Hi
Bongiorno guys :)
So I know I've been away for way too long and stuff but I went to Italy for a weeklong holiday! YAY! ^^ So I felt guilty and wrote this today in between my chores and unpacking bags and all that jazz, and I hope you like it.
And can I just say oh-my-god those two latest episodes. I watched them in one go when I got back and just oh-my-god. Oh-my-God. And OMG OMG OMG YES WE GOT A (partial :/) SEASON FOUR! WOOHOO! :DDDDD (and yes, I know I'm late to that party. Don't remind me, haha)
The door slammed open.
"Get out, all of you." The familiar shadow of a guard with a gleaming gun appeared in the doorway. "Today, suka!" He slammed the nearest girl in the stomach with his gun. "Get up and get out. All of you get out, playtime's over. Get up, get in line, and walk out the door. Go on, it's not that hard. The boss has a surprise for you."
The girls looked at each other, confused. What was going on? Usually a guard simply opened the door and told them to get up, they'd walk through the narrow metal hallway to the room where they'd get dinner and then they'd be marched back to the large space with the cots for the night.
"Either he's new," Irina whispered to Sascha, "or his girlfriend dumped him. Or he has a stick up his ass." Sascha grinned silently. Trust Irina to think up an insult for whoever she disliked. Not wanting to fall behind and get the guard's attention, she grabbed Irina's hand. Together with Aliya the two of them made their way over to the door, where a line was beginning to form. Sascha craned her neck, looking for the twins. Finally finding them, she saw that they were standing only three or four girls behind her. A second guard walked up to them.
"Ana, Tanya." Sascha hit her friends to alert them, a little too hard judging by their faces.
"The twins are Ana and Tanya! I'll talk to them on duty, okay?" They nodded, then told her to shut up and listen to the conversation the guard was having with the twins.
"…cleanup duty today." The two tiny blondes looked at him without saying anything. The left one, Sascha noticed she was maybe two centimeters shorter than her sister, looked up at the guards, drawing a breath to reply.
"I'm sorry," she spoke in English with a Russian accent, as all girls did. Sascha blinked, surprised. The twin's English was almost as good as her own, definitely above average. Of course, even with the more fluent ones teaching their less fluent friends the most important words, many girls didn't even speak English at all so the average was rather low. The girl continued. "But we do not know what that is and what we have to do..."
"And we want to go, um," The other twin, who had a stronger accent, seemed to be searching for words. She looked to her sister for help, but only found raised shoulders and wide eyes. Apparently she didn't know either. At that, the second girl just continued in Russian, with a quiet "We just want to go домой." The guard hit her in the face with the butt of his gun for her efforts.
"You don't speak Russian here," he barked at the crying girl. "Speak English or don't speak at all. And you can't go home." While his lip curled in a disgusted sneer, he continued. "Ask one of the other girls to tell you what to do. The others on cleanup duty are Oli," he pointed to a tall, chubby girl with a square chin who was standing right behind the first guard, "and Sascha." At this, he pointed to where Sascha, Irina and Aliya were quietly listening in to the conversation.
"Shit, he knows your name," Aliya said in shock. "Not a good sign. If they know your name you're either troublesome like Mariya, which you are not, or they have taken up a… special liking to you." Choosing to worry about that later on, Sascha smiled as best as she could and waved at the twins. She beckoned her friends to walk forward with her, ignoring the guard at the door who was yelling something irrelevant about staying in line as well as Irina whispering something about her having a death wish.
"Hi, I'm Sascha. And these two idiots," she pointed at her friends, who were making weird faces at the retreating back of the guard, "Knock it off you two. You want to get killed? Sorry. These two are Aliya and Irina. You can trust them."
The twin nodded. "I'm Ana, and my sister is Tanya."
"Yeah, so we've heard from that moron." With a nod to where the guards were standing Irina made clear who she meant. "Speaking of… Seems the idiot with the stick up his ass wants us to follow the other girls."
"Irina, stop insulting them," Aliya said. "I know you hate them, but you'll just endanger us all! If anyone hears you they'll kill you. Remember our plan?"
Irina sighed. "Yeah, I remember. Survive, then escape," she mumbled reluctantly.
The twins had been following all this open mouthed. "Survive?" one of them whispered. The other one, Sascha couldn't tell them apart, finished her sister's sentence. "…Escape?"
"Shh!" Aliya, responsible and concerned as ever, effectively shut them up. "Later! We'll explain life on the ship to you guys tonight, okay? First, dinner and cleanup duty."
One of the twins looked up at Aliya shyly, asking her a question, and Sascha noticed for the first time how young they seemed. They couldn't have been older than eleven! Suddenly, the words the girl had said came through to her. "Will dinner be better than breakfast?"
The other one chimed in, her nose crinkled up at the memory of the slimy stuff. "Yeah, that was gross!"
Aliya laughed softly, a smile that seemed genuine and amused at first sight but when looked upon closer revealed itself as sadness. "Sorry girls, but it won't be better. If anything, it'll be worse."
At that wonderfully cheerful remark, they entered the room where they'd have dinner. Sascha looked around, paying close attention to her surroundings for the first time in weeks. She was suddenly seeing everything as if she saw it for the first time, the way the twins must be seeing it right now. The rounded walls, which surrounded them everywhere they looked, were all the same metallic grey tint and provided the ship's interior with a kind of prison-look. The way you'd always see your own garbled reflection in the curved metal had given Sascha a few minor claustrophobic attacks when she had first gotten there; they gave you the feeling that the walls were closing in on you, that there was no way out, all the while showing your own wide-eyed reflection. Eventually, Sascha had gotten over that, at least enough to not freak out every time they walked through a hallway. Which was lucky, because the only places she had so far seen were narrow hallways and a few relatively large rooms, like the Dark Room, the dorm and the eating room. In the eating room, the tables were screwed to the floor. Sascha figured it was to prevent them from sliding around.
