A / N :

Character (s) : Adora Belle Dearheart.

Setting : Pre Going Postal.

Prompt word : Fear.


It doesn't matter how many bricks vault through her window - the Golem Trust headquarters will always be where Adora feels safe.

Adora lights a cigarette, alone in the gloom, and watches as the flash of the match illuminates a scarred wooden floor and a circle of shattered glass. She closes her eyes in frustration and grinds a heel into the ground, gouging a scar of her own into the floorboards.

Sweep the floor. Light the lamps. Paper over the cracks.

She does this week after week, night after night. She complains – loudly, to herself and to anyone else who can stand five minutes in the company of "the crazy golem lady". She complains because the golems won't. Golems never do. They work without complaint, without fatigue, without resentment. They tolerate everything, with a quiet patience that both fascinates and infuriates her.

Most people can't stand to see golems as people, can't comprehend how they think. They feel got at and unsettled before too long. Adora's devotion to the golem cause simply baffles the rest of the city. But she doesn't care. There is something steady about the golems, something solid and irrefutable, and she likes it. Golems have no scope for deceit, no capacity for greed. The centuries pass and leave them unchanged ; anchors from the past moored in the present, calm faces turned towards the future.

Golems fear nothing.

Golems don't fear the light of the clacks, flickering against the Ankh-Morpork smog. Golems don't see her father, flushed with pride in their parlour, pulling the handles of a scale model and smiling at a future that glitters like gold.

Golems don't fear the broad expanse of the Plains, the vastness of a clear blue sky. Golems don't see John, swaying on solid ground. They don't feel lever-callouses on his palms as his hands close over her own. They don't see his eyes, too-bright in a tired face, promising faster, better, easier because the clacks have shares in his soul.

Adora tastes smoke on her tongue and remembers, at last, to exhale.