll feel blood on his hands again, the warmth dripping from between his fingers, the smell of it copper-bright (he would sell his soul to keep Priya from having to experience it again—with no Topher to tinker, they had to download their original personalities completely, with no picking and choosing—but he figured out long ago that it isn’t possible for him to protect her, as desperately as he wishes he could).
He stays as far away from Juliet and her sermons as he can; he has no use for prophets (he still believes in God, but his is far different from any the desperate seekers at Circle, with their candles and their chants of hope, could every imagine). Priya lends her steady hands to Dr. Saunders (hands made to paint, to sculpt, to sketch, now stitching up human flesh, blood like paint on her hands), the two of them doing their best to keep everyone healthy and patched up (every few weeks, someone crawls through one of the air ducts, sticks their head out like a prairie dog, then scampers back, usually with a bullet or knife- or shrapnel-wound souvenir).
Caroline used to talk about the storm (when he pictures it, he doesn’t think of the thunder and lightning and rain of his boyhood, but of sand, thick and suffocating, and wind wailing sharper than a siren), and he thinks they’re in the eye of it now, the peace stifling, and all the more so because of what’s come before and what he knows is coming soon (he remembers this feeling well, the buildup before a battle, anticipation sitting hot and heavy in his belly like lead).
--
He sometimes thinks he hates her, but that’s because when he looks at her, he can’t help but hope. Like she says, hope seems almost cruel at this point.
--
He thinks he might be the only one who isn’t surprised that when Echo returns, she has Ballard with her. He thinks that until Priya rolls her eyes and says, “Looks like the White Knight found her. How shocking.”
He should have known that she’d see it, too; she’s always seen everything (artists, like soldiers, are taught to be observers, to not miss anything. But where she turned that observation into creation, he learned only to destroy. A chasm yawns between them, the difference between watercolors and war paint too wide to bridge—or so he tells himself).
He squats in the corner with Ballard, and it feels just like it did when he crouched this way by a campfire, the Afghan sky crazy with stars stretching out forever above him. He feels the familiar tingle in his fingers and he breathes again. This, he knows; this certainty a cool stone settling in his stomach: preparing for action. No more sitting here like trapped mice, waiting for the cat to pick them off.
Outside may be hell, but at this point, he’ll take hell over five more minutes of limbo.
As plans go, it’s one of the worst he’s heard, but he agrees, even though he knows they’ll lose most (if not all) in the process. This is what his commanders with their superior-officer jargon would never have called a suicide mission, even if every soldier knew that that was exactly what it was (sometimes he thinks that you can smell death coming).
The decision to go up isn’t one he would have made (even if there’s something poetic about it, symbolic, even), but it makes the kind of sense that doesn’t. The butchers and the dumbshows (he’s not quite sure who came up with those nicknames, but, God, do they ever fit) are used to the actuals hiding as far underground as they can; that’s where the hunters would hunt their prey.
No one looks up anymore.
They’re assembling in DeWitt’s office, running through a few last minute checks of supplies (he and Ballard were in absolute agreement that, at this point, ammunition is far more important than food) dividing up into groups to slip out two or three at a time, when he sees Ballard hanging a picture on the wall, the one Juliet had started covering with pictures several months before. It’s November-who-was-Madeleine, smiling wide and seemingly carefree, though the sadness is there in her eyes for anyone who’ll look closely to see.
Ballard jerks his shoulder awkwardly when he figures out he’s being watched. “To remember,” he says, and then he’s back at the front of the group, helping Caroline hand out instructions.
And then everyone else starts to produce pictures, pulling them out of pockets and bags and adding them to the collage: pictures of themselves, before, pictures of the ones they've lost. Adding them to the ones already there, knowing this is their last chance to create a memorial (he’s a soldier; he knows all about memorials).
Delta—no, it's Grace, that's her name—hands him one of the first Dr. Saunders, the kindly old man with the lollipops, and he tacks it next to the one of Boyd (where the hell is he?) that the woman called Claire placed there weeks ago (he’d tried everything he knew how to convince her to come with them, but her voice was as steady as her eyes when she said she needed to stay here and wait, and she seemed to know what she’s waiting for, even if he doesn’t). Caroline gives him the same grin from the photograph of herself that’s beaming down from the wall when she places the one of him beside it. And then it's Priya's turn.
