WHERE YOU GO
Chapter 1
"I can be just as harsh and evil as the world,
But sometimes, I would rather like to be kind…"
She had awoken in the night and her mother had not been there, and she had cried for her, the silent weeping that she had been doing since before she could remember, the kind of crying that attracted no unwanted attention. Her mother had appeared out of the darkness like a spirit, had held her close and kissed her and told her that she had only gone to the other side of the cell and there was no need to cry. Talia had burrowed her cheek into her mother's clothes and wrapped her mother's soft waves of hair around her fingers, and afterwards she remembered to look for her mother in the darkness before weeping. It was not hard. Her mother always stood in the same spot, near the cell door, gazing out expectantly at the walls of the pit.
Talia was never been allowed outside, not even when she was older. She could sit in the cell or nuzzle her face against the bars, but when she saw her mother finish braiding her hair and veiling her head, she knew she would be left alone for a time. Inevitably, she would tug her mother's dress and whisper,
"Can I come too?"
And her mother would always answer, softly but firmly,
"No, Talia." A gentle touch of her cheek. "Stay here. Wait for me."
So Talia would sit on the bed, on the blanket that was the only possession her mother had brought down with her from Outside, and watch her mother flit through the prison, feeling a squirming envy. Her mother did not know of the restlessness that overtook her daughter, how she wished terribly to be able to dash up the steps and all around the levels of the prison, to go all the way to the center, the bottom of the pit, and look up into the opening. She had memorized each way her mother took – out the cell, down a level of stairs and then to the right. She would go lower if she wanted to empty out their waste (they didn't use the communal toilet of the prison, but shared a chamber pot, the contents of which her mother threw out every day), to the left if she wanted to reach the place where food was lowered, and out of sight for… Talia didn't know. But she could find the path there too, she was sure of it.
Her mother always went when the other prisoners were in their cells, hiding her face and crouching low to the ground. Talia understood that it was dangerous to go out – how many times had a man passed by and hissed at them, or stuck a skinny arm into their cell and tried to grab them? But Talia thought there were good men in the prison too. She had seen a few. The doctor, he had always cared for her. There were others who passed by and looked at her, sometimes even talked to her. Her mother always told her not to answer, so she didn't, but she liked them. There was Limping Man, who smiled when he walked by her cell, and Crisscross Man, because he liked to tie his robe over his chest in the shape of an X. He would nod at her when she caught his eye. Tattoo Man had stopped once and shown her the inked in drawings that covered his skin, and her mother had used them to teach her colors. On his back was the color of plants in spring; over his arm, the colors of honey and butter; over his face, the color of the sky, of water. It had taken a long time for her mother to teach her that color. The only color her mother did not need to teach her was the color of blood. Talia had seen that plenty of times.
She had a ball to roll around. It wasn't really a ball, more a piece of cloth wadded up, but if her mother tied it just so, it became a bit more rounded and she could play with it in her cell while she waited. She had tried to tie it herself many times before, but the knots were too hard and her fingers too small and clumsy, and eventually she had thrown the string into a corner of the cell and cried furiously to herself. Then her mother would come, stroke her arm, and show her, again, how it was to be done, but Talia could never learn it right, do it as perfectly as her mother could.
So she rolled the ball, back and forth. She also had a pile of rocks to play with, pretty ones her mother had found for her. One of them had a white streak right down the middle; another shone when she held it at the right angle (her mother called it "crystal"), another was black, smooth and round, and yet another had small blue flecks over the surface. She liked to form piles with them, arranging them based on size or shape or color and then choosing her favorite out of them. Other times, she tried to build them up as high as she could before it toppled over.
Yesterday, her mother had shown her how to form a pyramid, layering four of the stones at the bottom and stacking the rest so that they formed a little pyramid. Talia tried this now, placing the four flattest ones on the ground in a square shape, then three on top, fitting them into the grooves of the bottom stones, then two on top of them. But her favorite part was when she would pick a rock at random and tug it free, watching the whole pile topple all over the floor. She hoped her mother could find another stone for her, so she could make a perfect pyramid.
