TITLE: One, Two, Three
RATING: High M / R
SUMMARY: After a narrow escape - after being brought to the very edge of the end - Wheeler, Kwame and Gi try to find a way to cope.
NOTES/WARNINGS: Written for the polybigbang on livejournal. Please be aware that the purpose of this challenge was to write a story of at least 10,000 words featuring a poly relationship. This story focuses on a poly relationship between Gi, Kwame and Wheeler and, while there's no graphic sex, there are references to adult themes, violence, torture, and emotional and physical abuse.
If this doesn't sound like it's going to be your cup of tea, please leave now, rather than read it and send me abuse because I haven't written your OTP or whatever. Been there, done that, don't care to do it again. :p
.prologue
Gi walked along the beach, the sky white at its edges and dangerously blue-purple above her. Thunder rumbled low and angry through the cloud. The sea was steely grey and foamless, the waves rolling restlessly against one another until they crashed to shore in salty spray.
Sometimes she thought she'd be all right – that such moments would be enough to drive out the sour fear digging its heels into the centre of her mind. Life had a way, sometimes, of organising things so that you could go on in spite of the worst.
Life on Hope Island was different to life everywhere else, though, and Gi was beginning to figure out that Hope Island didn't necessarily mean everything was going to be easier. Maybe it was harder – there wasn't as much distraction here; there was only more time to think.
She was restless, and the storm was doing nothing to ease the tension along her shoulders. The sea lacked its usual vibrancy, or tranquility, or whatever the hell Gi had been hoping to find when she'd wandered down to the shore.
She sank into the wet sand on a straight stretch of beach on the west side of the island and watched the storm rolling in over the water. She could see rain coming down in misty waves ahead, blurring the horizon as it moved toward her.
When the rain eventually reached her, it found her crying, and it washed the tears from her cheeks.
"You will fall ill if you stay out in the rain like that."
Gi looked at Kwame through her lashes, too lazy to fully open her eyes. His fingers were nested in her hair, which was still slightly damp, his thumb soothing a pattern against her temple.
"Rain doesn't just magically make you ill," she said quietly. "Viruses make you ill."
Kwame just smiled.
"Where's Wheeler?" Gi asked eventually, lulled to near-sleep by the quiet murmuring of the television and Kwame's fingers stirring slowly through her hair.
"Asleep."
"Me too," she whispered.
Kwame chuckled, and it was such a rare, lovely sound, she found herself smiling.
Sometimes they went to sleep separately. Gi was usually nestled against someone's back or chest or side, but sometimes someone retired to bed alone, desperate to prove the shadows of the night could be easily beaten.
But dawn always found the three of them inside the same blanket, midnight hours too tense and long to battle through without support from others.
Gi sometimes wondered if she should have followed Linka and Ma-Ti and simply gone home, to old familiarities and securities. But home didn't hold the same comforts for her as it did for Linka and Ma-Ti. She wasn't particularly close to her parents – not in an emotional sense, anyway. They were nearer to academic peers than anything else.
As a child, Gi had usually been left to her own devices. Her parents were often more focused on their work than on their daughter, and while she had never felt a lack of love from either of them, she was conscious of a divide between them that left her feeling like a stranger; it was awkward and tense when she came to needing something from them.
So she had stayed with Wheeler and Kwame, who both knew what it was like to have an uncomfortable family, or no family at all. The three of them clung together in the aftermath of a nightmare and tried to build something from fragments of their former selves in an isolated, unknown, undiscovered corner of the world.
Gaia was there, and yet she was not. Sometimes Gi saw her, but she wasn't the same. Fury and fear were still attached to her, and Gi felt she had lost the closest thing to a mother she'd had in a long time.
Losing Gaia was almost harder than losing Linka.
Her heart flutters madly in her chest. She glances to the exit, but the thought of escape never anchors itself fully in her mind; she knows it is futile.
She has heard one of them screaming – one of the boys, she thinks, though it sounded so inhuman and so unlike any of them she can't be sure.
It was terrifying. It has scared her more than anything else that has happened in here – that one scream has sent chills through her bones that simply won't leave, and she's still trembling.
Her ring is gone, taken, but even if she still had it, she thinks she'd be too terrified to remember how to use it.
She begs, but they advance anyway, and she knows she's about to find out exactly why her friends have been screaming in the other cells.
Gi breathed out, her breath hot and wet in the heavy humidity of the night. Sweat clung to her skin and the sheets were tangled around her legs. Wheeler's hand cupped her elbow and Kwame's arm sat heavy and warm over her waist.
"You okay?" Wheeler's voice was quiet but startling in the thick darkness of the night.
Gi swiped a tear away with the back of her hand, still feeling breathless. The nightmare hung in ragged ribbons at the corners of her mind, and she could feel her wrists aching with injuries that had since faded from visual memory.
She sniffed, loudly, embarrassed about waking in such distress, and Wheeler pushed himself closer to her, ignoring the sticky humidity of the night that brought sweat to their skin and made breathing a chore.
Gi closed her eyes, her body snug and hot between two others, and she tried to forget.