Continuing the series of songs-inspiring-me-to-do-drabbles-without-proofread.

My title is all copy, sucked from the "Strange Fruit" - There are great versions with Billie Holliday and Nina Simone, but my favorite is definitely that one of Siouxsie and the Banshees (bear with me, i was the goth kid in my teens).

This shit is a little heavy. But it's canon, so I guess that 70% is G.R. 's fault.

Let me know what you think! =)

I do not own Game of Thrones, The Song of Ice and Fire or the rights to the song


Strange Fruit

- Southern trees bear strange fruit-

Their knees found the ground with a muffled sound, cushioned by soft soil and rotting leaves.

Hm.

The owners of those knees would also be rotting sooner, swollen faces and necks distorted by the knot. Their eyes did not matter, big and begging for mercy; their expressions fearful and astonished as they stared at the filthy dress she wore. Alas, their helmets enameled in blue and decorated with Twin Towers were evidence, indictment and prosecution enough for condemnation.

Just the vision of them made her inflate her lungs with air that she no longer needed, and an ominous hiss came out from the tear in the throat, now muck more like a second mouth than anything else. Kill them all, it repeated like a bell in her empty body. Kill them all.

The others - perhaps her companions, perhaps her henchmen, she did not know anymore - closed in a circle and a low voice asked if they had taken part in what had occurred. She nodded, but in the end it did not matter either. The whole breed carried their guilt for what happened. Kill them all.

The ropes were tied, the barrels arranged and knocked over, the screams reaching a crescendo until they were silenced with a jolt and half dozen spasms from the bodies. And the fruits now hung from the tree, long and ready to be emptied by the crows until they finally fell and began to feed the maggots.

She stared at them, swaying in the icy breeze of autumn, the first rays of the sunset reddening the gaunt, inert skin, tracing bands of fire in the dark of hair under the leather cap. The youngest of them had bit his own mouth, the blood still dripping from the lips. There was blood on the floor, among the roots.

Blood at the roots, blood on the leaves.

She remembered close to nothing. Childhood, parents, minutiae of a broken life. But the red painting of the scene reminded her that, once upon a time, there was always blood on the leaves and white trunks; carmine tears streaming down wooden faces, not like the welts she carried herself, but of soft liquid in ritual and adoring form. This image pained all over her body, pulling something from inside of her.

Ache in her dried heart, for a love, lost.

Hurt in her hollow womb, for children, dead.

Her hand rested on the iron and bronze crown she carried tied on her belt. Revenge, she thought, for them, all of them. Kill them all.

She walked away from the tree in silence, as it was the only way she could do. There was still much to sow, many fruits still to be reaped. All of them.

- Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop -