I just had to write a Pol/Mal fic. I know it's not so great, but you know when you really have to do something before your head explodes? This is a possible prologue for a longer fic I may write after Succession.
Disclaimer: Apples.
"Mal! This is no time to be stupid!"
The sergeant's voice was a furious hiss as she batted the vampire's soothing hand away from her face. Rain pounded their little four-man tent. (1)
"Yes it is," Maladict replied, pushing a cigarette into Polly's tense fingers. "Lighten up, Poll. It's exactly the right time for foolishness."
Glaring, Polly took out an unmistakeable piece of card. It was a clacks. The grin dropped off Maladict's face and hit the ground with an audible clunk. "Tell me it's not-"
"It is." Slowly, the sergeant handed her the clacks message and sat back. Maladict choked.
"The bastards!" she howled. "And now, when we're doing a good enough job of killing ourselves!" The vampire was spluttering with rage.
"'S alright, Mal," Polly murmured, putting her arm around the corporal's waist. "'S not that bad. Calm down."
"The bastards!" snarled Maladict again, hugging Polly fiercely. "How dare-" A nervous cough cut her off. They looked around.
"Sorry," Rosemary mumbled. She was drenched to the skin and peering through the tent flaps with the air of one who has awoken to find their bed floating down a river of molten lava and has decided that it is a little early to get up yet. "It's just, um, we heard shouting, and – and – I'll go . . ." The girl backed away in the icy face of Polly and Maladict's glares. "Sorry."
When she fled, the was a long silence, underlined, emboldened and italicised by the pummelling rain. Each soldier was listening to the furious thoughts racing through her head. Eventually, Polly said: "It's our . . . duty."
Maladict laughed bitterly. "No."
"Yes, Mal. There's no way out of this."
"But your lads! They're only kids! None of them's even twenty yet! We'll get slaughtered!"
The sergeant didn't reply, but buried her head in the vampire's chest, breathing in her comforting, distinctive smell of coffee and cigarettes. Maladict didn't need sharper senses to feel Polly's heartbeat, and all at once knew that this girl meant more, so much more than anything else. It sounded cheesy, even inside her head, but Polly was, at that moment, all that mattered in the world. And if Ankh-Morpork had the . . . the nerve to call on Borogravia's army, then Maladict would defend her best friend to the end of the Disc and back again.
And when duty called, they would answer together.
(1) It is a well-known fact that there is no room for two men (2) in a two-man tent.
(2) Or women, or, as Professor D. Valuvam the wizard could tell you, ravenous jaguars.