Thicker Than Blood
Chapter 18
Friendly Fire
There are many here among us
who think life is but a joke
but you and I, we've been through that;
this is not our fate.
Let us not speak falsely now, the hour's getting late.
- Bob Dylan, "All Along the Watchtower"
12,002 BC
It had never happened that strong before. Never reached down into her mind and shattered all the borders between the nightmare and reality. Sure, the dreams had been bad. But the visions had never made her this sick at herself, never filled her with such disgust and self-loathing.
She couldn't stop her hands from shaking.
A thin stream of bright blood pooled on the table between her palms, mixing with the spilled tea among the broken pieces of the teacup, and she couldn't take her eyes away from it. Couldn't get her mind to widen enough to take in more than that crimson liquid spilling from her hands to the table.
"...Ivy?" She looked up, completely having forgotten about Janus. He approached her slowly, cautiously, and set the stuffed toy down on the table in front of her. Sat down in one of the chairs.
"Schala's okay," she whispered hoarsely. Her throat burned. Speaking hurt. "Schala's okay. They just want her to help clean up."
His face was unreadable. "She caught you."
"Yeah."
The corners of his mouth turned down, and his eyes shifted to the fireplace in one corner of the room. She couldn't tell if he were displeased or angry or what. "What did you tell her?" he asked, quietly.
One shoulder rose and fell in a shrug. "Nothing. She asked who I was and I said Ivy and she asked what was I doing and I said making light and she said why is an Earthbound using magic..."
Janus waited for her to continue, and when the silence held he turned to face her. "Ivy," he said, more sharply than he'd intended. The girl wouldn't meet his gaze.
"She said Janus is involved, isn't he, and I didn't know what to say to that so I told her yeah. And she brought me here and gave me tea." Ivy looked at the remains of it on the table. "I broke her teacup," she said, genuinely worried.
Janus sighed, deeply, lying his arms on the table and resting his head on them. Salvageble, then. No real damage had been done. He'd just have to lie to Schala. Again. And she would probably know he was lying, and he'd have to watch that dissipointment fill her eyes...
"We could always tell her the truth," he said.
Silence followed as they thought about this for a moment.
"We could," Ivy agreed.
This wasn't working. Janus let his eyes close. It was time to admit that this wasn't working, time to face the facts. There was nothing two kids could do that would have any effect on Lavos. If he thought Schala would actually help them -- but no, she'd never go against the Queen. Gods alone knew why, but Schala seemed to actually care for their mother. For all the good it did her.
All right, he thought. All right. Objective one: protect Schala. Objective two: kill Lavos. But how were they supposed to manage that? A bow and arrow wouldn't do much good against it. And neither could use magic worth a damn.
"What we need," he said quietly, without opening his eyes, "is someone to fight for us. We've been too disorganized.
"Melchior," she said, without hesitating. "And Belthasar. Gaspar... I'd rather not count on him." She was quiet for a moment, and Janus sat up just as she was opening her mouth.
"No," he said. And the quiet anger in his voice surprised both of them. "We are not getting Schala involved."
Ivy just looked at him, pity very clear in her dark blue eyes. Janus exhaled slowly, gritting his teeth. Fighting the urge to just slap her.
"Janus," she said quietly. "Maybe you haven't noticed -- Schala is already involved in this."
The one-eyed Nu faded into being in the middle of Dalton's room. It blinked sleepily for a moment, and then looked around as if taking stock. Oh, this would not do. Not at all. Its small pig's nostrils flared, taking in a stink that was almost palpable. No wonder Dalton was in such a mess -- poor, poor man. The Nu's eye stopped on the bottles of alchohol on the dresser, and it made a noise that may have been a sigh. All the years, all they had worked for hung in balance, ready to fall at any moment. No time for any mistakes now, the Nu thought. No time... And Dalton reaches farther into darkness each day.
The windows of the room were open, and it was full daylight outside. But darkness crawled in the corners like a solid presence, and though a wind blew the air hung dead and still.
No wonder Dalton was near mad. The Nu could feel the thin edges of the world in this place as easily as it could feel the floor beneath its feet.
It all came to rest on two arrogant, ignorant children and one half-insane man. The Nu shivered, a little, and pulled the box from beneath Dalton's bed. It looked through the book for a few moments, its body going more and more still with each page turned.
Shadows and dreams, it thought. Closed the book and its lone eye. All is shadows and dreams now.