He knows that photograph. It’s the one he took, back in their good days, before everything got so screwed up. He loves it, because it reminds him of how silly she can be, lighthearted and sweet when the past and the future aren’t trying to crush her between them.
He brushes his fingers against it as he passes.
He wonders if anyone will ever see them. He wonders whether there’ll be anyone left to remember (he wonders if memory is crueler than forgetting. He knows both far, far too well, but he still hasn’t figured out which one can break you more quicker).
--
He sees her silhouette against the night sky, and he remembers the birds she used to paint.
He used to hunt birds. Now he would give anything to let her fly free.
--
It isn’t the first time he’s done this, living off the land—summer camping trips with his uncles, boot camp training, weeks on end during his two tours in Fallujah—but it’s the hardest (he hadn’t thought anything could be harder, uglier than war. He was wrong. Or maybe this is just another flavor of war; humans seem to spend all their creative powers on fashioning new varieties). Getting out of the city—an enterprise that involved sneaking, gunfire, wading through sewers, malnourishment, and two of his companions sacrificing themselves to distract the butchers (not that different from Fallujah, really)—had been nightmare enough. But now that they’re out, it seems harder.
There aren’t any government delivered, Blackwater-provided rations in shiny plastic, and with a group of this size (he wishes his damn morals would leave him alone, let him break off from the group, take Priya and a few others most likely to survive and do this the right way. But “leave no man behind” echoes in his head), it’s hard to find enough hawk’s eggs, cacti or mushrooms--depending on the landscape—and canned food from long-abandoned convenience stores to live off of (hunger slices through his stomach sharper than a knife’s blade, but he still would have given up his share if he thought Priya would take it. He knows better than to ask).
With no technology more complex than the gun he’s holding, the flashlight in his backpack, the compass and cigarette lighter in his pocket (everyone takes up smoking during war; it’s one of the few things to do while you’re waiting—to die, to kill, to go home. Only he doesn’t smoke anymore; this lighter is for campfires), it feels like they're sinking back into the past, retreating to a time before technology (fire, steel, gunpowder, nuclear bombs, the ringing of a telephone) could steal your soul.
Topher dies before winter comes, and he can’t help but be glad. Not because of any hatred he might still harbor towards the man-child who invented the technology that destroyed the world—who invented the technology that stole him from himself for years—(he long ago gave up any sense of bitterness toward the broken boy who clearly blamed himself for every death around him, body or soul or otherwise—and when the hell did the little nerd develop morals anyway?) but because Topher couldn’t keep up, and the winter is going to be a rough one (he’s been cold for so long now, he isn’t sure he’ll be able to tell the difference when the season changes).
He’s pretty sure they’ve past the Canadian border by now, but other than that, he has no way idea of where they truly are. Priya’s kneading the muscles in her neck one night, close but not too close to him in front of the tiny campfire, when she voices what they’ve all been wondering for months now. “Do you think they really know where we’re going?” Her eyes are fastened on Caroline and Ballard arguing in harsh whispers on the other side of the fire, but her words are clearly for his ears alone (she’d never be so cruel as to steal the hope from someone weaker than herself).
He doesn’t quite recognize his own voice when he speaks, but he’s never been able to tell her anything but the truth, even if the single word explodes with all the force and bite of a dirty bomb. “No.”
She nods, once, sharp. Then she reaches into her backpack, pulls out two tiny cans. She wiggles them in front of his face. “Vienna sausages or Spam?”
--
It’s the way she unflinchingly faces the truth that leaves him most in awe of her. She turned from it once, but she learned the cost, and she’ll never do the same again, not even if offered the choice.
He wishes he was strong enough to say the same.