She gathered her thoughts for a bit. There were some things that were always there, and she decided to focus on those. Take the neat total darkness, for instance. During the whole time she had been there, Sascha hadn't seen daylight even once. There were no windows, at least not in this part of the ship. She never doubted once that Vlad had some. The few lamps that were there to illuminate the places Sascha had seen so far seemed to be better at casting shadows than enlightening the place in more than a three feet radius. Add to that the fact that there were simply too few of them, and you had a whole lot of girls living in constant twilight.
Another one of the few constants in the girls' lives right now was the cold. It was there all the time, even when they were huddled together with their friends against a wall in the Dark Room. It was worst at night. The girl shielded themselves from it with their blankets as best as they could, but just one of the ratty, threadbare things would simply not be enough. Therefore at any moment during the night, you could wake up and notice someone sneaking through the dorm, carrying a blanket she had just stolen from one of the others. To make sure they wouldn't steal from you, you had to develop a kind of sixth sense, to notice when someone was near even when sleeping.
And of course another thing that kept many girls out of their sleep, was the ever-present rolling and lurching of a ship out at sea. Sascha had seen many girls get a sickly green face and run to the slightly closed-off corner of the room where the hole in the floor was that they had to use as a toilet as well as vomiting hole. Sascha shuddered. The mere thought of that stinking hole in the floor was nearly enough to make her throw up herself, so she quickly discarded it.
Shivering, she looked at her half eaten dinner. Left and right she heard some whispers. They all were on the same topic, she gathered: speculating why they had been called out this way. All of them were asking about what Vlad was planning, and how they might be able to shield themselves from it. Some were worrying about whether they'd be able to shield their friends. Some others were crafting plans to make sure the girls they disliked got the worst of it.
Sascha sneaked a glance at the twins, who were sitting on either side of her. Their eyes were cast down, their shoulders slumped. The one on her left, she thought it was Ana, was crying silently. Sascha bent towards her slightly and put an arm around the girl's slim shoulders.
"Don't worry, it'll be alright. You and your sister are with us now." Sascha suddenly realized something, and with hope coloring her voice she bent over to where Irina was sitting. "This makes us one of the largest groups! We're with five now, just one less than those girls at the other end of the dorm. That's the biggest group there is, save Mariya's!"
Irina turned to look at her. With a shrug and an indifferent look on her face Sascha wasn't used to, she pursed her lips before formulating a reply. "Yeah, save Mariya's. Don't forget, they're with eight. Most girls won't come after us now, which is good, but Mariya has a bone to pick with the twins. We better watch our backs before she breaks them."
"Wow, thanks a lot, Ms. Positive. We're with five," Sascha said, turning back to Ana, "which means most girls won't come after us. We'll keep you save."
The little blonde looked up at her. Relief and hope as well as doubt were easy to read from her face. "Really? I'm scared, Sascha."
Sascha smiled as reassuringly as she could. "Really. We'll protect you. Tonight, we will explain what life is like on the ship to the both of you. We will explain the rules." Sascha's gaze slowly moved to Mariya. She waited until Ana had followed it, and then continued, putting some emphasis on her words, "We'll also tell you who not to make angry. We've got your back now. That holds true for you too, Tan," she added, turning to Tanya and winking at her.
Ana shivered. "What we did this morning, stealing that big girl's hairbrush… That wasn't a smart move was it?"
"No," Sascha answered, both her voice and her eyes suddenly deadly serious. "That was not a smart thing to do."
"We just wanted to show that we won't do as they say!" Tanya whispered loudly. "They don't control us!" Obviously she was a lot more defiant than her sister. She had probably been the instigator of the whole thing. Sascha knew she had to stop this here and now, or else the twins would get in terrible trouble sooner rather than later.
"Listen to me, Tanya," she said in an urgent voice. "Both of you, listen. You have to do as they say. You can't get in trouble! You have to lay low, stay out of trouble. They do control you, at least for now. Do you understand?" She met Tanya's defiant gaze. "Do you?" Sascha leaned towards the shorter blonde, who sighed before admitting defeat.
"Yeah, I do."
"Good. Now be silent, okay?"
Sascha rested her chin on her elbows, her eyes following the contours of the ship's curved, metal walls once more. They came to rest on the twins' reflections, quietly eating the brownish goo they had for dinner.
She was more shaken by the arrival of those two little blondes than she had let on to be. They seemed so young, way too young for all of this. Sascha suddenly felt that she had to protect the two of them, if it was the last thing she did. I promise, she thought. I won't let anything happen to you. Cross my heart and hope to die.
Actually I was planning to do the cleanup duty, a horrific [spoiler] in Vlad's [spoiler] and a gruesome [spoiler] (hehehe) this chapter, but I'm bone tired and it's 1 am here so you'll just have to bear with me. I figured I'd send this out here already, and the next chapter WILL contain the things mentioned above. And it shall be perversely awesome in a sadistic, perverse way ^^ (my favorite haha I'm such a psycho)
Oh and this chapter is for chill-the-beans, as promised. Lucky guess in that review right there XD
And one last thing: I really want to thank Violet Temperance for her advice and also giving me even more advice over PM. I hope this is better? :3 I mean I know I crammed it all in one piece but I'll even it out more in the next bit. This was just to make sure everyone could see it better at once, like you said ^^
SOOOO all of you, please tell me your thoughts! I love hearing them :DDD
Until the next update! (Which will probably be way too long from now anyway, sorry in advance about that)
Xx
