ScapeRoute "Make a scene" writing contest: what could have happened to some
of the crew between DWTB and season 4. No more than five pages.
Characters involved: you'll see
Setting: about three weeks before Crichton Kicks
Rating: R
Wanted
She had always been very supple. Some people smirked calculatedly when told about it; she knew it meant a lot more than that.
She disengaged her left foot in slow motion, careful not to make any noise, she still had a long way to go and she needed the element of surprise. The rusty suspended air conduit didn't even wobble as her toes reached tentatively down through the vertical shaft, she felt the muscles in her right leg pull and stretch all the way through recent sore and discomfort until that nearly orgasmic place where total relaxation had to take over as the only other bearable alternative. She let out a deep breath, her whole body slackened and her right knee came to rest gently against her collarbone, her ankle providing her with a hold on the ledge she had just left while her gloved hands slid down the sides of the exceedingly narrow conduit. Her left foot, carrying her small pistol tightly secured just above her ankle, achieved a stable hold below.
She loosened her grip on the sides and folded her upper body to reach down to the horizontal opening below. Her skull brushed against the lining, she felt the dust and grit coat her hair on the way down, adding another layer on the previous ones and she repressed a quake of revulsion. She may have been a tralk but she had never enjoyed being dirty. Her ribs met with her spine, the connection unhindered thanks to a shrivelled stomach that had not seen food in five solar days. Her shoulders pressed against the encompassing walls, squeezed through her legs and she rotated her hips to bring her right leg on the other side of the conduit so she could fold it on her bottom. She bent her left knee and curled in a twisted fetal position until her head and her arms found the horizontal opening and she snaked her way inside, feeling the sudden easiness of the forward motion that would only last until the next bend and another challenging vertical shaft.
She continued her crawl forward through the bowels of the abandoned warehouse, in whose large space her quarry had the habit to gather in secret, protected from unexpected visitors by the clear expanses all around them, not believing that someone would think of using the narrow suspended conduits and yet, they knew about her suppleness. Oh yeah, they did.
A shudder went through her spine, so fierce it sent the heavy dust flying around her and awakened the aches all over her body. She froze and held her breath as she sensed the imminence of a sneeze. Her hand crushed her nostrils, smearing some more dirt on her face and quelled the urge. Her mouth grimaced against her palm. With all the dirt over her clothes and her face, would they even recognize her? She breathed haltingly through the smell of dried up blood and fear-laced sweat reeking from her gloved hand and wondered how she could still have bile coming up from empty insides. Tears threatened to assault her eyes and she blinked them back furiously. She had come this far, there was no turning back now but she wasn't sure she would have the strength to carry through in the end.
She had tried to make sense of it, to find some reason behind the events but how rational could she make it? There had been no sense from the start, no sense at all and she could only think of repeating the same sentence over and over again like a mantra: she had not deserved that.
The casino had kept her winnings, she had gained nothing from her badly controlled scam and the only thing she could really be accused of was plain stupidity and grave misjudging of her situation. Compliant authorities had provided her with medical attention since her death would have given them more trouble than necessary; they had waited two solar days until she had recovered her sight then let her out again in the streets with an overgrown coat to cover her torn clothes and enough currency to get herself a room. She had made a beggar immensely happy at the first street corner she had turned.
She. Had. Not. Deserved. That.
No one did.
She nervously rubbed her nose and her eyes with the back of her hand and resumed her slow motion forward. To the best of her knowledge, she had five other vertical shafts to overcome and she didn't want to get to the end and find out that the men had left. She reached the first of the shafts and skilfully engaged her body in another challenging experience, one she had full control over.
Her appreciation of her other. 'abilities' had evolved with the different forms they had taken but fear had been present all along. Fear of going crazy, of being unable to prevent what she saw, of misunderstanding the images completely and frelling up altogether and, by the end, she had grown apprehensive at the increasing length of time between the visions and their actual occurrences. She had been fascinated by the change and somewhat relieved too, believing that by getting back to just a feeling of things to come, she would no longer torture herself about the future, it would happen too soon for her to have time to worry. Her growing fascination had turned into exhilaration in the casino. She had literally not been able to believe her eyes at first and even as her head had felt the pounds of a budding headache and her sight gone through disturbing periods of blindness, she had been too caught up in the game to realize what was going on and that she was putting herself in an impossible situation.
