Good Lord above, don't you know I'm pining?
Tears all in my eyes
Send down that cloud with a silver lining, lift me to paradise
Show me the river, take me across
Wash all my troubles away
While the lucky old sun has nothing to do
But roll around heaven all day.
- "That Lucky Old Sun", by Dean Martin
The sun is the most vital totem in human civilization that ever was. It is remarkable that man effectively orbits this figure of mythological proportion, while the earth does the same. Where would man be without it? A funny question, because man wouldn't be without it, and neither would anything else. Perhaps things could be, but they'd have nothing conscious to observe their existence, thus rendering their existence futile.
This line of thinking hearkens back to that old cliché of 'does a falling tree make a sound when there is no one to hear it?'. Is existence meaningless without humans? Was it the natural conclusion for life to eventually evolve to reflect on it? To Eris, these things are so human-centric that she resists it at first, an ironic notion considering her first and foremost interest is in people. Though she is unsure if she can place mankind at the center of existence, but it does make sense.
And speaking of the sun, it beats down on her like rain would, if she were somewhere even close to hospitable, but she wasn't. Two weeks had passed since her row with Inculta, and the only good thing that had come of that, was that he'd placed her in a different tent, bunking with only two other slaves. Also, her duties had changed. She'd been proudly promoted from latrine janitor, to apprentice to one of the camp's cooks, a woman not far from her own age.
Why he'd had the brilliant idea to transition her to culinary duties, she'd not the slightest. Of course, she spent much of her time overanalyzing that one, brisk conversation a couple of weeks ago, naturally because she is so deprived of people with whom she can talk to about more than just the local happenings in the camp. On that note, she is surprised that her interest in local, women's gossip has not faltered, and she listens with rapture for any tidbit of information that she can get her hands on, especially pertaining to the world outside of here.
Unfortunately for her, the slaves know very little about what goes on outside. That, or they've been instructed to withhold information from her, but that could simply be her age-old paranoia at play. She's got a complicated relationship with trust. She neither trusts, nor distrusts people, she just likes having her options open and the manifold motives of others kept in mind.
Her prestigious duties usually encompass flitting to and fro in the Fort for ingredients, a job where she learns much, but nothing particularly seedy or lucrative. But she's not so stupid and reckless to not be thankful for this assigned job. The thankfulness, though, reminds her that a time could come, when she doesn't resist feeling gratitude toward her captors. That fear, however, is countered by the fact that if that time came, no hard feelings would be had, considering she'd be so lost in the conditioning that it wouldn't matter to her, and therefore wouldn't matter to anyone else.
Although, was that last part strictly true? There it is again. That echoing voice in the back of her mind, which Freud would've diagnosed as an inner child that went un-nursed. It is funny, she thinks, that her interest in psychoanalysis never extended to herself, but in herself she finds an inner world strongly in need of introspection. Because, that unloved, inner child yearns for some kind of masculine force to firmly exert some kind of authority, and nurturing, over her. It is in this, that she wonders if House would miss her if she never resurfaced. The ugly truth is probably that, no, he would not. But a lingering, childlike hope remains that, yes, he would.
That rebellious side, less of a side and more of an entire entity that makes up a sizable portion of her, laughs at the notion that Caesar could ever fill that role in her inner world. He is patriarchal enough, certainly, but he lacks something that House doesn't. Eris wonders if she could ever say any of this aloud without other people getting the wrong idea. Rarely, does she find anyone who can conceive the nuances of psychoanalytical turns of phrase.
The stew bubbling before her smells of rendered fats and carrot. Carrots she can tolerate, but she so loathes working with the meats in these kitchens. So peculiar are her mannerisms when working with it, that Lyra often fastened her with a hard, matronly stare whenever she freezes upon first chopping a flank. It is odd, she supposes, to be fixed with a stare so reminiscent of old women, by a woman not much older than her. Lyra is tolerable, however, as opposed to the first few women she was exposed to here at the Fort. While woodenly and profoundly under-stimulating, she is kind, and Eris decides, decent. In the kitchens, there is more or less a clearer hierarchy, which doesn't allow for the petty shenanigans of Rona or her flock of crows.