--
They’re holed up in an abandoned barn, hiding from used-to-be-human eyes and the cold bite of sleet. He’d been against stopping here, and said so—this is exactly the kind of place the butchers and dumbshows would look for them; nearly anywhere would be better than here. But Adelle, wasted down to nearly nothing since Topher died, is shivering so hard she looks like she might collapse despite her set face (the woman is made of steel), and Tango—no, he reminds himself, her name is Myra—looks like tiredness incarnate. Besides, that last skirmish was a particularly bad one—they lost Lynn and Graham, and Rachel’s wound is bleeding sluggishly in a way he’s seen far too often—and he aches all over. After exchanging a glance with Ballard, he relents, and they scatter throughout the building to bunk down.
It’s possibly the least romantic place he could ever imagine, this hayloft: the scent of moldy hay as unpleasant as the drips of frozen rain that find every hole in the roof and seemed determined to make their way under his clothes and to his skin. He has that jittery feeling he used to get after battle, the kind that won’t let you lie down and rest, no matter how tired you are (later, if he’d needed an excuse, he could have blamed that restlessness. But he’s tired of excuses).
It isn’t because she looks beautiful. She doesn’t. Her hair is stringy with grease, her lips chapped and bleeding, smudges of black underlining her eyes so deeply that he can imagine what her skull looks like under the skin. That body that used to call to him even when he didn’t know what the call meant, it’s swaddled in layers of too-large, too-rough fabric (and he’s probably not much better, if not worse). There isn’t one desirable thing about her at this moment, and he can’t even remember what she looked like when there was.
But she’s warm and she’s Priya and he can’t convince himself not to miss her, and, God, he still loves her (and he’s beginning to suspect he always will).
She comes to him when he reaches for her, like she’s been waiting for this all along (she probably has. She’s always been half a step ahead of him, glancing back at him over her shoulder, impatient but lingering till he can catch up).
The copper tang of blood is nothing he’s ever associated with her taste, but it seems fitting now. A few drops spring up on her poor cracked lips when he kisses her, and he feels like he should back off, not cause her more pain (too late by far for that), but when she feels him pull away, she attacks his lips and he discovers that he doesn’t hate the taste of blood (is it possible that she can redeem even this?).
Her cold hands worm their way between and under cotton and wool, flannel and polyester till they find his skin, kneading muscle, searching out the slicker ridges of scars (no way to erase them now, but he’s long past caring). He tugs at her clothes in return, annoyed that her body feels so bulky and unfamiliar against his when she’s wrapped up in so much fabric. It’s too cold—and it would be stupid—to shed their clothes entirely when they might have to pack up and take off at a moment’s notice. But they peel off a few layers, enough that even if they can’t press skin against skin, at least the shape is familiar enough. They’re both thinner than they’ve ever been, harder, too, and the presence of so much clothing between them keeps this from turning into anything tender, but never has anything ever been so necessary.
It’s silent except for their rasping breaths, the crinkle of hay shifting beneath them, the drum of sleet on the roof, the murmurs and coughs of those below them. The angle’s off, and they can’t shift because the thumping would give them away, and he can’t whisper all the things he wants to, and they aren’t nearly close enough, and there’s a sharp edge of something poking into his leg, and it’s nothing like it ever was before.
It’s the hottest thing he’s ever experienced.
But she lets him hold her close against him after, bony bodies seeking warmth, wrapped in ugly flannel long underwear. She nuzzles his chest, murmurs, “You smell good.”
For the first time in months, he laughs, a staccato burst of machine-gun fire. “I smell like an unwashed dog.”
“You smell like you.”
Then she falls silent, then into sleep, but he’s still reeling, hearing the arrow-accurate truth in those four words, knowing what they really mean: the three words she hasn’t said since she found herself again.
He whispers them back, warm and sure and heavy, into her hair.
--
The feel of her is as familiar as the weight of a gun in his hands.
--
So Caroline was right about the mountains all along. He can’t count the number of times she’d mentioned mountains and how they would be safe there; even before she found herself again, when she was still Echo, she knew she had to reach them. He figured out long ago that that’s where they’re headed, even if they hadn’t gone straight there—they took a more meandering route (if anything can be meandering when it’s interrupted by moments of intense, brutal bloodshed and terror of a kind he remembers well from his first war), both to ensure that no one was following them and because they needed to wait for the spring thaw (seasons don't matter to him at all anymore; Priya is all the warmth he needs).
