Post by Shade on May 20, 2011 21:40:15 GMT -8
Nock.
(how)
Draw.
(dare)
Aim.
(they)
Loose.
(how)
Nock.
(dare)
Draw.
(they)
Aim.
(how)
dare they. How dare they. How dare they how dare they how dare they -
Loose.
The air parts, screaming, and the arrow slams home; one more in a ragged spiral towards the center. She has been here for some time. Long enough for the false forest to overwhelm the target's surface three times. Long enough for false dawn to come creeping. The sun will rise, soon, and tip his hat to the pregnant moon before she goes to stir her cousins on the other side of the world.
The spiral tightens each time she draws it. But she is scattering outwards and desoile, to years ago and miles away, where she lies on a stained mattress, bleeding. Her hands are cuffed together, and her mouth and eyes are bruised. Her hair sticks to her forehead, sweat and seminal fluid mingled.
But she is alive.
The sink in the bathroom is dripping. One – two – pause pause – three. One – two – pause pause –
Three.
The air tastes like iron and dead cells. Her clothing lies in a haphazard pile next to the ancient box-spring, like the abandoned wrapping on Christmas Day. She laughs when she thinks this, desperate and cracking, then cries out at the pain in her ribs. Her tears are very warm.
She is very cold. But she is alive.
She becomes aware, dimly, that her hands are aching. There is a slickness in the curve of her knuckles, and the shriek of new flesh forced to moves before its time. It is an act of will to stop the rhythm and strip off her glove. Clear pus and drops of blood glisten in the half-light; she flexes her fingers and hisses at the pain, delighting in its sharp reality. Pain is reliable; it will never desert her, nor demand anything of her save endurance and will. She wipes her fingers with a piece of cloth, cleans the inside of the glove, and begins again, new skin and raw nerves whimpering. She nocks another arrow, breathes deep and lets it out by inches, ribs and stomach aching. There is salt in her mouth and her eyes. Her wrists ache, but the blood on her arms is slick, and her hands are small.
One hand free. She tries to drag herself across the mattress, but the scrape of polyester against open cuts almost makes her scream. So she rests her weight on her arms – wrists throbbing until she has three heartbeats – and crawls to her clothing. Puts it on. Warmth sinks through her skin, down to the bone, and she stops shaking.
She is an empty room full of echoes, almost all animal now except for the small part that is always watching, recording, describing, remembering yes, tears sting, shame burns, joy blazes; is it better to say that your stomach dropped or that the world fell away?; exactly how hot is rage, or is it cold? and it is that part which observes that she is no longer fully human. There is pain deep in her bones, and a hollow space in her heart. She's hungry; she creeps into his kitchen and fills her pockets with food, snatching starved mouthfuls as she goes.
There are knives hanging on magnets over the stove. She takes one without thinking and becomes a scavenger, moving through the apartment with a furtive grace. There's a backpack in the closet; she fills it with food that will keep, apples and bread and a hunk of cheese in plastic wrap. She takes electronics, jewelry, anything portable. As much as she can carry. The window is locked, but the lock is cheap. Her picks – cheap and loyal – are where she left them, hidden in the soles of her boots. Her hands shake. But it opens. And she is gone.
The arrow flies.
She hasn't thought of this in a long, long time, not so clearly. The memory had stayed politely below, a bloody portion of amalgamated memory – all the evil – when she had been a different person, and had another name. Why was it pushing to the surface now, this unremembered splinter, this leviathan rearing from the unsounded deep?
What had happened next?
She had run, run and run until she reached the end of the world and hung off the island, shaking and vomiting into the East River. It was the East River, she was sure of that – although nothing else, not even how long he'd kept her – it had to have been, because the sun had been setting and she had seen the moon hanging low across the river, in a sky bruising towards night. Her mind is coming back to her body, now that it's safe, and she can feel the places he touched her as burning brands under her skin. The railing is flaked and rusting under her clenched hands, rough and cold and real. Her throat aches. A slow pulse begins behind her ribs, in the shadow of her heart.
She is still alive.
