dumb story inspired by a dumb game at adarkroom dot doublespeak dot com, previously posted on ao3
because why the hell not
warnings for angst, mentioned violence, mentioned character death
im sorry
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A DARK ROOM
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i ;
The fire has gone out, and you wake in bone-cold darkness.
The sun hasn't risen yet. A chill has worked its way into your bones and you feel like your spun glass body will shatter if you move, so you don't. You take a moment to lie buried beneath your blankets. You are certain that your breath, slow and steady, is fogging the air, but you cannot see it.
Too dark.
You sit up, your movements stiff and jilted, a blanket wrapped around your shoulders. You fumble for a match, some tinder, a log or two.
You relight the fire.
Slowly, it warms you.
.
Your breakfast is pine needles, smashed and steeped in boiled water from the spring outside your door. It does nothing to fill you but it does warm you, chasing away the last of the lingering chill in your bones, and lighting up the empty space in your chest. You have been hollow for so long that it hardly bothers you anymore. You lean back against the flimsy wall of your home, your steaming tin cup clutched tight in your hands.
The sun is rising, a flat and pale disk against a flat and pale sky. The skeletons of trees scrape the sky, barren and dark.
There is a bird roosting in the branches of the tree above you. It is a starved and beaten looking-thing, regarding you with beady black eyes. It chirps at you, and you blink at it. It tucks its head under a mangy wing, sleeps.
You wish you could sleep, again, but when you dream at all they are plagued with memories of fire from the sky and a world gone wrong, a mother, dying, a father, dying, a brother, dying.
You, dying, and then (miraculously?) not. You woke from fever and dug their graves with your bare hands and buried your family and their memories and now you are the only one left. For almost four years, a survivor.
You sigh into the morning. Your breath fogs the air, and creakingly, you stand. Your bare toes curl in the drying loam of the forest floor, and you pour the rest of your tea into the dirt. It was shitty anyway. You stretch, your long limbs reaching up, up, up.
You go about gathering some wood, sticks, and tinder. Your stores are getting dangerously low, the pile next to the door dwindling.
You breathe in deeply. There's the smell of ozone in the air, faint but growing in strength. It's going to storm tonight.
You pick up your pace.
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There is a storm, and it is rattling your flimsy walls with a ferocity that almost invites you to feel fear. As it is, all you do is curl a little deeper into your blankets and prod the fire a bit more thoughtfully. The storm will pass, just like they all do. You eyes droop a bit, sleep threatening to take your rail-thin body. Thunder crashes directly overhead, and something shuffles outside.
Alive, moving.
You stiffen, reach for the blade you keep under your pillow. Your fingers brush it just as a cloaked figure throws open the door to your hut and stumbles inside, shutting the door as quickly as they'd opened it. They collapse against the wall near the door, soaked and shivering, barely more than swirling shadows in the firelit gloom. You relax, somewhat, but keep your fingers on the hilt.
This one won't harm you, you think.
"Hello," you say, your voice rusty from disuse. The figure jerks, hooded head twitching, fingers spasming in the folds of the cloak. The hands are slim, pretty, pale. But there's something about them, you can't tell what. The head lifts, face still hidden in the shadows of the hood. "My name's Rose. Who're you?"
The figure shifts, pulling closer to the fire. Hands reach out to the flames, trembling, and you - you notice that under the golden glow, they are silver. A shiver runs down your spine.
From under the hood, green eyes hemmed by gold. Fine cheekbones and full black lips.
A wanderer.
It says, "My name is Kanaya."
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ii;
The wanderer stays three days, for the duration of the storm. She gathers wood for you when the rain lessens and tends the fire, golden eyes dispassionate. She is a firm presence, another warm body, and you begin to realize how much you've missed company. The storm passes, and you say, hoarsely: "You do not need to leave."
She inclines her head, considering. She had horns, once, but they are since broken off near the base. "I could build things, if I had the supplies. Traps, a wagon. Perhaps more huts, given time."
"Okay," you say, your breath shuddering out. The remnants of her horns look infected. Bleeding, painful. "Okay."
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Snow falls and it becomes imperative that the fire does not go out. You go out foraging for logs and sticks and tinder and the wanderer comes with you, sometimes, holding the logs that you cannot and humming quiet alien songs.
She mends the hut you live in. It still whistles in the wind, but the wind doesn't blow through the cracks like it used to. It almost holds heat in.