They had arrested her. They could do nothing less. No casino liked to let people con it more than it cons them; that made for plain bad reputation. They had put her in a cell for questioning and she had presumed of her skills. She could kick, kiss or cry her way out of any situation but only as long as it involved no more than two men in a cell with her. She knew that now. They had asked her if she wanted to play and she had not understood how different their rules were going to be. She could have tried to ' see' the situation but she had not mastered that skill yet. Even in the casino, the vision had come without prompting.
She eased through the last vertical shaft, sweat beading her forehead in exhaustion. She saw the lit opening at the end of the conduit and gritted her teeth in concentration. That last part seemed to be in really poor state and she wasn't even sure it was still strong enough to hold her weight. She heard snatches of loud voices and deep chuckles ahead of her. Just by listening, she could tell the progression of their inebriated state.
The vision had come unprompted in the cell too. At the worst possible time.
She had no longer been torturing herself about the future but others had decided to take over the torture part. She had known exactly what was coming, every little detail of it as time had slowed down to near stillness and she had had no way of preventing the abuse from her captors. Not once had the visions lied to her, every bit of pain they had promised had come. and lasted through the stretch of time. She had tried to make it stop, all of it, the visions and the torture. She had cried and begged. She had closed her eyes but the sights had kept on burning behind her lids while her body had drowned her brain with confirmations. She had wanted to fight back but the visions had kept saying differently. She had opened her eyes to complete darkness and stopped resisting.
She made the last of the way at a snail's pace, her body eating its last resources. Sliding down the vertical shafts had taken a lot of energy from her already depleted reserves, she was shaking and sweating with each movement, fighting to keep moving forward. She made the last pull on the strength of her arms only, bringing her eyes just far enough to take a peek downward. Before she had time to take a good look at the three men sitting five motras below and away from the conduit she was in, a powerful cramp seized her left leg and she nearly screamed in the agony. She awkwardly rolled on her back and reached for her leg, trying to unknot the cramped muscle. She felt the tears run unhindered down the sides of her face at the last microt betrayal of her body.
Breathing in and out in small gasps, with her eyes concentrating on a scratch of rust above her, she felt the pain ebb away in what seemed to be an excruciatingly long time. The smells and sounds of her environment returned in full and she was greeted with more roaring laughter from beneath.
Happy monsters. Without a care in the world.
She choked on the anger building up inside, washing away the exhaustion. She had a pretty good idea she had not been the first to benefit from their treatment and would not be the last. They had probably learned by now that she had been let out of custody yet they kept on behaving as if everything was normal, her existence merely dismissed from their lives. If only they knew. they wouldn't be laughing so hard. She carefully removed her small pistol from its secured spot on her left ankle and brought its cold familiar feel against her cheek. She had procured it only a few arns ago but it was the same model as the one that she had had those past monens until she had lost it during another near catastrophic escape.
She rolled back on her stomach and attempted to get into a position that would allow her to jump out of the conduit to land right before them. She wanted to see their looks of recognition before she pulled the trigger. Her legs finally in place and feeling steady enough, she checked their position again and gave the warehouse a last microt roundabout inspection.
Her half-cry of surprise came into a sudden bubble of silence and, for all their drunken state, the men below reacted promptly to the threat. They brought their weapons to bear on her conduit and fired. The tube was so weakened by rust that the first poorly aimed hit was enough, it gave way behind her and tipped forward with a heavy list to the left, trapping her inside before she could jump or fire back.
Time stretched and she thought she was going to just fold and crash.
The heavy list in the conduit's fall protected her from the pulse fires of the men but her landing called for broken bones. She made the effort to look up again and consciously wondered how the image of Rygel plunging downward on his sled could grow so rapidly in the stilled landscape. What different timeframe was he on? She heard the distorted shouts of the men as they reacted to the incoming threat and she pushed on her feet to escape the conduit. She went flying into the air and felt a thickness holding her there, floating between slow moving images. The men were turned away from her and she was bound to end up at their feet in the downward curve of her fall. Gravity was still ruling the game. Rygel's raised arm produced three small explosions and spurts of blood greeted her descent before the warehouse turned black and she crashed on the floor, her unused pistol still clutched in her hand.
She felt a boot under her cheek and scrambled back frantically to her knees, her moves made clumsy by the blindness. The tang of fresh blood assaulted her nose. Her hand came up to drive the smell away, it met resistance and she realized after a couple of microts that she had just batted away Rygel's arm presenting a knife to her. She heard his thronesled whine away, shuddered through the last gurgles of death coming from somewhere before her and looked up questioningly toward the returning whine.
"I was a Dominar," he answered to her unspoken question, "what more can I be blamed for?"
She felt his hand grip her upper right sleeve and he helped her get back to her feet. She placed her own hand on his sled.
