Note: still Pratchett's, still T. Also, I hereby declare that I do not condone cruelty against animals in any way, shape or form. I am, in fact, a vegetarian.

Please believe me.

Edit: chapter made all nice and shiny after substantial criticism by Amazon Syren and Hyel.

-

Plogviehze, Baby: Chapter 2. In which small furry animals DIE.

-

Polly killed a few hours gathering firewood while exploring the landscape, desperately not thinking about anything at all. So she was handling a bunch of stakes. So what.

She found absolutely no human settlements, anywhere. With the same fierce determination, Polly did not think about the significance of that, and spent part of the day nursing the fire back to health. With care and positive reinforcement, it soon burned a lot higher than when Mal had tried the same this morning, something that lightened up her mood.

She was watching herself a lot, and when the shivers returned, she knew what they were and thought of something else. For half an hour, it even worked. She tried Mal's cigarettes, which improved things a bit, and before she got really uncomfortable - more uncomfortable, at any rate - , Mal turned up with a pair of fluffy white bunnies.

No, really. Polly stared.

"Dinner," announced Mal. "Please excuse the fluffiness, it must be their winter fur."

"Mal," said Polly, and swallowed, "these are adorable."

"Aren't they?" said Mal grinning. "Medium, well-done, charcoal?" She cocked an eyebrow. "Rare?"

The bunnies moved. Polly shivered. This was not the time for Mal to channel Tonker, bless her little cotton socks. Or lack thereof.

"Mal, they are still alive!"

"That's kind of the point, yes," said Mal unsympathetically.

"This is what you call socially acceptable? Couldn't you have brought rats? Voles? Shrews? Musquashs?"

"A lot of Black Ribboners enjoy a rare steak once in a while," said Mal. "This is just taking it a step further." She threw one of the bunnies into Polly's lap, where it made a desperate but fruitless attempt to escape. Polly was getting really good at the superhuman speed thing. Whoo-bloody-hoo. She picked it up by the neck and inspected it.

Ngk.

Impossible, she thought. Can't do this. Not hungry. Not hungry at all.

Plus, the fur was thick and she didn't want hair in her mouth and this was disgusting and small furry animals didn't deserve this, said her inner seven-year-old.

Her inner barmaid added, yes, they deserved at least some kind of sauce, possibly with blueberries and thyme.

"Mal, is there any way one can make this less... disgusting? At all?"

Polly could see on Mal's face that the vampire had never, ever given thought to this particular aspect.

"Well," she suggested, finally, "I suppose you could try wrapping it in a lacy nightdress and calling it Lucretia."

Polly gave the bunny another, more calculating stare and surprised herself by saying, "I was thinking more along lines of a marinade..."

"That's the spirit," said Mal. "Unfortunately, I am no Shufti and I have no onions, so I'm afraid bunny au naturel will have to do."

In one treacherous corner of her mind, Polly understood all of this and she was nothing if not a practical person, but still -

"I'll need your knife," she said. "And a mug, if we've got one left. Because this is disgusting, Mal."

"Anything else?" said Mal, wandering over to her pack. "A napkin, maybe? Candlelight?"

"How 'bout some pleasant company?" said Polly. She took both items from her, and looked up into a puzzled face. "You didn't expect me to bite it, did you?"

"Actually," said Mal, and paused, "actually, I expected you to throw it in my face."

"Ah," said Polly.

"Give me the knife back when you're done."

On the whole, it wasn't that different from killing rats for dinner. A struggle, a slash, a steady dribble, a desperate need to concentrate on something else for a moment - handing Mal the knife was good for that. She closed her eyes, concentrated on being a soldier in the snow.

Could be worse, she thought. Could be legs.

On the opposite wall, Mal sat down to prepare the other bunny for a bit of more conventional cuisine, all the while watching Polly from the corner of one eye.

Polly tried a tiny sip, like someone dipping a toe into icy-cold water.

The best that could be said about it was that it calmed the shivering. Everything else defied description, and therefore Polly settled for "ew" again. Better get it over with.

Ew ew ew what the bleeding hell had happened to her life -

Moments passed in which Polly was trying not to move.

"It's not going to stay like this," said Mal, after a while. "You're just in transition. The really bad cravings are more of a once-a-month thing. On average."

Polly stared. And thought. And said: "I can see a whole array of really bad jokes forming in my head."

Mal went on humiliating the bunny, but this time, something squirted.