She mends the blankets that have torn or frayed, the rips in the few clothes you own. You watch her deftness with the craft and ask where she, a soldier, learned to handle a needle. She goes blank for a moment, then resumes sewing. There is snow falling outside, you can see it through the crack in the door, but the fire is burning merrily.
"I wasn't a soldier," she says quietly. "I was a seamstress for the fleet. One of many. They needed us to mend uniforms and sometimes injuries."
You swallow, and nod. You hadn't thought of the wanderers as ones who would take seamstresses on their ships with them, but there you are. Life is full of surprises.
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The wanderer cleans her horns. They are still shattered echoes of what they might have been once, but they are no longer pus-ridden, or caked in dark green scabs. They still hurt to look at, the sympathetic ache of seeing them riding deep in your jaw.
This is how it is, for a time:
The wanderer is quiet. She keeps to herself, constructing and repairing traps. She sees you drinking, throwing out your pine needle tea, and quietly leaves strips of the roasted animals she kills on a board for you. You start to eat again. At some point your birthday passes. You do not know the exact day, you do not care. There isn't much difference between sixteen and seventeen anyway.
You sleep. You do not dream.
Not anymore.
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You had a brother once. He died, like so many in the War. His death was unnecessary, brutal, and you wept for him.
But wanderers didn't kill him.
Human beings in a mob beat him to death and hung his corpse from a decaying lamppost in a decaying city. You saw him for the last time painted red and hoisted above a crowd. You shouldn't have looked back.
He had been at the wrong place at the wrong time and had had compassion when he should not have had. He didn't need to die.
You tell the wanderer this, you don't know why. She nods solemnly, and the space between you is small and charged with electricity and you can't bring yourself to touch anyone, not yet, not with your brother's empty eyes echoing in the void inside you.
He was in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and he had the wrong skin. You shared a womb with your brother, and you shared his skin, and you had to run because of it, lest you shared his fate. You were a coward. You'd thought that humans might have forgotten such superfluous prejudices in the face of a greater threat, but you were wrong.
Life is full of surprises.
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It is getting warmer, somewhat. You can venture farther in the mornings. You catch some animals in the few traps that the wanderer sets up, and it is nice to have furs to protect you from the cold, for however long it chooses to stay. You almost want the world to remain frozen for longer, if only because you don't know what will pass through your woods when it thaws.
You are terrified that the cities are full, and that they will come.
The wanderer says not to worry, and she crafts a rudimentary spear from a sharpened tree branch and a bone from an animal. She says, if they come they will be weakened, and they will not know these woods as we do.
She gives you the finished spear, starts working on another one. You heft it, carefully. It is surprisingly well-weighted, and gives you more range than the knife you'd been using before.
She eyes you carefully. "Maybe they will not come looking for a fight."
"Everyone comes looking for a fight," you reply immediately, and she laughs. It is low and lilting, like a summer's day.
"Not everyone," she says, and looks at you fully. "Please, Rose, call me Kanaya."
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So, you do.
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iii;
Winter goes on its way: Kanaya builds traps and a cart for more wood and she begins drafting plans for a hut, two, three.
You say: "Why do we need more huts?"
She says: "We need to survive. We need more hands to do that. There are people out there, humans and wanderers, willing to work if we give them a small measure of security."
You say, upturned and questioning: "Wanderers?"
She nods. Says: "We came to this world in search of glory, and broke its back. We now pay the price for our foolishness and our greed. We have been exiled, we are being punished. This world is as much ours now as it is yours still, and we will have a hand in mending it."
You say: "You're sure they'll come."
She says: "Yes, of course."
You say: "And be peaceful?"
She says: "Yes."
The distance between you is electric; when your hands brush you are set on fire.
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Your sleep. It comes easier.
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The weather warms, the ground thaws, and occasionally when you are out scrounging for wood there will be beasts that leap out of the bushes at you. Sometimes they are dogs, sometimes unrecognizable things that Kanaya says came with the wanderers on their ships. She says this composedly, prodding at the warped carcass with a cold expression on her face.
You eat well, on those nights.
Sometimes you forget your knife or spear, or Kanaya is not in shouting distance, and you get scratched, or bit. It is no matter. You heal, your skin grows stronger with the scars.