While averse to most forms of authority on a strictly personal basis, having a structure like this makes things less confusing, therefore boring yet simple.
"I'm going to relieve myself, need anything while I'm out?" Eris asked the other woman, though it was a subtle way of asking permission to use the restroom.
For slaves, it was pertinent to ask permission before journeying anywhere throughout the camp, which is why if anyone else had found her sleeping at the foot of the kennels before, she may have been scourged or worse. Asking permission to relieve oneself was… humbling, to say the least. Autonomy was a foreign concept to the slaves of the Legion, and indeed its legionaries too. But how could such a society be held together otherwise?
"No, no. We need nothing else." Lyra answered distractedly, then added, "Thank you."
She was a taller woman, taller than Eris though that was no great achievement. Like many others here, she was not much older than Eris but looked the part. Where her cheeks might have been full with childish roundness, there were hardened lines and angles, and her dark brown eyes were flat and sunken, much like her own probably were, though she was far from a good judge of her own beauty. She chiefly relied on other people to keep her informed.
A trip to the latrine, the one she'd spent the most time in, was longer than it should've been. The nearest 'facility' was not a thirty second walk, but that wasn't the one, so to speak. The one that held a potential means of escape. Everyday, she checked for it underneath the metal frame that had a welded toilet hole in it. Her hands were far cleaner these days, much to her shocking discernment, though no less calloused. She likes to daydream of a time where they weren't, despite having never been one who indulges in wish-fulfilling fantasies.
Her eyes remain fastened on the path she's taking to the building, trying to ignore the sounds of men rutting sexual slaves in their tents, and the yelp of unseasoned hounds trying to defend said slaves. She recalls Antony telling her stories of how some of his hounds were executed for defending slaves as per their natural prerogative, and how sorely he lamented having to lose one of his own.
Still, early evening wasn't so bad out here, even if it was polluted by the sounds of thousands of wretches, and the constant baying of dogs. Any reprieve from the heat of a midsummer's day was welcomed, and sometimes, there were birds too, if she looked for them. She often watched them flying out of here, somewhat envious that she couldn't do the same.
Even though she doesn't need to use the restroom, she does even still. She's never been a particularly punctual or ritualistic person, but rituals are integral to the human condition she supposes, and therefore she's created a ritual of checking for the Fork once in the morning, and once in the evening. There are three legionaries in the latrine, as there always is at or after mealtime. The food is barely digestible, and that's her saying that, so she doesn't blame them. They watch her like she is a stranger, an unknown variable, but they are becoming used to her maudlin presence, a thing that she despises. She doesn't want to become familiar with this place, and she doesn't want people to become familiar with her being in this place.
Using the toilet around others is truly a novel thing for her civilized sensibilities. There was little to no privacy in the Legion, and she never knew how much she respected privacy until hers had been violated a thousand times over while here. Bathing was just the same – a communal event, something that should be wholly degenerate and delinquent but the Legion can make even this soulless and uninspired.
If she ever gets out, if she survives the year even, she's writing a thesis on the discontents of communism. She imagines herself taking on some kind of jingoistic, prewar American stance on the Legion, comparing them to the Chinese and calling them the 'Red Terror'.
Why was red always a color used by them? She didn't know enough about color science to figure it out, so she considers every movement she's aware of that implements the color red, while she uses the toilet and waits for everyone else to clear out. Thankfully, they hadn't stolen her toilet.
She's disappointed when she starts inwardly criticizing how ineffectively the toilets have been cleaned today, and gets the impulse to bang her head against the wall a few times, to knock some sense into her. Resisting the Legion is harder than anything she's ever done before, barring considering the feelings of others. It's hard, because the threat of punishment looms ever over her head, and the workload they put on everyone, including her, makes her thankful just for the sleep she gets at night, and for the legionaries who don't mistake her for a concubine and pull her aside. Rationally, she's perfectly aware that this is subliminal conditioning, and acknowledging that is the first sure sign that the conditioning is not working. But… is it?
