The Fool's Armour

❛ Day 88 ❜ looked like a proper mess.

Cobbled together from yesterdays, and snatches of a barely risen today, it skipped through time with about as much grace as a newborn filly might navigate its pasture. Not overly well.

It made her dizzy. Turned her eyes hot in their sockets, a sting to them she couldn't squeeze out no matter how vigorously she rubbed at them with her thumbs.

Will you just get it together?

Sadja snapped her eyes forward, peered at a slice of reluctant light running down the middle of a set of listless curtains, and wished herself bored.

Hard to think a few days ago she'd have liked to be anything but. Now she'd give a hefty chunk of herself for a lasting lull.

Bollocks.

With a sigh, she turned back to her journal. Looked down at words she'd hoped would tear a little of the pressure from her chest.

❛ I've done this before.

Once.

I've gone off and dragged home a wayward Sare. He'd tripped through a rend in the Verge, one left behind by some calamity or the other back when even the Nightingale had been no more than a vague idea in someone's loins.

This'll be easy, Vik had said then, and she'd sent me off with a pat on my shoulder and a Good Luck that lasted about a day.

The Sare hadn't been pleased.

He'd liked what he'd found. Had gotten cozy. Had thought that he'd gone and done what we all wanted: Found a life worth the effort. ❜

Sadja let the pen hover. Contemplated leaving it at that, since the words that pushed at her from the inside weren't about to taste nice on the way out.

❛ Back then I didn't quite get it.

I saw only a world that was a little too high up, what with the clouds below my feet. And I thought it stank an awful lot, the air dirty and full of airships coughing up thick clouds of oily smoke.

Not once did I pause to consider how things worked different here, even if they didn't work perfect.

He pleaded when I found him. Swore to Elaya's ever gentle heart that he'd behave from here on out, and you'd think I'd have recognised the words. The I'll be good! I swear, I swear— I didn't mean to overstep— while you've got a Ward Knight turning a hot iron in their hand, ready to turn the world black.

But he'd made a mess. Muddied up things and made himself mean more to this world than he'd ever had any right to. And this the Cataract couldn't tolerate. Neither would its Keepers. Fledgling or not.

So I brought him home.

"Awfully well done," Sinvik had said when I'd returned to her, and I'd been a little proud. ❜

The page ran out, and her heart did too. A little, anyway. Sadja scowled at the words, as if that'd show them for how they twisted her throat up tight. They cared none for her defiance, or for her defeat. Flipping the page, and giving her nose a scrub with the back of her hand, she went back to dragging the past and present from the tip of the pen.

❛ I'd done good. A tainted sort of good, but right then I hadn't cared a lick for that. Eager to please was what I'd been, and I wanted to do it all again.

Well. Shit.

Here's my chance. Years later— and I'm thinking Not like this. Please. ❜

Tight lipped. A strained huff out her nose. Knuckles white where she held the pen. Not bloody fair.

❛ There's a weight to what I'm faced with. A finality to my failure that extends beyond what I'm allowed to give. My life, now that's mine to lord over, despite what some might think. Losing that is on me and me alone, but if I don't get this right?

So please please please. Let me look away. Let me turn my back and walk, because I'm not made of bits hard enough to weather this. Sinvik is. Her and those she's gathered around her. Heroes. Men and women who've carried Trero's unsteady weight on their shoulders without fail, and who I can't ever see buckle under it.

Them.

Not me.

I'm not a hero.

Don't wa ❜

"—I'll have to buy you a new one."

Sadja lifted the pen, and a quizzical look fell to Redfield hovering by the mouth of his kitchen.

He looked about as ready for a day of things important as he possibly could, all business and a definite lack of play. Halfway to rested too, she thought, his eyes alert and the lines that had started gathering around them a little less liny.

"Hm?"

His head gave a brief nod to her journal.

"Ah—" Sadja ran a finger up the side of it and flipped through the last four empty pages. Idle fingers had filled the thing right quick.

"I need money," she said after a moment of staring at blank paper, wishing a little that her mind could be as vacant and unwritten. Not a mess of scribbles lining the insides of her head.

Redfield made a noise in response that got her to look up. He'd wandered closer, joined her at his kitchen counter to sit by her side.

"One thing at a time," he said.

Her grip on the pen tightened. She breathed out, tried to evict the pressure from her lungs squeezing in from around her spine. Failed at that. Terribly too, and he picked up on it.

"You alright?"

Concern lapped against her gates. It had a muted heat to it. Careful and almost tender, and she toyed with the thought of letting it in. Instead, she let the pages fall back down and blinked at the drying ink.

"You don't look it." An arm dove past her. Returned with a carafe still halfway full of coffee.

She shrugged and listened to him pour some into his mug.

"I've got things to live up to," she admitted after a while and he allowed her a distracted Huhm that tapered off with his first sip. "And I'm not altogether sure I can."

"If you're worried about the assessment— don't. You're doing fine, and it's mostly bull anyway."

"No— yes. I—" she winced.

"You're really not okay." The mug clicked against the counter and he shifted by her side. Turned to face her, she figured.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"You don't word right."

Now that's just uncalled for.

"I word just fine," she said and snapped her eyes to him. Caught him reading.

"Oy! Isn't a girl allowed any privacy around you?"

Redfield shrugged at that, a lovely nod of his shoulders that she rather liked, at least until he looked at her. His brow was pinched and something weighty set in the muddy blue stare.

"We don't even know if he's still here," he tried. "He might be gone by now."

And that'd make it worse, because then I'll have been late, she snapped, but out loud said: "It hasn't been that long since Ansel. He's here, or else I wouldn't be."