And a few momemts later, the room was empty once again.
"And you say someone did this purposely?"
"Not really much other way, Miss."
Schala could only stare at the wounded Earthbound gathered in the large chamber around her, the reports in her hand of how much damage had been done. Some of the 'men' were little older than Janus. And from what they were saying, it had been a boy that had done this. A child, taking his own life, not caring about who might get caught in the backlash...
Why? she thought as she began issuing orders for cleanup and repair. Surely we don't treat them that bad. They live in caves, another part of her whispered. Even someone with magic would have trouble with the monsters down there. The monsters they have to eat, before they starve or get eaten themselves. The land is locked, frozen, and the people are starting to freeze with it.
The healers walked carefully among the Earthbound, reluctantly doing their work and picking their way though the mass of ragged people without really touching a single one.
We use them and walk all over them and don't even think twice about it, when really they're just like us. Harder, colder, with more scars than we understand. We expect them to leave their families and come here and slave away for us, and we aren't even paying them, we treat them like shit and think they deserve it.
Maybe we deserve it...
"Schala?"
She tore her eyes away from the dark abyss held at bay by a small bit of magic, and narrowed them at Dalton. She cleared her throat. "Yes?"
"Bethashar asked me to tell you that the damage isn't as extensive as it seems." Seeing the fleeting horror in her eyes, mistaking it for something else, he added quickly, "It's only superficial, he says. Looks worse than it is. More structural than anything important."
Like lives? she thought fiercely before she could stop herself. Like those poor people who left bits of themselves in some of the tunnels? Important like the boy who blew himself into a thousand pieces to tell us I'm hurting, and no one cares enough to stop it? But she only said, "Thank you, Dalton." And she found herself staring past the guardsman and into the deep, accusing eyes of an old man with blood streaming down his face. Schala cleared her throat again, met Dalton's slightly confused eyes and said with false brightness, "Do you think, perhaps, you could give me a hand for a moment?"
None of them thanked her. More than a few growled cruses under their breath or spat in the dirt when she finished with them. It seemed as if every single Earthbound down there had at least a few gashes or shrapnel stuck in them. It was odd, Schala thought, that they were all wounded and not a single Enlightened bore more than a scratch. And when she said as much to Dalton while they worked side-by-side on two old grizzled men, one with an ear torn off, and one with a shard of Dreamstone embedded in his thigh, Dalton merely shrugged.
"Of course. What did you expect? That's what they're here for -- begging your pardon, sir," he added when the old Earthbound spit a gob of saliva on his shiny boot.
"But -- "
"They're Earthbound, Schala." He began wrapping a bandage around the man's head. "Who cares?"
No one, she was beginning to realize. And that was the problem. "Some of them are children -- "
"We start early," her patient said, a grinned toothlessly at her horror.
"How could you possibly joke at a thing like this -- " She stopped when she found her hand engulfed by his leathery one. Calluses and scars pressed against her flawless skin.
"Wasn't no joke, your highness, begging your pardon. You wanna think it's wrong, you wanna look at us in here breakin' our backs for you and be horrified, well, go right ahead. Means you still got some humanity left, and that's more than can be said for most of you Enlightened." He spat the word, his bright blue eyes boring into hers. "But just feelin' ain't gonna change a damn thing, and it ain't gonna stop the way your people treat us. Do something. You're the princess, the heir; it'll all belong to you one day. Are you going to sleep comfortably in your safe, warm bed at night knowing little kids are starving for just a scrap of bread or are you going to serve all your people and give it to them?"
Dalton looked over and frowned, swatting the old man's hand away from hers. "Keep your paws off her, old man. And stop filling her head with that garbage." He looked at Schala, plainly disgusted. "Don't listen to him. They all try that."
"But -- "
He wasn't listening, staring at someone over behind her. "Come on," he said, pulling her to her feet by her shoulder. "Queen Zeal's waiting to talk to you."
Rast: Life...is very, very weird. I'm not going to bore you with the details -- if anyone out there is actually reading this, damn, its been a whole year since I've updated -- so, suffice to say, EVERYTHING changed for me in very big ways. I couldn't write. It was...impossible.
And that's all the dirty laundry I'm going to wash in public, for the moment.
Sorry for the long wait. I hope this chapter isn't dissipointing for anybody. It may take me a few chapters to get things back the way they were. I haven't written anything in a long time, and I'm more than a little bit rusty. Sorry this chapter wasn't longer.