A loaded sigh leaves her lips, blowing the tips of her blonde hair, which was pooling over her shoulder and into her eyes.
How could any place be so lonely and so quiet yet so populous and loud? Her gaze trails the legionaries until they leave the building, and she cringes at the smell of them walking past her.
Once they're gone, she slips off the toilet and immediately starts fingering for the Fork underneath the lid. It's there, and she pulls a small stone out of her shoe, and holds it up against the prongs. She's never sharpened a blade before, and has absolutely no clue how to go about it, besides the hours of watching the blacksmiths and legionaries here sharpen their own. Therefore, she can't hold a single candle to their own skill.
It's crude metal though, unpolished, and she assumes that means it can be sharpened, even though the subtleties of sharpening knives and other objects is beyond her. One thing's certain though, she's never seen a knife that was polished and glazed like forks were. She slides the flat of the stone against the Fork, and repeats the motion on all sides, as she's been doing for nigh on a week now. The difference between now and then is negligible, but she could swear it was sharper. But, anything is sharp in her hands these days.
Regrettably, it's a 'public' place, like anywhere else in the Fort aside from Caesar's tent, and thus given to having people in it constantly. Three minutes, she allows herself, and when the three minutes has more or less passed, she tucks the Fork away quietly, looking from side to side and toward the entrance, for any sign of eyes following her.
The issue she considers, is that if she manages to unlock the keyhole on her collar, and if she does it when she's not planning on crossing that river, she's as good as dead. A high priority, untrustworthy prisoner without a collar will certainly raise some eyebrows, so in the damp humidity of the latrine, she considers just how she's going to get away with taking her collar off during the communal bath in the Colorado. Fork can't go in her shoe, and besides that, they all strip before they get in, probably so that things like this don't happen.
If she could somehow unlock the collar but keep it on her neck, could it work? Perhaps she could forgo swimming away during bath time and climb down from that cliff near the kennels? It'd require some thought, some observation, which she's not poor at doing – most of the time. If she could just remember and visualize the area below the cliff's edge, which she's sure she saw coming up here the first time. Either way, she can't half-ass it like she did at the Cove. This would be a breakout on a grander scale, because the Fort is essentially separated from the rest of the Mojave by the Colorado, a river that she knows about only through House.
Silently, she sends a 'thanks' to House, for those lectures about the Mojave's geography, and his occasional mention of the Hoover Dam, ergo the Colorado, which she'd known he was just as obsessed with as Oliver and Caesar – he was just better at hiding it and prioritizing other things along with it.
The brilliant idea then occurs to her, to ask Antony. To ask Antony, in a way that wouldn't incriminate either of them. Surely, some curiosity about the area, combined with some off-handed remark about how far the drop was from the cliff, wouldn't be too suspect? He was a fellow rambler, like her, and exceptionally open-minded considering he was a legionary. Open-minded, mostly because he had brief, intermittent psychotic episodes in a society that didn't understand things like that. And, simply, because he didn't know any better. Yeah, she wants to spare him a punishment of any sort, so she better get back on her game and soon.
Pleased with the prospect of success, and her spirit reignited by yet another scheme, she leaves the latrine and finds her way back to the kitchens, where she's certain she's not needed. Having something over the legionaries reminds her of all those nights of watching the Omertas, as she'd slowly but surely infiltrated them without their knowledge. Only, this time was vaguely different. Perhaps, because this time, she actually had a purpose, and something real to look forward to.