"They've all been made. Repeatedly. Trust me on that," she said and put a skewer through the non-cocktail-bunny, and wound some string around it. "And now for something delicious and wholesome -" she added, and held it over the flames, looking at it with the resigned hopefulness of the really bad cook.

They didn't say anything for a while - Polly, because she was desperately trying to keep the bunnydrink down, and Mal, because she thankfully wasn' the sort to talk to herself. Polly was watching the flames, and Mal, both of which were looking reassuringly normal, look, no colours, no blur. It was almost like camping.

Dinner - real dinner, not the godawful mess from before - was stale horsebread and bunny so rare that it would have been disgusting, had Polly not just re-evaluated her concept thereof.

Besides, she wasn't going to say anything about her suspicion that maybe Mal wasn't quite able to suppress her little bloodsucking problem anymore. Polly needed a shining example, after all, and in the absence of that, she took what she got.

No comment about the broken mug.

-

The sun was setting when they started to clean the cave; it had long gone dark when they finished, Mal being rather insistent about not leaving anything behind. Especially no bloodless bunny bodies, "...and sorry 'bout the dreadful alliteration, Pol."

Once, when Mal had been outside to wash out the remaining cups (one regimental mug, one very tiny espresso cup), and clean the coffee engine, Polly managed to stir up a bat in the back of the cave, but since it disappeared quite soon, banging against the walls twice on the way outside, she didn't think anything of it.

Mal seemed to know where they were headed, and this was a good thing, because Polly didn't. They walked in silence, their pace light and fast, and everything was different from normal walking, and Polly thought a lot.

To be fair, most of her thoughts started with "you bastard" and ended on a similar note, but along the way there were some valuable insights that she didn't hesitate to share.

"So, Mal," she said, after maybe an hour of the unnatural walking.

Mal was in front of her, carrying the one pack they shared between them. She turned around. "Yeah?"

"I've been thinking."

"That's great, Polly. What about?"

Polly was in dire need of some cheering up, but she wasn't sure this qualified as such.

Mal waited for her to catch up.

"Stakes, mostly," Polly admitted.

"Ah," said Mal, uncertainly. "What an interesting choice of topic. Why?"

"Remember the little coffee disaster?"

The silence indicated that Mal was, indeed, remembering the little coffee disaster.

"So, you know, last time things went spectacularly wrong, Igorina had a stake ready. Why d'you think she did?"

"Igorina's a resourceful girl, you know," said Mal, clearly wanting to leave the topic alone. Well - and Polly groaned at the double entendre - sucks to be Mal. Polly wasn't going to leave the topic alone.

"Igorth are uthed to thervithe," she said.

"That's quite a good lisp you've got going on there," said Mal. "Now, please, change the topic, 'cause I know where this is leading. Please?"

"Igors are not big on killing. Right?"

"Yeah. So? I was a danger to society."

"One could go as far as to say that they would have certain reservations regarding killing anyone, including Strappi, the enemy, and societal hazards."

"Maybe she wanted to recycle my head, I don't know!" said Mal.

Polly's imagination went all graphic on her again; she desperately tried to switch it off, to no avail.

"Mal," she said. "I need some truth, here."

She received a very strange glance, and a lot of silence, and then -

"So I might have dropped a hint," the vampire said softly.

"You told her to please kill you if you turn out to be really dangerous to the squad, because she was the only one who wouldn't make a dreadful bloody mess out of it, is what you were really going to say, am I right?"

"She was the most efficient-looking of the bunch, and it was the best idea I came up with," said Mal. "Those acorns weren't really cutting it, to tell you the truth."

"I noticed. You're a really bad actor. Actress. Why did you do it?"

"Do what?"

"Drop the hint," said Polly with all the patience she could muster. "You went cold bat before, didn't you? Could have managed it again."

"It's not the managing that's the problem," said Mal, "'cause you don't manage in the 'manage' sense of the word. It's more a question of being locked up good and proper. Out in the open, once you've got the really bad cravings, I'm afraid it's kill or be killed, and the latter is more," she coughed, "humane for everyone concerned. So."

"Yeah," said Polly. "Yeah, it's really great you had a choice."

Mal didn't say a word for quite a long time, and that made Polly furious, but probably not as furious as anything Mal could have said. Ice was being annoyingly crunchy under her feet, and the wind tugged at her hair, and other than that, silence.

"Polly?" Mal finally volunteered.

"What?" Polly's voice didn't tremble. She was going for pure, undiluted anger here, and that she had become quite good at. If she says she's sorry, she's a kebab, she thought, and then I'm going to BITE her head off.