Her pile built up as high it could go, Talia stood up and ran to retrieve her ball sitting a few feet from her. It got caught on everything – a bit of jutting stone, the sand on the floor, the rough metal of the bars catching on the cloth – and she had to get up and toddle over to pick it up. She would also toss it, watching in glee as it went to the ceiling, so high up above her. When she was small, she would jump up and down on the cot and try and reach it, but then one day she had torn the bed and her mother had been mad at her. The doctor had to come over and repair it. But there was a shelf of ledge hanging out over their cell that was even higher than their ceiling, and she wondered if she could hit it too…
She threw the ball up, and it sailed between the bars.
Talia froze. It was outside.
She crept over to the bars. There were men about, trailing up and down the levels of the prison, but they were always there; she noticed them no more than she did the dust in the air or the indirect sunlight that crept along their walls. They passed by, most doing no more than sending her a shifty glance, while she stared at her ball sitting outside.
She could not go out. Her mother had told her never to leave, in that stern, quiet voice that meant she was deadly serious. But it was her ball out there. What if the men took it? She knew there were kind men, but none of them had ever had a ball, or at least she hadn't seen them with it, and she couldn't fathom one of them not wanting it and stealing it when she could.
So she would not ask, or send pleading looks for help to them. She would get it back herself. Creeping over to the door, she slid her arm out between the bars, carefully, cautiously, drawing back quickly when a man passed by. When he was far away, she drew near once more, squeezing her small body up against the bars. They pressed painfully against her shoulder as she tried to reach for the ball. It did not look so far, but she needed just a bit more length. She glared at the ball, memorizing its spot, then turned her head so that it wasn't in the way and reached out as far as she could, squeezing out her shoulder and part of her body until the bar was jabbing into her back.
And suddenly she felt cloth against her fingers. A triumphant smile spread itself over her face. She grasped her ball and pulled her arm back, turning her head back around so she could see outside.
She jerked back.
There was a man kneeling there, his hand outstretched towards her and fingers cupped slightly, as if he might grab something that had rolled out the cell – or had just released something back to her.
Talia held the ball against her chest and stared. His face was covered – Covered Man, she named him. She rolled the ball over and over in her hands. The string that held it came untied from her nervous worrying, the cloth tumbling loose into her hands. She stared at it and felt a hard pain in her throat. Now her ball was gone, and just when she had it back. Her mother would remake it for her, but it always took so very long for her to return…
She folded the cloth in her small hands, wishing she could make it into a perfect triangle like her mother could. Hers had wrinkles and folds in it. She looked up at the man again, who was standing now. His head almost reached the ledge above, she realized with awe. Not even her mother was so tall. She hugged the folded cloth to herself again, then pressed it over her head like her mother would. Her mother always looked so pretty that way. She swayed back and forth like that for a few moments, feeling rather pretty herself, and thought she saw Covered Man's eyes widen slightly. He drew nearer. She hopped a few inches closer as well.
A figure appeared from behind him and moved. There was a thud, and suddenly the man had fallen to his knees. Talia backed away, pushing the cloth from her head.
From out of the shadows of the prison came her mother, her mother who had slammed her fists into the man's head, who was now rushing into the cell quicker than Talia had ever seen her. She tore the cloth from Talia's grasp, crushed it in her hands and threw it against the wall, then sank into a corner, grabbing Talia and squashing her against her chest. Her hands pinched the scant flesh on Talia's arms and she could hear her wild heartbeat in her ear, and suddenly Talia knew that her mother was scared. She began to cry, for it was a very bad thing if her mother was scared and could not protect her. By the time her mother got around to comforting her, and when Talia could finally lift her eyes to the cell door, Covered Man was gone.
Later, her mother had pulled her into her lap and hissed that she was not to cover her head or take off her pants or cry or do anything to reveal that she was a girl, and sounded so angry and scared that Talia was on the verge of tears again, even as the unfamiliar word – girl – resounded in her head.
"What's a girl?" she had whimpered.
"We are girls," her mother had said. Talia wiped at her eyes, feeling them sting as a loose thread got under her eyelid. She supposed that her mother was a girl – she certainly looked different enough from the others in the only home she knew – but Talia felt more like one of the men (that was what her mother called them) herself, with her short hair and prison clothing.
"It is dangerous to be a girl here," her mother murmured. "We are different. They will hurt you for this."
Talia had known they were different, but never had she connected the hooting men, their leering smiles and grasping hands, to this difference. She had even seen her mother attacked, her arm or dress clutched in a prisoner's hand. Her mother always managed to spring free, but Talia had seen the men hit each other as well and bleed that red color. Sometimes, she even saw her mother with that color, running down an arm or her skirt. She had hated the men, then, had wished that her mother might fight back and hurt them. But she knew it would not happen. Her mother was too good and kind to attack others. But when Talia was older, she would be big and strong and she would make sure they never hurt her mother again.
