Disclaimer: Nothing that I do not own is mine.
A/N: Have I anything to say? Nothing beyond apologies for the delay. Final edited edition.
*
To say Clar was nervous was something of a drastic understatement. The human - or at least that was what Clambrithe thought she was - was silent, but there was panic in her eyes. Clambrithe had seen it more than once before, and had been the cause for it for as long as he cared to remember.
This panic. This innate fear, this need to run away. Why was she so afraid? Why was he so afraid? This thing would not affect him - he had done his duty. His position was in no jeopardy, and no more lives were at stake. But yet Clambrithe felt frightened, for the first time in a long, emotionless while, frightened. Something was happened, something odd and something inexplicable, and somehow it had come to be centred around that one child. A child!
Clambrithe felt close to hysterical, but his face did not show it. His eyes darkened a shade, but that was all that betrayed his conflicting emotions. Nothing. No words, no gestures, no life. Widepaw seemed to be doing the same, exerting his laconic control over the situation.
'You come from where...?' the badger lord inquired in that decorous, patronizing tone that Clambrithe had heard many times before in the past. It was one that brooked little to no argument, and one that demanded above all else honesty. Truth. Fact. Not intuition. It was a tone that belied little tolerance. It was a tone used for the enemy.
'A place far away,' Clar responded, as evenly as she could. Clambrithe knew better. 'A place not from here. A place in another world.'
'And you expect me to believe that?'
The badger's eyebrows were mockingly raised, playful. Taunting. The human looked strained to the point of breaking, what little of her remaining composure draining off as quickly as the blood from her face. Clambrithe decided to step in.
'I do not think she knows how she came to be here, my lord.'
'Do not interfere with this, Jonathan.'
An order. Clambrithe stepped duly aside.
'I don't know, all right? I'm not sure why, or how, I came to be here! I don't have your answers!'
The hysteria was clearly in her voice now, in her almost shrill tone. Clambrithe noted it with almost dull appreciation; this one had far from perfected the art of reeling in her emotions. The major let his eyes fall to sweep the floor. There was shame in that gaze, shame for this sorry... something. Widepaw was now openly sceptical, warning inflected in his tone.
'You killed two of our number, and you claim you do not have answers?'
'They were going to kill me first!'
'They would not have attacked if they hadn't been provoked.'
'I did nothing of that sort!'
'Then what did you do?'
The calm versus the crazed. Clambrithe knew who was going to win this argument.
'I...'
Clar did not seem to have an answer herself.
'I don't know. I did nothing.'
Widepaw regarded the human closely once more. Clar now openly faltered, falling back a step. Clambrithe almost felt pity.
Widepaw's eyes dilated suddenly, and something in the room crackled. The major started. It was a sign, a clear sign. Badgers had always been magical beasts, prophetic animals. And something intuitive, something in the back of his mind, something warned Clambrithe. But by the time Widepaw's eyes were opened once more to the world, it was too late.
Clar had changed. She was no longer the human, the thing, she was now clearly, most evidently, vermin. In front of the stunned, if jaded, Clambrithe stood a ferret. Widepaw allowed a growl to hitch up the back of his throat.
'Take her to the cells, major. I will hold council tonight.'
Clar did not seem to hear the words. Her face, newly contorted, was pale with shock. Her paws trembled with disbelief.
'What...?'
Clambrithe heard the quiver in the question. He knew it from the countless numbers of young leverets, fresh from their first kill. It was the frontier that bordered fevered screaming, that edged upon madness and complete loss of control.
Clar was weak. Clearly vulnerable. There seemed no strength left in her limbs, no more resolve in her words. No conviction. She was close to screaming, close to tearing and howling and turning into some wild thing. But no. There was a need for control, now more than ever, a need for control. Clar tried to stop the oncoming heady rush of emotion. Clambrithe had long secured himself to her side and was now bodily dragging her down to the cells, to some prison in the core of this gigantic, hostile mountain.
Clar was lost. Clar was utterly, completely and entirely out of her element. She knew nothing. Her limbs refused to obey. Her mind was blank, almost beyond her perception. Everything had gone insane. Her world was surreal. Nothing was right.
Clambrithe said nothing, but continued to drag the ferret down, down, down into hell.
'Focus,' he hissed in her ear, and Clar started.
'What's going on? What's happened to me?'
There was a whimper in her voice.
'Maybe you have become what you were meant to be,' Clambrithe muttered darkly as he descended the final flight of stairs, heaving her down the steps. Clar shook her head in denial.
'I'm nothing. I'm not like this. What am I?'
'You're supposed to tell me!' Jonathan finally lost his composure. Something had broken, something had snapped. Something had seared through the strings and clogs and barbed wire, something was burning, eating away at him. 'You are the one that came stumbling into my life, and you are the one that is supposed to be telling me just why you have turned into a ferret!'
He tossed her into her cell. The torches lighted in the underground area made the shadows on his face flicker madly. Jonathan's eyes were a deep, deep blue. He was drowning. He no longer knew what was right.
Clar, momentarily jolted out of her shock, flung herself against the bars of her cell. Of her cage.
'I'm not an animal. You can't keep me like this!'
'Well, I'm not an animal either, Clar!' he snapped before he realized what he had said. 'But I'm kept! So keep your intuition and words, and keep your silence and rages! I do not understand this any more than you do!'
Jonathan knew he had to regain control. This was so desperately wrong. He wanted something, wanted to dig deeper than he was allowed to go. Wrong. Wrong. So wrong. He had to stop his involvement, reattach himself to what he was meant to be and stop trying to understand. This was not his affair to meddle with.
But Jonathan knew, also, that it was too late. Clambrithe had finally slipped, and Jonathan had come out. The madness was causing him to stagger, to fall. It was rendering him slowly defenceless. He had known this creature, this human, this ferret, this vermin, this child, this thing for less than a month, yet she was eating at him like a disease. His breath came heavily and in rushed gasps as Jonathan backed up against the far wall.
Clar clawed at the restraints.
'Then let yourself go, Jonathan! Do not hold back on whatever it is, whatever control you so desperately need! You will kill yourself! Emotion isn't meant to be locked away in whatever corner of your mind that you stifle it in! You have to understand. You have to. Not while everyone else is so blinded. I see it in their eyes! They do not understand. They are prisoners, Jonathan! More than I am! More than you are!'
'Shut up,' Jonathan muttered, more to himself than to Clar. He pushed himself upright with the support of the wall. 'Shut up,' he repeated, more firmly. 'Don't call me that. You cannot begin to understand. You do not even know me.'
'Perhaps I know you better than you know yourself, how about that?'
Clar was almost screaming. Jonathan could not understand her odd speech, her strange vernacular. But there was intuition. The major righted himself and pulled his tunic back in place.
'I do not want your words, Clar.'
All formality returned. Some precious measure of control regained. Clambrithe backed away and headed for the door.
'You want my words, Clambrithe!' Clar shouted at him from behind the bars of her identity. 'You just don't want my pity!'
Clambrithe slammed the door to the cells behind him as he ran up, back up, up, up to the heaven of his duty. To the heaven of his understanding, to the place where things made sense. Clambrithe ran, but there were questions, questions, always more questions.
For a moment, Clambrithe was not
sure where hell really lay. But he ran, and Clambrithe ran, and Jonathan
was running away.