"We should be gone already," he said, "Peacekeepers have been reported on the system's second planet."
She let him guide her out of the depository and through the streets, her hand gripping his sled.
The after effects of her vision cleared away little by little and she finally managed to look at him clearly. She had almost not recognized him the day before when she had unexpectedly bumped into him in the city's busy streets. His face had looked as bruised and battered as her body felt, with his right eye swollen shut in a sea of black and blue. She had been quite dazed and confused at the time and couldn't remember what he had told her exactly, something to do with wanted beacons and Peacekeepers, as if she hadn't known about that already. She had left him without a word of explanation to go running after a bulky form, oblivious of his warnings to leave the planet immediately.
His eye was now opened to a tiny slit but his face was still looking terrible and a lot older. She noticed how he was sitting slightly slumped on his sled, as if he could not quite hold himself upright, but she could sense a purpose in the way his hand gripped the sled's controls and led them on on a straight path through the city. She smiled sadly. He was supple too, in that same other way she was. She sniffed and tapped her hand on his sled before finally releasing her hold on it. He grunted in acknowledgment.
"So, huh, where. where are we going?" She asked quiveringly, her spine jarred by her jerky movements, her muscles too sore and tired to respond correctly to her commands.
"We have to find the others. We defend ourselves better when we're together."
Her eyes darted all over the place, trying to make up for the lost sights of the past arn. "How are we gonna. gonna find them? We, uh, all left. monens ago." She glanced at him with a worried frown. "Where do we start? They could be. anywhere by now. and we'll be searching for like, cycles. and with the Peacekeepers on our trail."
"We will keep it simple," he interrupted her with a steady voice. "Start where we left off and move on from there."
She stared at the spaceport spreading before them and then glanced behind her at the city with its bustling activity, its fateful casino, its bleak prison and its abandoned warehouse with the three dead men. She looked back at the spaceport and spotted Moya's battered pod waiting for them a stone's throw away. She thought of the fourth man lying in a narrow alleyway, with his guts spilled outward, blood pooling on his lap, soaking clothes stenched with the smell of his fear. His pitiful pleas of mercy had filled her with disgust and she had nearly relented but then, his begging hands had reached out to her and her knife had replied. Repeatedly.
She looked again at Rygel's bruised face as they entered the pod. She knew that was the only way they could go but she wished they could have started over instead.
**FIN**
Wanted
She had always been very supple. Some people smirked calculatedly when told about it; she knew it meant a lot more than that.
She disengaged her left foot in slow motion, careful not to make any noise, she still had a long way to go and she needed the element of surprise. The rusty suspended air conduit didn't even wobble as her toes reached tentatively down through the vertical shaft, she felt the muscles in her right leg pull and stretch all the way through recent sore and discomfort until that nearly orgasmic place where total relaxation had to take over as the only other bearable alternative. She let out a deep breath, her whole body slackened and her right knee came to rest gently against her collarbone, her ankle providing her with a hold on the ledge she had just left while her gloved hands slid down the sides of the exceedingly narrow conduit. Her left foot, carrying her small pistol tightly secured just above her ankle, achieved a stable hold below.
She loosened her grip on the sides and folded her upper body to reach down to the horizontal opening below. Her skull brushed against the lining, she felt the dust and grit coat her hair on the way down, adding another layer on the previous ones and she repressed a quake of revulsion. She may have been a tralk but she had never enjoyed being dirty. Her ribs met with her spine, the connection unhindered thanks to a shrivelled stomach that had not seen food in five solar days. Her shoulders pressed against the encompassing walls, squeezed through her legs and she rotated her hips to bring her right leg on the other side of the conduit so she could fold it on her bottom. She bent her left knee and curled in a twisted fetal position until her head and her arms found the horizontal opening and she snaked her way inside, feeling the sudden easiness of the forward motion that would only last until the next bend and another challenging vertical shaft.
She continued her crawl forward through the bowels of the abandoned warehouse, in whose large space her quarry had the habit to gather in secret, protected from unexpected visitors by the clear expanses all around them, not believing that someone would think of using the narrow suspended conduits and yet, they knew about her suppleness. Oh yeah, they did.
A shudder went through her spine, so fierce it sent the heavy dust flying around her and awakened the aches all over her body. She froze and held her breath as she sensed the imminence of a sneeze. Her hand crushed her nostrils, smearing some more dirt on her face and quelled the urge. Her mouth grimaced against her palm. With all the dirt over her clothes and her face, would they even recognize her? She breathed haltingly through the smell of dried up blood and fear-laced sweat reeking from her gloved hand and wondered how she could still have bile coming up from empty insides. Tears threatened to assault her eyes and she blinked them back furiously. She had come this far, there was no turning back now but she wasn't sure she would have the strength to carry through in the end.