"Promise me, Talia. Tell nobody." Her mother had said it with that dark, serious look in her eyes.
"I will."
"You won't."
"I won't, I promise." She squeezed herself close to her.
Her mother sighed, wiping at her daughter's tear-soaked cheeks. "Shhh…. no need to cry. Let me tell you a story."
Her mother's stories were what Talia loved the most. Often, her mother would go out, and when she returned it would be with some gift for her daughter. Once, she came back with a piece of cloth that she had folded over and sewn and wrapped over Talia's body, replacing an older, worn out shirt. The pieces were always too baggy, too large for Talia, and it made her skin prickle from sweat and the roughness of the fabric. She wanted to dress like her mother, who was so beautiful in her dresses and veils.
"This is an old dress," her mother would say, and point out the stains along the sides, the fraying of the edges.
"But it's pretty," Talia insisted, feeling small and ugly in her dust-brown tunic and floppy shoes. Nobody had anything like her mother's dresses, even if it was dirty and stained.
"I knew women who had more beautiful dresses by far," her mother said. Talia curled up beside her. Whenever her mother had that tone of voice, she knew she was about to tell a story, a story about Outside. Talia had never been Outside, but she dreamed of it – a big, wide open place, full of plants (they were green blobs, for she could not imagine the soaring trees and multitude of flowers and shrubs and grasses her mother described), of water (a fuzzy blue expanse – water was a rare and precious thing in the prison), mountains in the distance (Talia could not imagine anything higher than the ledge, the prison walls), homes and buildings and all the lovely things her mother told her about.
"There was a woman, once," her mother said, "not beautiful – or most said she wasn't – but she had a dress that flowed like the wind. It was such thin fabric, thinner than this cloth," and she touched the most worn out edge of her dress, which to Talia felt it might tear if she so much as pulled on it, "and smooth. You could run your fingers over it and not get your skin caught on even a thread."
Talia examined her own hands, which were roughened from playing on the ground or grasping the bars of the prison, the nails short and uneven and which got caught on everything.
"And the colors – it was yellow at the top, but so light yellow you thought it was white, cream-white-" Talia didn't know what cream was, but she wouldn't interrupt when her mother was in this mood, "- but when it reached your chest, it had turned to gold, like the sun when it has just started to set. And it was orange too – the color of the sky when the sun has disappeared, and then pink, and red, and purple at the bottom…"
"What else?"
"The end of it was over her left shoulder; it flowed all the way to the ground, and the colors were the same as her dress, but when she walked, she never stepped on it. It would cling to her body and flow over her feet."
"And she had long hair?"
"Yes, down to her waist."
It was an incredible length; even her mother's hair only fell halfway down her back. Talia loved her mother's hair. Her mother often kept it in a braid, but Talia's favorite moments were when she took it down and let Talia run her hands through it. Sometimes, she would talk about how women washed it with liquids that made it bubble (Talia did not know what a bubble was), and perfume it, and comb it out so that they might tie it up into far more elaborate designs than her mother's simple braid. Talia didn't understand all of it, but she did know what combing was. Her mother often let her do it, using her fingers to tug out knots. Sometimes Talia would find a little white thing crawling around in it. She thought it fascinating and would let it run over her finger, but her mother always crushed them, a look of disgust on her face.
Most other times though, it was food her mother brought back, a small piece of bread they would share, a skin of water, or rarely, a piece of preserved meat.
"Which piece do you want?" her mother would ask her. She had ripped the bread in half, into two irregularly shaped and sized pieces.
Talia would point to one, and her mother would give it to her. Sometimes Talia picked the larger piece, and sometimes the smaller. Her mother said this was the best way to be fair – one would split the bread, the other would take whatever piece they wanted first. Talia didn't think so, though – after all, if she was the one who chose (her mother always insisted she did), then she was always the one who could make the other person have a smaller piece. It wasn't fair, and she thought sometimes that she ought to split the bread and let her mother choose.
But when they started eating was the best time. "What is this?" she would always ask her mother. And her mother would say it was bread, and Talia would ask, "Was there anything else?" referring to the boxes of food that was dropped down for the prisoners.