"Do you want me to kill you?" asked Mal, looking rather more honest than Polly felt comfortable with.

"Would you do that?" she asked.

Mal grimaced. "No, probably not. Wait, make that an 'absolutely', 'cause I'm reformed. I just wanted to know if you, you know, wanted me to, because the way I see it, it's the only way to get things back to how they were when I, you know, didn't give you a choice."

"Wow," said Polly, "that was pretentious, Mal. So you think of yourself as the shining rescuer-type?"

"Always wanted to be a hero," said Mal. "Wait, no. Polly, it's hard to explain."

"You're not making things any clearer."

"It's 'cause things weren't very clear to begin with," said Mal. "And boy, do I ever need a fag." She looked through pockets. And looked. And looked some more.

"You haven't smoked them all, have you?" she asked, with considerably more exasperation in her voice than before.

Polly shrugged. "Missing the sucking, are we?" She knew she was getting insufferable. Had she been in Mal's place, she'd already been killed ten times over, but then again, she did have some slight anger management problem at the moment, and then she got confused with all the 'she's, and stopped.

Mal only sighed. "Yes, Polly. Yes, I am missing the sucking and I am very afraid we might run across some humble wood gatherer, 'cause I don't know what I'm going to do then, and that's why we're taking this godawful zigzag route through nowhere. Also, you've smoked my last cigarettes, although I'm inclined to admit you probably need them even more."

Okay. That, at least, was honest.

"So," Polly said, "I'm still a bit hazy on the details of why the hell you bit me in the first place. Could have saved yourself all this trouble."

"Yes," said Mal.

"So?"

"Right," said Mal, drawing breath. "The battlefield. I stayed behind so I could, you know, be with you when you died, hold your hand sort of thing, only it turned out not to be a very nurturing experience at all, what with me realising that -"

She paused, and tried again, "- Realising that I very much did not want to be there when you died, and you being sort of unconscious and thus not getting much out of the holding hand sort of thing, and the bloody crows were trying to eat your eyes all the damn time. So I thought I'd carry you away, find a spot of land with more daisies and less, you know, gore, but then I found out you were in no position to be moved, and then I sorta screamed at you for a bit -"

"Hey," said Polly. "I think I remember that."

"- And then you sorta woke up, only not really, 'cause you aren't remembering a single damn thing of what you said then. Now please let go of the topic before I manage to traumatise myself."

Polly was silent for a while. Daisies? she thought. Daisies? Hard to stay angry when thinking about daisies. She tried, though.

"Mal?" she asked.

"Yes?"

"This had nothing to do with what we agreed on not talking about ever again, had it?"

A wan smile, and, "Not going to talk about it, am I?"

"Mal!"

"Answer's no, Polly. Would have done it if that hadn't happened."

"So you would have done it to everyone else lying face-down in the snow and dying from acute abdominal perforation?" asked Polly.

"Are you underestimating my private life, Polly?"

"You don't have one, Mal, dear," said Polly.

Mal sighed, and even stopped, and took the time to look at Polly. "No," she said. "Wouldn't have done it. Could have been just as wrong a decision, or just as right, I wouldn't know."

There was silence after that, and Polly kept thinking in full sentences, and some of them even began with "You bastard", but it wasn't quite the same.

-

They walked like this for two nights, not talking much, and Polly - grudgingly - learned things. She learned to treat food as food, although she never touched a bunny again. The cravings grew gradually milder, too, and farther apart, but the rats and birds left a taste in her mouth that suggested this couldn't quite be the real thing, now, could it?

She would have to do something about that, soon, but for now she was still okay, or as okay as she could possibly be under the circumstances. Angry, angry still, but working with what she had.

Mal, on the other hand -

Polly was watching her. Mal didn't eat a lot and when she did, it was very rare meat, and, as far as Polly could tell, she didn't sleep at all. Every time the cold woke Polly up during the day, Mal would be gone from the tiny army tent they shared. Polly had no idea how to address this topic properly without screaming at Mal, and that didn't fit into her plan of getting the anger management thing done.

One the third evening, Polly came back from makeshift hygiene and found Mal sitting on a rock, espresso cup in hands, in a pose that looked as disgustingly confident as ever. One had to hand it to her, she was a natural at looking.