"Okay. But you're not doing this on your own. If he's only half as much trouble as you said, then he's as much our problem as he's yours. Worse, if he's mixed up with Neo Umbrella. Which—" He picked up his mug. Took a sip. "—makes him the B.S.A.A's responsibly. My responsibility."

Her heart pinched.

"I'm not going to tell you not to worry. That's pointless, we both know that, but this is good. This is a start. And after that—" Another pause, and he spent it tracking an unsteady line along her, mapped her out with eyes that seemed to carry their own words with them.

"I can help you get set up. Doesn't— doesn't have to be here of course. Can be anywhere. Hell, I'm okay with that road trip down the coast."

An ugly slice of dashed want filled her up. Drowned her.

She remembered. The empty suggestion of: "Once this is done I could rob us another thieves den. We could buy another red beastie, and you could drive me up and down the North America."

That lie that neither of them had bought. That both of them had needed.

The truth was no-where near as much fun, what with the You can't stay, the beast had reminded her of. But she'd shouldered it aside, thought herself in no rush to consider what tomorrow would bring. Because why waste time and effort and dwell on things that weren't stood right in front of her?

Ignorance is the fool's tattered armour, Sinvik had told her once. An echo of wisdom passed on from the Keeper's Da, a man Sadja often wished she could have met. It was an armour only good as long as you kept your blinkers shut and your ears stuffed.

Blindfolded. Unhearing. Feet rooted to the ground, because forward hadn't appealed to her. And now, with the armour shattered, she stood in front of a clear track laid in front of her. One leading her places. Leading her away from red metal beasties and grouchy furnaces with a terrible thirst.

She frowned and said Furnace's brow furrowed.

"What?"

"I'm not staying, Redfield. I can't. Once this is done, if this gets done, I'll be called home. And that's a call I can't not answer."

He looked on. Quiet. Contemplating her words with a bit of a downward roll of his shoulders.

"So you can go home?" The shoulders came up again. His elbow propped up on the counter. "You can like— go back right now? If you'd wanted to, I mean. Could you just head home, warn your friends?" He hesitated. "Bring help?"

Unbelievable. Always so bloody professional. What's the world given you that all you've got on your mind is saving it?

"No. I've got no choice in that. The Cataract is the one deciding where I go and when I go. It has got a hold on Keepers that we can't ignore, a pull of sorts that gets your blood singing in your veins and your bones rattling. I've only felt it once, and then only briefly."

She twitched with the distant memory of a shrill thrum seated deep within her, like the chime of a bell struck at her core and reverberating outwards. Over and over and over again…

"So how did Marrk get here?"

It was question time then? Fine.

"Vil Marrk. It's a salutation declaring nobility. You've got those here too, no?"

"You're changing the subject."

"I'm educating. "

"How'd he get here?"

Chisel and hammer had come out, ready to dig at her with an aggressive sort of curiously.

Sadja shrugged. "Most like it's the Nightingale who's helped him. She doesn't bother with the finer details of rules on how things are meant to work. If she sees something she likes she'll go get it, and she'll crack the Cataract open for it any time she pleases to. What I can't fathom is why she'd align herself with Vil Marrk."

Aggravated by her own words, Sadja snapped the journal shut and went for his mug. He didn't protest.

"They're different shades of trouble. He wants to reshape the Ward, eradicate the Sare, and rid Trero of it's Reapers. And kill me. Not particularly in that order. And Gale, she just wants. She's fickle and she's insane, there's no telling what she's got on her mind this time."

She scoffed and tried for a smile, hoping it'd take the edge off the itch of desperation.

"Sinvik said she once wanted to steal Hell. Whisk it from the skies. Which'd be bloody hilarious, if she hadn't been serious about it and almost broke it. That'd end a bit like if your moon got plucked away. Not well."

Redfield watched on and she liked to think the gears in his head were turning furiously, bits of her stuck in their teeth. Bits of crazy.

"It's up to us then," he said, not overtly fazed by the thought of someone trying to nick his moon. Just thinking you're making it up, most like.

Sadja nodded to that. "And not up to me if I stay or go."

Wha-whump her heart said to that, and she could have sworn she heard the Beast mewl with a hint of regret.

"Okay."

That's what he said, at any rate. A simple word without any implication attached to it. An acknowledgement to things that were outside of his control, much as they were outside of hers. But out past her gates things looked a little less Okay, and when she took a gander over them, letting herself get stepped on by the weight of him, the Furnace bled defeated heat. It was a weary resignation to what lay ahead of them: Vil Marrk, Ada Wong, and a world with a stubborn tendency to wish him hurt.

And then he went and surprised her. Again.

"Okay," he repeated and tapped at her journal. The tired discord faded. What remained was a warm hush, gentle in every way, and altogether too tempting. She scurried back behind her gates, pulling them shut behind her.

"Wrote anything about me?"

A slow breath caught in her throat. Stayed there. Grew a little stale before she breathed it out. Her lips quirked.

"Mh. About your passing out the moment your ass hit the bed every night. Trousers still on and all."

"Unlike you, I get tired." He scoffed and smiled, even if it looked a little frayed. Then he reached for the cup she'd started clinging to, coaxed her fingers off it, and downed what she'd left in there with a tilt of his head.

"Come on. Get dressed, I'll have you cleared today."

"Oh, you're optimistic."

"Persuasive."

Sadja clicked her tongue. "Ah-right then, Redfield. Dazzle me with how you'll convince your people that I'm a harmless kitten, and am to be trusted with your deadly playthings."

And there wasn't about to be much more to it.

Nothing left to say as she hopped off the high chair. Nothing but tomorrow ahead of her, and a track that'd lead her away from him, the fool's armour clinging to her shoulders.