Lyra is waiting for her, by now used to her long trips to the latrine, which Eris excuses by having a bladder voiding problem. It is the most absurd fucking excuse she's ever given to anyone to cover for her misdemeanors, but the woman accepts it, or, she overlooks it. Weird bathroom excuses are probably nothing new here, in a place where a portion of the female population is charged with the express duty of being raped. There was also the odd reality of menstrual cycles in the Legion, which were a blessing in disguise, particularly for those said female slaves who existed as concubines. Eris wouldn't be surprised if, in the next century or so (if the Legion survives even that long), there are folk tales spread among the former tribal slave women about eccentric rituals done to appease the supreme deity of menstruation, which protects them from sexual violence.
"Dinner?" Lyra asks, in Latin no less.
Latin was a beautiful language, to be sure, once. It is now one among many things she is nearly completely desensitized to, no longer carrying with it the cadence of an era long bygone, an era decorated with great minds and rulers. Eris understands a lot of it now, but not enough to carry a full conversation. Her fluency in Latin will be a sign of her failure to escape, and that's how she sees it, much to the chagrin of her ever insatiable curiosity.
"Yes." She replies, in a flaccid tone that reminds her of every other slave here. Tragic.
Eris learned that the cooks in the Fort are handed marginally better conditions and quarters than the rest of the slaves. She assumes this is because no matter how stubborn Caesar is to make everyone's life an equally endless struggle, good food is still held in high regard.
It's in this tent that there are makeshift, wooden counter spaces, and a table that she often eats at with Lyra, and sometimes with a few other girls. Thankfully, none of the girls are ever the ones she bunked with previously. The table is tiny, and the space is cramped and always slicks her skin with humidity both from outside and the smoke from the stove. Again, it's tiny relative to its function, which is to feed about a quarter of the entire camp.
"You know, it is good that Master Vulpes has placed you here with me." Lyra comments over their shared bowl of stew, which Eris pokes around with her wooden spoon. Surely, the broth is okay to eat, and so she makes do with picking all the fatty pieces of meat out.
"Oh? Why is that so?" She fishes, waiting to hear a falsehood that the woman wasn't even aware was a falsehood. Lyra is nice, and has a kind of generosity uncharacteristic of conditioned slaves. Eris suspects that she would be kind even if she wasn't here, which was saying a lot.
Regardless, Eris knows better than to look down on people like Lyra. If people like Lyra weren't here to populate the earth and occasionally show their faces to people like Eris, who knows where civilization would be, if it even would be. In the woman, there is a kind of intelligence that can't be found in books or discourse, a kind of intelligence that she assumes is innate, which further reinforces the idea that she could never possess it.
"Because you are funny, and it is good to laugh for a change." That response surprised Eris, and she found herself raising a quizzical brow in regard of the other woman. Eris was fully expecting a rehearsed response, perhaps some kind of wooden praise about her utility.
"I'll have you know that any kind of humor that comes out of these lips, is for you only. No one else knows the real me." She bullshits, but Lyra laughs at this, causing the corners of her own lips to twitch. "But seriously, thank you. I'll run that through my head next time I'm feeling like banging it against a wall fifty times."
To her deepest misfortunes, Eris felt like she couldn't hold a conversation where she wasn't actively disagreeing, explaining something, or making herself look foolish. When the former two were not an option, the last was usually the easiest course. She can't help but feel grievously inferior to people like Lyra, and seriously deficient in something that seems to be common in other humans.
Recently, she's been asking herself if she really wants to exist merely to make funnies.
It's so easy to forget the faces she's familiar with. It's difficult for her to even visualize Arcade, or Swank, or Mr. House, and she's not sure if she's being a dramatist or not. Always, it's been easy to deflect on being a dramatist whenever something intensely emotional or sensitive is brought up, because it means she can be a regular stage clown instead of look stupid, which she ends up doing anyhow, at every possible chance.
Thinking that she's been a dramatist for justifiably missing other people is a roundabout way of stating that caring about other people is unfamiliar territory. All those times she may have had an opportunity to thank her employer for inquiring as to how she's doing, in that deceptively detached air that he always took, and yet she had viewed their precious interactions as little more than a science experiment.