But now they’re pointed in the right direction, and the mountains stretch out ahead of them, snow-swaddled peaks looming ahead, jagged knives scraping against the sky. They reflect the colors of the sunset and sunrise, never the same shade twice, hues more subtle and unique than he ever could have imagined (he couldn’t have seen them before, not without Priya beside him).
“I wish I could paint them,” Priya says, and his idea of happiness becomes a world in which Priya can paint again.
This close, with the scent of pines and melting snow drifting down to them on mountain winds, hope expands in his chest, and sometimes he can’t breathe because of the way it fills his lungs like mustard gas. He hasn’t allowed himself to hope, not all this time, not since the sky fell down at the ringing of a billion telephones like death knells for the whole world. But now he can’t stop it from taking him over, from filling his nights with dreams of safety and peace and Priya painting mountains in thousands of colors on a pure white wall and then smearing paint on him, turning his body into a work of her art (only bright colors: blues and oranges and purples, not a hint of black in sight: no more war paint for him, not ever again), a place where they can be still.
He's been moving forward for so long that he's forgotten what being still even feels like; even when he's lying stretched out on the cold ground at night (in Fallujah, the ground kept the warmth like a gun's metal, letting him soak it in at night; here, the soil seems to hold onto the cold, refusing to acknowledge that spring has come at all), his arm around Priya, her leg draped over his, he still feels like he's walking (the way, after a day on the lake with his uncles, he would still feel the little waves when he laid in bed at night, a rocking that felt like peace, back before he knew what war was). But it's different now.
Until he first caught a glimpse of the mountains, hazy sapphire against an azure sky, he had been running away. Now that they are in sight, undeniable and sharp, he feels for the first time as though he's moving toward something.
“I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.” It's Adelle murmuring those words, and before, he would have found that funny or even pathetic (she's never seemed like the scripture-quoting type). Now, though, with everything behind them and only the mountains before him (with Priya beside him), he knows how she feels.
Priya takes his hand, and they begin to climb.
So the thing we all love about Victor/Sierra is how sweet and innocent it is, right? Well, watch me turn them into angst-ridden cynics who hate each other as much as they love each other! (What is wrong with me?) I am already working on a much happier story to make up for the horrific angst I’m subjecting you to here.
Also, do you have any idea how hard it is to write a story in which you don’t know the main character’s first name? My respect for Daphne du Maurier has grown exponentially.
Title: Guns and Pretty Girls and Other Things That Steal Your Soul
Fandom: Dollhouse
Characters/Pairing: Victor-centric, Victor/Sierra(Priya), cameos by Adelle, Topher, Echo, and Ballard
Rating: R
Timeline: “Epitaph One”-era
Spoilers: Up through 2.04 “Belonging”
Disclaimer: Joss is boss.
Summary: The feel of her is as familiar as the weight of a gun in his hands
It’s the way she just looks at him. It’s been over for months now, even before all hell broke loose. The whole thing had started out so innocent: one person—one human body—drawn to another. Once he recovered enough of himself to have such a thought, he began to believe that what they had had to be real, had to be pure: if they knew they loved each other when they didn’t even know who they were, how could they be anything less than soulmates? But as personalities began to emerge, coalesce, so did the conflict, until the constant battle became too much to bear, and he remembered that he’d never believed in soulmates, anyway. And neither had she.
Still, ending it nearly killed him, and the way she looks at him now isn’t helping.
She knows what she’s doing. Knows how it tears him up, makes him burn, white phosphorous that scalds and scars, when she looks at him from under those long lashes (he still remembers how they feel, brushing butterfly-soft against his neck, the silk of her hair sliding across his shoulder), that knowing smile tugging at her lips. She knows, and she knows that it was that cynical game-playing that made him end it to begin with. When your life is one big game, one you don’t know the rules to, the little games stop being fun and just become another shade of torture (he can’t blame her for that cynicism, not after figuring out—again—how—and why—she ended up in this place).
Maybe that’s why she does it, because she knows when he looks at her that she’s still all he sees, the world around going fuzzy, the edges blurred and unable, for once, to cut and slice. On the days when, despite being eight stories underground, they can hear the explosions and screams, those are the days she shoots him that look, and for a little while, he can forget about where they are and why they’re here and how they got here and just remember the smell of her when he buried his nose in the hollow beneath her ear, the little hitch in her laugh that always hit him like a bullet in the gut (and he knows what that feels like from personal experience), the intensity in her eyes as she examined his face to find the shadows of his scars (even when no one else can see them anymore, he knows she still can).
--
He’s been on both sides of torture, but he never knew it could leave you this broken, this raw.
--
Being around the others is just too much. The three of them (it feels wrong without November—the real November—there with them, and he still has nightmares about what happened to her) take over Topher’s office (he’s long since abandoned it, as though the sight of the technology he perfected is too much for his shattered mind), holing up there with the guns and ammunitions (he doesn’t tell Priya, doesn’t tell Caroline that he feels at home surrounded by the weaponry in ways he never did when his life was all bonsai trees and koi in fountains, but he thinks they know anyway. Oh, yes. He feels right at home).
It’s the perfect size for three, but too small by far for two, and after Caroline leaves, he feels like he’s going to suffocate.
He focuses on teaching Priya and any of the others who are interested to shoot—there’s a shooting range in this complex; no surprise there (these people thought of everything, like they knew this was coming: stocking up on food, weapons, toilet paper and tampons, a thousand other mundane items)—on trying to convince her to take the medication. He never tells her that he respects the hell out of her for refusing them, for believing that knowing exactly who she is is far more precious than stopping the excruciating pain that is its side effect (she’s one of the strongest people he’s ever known).
DeWitt is the best shot, which doesn’t shock him at all, and he bounces back and forth between loathing her for what she is and admiring her for the way she takes care of Topher (he’s more of a child than any of the Actives ever were in their most pure tabula rasa state). But the shooting lessons—and the hand-to-hand and knife-throwing classes—don’t last nearly long enough, and he needs to fill the time so that he doesn’t grow so desperate that he reaches for Priya again.
He spends his time (so much of it, when before there never seemed to be enough) drawing up plans to defend this place (it feels like the perfect setting for massacre, and the irony isn’t lost on him), spending hours debating which defenses are best (this office, its glass walls overlooking the whole place, feels like high ground). He feels Boyd’s loss keenly; the man would have been invaluable if it comes to fighting. And it will. Sooner or later, he’ll feel blood on his hands again, the warmth dripping from between his fingers, the smell of it copper-bright (he would sell his soul to keep Priya from having to experience it again—with no Topher to tinker, they had to download their original personalities completely, with no picking and choosing—but he figured out long ago that it isn’t possible for him to protect her, as desperately as he wishes he could).
He stays as far away from Juliet and her sermons as he can; he has no use for prophets (he still believes in God, but his is far different from any the desperate seekers at Circle, with their candles and their chants of hope, could every imagine). Priya lends her steady hands to Dr. Saunders (hands made to paint, to sculpt, to sketch, now stitching up human flesh, blood like paint on her hands), the two of them doing their best to keep everyone healthy and patched up (every few weeks, someone crawls through one of the air ducts, sticks their head out like a prairie dog, then scampers back, usually with a bullet or knife- or shrapnel-wound souvenir).
Caroline used to talk about the storm (when he pictures it, he doesn’t think of the thunder and lightning and rain of his boyhood, but of sand, thick and suffocating, and wind wailing sharper than a siren), and he thinks they’re in the eye of it now, the peace stifling, and all the more so because of what’s come before and what he knows is coming soon (he remembers this feeling well, the buildup before a battle, anticipation sitting hot and heavy in his belly like lead).
--
He sometimes thinks he hates her, but that’s because when he looks at her, he can’t help but hope. Like she says, hope seems almost cruel at this point.
--
He thinks he might be the only one who isn’t surprised that when Echo returns, she has Ballard with her. He thinks that until Priya rolls her eyes and says, “Looks like the White Knight found her. How shocking.”
He should have known that she’d see it, too; she’s always seen everything (artists, like soldiers, are taught to be observers, to not miss anything. But where she turned that observation into creation, he learned only to destroy. A chasm yawns between them, the difference between watercolors and war paint too wide to bridge—or so he tells himself).