"No," her mother said, and always, "but there is more food Outside." Talia would ask her what, and as she filled her stomach, she would also fill her mind with her mother's descriptions.
"Fruits," her mother might say. Fruits? "Sweet, round things – sweet is the taste, you feel it here-" she might point to the tip of her tongue – "and it is… soft, and disappears so quickly, but it's the taste that always lasted the longest." Talia would try in vain to imagine it. On the rarest of occasions, there might be some fresh fruits or vegetables sent down, but the men always managed to grab it before her mother could. Talia had never tasted sweetness.
She didn't mind, though. It was better when her mother described them. "What kinds of fruits?" Talia would ask.
"Round ones," her mother would make a shape with her hand, "pink and red," indicating her dress, her veil for the color, "but lighter. It was mostly pink, or white, but there was red here or there." A sudden flash of inspiration. "Like your face." She indicated her cheeks. "And when you bit into them, they were soft, they melted on your tongue and the juice would squeeze out of the flesh and drip onto your skin."
Or, "Yellow, long, and smooth like the skin here." And she rubbed the underside of her wrist. "Peel the skin off and eat the inside, and it would feel… soft, but like there was a bit of sand inside." Talia made a face. She had sand in her food before, and it was awful, but her mother said it was soft sand. Or maybe, "A ball with a tip at the end, light green, and you bite it and it is like your bread, dry, and like chewing dust, but just a bit sweet."
"Do they have bread, too?"
"Yes, but the inside is white, and soft." Their bread was gritty with sand, crumbling and dark. "And you could spread things over it to make it taste better – butter that melted in the mouth and honey that would slide, slow and sticky, off the crust of the bread, and which made it salty or sweet." Talia thought she might prefer the sweet.
"What else?" she asked her mother.
"Meat, from a-" and she would give a word Talia didn't know, but she would say it was a creature with a mall body and arms that spread out and helped them to fly, soar through the air, unbelievable as it was to Talia. "The legs and wings would have honey dripping from them, sticky and sweet – it would get on your fingers and you would feel the stickiness for hours afterwards. And the meat came right off the bones and tasted… salty, but the honey made it not so much…"
Her mother had once brought her a piece of meat. It had been so hard and tough that she had spent hours chewing it, her jaws aching, before finally spitting it out when her mother wasn't looking. The taste had made her tongue feel dry and dusty.
"…and they would decorate it, with fruits and flowers."
"Flowers?"
"Yes…" And her mother fell silent for a few moments. "They are… beautiful things…" She made shapes with her hands, a center and parts flowing out of them, like wings. "All colors, but mostly red, yellow, orange, purple – and all shapes too-" And she would cup her hands and describe how one had its wings folded within itself over and over again, or another made a round shape with its petals and a yellow center. "And when you ate, there would be others playing music and singing."
Of all the things her mother had told her, it was music she could not describe, though she said it was similar to singing. At night, they would share the bed, and her mother would tell her about singing, and teach her a few songs. Talia would roll the melodies in her mind and the words in her mouth long after her mother had fallen asleep, repeating them, memorizing them, always knowing there were more and that all these things were Outside and they might see them one day.
And occasionally, her mother would tell her about her father, a brave and wise and handsome warrior who loved them both very much and was coming to rescue them. Talia loved those stories the best – not for her father, who she did not know, but for her mother, who looked so much happier when telling them. Her eyes would grow wider, her gaze far away, and her hands would move with more energy as she described how her father had fought off twenty men and been made leader of an army.
But the story always ended sadly. It always ended with the warrior gone and her mother in the prison, and when Talia asked if there was any more, her mother said there was none. And it was the first story Talia knew, and so she would always be surprised when later stories had happier, satisfying endings.
Yet she was always afraid when she asked for stories, because always her mother would sigh and say, "That's enough stories," and leave Talia alone on the bed to take her place at the cell bars, looking up at the walls of the prison. Other times, she would simply stop and be sad and still. Talia hated those moments, when the silence descended on them so that the very air seemed heavier, suffocating. She could never be sure what caused those moods – sometimes too much time spent looking out the cell door, sometimes when Talia asked too many questions, sometimes when the men were loud and raucous. They spat through the bars or urinated on the floor, calling to them or cursing them. Her mother would only turn her head away, while Talia watched them, a hot angry pit in her stomach, wishing they might hurt for their actions. Her mother could not do that – she was too kind and gentle – so Talia imagined instead that she hurt them herself. She would watch them and try and memorize their faces and, occasionally, feel a tiny, stinging satisfaction if she saw them hurt or die.