The sun beats down and you sit under it, basking. Your hair pales, your skin darkens. Summer leeches back into your bones. You start to remember what it is to feel warm.
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The stream near your hut thaws and warms enough to consider bathing. You take a rag and you strip, easing yourself into the warmer-but-still-glacial water. Your eyes snap open and your skin prickles with gooseflesh. Kanaya has lived here with you for three months now, and winter is long gone. The forest is blooming green in a way you did not think it could again.
You climb trees sometimes, and if they're tall enough you can see for miles, and it is all blooming green. Life beginning again where there once were battlefields, vines around fallen ships and fallen soldiers.
It's beautiful, you guess.
The decaying of things. And the gradual replacement of the old with the new.
Today is not a tree climbing day. The birds are singing.
You float on your back in the water, and listen as something large and frightening in your chest groans, and shrinks in on itself. Above you, the sky is blue and the leaves on the trees are green, green, green.
(Kanaya's skin blushes green, too, when she slides into the water next to you. You orbit each other like suns and moons.)
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You sleep again. For the first time in months, you dream quietly, with songbirds in your heart.
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More traps, more structures. Kanaya is getting ready to build the first of the huts, and you are bristling with anticipation.
She says people will come, and you think, maybe, but she didn't see the cities.
Secretly, you think that there is no one left but you two.
Sometimes, you hope this, and you hate yourself for it.
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You wonder, sometimes, what life would have been like if your brother had lived, your mother, your father, if they had lived. You wonder if the world would seem as green or if the sunlight in the morning would still seem to you like so much spun gold.
Thinking about them feels like dancing around the edge of the precipice in your chest, but the chasm is getting smaller with every passing day and it is becoming. Not less painful, but easier. Easier.
Four years.
You miss them.
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One night, laying on a grassy embankment under the stars, Kanaya tells you a story.
She had a brother too, she says, halting and slow. Or, a friend who was very very dear to her. The human language does not have words for it like the wanderer language did. She says the word slowly, it rolls off her tongue and sounds irrevocably alien. It sounds like a death knell.
Her people, the war generals, killed him. Slit his throat because he had the gall to bleed an unacceptable color, because he had it in him to love.
They broke off her horns when she tried to defend him, or to hold him while he twitched into oblivion. The pain of that painted her mind red, red, red. Her mindscape matched her brother's, for the briefest moments in time. Then, they cast her out into the wastes.
She says, that was a blessing in disguise. The next morning, aching and mourning, she watched in grim, horrified satisfaction as the fleet imploded. The ships, hundreds of them, winked out one by one, and then fell to the earth like so many falling stars. She likes to think that she could hear the screaming of the crews as they burned up in the atmosphere.
She is quiet, watching the stars. You are watching her. She has been with you for five months, and the space between you is nuclear.
This is a catalyst.
You move, closer, and then there are fireworks.
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The thing is, neither of you were soldiers.
You were thirteen when the wanderers came, a civilian in every sense of the word, and war did not spare you. You are older now, by years, and you still don't know if you can make you-then and you-now fit together. You are trying, though.
Kanaya wasn't a soldier either. She was a seamstress, following a boy into battle, following the propaganda of an empire she was raised to believe in, an empire that bred all the love and softness out of her. Or, tried to. It takes a sort of strength, you think, to defy that.
It takes strength, she says to you, to carry on after all you've been through.
Neither of you were soldiers: the war that was fought and lost by everyone was not your war, but it took you and remade you anyway.
And somehow, by some sort of grace, you made it through the fire, maybe not whole but alive, certainly alive.
You have to remember that.
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Her heart is slow and steady under your ear.
You steady your breathing, matching her beat for beat.
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iv;
You are a prophet, and you dream of happier times.
Gone by and yet to come.
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You stand together in the golden light of the setting sun. She is draped over your shoulders, tall and willowy and smelling crisp and clean. Her hair has grown long, so has yours. There are four huts lining the path behind you, two more deeper into the woods, five more in the works, two clearings set aside for the growing of natural grain, and inklings of plans for a lodge, a smokehouse, a fence to hold it all. The small path leads away, out into a world bloomed green.
You breathe deeply, close your eyes.
"They will come," she says, murmuring in your ear. Something loosens in your chest, slowly, then all at once.
"They'll come," you echo in response, a small, unpracticed smile blooming on your lips.
And they do.