She had tried to make sense of it, to find some reason behind the events but how rational could she make it? There had been no sense from the start, no sense at all and she could only think of repeating the same sentence over and over again like a mantra: she had not deserved that.
The casino had kept her winnings, she had gained nothing from her badly controlled scam and the only thing she could really be accused of was plain stupidity and grave misjudging of her situation. Compliant authorities had provided her with medical attention since her death would have given them more trouble than necessary; they had waited two solar days until she had recovered her sight then let her out again in the streets with an overgrown coat to cover her torn clothes and enough currency to get herself a room. She had made a beggar immensely happy at the first street corner she had turned.
She. Had. Not. Deserved. That.
No one did.
She nervously rubbed her nose and her eyes with the back of her hand and resumed her slow motion forward. To the best of her knowledge, she had five other vertical shafts to overcome and she didn't want to get to the end and find out that the men had left. She reached the first of the shafts and skilfully engaged her body in another challenging experience, one she had full control over.
Her appreciation of her other. 'abilities' had evolved with the different forms they had taken but fear had been present all along. Fear of going crazy, of being unable to prevent what she saw, of misunderstanding the images completely and frelling up altogether and, by the end, she had grown apprehensive at the increasing length of time between the visions and their actual occurrences. She had been fascinated by the change and somewhat relieved too, believing that by getting back to just a feeling of things to come, she would no longer torture herself about the future, it would happen too soon for her to have time to worry. Her growing fascination had turned into exhilaration in the casino. She had literally not been able to believe her eyes at first and even as her head had felt the pounds of a budding headache and her sight gone through disturbing periods of blindness, she had been too caught up in the game to realize what was going on and that she was putting herself in an impossible situation.
They had arrested her. They could do nothing less. No casino liked to let people con it more than it cons them; that made for plain bad reputation. They had put her in a cell for questioning and she had presumed of her skills. She could kick, kiss or cry her way out of any situation but only as long as it involved no more than two men in a cell with her. She knew that now. They had asked her if she wanted to play and she had not understood how different their rules were going to be. She could have tried to ' see' the situation but she had not mastered that skill yet. Even in the casino, the vision had come without prompting.
She eased through the last vertical shaft, sweat beading her forehead in exhaustion. She saw the lit opening at the end of the conduit and gritted her teeth in concentration. That last part seemed to be in really poor state and she wasn't even sure it was still strong enough to hold her weight. She heard snatches of loud voices and deep chuckles ahead of her. Just by listening, she could tell the progression of their inebriated state.
The vision had come unprompted in the cell too. At the worst possible time.
She had no longer been torturing herself about the future but others had decided to take over the torture part. She had known exactly what was coming, every little detail of it as time had slowed down to near stillness and she had had no way of preventing the abuse from her captors. Not once had the visions lied to her, every bit of pain they had promised had come. and lasted through the stretch of time. She had tried to make it stop, all of it, the visions and the torture. She had cried and begged. She had closed her eyes but the sights had kept on burning behind her lids while her body had drowned her brain with confirmations. She had wanted to fight back but the visions had kept saying differently. She had opened her eyes to complete darkness and stopped resisting.
She made the last of the way at a snail's pace, her body eating its last resources. Sliding down the vertical shafts had taken a lot of energy from her already depleted reserves, she was shaking and sweating with each movement, fighting to keep moving forward. She made the last pull on the strength of her arms only, bringing her eyes just far enough to take a peek downward. Before she had time to take a good look at the three men sitting five motras below and away from the conduit she was in, a powerful cramp seized her left leg and she nearly screamed in the agony. She awkwardly rolled on her back and reached for her leg, trying to unknot the cramped muscle. She felt the tears run unhindered down the sides of her face at the last microt betrayal of her body.
Breathing in and out in small gasps, with her eyes concentrating on a scratch of rust above her, she felt the pain ebb away in what seemed to be an excruciatingly long time. The smells and sounds of her environment returned in full and she was greeted with more roaring laughter from beneath.
Happy monsters. Without a care in the world.