He squats in the corner with Ballard, and it feels just like it did when he crouched this way by a campfire, the Afghan sky crazy with stars stretching out forever above him. He feels the familiar tingle in his fingers and he breathes again. This, he knows; this certainty a cool stone settling in his stomach: preparing for action. No more sitting here like trapped mice, waiting for the cat to pick them off.
Outside may be hell, but at this point, he’ll take hell over five more minutes of limbo.
As plans go, it’s one of the worst he’s heard, but he agrees, even though he knows they’ll lose most (if not all) in the process. This is what his commanders with their superior-officer jargon would never have called a suicide mission, even if every soldier knew that that was exactly what it was (sometimes he thinks that you can smell death coming).
The decision to go up isn’t one he would have made (even if there’s something poetic about it, symbolic, even), but it makes the kind of sense that doesn’t. The butchers and the dumbshows (he’s not quite sure who came up with those nicknames, but, God, do they ever fit) are used to the actuals hiding as far underground as they can; that’s where the hunters would hunt their prey.
No one looks up anymore.
They’re assembling in DeWitt’s office, running through a few last minute checks of supplies (he and Ballard were in absolute agreement that, at this point, ammunition is far more important than food) dividing up into groups to slip out two or three at a time, when he sees Ballard hanging a picture on the wall, the one Juliet had started covering with pictures several months before. It’s November-who-was-Madeleine, smiling wide and seemingly carefree, though the sadness is there in her eyes for anyone who’ll look closely to see.
Ballard jerks his shoulder awkwardly when he figures out he’s being watched. “To remember,” he says, and then he’s back at the front of the group, helping Caroline hand out instructions.
And then everyone else starts to produce pictures, pulling them out of pockets and bags and adding them to the collage: pictures of themselves, before, pictures of the ones they've lost. Adding them to the ones already there, knowing this is their last chance to create a memorial (he’s a soldier; he knows all about memorials).
Delta—no, it's Grace, that's her name—hands him one of the first Dr. Saunders, the kindly old man with the lollipops, and he tacks it next to the one of Boyd (where the hell is he?) that the woman called Claire placed there weeks ago (he’d tried everything he knew how to convince her to come with them, but her voice was as steady as her eyes when she said she needed to stay here and wait, and she seemed to know what she’s waiting for, even if he doesn’t). Caroline gives him the same grin from the photograph of herself that’s beaming down from the wall when she places the one of him beside it. And then it's Priya's turn.
He knows that photograph. It’s the one he took, back in their good days, before everything got so screwed up. He loves it, because it reminds him of how silly she can be, lighthearted and sweet when the past and the future aren’t trying to crush her between them.
He brushes his fingers against it as he passes.
He wonders if anyone will ever see them. He wonders whether there’ll be anyone left to remember (he wonders if memory is crueler than forgetting. He knows both far, far too well, but he still hasn’t figured out which one can break you more quicker).
--
He sees her silhouette against the night sky, and he remembers the birds she used to paint.
He used to hunt birds. Now he would give anything to let her fly free.
--
It isn’t the first time he’s done this, living off the land—summer camping trips with his uncles, boot camp training, weeks on end during his two tours in Fallujah—but it’s the hardest (he hadn’t thought anything could be harder, uglier than war. He was wrong. Or maybe this is just another flavor of war; humans seem to spend all their creative powers on fashioning new varieties). Getting out of the city—an enterprise that involved sneaking, gunfire, wading through sewers, malnourishment, and two of his companions sacrificing themselves to distract the butchers (not that different from Fallujah, really)—had been nightmare enough. But now that they’re out, it seems harder.
There aren’t any government delivered, Blackwater-provided rations in shiny plastic, and with a group of this size (he wishes his damn morals would leave him alone, let him break off from the group, take Priya and a few others most likely to survive and do this the right way. But “leave no man behind” echoes in his head), it’s hard to find enough hawk’s eggs, cacti or mushrooms--depending on the landscape—and canned food from long-abandoned convenience stores to live off of (hunger slices through his stomach sharper than a knife’s blade, but he still would have given up his share if he thought Priya would take it. He knows better than to ask).