The thought is not frantic; it's a slow unfolding, a tonic seeping into her bones and working strange alchemy on her bleeding soul. It is not joy; it is too deep for joy. He wanted to break her, own her, reduce her (she remembers the things he called her) and he failed because she is still alive and still herself and she is still here. She grips the rusting iron, knuckles white, and feels the pinch of metal on skin.
The warm hard pulse in her heart's shadow grows stronger.
The sun is only just touching the horizon and the still-blue sky pierces the moon, making it translucent and not quite real. Not yet. For a single, perfect moment, the setting sun and the rising moon stare at each other across the gleaming city and their merged light streams horizontal through sleepless streets, and not even God himself could tell the difference.
- oh.
Her scattering self halts and hangs suspended in the white noise for a single heartbeat. The maelstrom beckons, sings not-your-fault and why-me – but her tiphareth is calling and the pieces begin to dance inward and widdershins.
She takes another arrow from her quiver. Nock-draw-aim-loose. But no pounding outrage, now. Now she is living in two time zones, and her swift grace feels to her like the slow evolution of a continent, muscle-bone-sinew twisting to the driving pulse of pain. And below that, a deep bass cutting through the higher rhythms – comes the back-beat, the heart beat. Tiphareth song.
She closes her eyes and moves by touch and memory, fingers trailing along the weird angles and broken lines. This is a new puzzle, but there are pieces of the old, and her fingers remember. Twisted Tail's den smells of sage and sweetgrass, and she knows that her teacher is behind her.
The first piece. She follows the edge until she finds a tip and grasps it in the pincer of one hand. With a single finger of the other, she traces the edges, over and over, until there is a picture in her mind. Then she sets it aside, carefully positioned, and takes another from the pile in her lap.
A whuff of approval from roughly two-o'-clock, and the air whispers as four legs become two. Or is it the other way around? There is a thin snake of opium in the air now, rich and cloying and sweet, and the girl who is still Lisa breathes deeply, unafraid.
“Tell me, daughter. What is duty?”
“What, now?”
“Yes, now,” Twisted Tail says, and there is laughter in her voice but also warning. No argument. Lisa bites her lower lip and answers.
“Something you have to do. Like a job.”
“How is it like a job?”
“Because, um, if you don't do it, you get in trouble?”
“Then a duty is something you are forced to do?”
“...ye-es?” She is still working on the puzzle. That is part of the lesson. Her hands work, and her mind, and they are not working at cross-purposes.
“Why do we honor those who do their duty?”
“Um. Because, um. It's the right thing?”
“But they have no choice.”
“Except they do! I mean, they'd get in trouble if they didn't, but...”
“But?”
“I mean... getting in trouble isn't why they do it. Isn't why you do it. Because you always have a choice, right, and sometimes the choice really sucks, but it's always a choice. You have to choose it. Otherwise it's not – it's a lie. Duty is something you choose to do. It has to be. Anything else is just... I don't know. Making laws just to have them and wanting people to do one thing just so they won't do another thing. Not because it's needed.”
Twisted Tail is silent for a long moment.
“You can look, now,” she says at last, and there is something like grief in her voice, and something like a terrible joy. Lisa opens her eyes and looks, and the puzzle is sitting in her cupped hand, complete. But there is a space – a missing piece. She furrows her brow and glares at it for a long time, worrying at her lip.
“I... I don't understand.”
Her teacher covers Lisa's hands with her own, as she has a thousand times, but this time the puzzle is between them and it doesn't quite fit, and Lisa is frightened, suddenly, more frightened than she's ever been. There is pain in Twisted Tail's eyes, and fear, and an awful love.
“One day,” she says like a woman drowning. “You will.”
The arrow flies. There is raw salt in the back of her throat, heat behind her eyes. Duty. Something you choose to do. Not in conflict with free will; rather, the fiercest expression of it. Give your life that others may live, not in one glorious moment but inch by painstaking inch, every moment of every day until you die and begin again.
The arrow flies. She has been looking for a reason, a reason to care, but she's had her reason all along and it lives in the love she never expected to feel so much of, or so deeply. If she lives past the end of the world she may never know how she feels about having a Silver Fang for a father - but she has one for an uncle, and she loves him. She could walk away, but she's choosing not to. Here and now, she chooses to stay. And duty is something you choose to do.
The arrow flies, and hits home.