She choked on the anger building up inside, washing away the exhaustion. She had a pretty good idea she had not been the first to benefit from their treatment and would not be the last. They had probably learned by now that she had been let out of custody yet they kept on behaving as if everything was normal, her existence merely dismissed from their lives. If only they knew. they wouldn't be laughing so hard. She carefully removed her small pistol from its secured spot on her left ankle and brought its cold familiar feel against her cheek. She had procured it only a few arns ago but it was the same model as the one that she had had those past monens until she had lost it during another near catastrophic escape.
She rolled back on her stomach and attempted to get into a position that would allow her to jump out of the conduit to land right before them. She wanted to see their looks of recognition before she pulled the trigger. Her legs finally in place and feeling steady enough, she checked their position again and gave the warehouse a last microt roundabout inspection.
Her half-cry of surprise came into a sudden bubble of silence and, for all their drunken state, the men below reacted promptly to the threat. They brought their weapons to bear on her conduit and fired. The tube was so weakened by rust that the first poorly aimed hit was enough, it gave way behind her and tipped forward with a heavy list to the left, trapping her inside before she could jump or fire back.
Time stretched and she thought she was going to just fold and crash.
The heavy list in the conduit's fall protected her from the pulse fires of the men but her landing called for broken bones. She made the effort to look up again and consciously wondered how the image of Rygel plunging downward on his sled could grow so rapidly in the stilled landscape. What different timeframe was he on? She heard the distorted shouts of the men as they reacted to the incoming threat and she pushed on her feet to escape the conduit. She went flying into the air and felt a thickness holding her there, floating between slow moving images. The men were turned away from her and she was bound to end up at their feet in the downward curve of her fall. Gravity was still ruling the game. Rygel's raised arm produced three small explosions and spurts of blood greeted her descent before the warehouse turned black and she crashed on the floor, her unused pistol still clutched in her hand.
She felt a boot under her cheek and scrambled back frantically to her knees, her moves made clumsy by the blindness. The tang of fresh blood assaulted her nose. Her hand came up to drive the smell away, it met resistance and she realized after a couple of microts that she had just batted away Rygel's arm presenting a knife to her. She heard his thronesled whine away, shuddered through the last gurgles of death coming from somewhere before her and looked up questioningly toward the returning whine.
"I was a Dominar," he answered to her unspoken question, "what more can I be blamed for?"
She felt his hand grip her upper right sleeve and he helped her get back to her feet. She placed her own hand on his sled.
"We should be gone already," he said, "Peacekeepers have been reported on the system's second planet."
She let him guide her out of the depository and through the streets, her hand gripping his sled.
The after effects of her vision cleared away little by little and she finally managed to look at him clearly. She had almost not recognized him the day before when she had unexpectedly bumped into him in the city's busy streets. His face had looked as bruised and battered as her body felt, with his right eye swollen shut in a sea of black and blue. She had been quite dazed and confused at the time and couldn't remember what he had told her exactly, something to do with wanted beacons and Peacekeepers, as if she hadn't known about that already. She had left him without a word of explanation to go running after a bulky form, oblivious of his warnings to leave the planet immediately.
His eye was now opened to a tiny slit but his face was still looking terrible and a lot older. She noticed how he was sitting slightly slumped on his sled, as if he could not quite hold himself upright, but she could sense a purpose in the way his hand gripped the sled's controls and led them on on a straight path through the city. She smiled sadly. He was supple too, in that same other way she was. She sniffed and tapped her hand on his sled before finally releasing her hold on it. He grunted in acknowledgment.
"So, huh, where. where are we going?" She asked quiveringly, her spine jarred by her jerky movements, her muscles too sore and tired to respond correctly to her commands.
"We have to find the others. We defend ourselves better when we're together."
Her eyes darted all over the place, trying to make up for the lost sights of the past arn. "How are we gonna. gonna find them? We, uh, all left. monens ago." She glanced at him with a worried frown. "Where do we start? They could be. anywhere by now. and we'll be searching for like, cycles. and with the Peacekeepers on our trail."
"We will keep it simple," he interrupted her with a steady voice. "Start where we left off and move on from there."
She stared at the spaceport spreading before them and then glanced behind her at the city with its bustling activity, its fateful casino, its bleak prison and its abandoned warehouse with the three dead men. She looked back at the spaceport and spotted Moya's battered pod waiting for them a stone's throw away. She thought of the fourth man lying in a narrow alleyway, with his guts spilled outward, blood pooling on his lap, soaking clothes stenched with the smell of his fear. His pitiful pleas of mercy had filled her with disgust and she had nearly relented but then, his begging hands had reached out to her and her knife had replied. Repeatedly.
She looked again at Rygel's bruised face as they entered the pod. She knew that was the only way they could go but she wished they could have started over instead.
**FIN**