With no technology more complex than the gun he’s holding, the flashlight in his backpack, the compass and cigarette lighter in his pocket (everyone takes up smoking during war; it’s one of the few things to do while you’re waiting—to die, to kill, to go home. Only he doesn’t smoke anymore; this lighter is for campfires), it feels like they're sinking back into the past, retreating to a time before technology (fire, steel, gunpowder, nuclear bombs, the ringing of a telephone) could steal your soul.
Topher dies before winter comes, and he can’t help but be glad. Not because of any hatred he might still harbor towards the man-child who invented the technology that destroyed the world—who invented the technology that stole him from himself for years—(he long ago gave up any sense of bitterness toward the broken boy who clearly blamed himself for every death around him, body or soul or otherwise—and when the hell did the little nerd develop morals anyway?) but because Topher couldn’t keep up, and the winter is going to be a rough one (he’s been cold for so long now, he isn’t sure he’ll be able to tell the difference when the season changes).
He’s pretty sure they’ve past the Canadian border by now, but other than that, he has no way idea of where they truly are. Priya’s kneading the muscles in her neck one night, close but not too close to him in front of the tiny campfire, when she voices what they’ve all been wondering for months now. “Do you think they really know where we’re going?” Her eyes are fastened on Caroline and Ballard arguing in harsh whispers on the other side of the fire, but her words are clearly for his ears alone (she’d never be so cruel as to steal the hope from someone weaker than herself).
He doesn’t quite recognize his own voice when he speaks, but he’s never been able to tell her anything but the truth, even if the single word explodes with all the force and bite of a dirty bomb. “No.”
She nods, once, sharp. Then she reaches into her backpack, pulls out two tiny cans. She wiggles them in front of his face. “Vienna sausages or Spam?”
--
It’s the way she unflinchingly faces the truth that leaves him most in awe of her. She turned from it once, but she learned the cost, and she’ll never do the same again, not even if offered the choice.
He wishes he was strong enough to say the same.
--
They’re holed up in an abandoned barn, hiding from used-to-be-human eyes and the cold bite of sleet. He’d been against stopping here, and said so—this is exactly the kind of place the butchers and dumbshows would look for them; nearly anywhere would be better than here. But Adelle, wasted down to nearly nothing since Topher died, is shivering so hard she looks like she might collapse despite her set face (the woman is made of steel), and Tango—no, he reminds himself, her name is Myra—looks like tiredness incarnate. Besides, that last skirmish was a particularly bad one—they lost Lynn and Graham, and Rachel’s wound is bleeding sluggishly in a way he’s seen far too often—and he aches all over. After exchanging a glance with Ballard, he relents, and they scatter throughout the building to bunk down.
It’s possibly the least romantic place he could ever imagine, this hayloft: the scent of moldy hay as unpleasant as the drips of frozen rain that find every hole in the roof and seemed determined to make their way under his clothes and to his skin. He has that jittery feeling he used to get after battle, the kind that won’t let you lie down and rest, no matter how tired you are (later, if he’d needed an excuse, he could have blamed that restlessness. But he’s tired of excuses).
It isn’t because she looks beautiful. She doesn’t. Her hair is stringy with grease, her lips chapped and bleeding, smudges of black underlining her eyes so deeply that he can imagine what her skull looks like under the skin. That body that used to call to him even when he didn’t know what the call meant, it’s swaddled in layers of too-large, too-rough fabric (and he’s probably not much better, if not worse). There isn’t one desirable thing about her at this moment, and he can’t even remember what she looked like when there was.
But she’s warm and she’s Priya and he can’t convince himself not to miss her, and, God, he still loves her (and he’s beginning to suspect he always will).
She comes to him when he reaches for her, like she’s been waiting for this all along (she probably has. She’s always been half a step ahead of him, glancing back at him over her shoulder, impatient but lingering till he can catch up).
The copper tang of blood is nothing he’s ever associated with her taste, but it seems fitting now. A few drops spring up on her poor cracked lips when he kisses her, and he feels like he should back off, not cause her more pain (too late by far for that), but when she feels him pull away, she attacks his lips and he discovers that he doesn’t hate the taste of blood (is it possible that she can redeem even this?).