Back then, it had been easy to view it from the lens of a scientist, because she'd been under the impression that she had nothing to lose. That was an easy trap to fall into, for the collective of privileged children she considered herself to now have been a member of.
Eris is completely desensitized to being naked in front of others, even to those repulsive legionaries who watch her like they wished she was a concubine. Granted, she was pretty, but she had none of the stuff to make her a concubine beyond her airs. Beyond that, she'd looked much nicer in a different life, before this one, when her cheeks weren't perpetually sunken in, and her nails weren't filed down to bits because of the days full of hard labor.
Yes, the hard labor was probably good for her in the long run, but weren't manual laborers entitled to enjoy the fruits of their labor? Here, you weren't really able to see what effects you had on the world, because there was always more to do. She's sick of being the profligate that has been conquered and used as an icon to show how wise Caesar is. Indeed, that is one of the only things that keeps her alive, and she imagines it's a morale booster for the newly seasoned legionaries. Her worth depended on the value that the state placed on her. Very sad!
Regrettably, that was the life of many, and not just her. Although it was easy to wallow and be self-absorbed when the wound was still fresh and festering with all manner of pus. No longer does she talk back to the legionaries, and most days, it takes a superhuman amount of effort to push herself to sharpen the Fork and stow away other tools to make an escape. How morale can sink so low in the span of three weeks is beyond her, primarily because it is happening to her, and she's never been too great a judge of the present.
To be utterly and completely stripped of your own humanity, to be dehumanized at every corner, now she sympathizes with the many who fight for freedom. The water of the Colorado is lukewarm, baked underneath the hot Mojave sun, and she wants it to take her and wash her down the river, never, ever, to be seen here again. All of the legionaries watch them like hawks, and those who don't, watch them like perverts. Even still, she holds no ill will toward them, but she knows she should. That would be the normal, human thing to do.
If only she'd taken House's advice to learn more about tech, then maybe she'd understand better that uncomfortable piece of metal wrapped around her neck. She's immune to the blink by now, too. Once, it kept her up at night when it flashed, just enough to remind her that it was active.
Her toes absentmindedly sift through the silt below, pushing it around and wondering what it would be like to just give in. Her feelings toward escape are volatile, because she knows now that she doesn't want to die, but she knows she doesn't want to stay, either. There's too much to live for, even if they feel so far away.
Perhaps it is the hardest decision she's ever had to make, to risk her life trying to get out, or sign herself over to a lifetime of servitude to a people she neither respects nor loves. Even in her mind, which has been broken apart by months of both overt and subliminal psychological warfare, she knows which one she will choose. The fear, which she holds closely like an idiot child, mostly surrounds the question of what she will return to.
She failed him, by getting captured, and such an idea would've never bothered her before. Failure wasn't so big of an issue when it was only a telling off or a cold reprimand, but she's now aware that setting oneself up for failure at every turn can lead to extraordinarily dire consequences.
Water without soap doesn't tend to really clean anything, it mostly just washes the grime away without replacing it with better aromas. When she doesn't smell like food, she smells like dirt, because bathing in the Colorado River is far from being a five-star experience. Also, she's far too much of a thinker to be able to envision that she is somewhere else, anywhere else, while she bathes, and that's not even considering the additional deterrent of bathing with a hundred other people. Again, she tries very hard to imagine that they are not currently urinating in her bathwater, but as with before, she thinks too much for that to ever work.
Instead, she accepts it, because she's a good little slave. Trying to accept that reminds her of how much she inwardly resists it, which is a good booster for her own dwindling morale.
After she's sure she's clean (or some other subpar mutation of it), she asks for permission to leave and return to camp. These kinds of requests eat at her, just like it may have for every other slave, in the beginning, at least. They are always slow to give her permission, making eye contact with another superior, who has to give them approval for they are assured of their response. It is pitiable really, because they went through the exact same thing that she is going through now.
So what gives?