And then there were some days, the worst days, when there no stories. Those days, her mother would lie on the bed and not move, not speak. Talia would tug on her dress and whisper, "Mother, mother…"
And when she still did not get up, Talia would sit there, rolling her ball slowly around the cell and waiting. Sometimes, Talia would see her mother cry, and then Talia would curl against her mother's back and twist her dress in her fingers. Those were the worst times, Talia hiding her face and trying not to cry because her mother was crying and it scared her so terribly.
When the crying was over, Talia crawled close to her mother. "Will my father come?" she asked, for sometimes when she asked of her father, she would make her mother smile. She wanted only to see her mother happy, to watch her eyes sparkle, but it seemed less and less often that her mother was ever happy.
Drying her eyes, her mother only said, "Perhaps."
Talia swallowed. "Why hasn't he come before? Mother?"
Her mother turned her head away. "He was exiled... he wouldn't know..." She let the sentence trail away.
Talia squeezed up closer to her. "Know what?"
Her mother shook her head. "It doesn't matter."
And Talia was left to ponder this man who her mother said was a great, strong warrior who loved them both, but who hadn't fought her grandfather, who hadn't come searching for her and her mother. Was he frightened? Was he not as strong as her mother said? Was he cruel and bad just like her warlord grandfather and cared nothing for Talia or her mother?
"He is your father," her mother would say whenever Talia voiced her tiny, tiny doubts. "He loves us both very much."
But he was a man, and the only men Talia knew of were the inmates sharing their prison. Some were kind, most indifferent, and a few cruel, and she when she saw them draw near her cell, she would shy back, fighting a mix of curiosity and fear.
"He is not like them," her mother would say when Talia spoke of that. "Fathers love their children."
But the only fathers Talia knew were her mother's father, who had sent his daughter to the prison, and this own mysterious father of her own who did not come and who made her mother cry when she spoke of him, her mother who did not cry even when talking about the cruelty of her own warlord father.
When Talia cried, her mother would stroke her head and comfort her and soothe her into sleep. But Talia could not cry now. Her mother was sad, and Talia had to be the happy one now.
"Mother," she whispered, "my father will come. He can take us Outside, and…" She would not admit that the big, wide open Outside made her stomach clench - how could there be a world bigger than that of the cell and the pit? She pushed the fear aside and thought instead of how they wouldn't have to worry about the bad men. Talia could go out of her cell when she wanted to (her mother had to explain often that people did not have cells Outside). She could eat all the things her mother told her about, and smell flowers, and her mother could hear music and singing again and wear dresses and put her hair up.
"He'll come," Talia said again. She lay down, imagining her father descending towards them. "He's looking for us, Mother, and then he'll climb down and get us."
Her mother's voice was a thin thread of sound in the cell. "Yes, Talia. He will come." And then she grabbed her daughter and clutched her tight, tighter than she ever had. Something deep inside Talia knew to stay still, to not wriggle about as she did when her mother held her a little too tight. She lay there and let her mother rock her back and forth and wrapped her arms around her neck. Sometimes, she thought, even the ones who were meant to protect her needed protection too.
But most of all, Talia thought, her father would come down, and she cast aside her trembling doubts and nightmares of a man throwing her down to the prison and taking away her mother, and thought only of happy dreams of her father, who would make her mother smile, truly smile, and make sure she would never cry again.
A/N: So, if you've reached here, then I take it you got past my soppy summary and the rather lengthy chapter above. Congratulations! (That probably sounded patronizing, but it wasn't meant to be.) This is my first story in some months and second Bane/Talia fic, so hopefully I'm not too rusty.
I'm in the habit of posting notes at the end of each chapter, but I really don't have much to say here, except I apologize for any historical or cultural inaccuracies, as I did little to no research at all for the story, unless you count diving into your own childhood memories as research. The location of the prison and ethnicity of Talia's mother were kept pretty vague (I have this image of the filmmakers waving their hands around and saying, "Oh, you know, that desert-y area around middle-eastern-southern Asia"), so I'll just use that as an excuse. Nothing else to say, except that the next chapter will be up in a few days and will be more exciting than this. (I'm not exactly harboring any illusions about what character readers want to see most.) Read and (hopefully) review!