Her cold hands worm their way between and under cotton and wool, flannel and polyester till they find his skin, kneading muscle, searching out the slicker ridges of scars (no way to erase them now, but he’s long past caring). He tugs at her clothes in return, annoyed that her body feels so bulky and unfamiliar against his when she’s wrapped up in so much fabric. It’s too cold—and it would be stupid—to shed their clothes entirely when they might have to pack up and take off at a moment’s notice. But they peel off a few layers, enough that even if they can’t press skin against skin, at least the shape is familiar enough. They’re both thinner than they’ve ever been, harder, too, and the presence of so much clothing between them keeps this from turning into anything tender, but never has anything ever been so necessary.
It’s silent except for their rasping breaths, the crinkle of hay shifting beneath them, the drum of sleet on the roof, the murmurs and coughs of those below them. The angle’s off, and they can’t shift because the thumping would give them away, and he can’t whisper all the things he wants to, and they aren’t nearly close enough, and there’s a sharp edge of something poking into his leg, and it’s nothing like it ever was before.
It’s the hottest thing he’s ever experienced.
But she lets him hold her close against him after, bony bodies seeking warmth, wrapped in ugly flannel long underwear. She nuzzles his chest, murmurs, “You smell good.”
For the first time in months, he laughs, a staccato burst of machine-gun fire. “I smell like an unwashed dog.”
“You smell like you.”
Then she falls silent, then into sleep, but he’s still reeling, hearing the arrow-accurate truth in those four words, knowing what they really mean: the three words she hasn’t said since she found herself again.
He whispers them back, warm and sure and heavy, into her hair.
--
The feel of her is as familiar as the weight of a gun in his hands.
--
So Caroline was right about the mountains all along. He can’t count the number of times she’d mentioned mountains and how they would be safe there; even before she found herself again, when she was still Echo, she knew she had to reach them. He figured out long ago that that’s where they’re headed, even if they hadn’t gone straight there—they took a more meandering route (if anything can be meandering when it’s interrupted by moments of intense, brutal bloodshed and terror of a kind he remembers well from his first war), both to ensure that no one was following them and because they needed to wait for the spring thaw (seasons don't matter to him at all anymore; Priya is all the warmth he needs).
But now they’re pointed in the right direction, and the mountains stretch out ahead of them, snow-swaddled peaks looming ahead, jagged knives scraping against the sky. They reflect the colors of the sunset and sunrise, never the same shade twice, hues more subtle and unique than he ever could have imagined (he couldn’t have seen them before, not without Priya beside him).
“I wish I could paint them,” Priya says, and his idea of happiness becomes a world in which Priya can paint again.
This close, with the scent of pines and melting snow drifting down to them on mountain winds, hope expands in his chest, and sometimes he can’t breathe because of the way it fills his lungs like mustard gas. He hasn’t allowed himself to hope, not all this time, not since the sky fell down at the ringing of a billion telephones like death knells for the whole world. But now he can’t stop it from taking him over, from filling his nights with dreams of safety and peace and Priya painting mountains in thousands of colors on a pure white wall and then smearing paint on him, turning his body into a work of her art (only bright colors: blues and oranges and purples, not a hint of black in sight: no more war paint for him, not ever again), a place where they can be still.
He's been moving forward for so long that he's forgotten what being still even feels like; even when he's lying stretched out on the cold ground at night (in Fallujah, the ground kept the warmth like a gun's metal, letting him soak it in at night; here, the soil seems to hold onto the cold, refusing to acknowledge that spring has come at all), his arm around Priya, her leg draped over his, he still feels like he's walking (the way, after a day on the lake with his uncles, he would still feel the little waves when he laid in bed at night, a rocking that felt like peace, back before he knew what war was). But it's different now.
Until he first caught a glimpse of the mountains, hazy sapphire against an azure sky, he had been running away. Now that they are in sight, undeniable and sharp, he feels for the first time as though he's moving toward something.
“I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.” It's Adelle murmuring those words, and before, he would have found that funny or even pathetic (she's never seemed like the scripture-quoting type). Now, though, with everything behind them and only the mountains before him (with Priya beside him), he knows how she feels.
Priya takes his hand, and they begin to climb.