It's a minor inconvenience for them, because they have to escort her back up to camp, and it's during that walk that she realizes she will never be able to escape during bathing time. That's just not possible. So what, then? Like with after every bathing session, she searches the environment down below the camp, beyond the walls, and this time, she tries not to procrastinate observing the littler details, even though she is so tempted to just give in. It's all very tiresome, for the mind and not only the body.
So caught up in observing the steep landscape is she, that she doesn't even realize that she's stopped in her walk and is just staring in a way that should implicate her, but it doesn't. Instead, it earns her a harsh shove from the stony legionary that's marching her back up to camp. Why they let her leave early is no secret – it's because they think they have her in their clutches, and really, were they so wrong? She's caught between leaving and wanting to live, much like the coward she truly is.
Instead of doing what she wants to do, which is stare at the walls for as long as she reasonably can, she walks forward, her back aching from that unnecessarily forceful shove. She should be used to it by now, but she's found out that she's pretty sensitive to pain. The last thing she wants her captors to know, is that she's (albeit half-assing) planning to escape. It's good that she never gets to see Caesar, because she's sure that he would've known by now what she was up to. Even her bias considered, he is a highly astute man.
One thing she misses most about Vegas, besides an actual friend, is music. She'd be ecstatic just to hear one of Mr. New Vegas' cheesy, repetitive numbers. That's how desperate she is to hear something reflective of the humanity she's lost.
And distractions. She misses those too, because it's so easy for her to lose her train of thought, and she misses when she had fuel to do so. Going on loosely associated tangents was the spice of life, after all, though when there is nothing to fuel it, she's forced to think about one or two things at all times, which are mostly hunger and dissatisfaction.
It's funny really, that she'd just thought of that and here comes a distraction in human form. If her mind were anymore fragile, she might be tempted into thinking she was manifesting coincidences on thought alone. She hates that Inculta is a welcome distraction, mostly because he is not very interesting except for his physical beauty – a truly unavoidable thing. She supposes she can add 'mostly decent human' to his resume too, but she remembers Nipton the same as him, though his experience would probably denote that Nipton was primarily an act of supreme virtue. With that in mind, she can't afford to spend too long thinking about how she could easily agree with Nipton having been justified.
Behind him there are no legionaries, and so she is properly motivated to address him. The way he speaks to her when his subordinates are around is cold and stilted. Mind, it's pretty fucking stilted when they're (mostly) alone, too.
"Going somewhere?" She asks as he is about to pass her, in the middle of the long trek up the hill.
The legionary guarding her looks like he'd rather be anywhere else, and she knows now that it's because Inculta is unpopular with many of the less cerebral legionaries. There is a covert civil war blooming in the Legion, between the Frumentarii and the Legate, and she wonders if one day, when Caesar is dead and cold, they will divide and conquer and ultimately be reduced to less than a standing army.
"I hardly believe that it is any business of a slave." He tells her, but his icy stare is not persecutory.
That detail of a courier bag on his back doesn't pass unnoticed, and she wonders if he is leaving for Vegas.
"You're returning to Vegas, aren't you?" She asks, hoping that she can cover that she's fishing for a criminal reason. Maybe she can disguise it as small talk, or genuine care for his whereabouts. They are, after all, somewhat-friends. Or, she considers him as close an ally as possible in a place like this. He is responsible for getting her away from Rona and her hens.
He doesn't answer her directly, but nods nonetheless and says, "You might have been a good spy, had you chosen the right course of your own volition, which you had been offered."
"No, no. I think I'm a better cook." She remarks disbelievingly, which to her surprise, tugs at the corner of his thin lips, though it is gone just as soon as it was born.
"All the same, then." They have nothing to talk about out in the open, so she looks at the ground and does that awkward thing where she purses her lips for no reason, not quite ready to go back to camp. "Ave, true to Caesar."
It is extremely awkward, this interaction, which is being watched by a third party, who is probably completely unused to the sarcasm either of them just used.
"Ave." It sounds foreign even to her own lips, still something she cannot say with a straight, well-to-do face. Though admittedly, she finds it difficult to do anything like that.