Come to think about it, coffee was the one thing Mal had been consuming in amounts that made Polly wonder if they'd ever even make it to the Sto plains before running out. Why, maybe it really did make up for food, maybe Mal's body did mobilise some kind of energy out of it, but whenever Polly contemplated vampire physiology, logic tended to come to a crashing halt anyway.

"Sit," said Mal, and Polly did, thanking a nameless rodent soul for her calm. Not exploding at simple imperatives could be a blessing.

"Shouldn't we get going?" she asked.

Mal simply gesticulated with the cup. Coffee time, thought Polly. It was holy. Even though it looked as though Mal got less and less out of it, but she wasn't going to think about that.

"We have to go lower," said Mal suddenly. "See the clouds over there?"

Polly did. She groaned. "Not more bloody snow," she said. Even at this moment, it seemed to get colder as a sharp wind came up, tousling Mal's very black hair as it did so. Mal, who didn't have to gene for scruffiness, patted it back.

"Snow storms," she said. "And I honestly thought we'd be past that." She seemed to regard the weather as a personal offence.

"Er," said Polly, "I'm not trying to be insufferable here, but I've got to question your motives."

As if to contemplate that, Mal downed the rest of her coffee, grounds and all. Polly was distinctly not noticing the way Mal's hands were shaking as she did that.

"We've got to, Polly," said Mal. "It's going to be a bastard of a storm, even farther down. We just have to be careful." So maybe Mal sounded a little frightened, or even a little hungry. Polly was no expert in interpreting the exact source of a tiny tremble in someone's voice, and people who claimed to be able to do that were overly dramatic.

"What happened to the whole immortality thing, then?" asked Polly, and thought: great idea. We could just sit it out, we're not going to freeze anyway.

Yeah, really great idea, Polly.

"I hate cold," said Mal, as if that settled it.

And strangely, it did, because Polly hated cold as well. Cold and snow and storms and everything that was associated with it. She had, after all, spent the entire winter in tents, in the mountains, and considered herself lucky she merely lost a toe.

Which had grown back. Polly had just noticed that the day before. Somehow, though, she couldn't bring herself to ask Mal the things she was really interested in, like, what's with the infamous body restoration thing, eh? Obviously, the bodily restoration thing worked, but -

It was most distressing. Would Mal grow a second head if Polly detached and hid the first one?

And no, she hadn't just thought that, at all. Anger management was, after all, the key to solving all of her problems.

Well.

-

They had barely begun descending from the pass when it started snowing. It didn't stop at all that night, and the wind got worse. Mal was walking in front of Polly, not employing the light stride anymore that Polly had grown used to in the last few days, but instead giving off the impression the wind had done something dreadful to her, judging by the intensity with which she fought it. Polly could barely keep pace with her, and she wasn't even the one carrying the pack.

Of course, Mal had years and years of experience with superpowers, Polly told herself. Still annoyed.

By midnight, they were knee-deep in snow, and a few hours later, Polly's boots were filled with snow, which turned to water, which slowly turned to ice. The snow slowed them down. The wind slowed them down. The snow and wind combined, however, made Polly feel they were walking backwards.

One interesting thing about immortality was, Polly mused, that life's little annoyances, like Mal, or like bloody snow between her bloody toes, did never cease to be annoying. And, in the case of the snow between her toes, didn't cease to be painful. All you got extra were socially unacceptable eating habits, and -

All right, maybe the odd superpower here and there.

Mal stopped, and Polly very nearly bumped into her. Turning around, Mal was trying to wipe snow off her cloak and trousers and face and hair, with hands that were pale and stiff from the cold, and without much success.

"What a cunning disguise, going as a snowman," Polly joked, half-heartedly, and didn't mean it. Iced over like that, Mal looked nothing short of eerie, all pale skin and white-frozen hair and dark eyes.

"You still okay?" asked Mal, her voice hoarse from all the wind.

Polly was, actually, soaked and freezing and miserable and angry and curiously desperate for a cup of tea and a fire in a real fireplace and maybe a warm bed. Homely things, she thought. Oh, and getting that sword off Mal when she was looking like that would be nice, too.

"I'm -" she said and only ever got that far, because Mal was, very suddenly, hugging her. It was quite clumsy for a vampire, Polly thought, and there was an inch or so of clumpy snow between them, and neither had much warmth to give away. Somewhere beneath all the anger, Polly realised it was a... nice gesture. Yes.

"I'm sorry," said Mal, softly, "we should have gone down much earlier. So sorry..." Her voice trailed off.

"Mal, you're shaking," said Polly, astonished. She was not entirely at home with the concept of holding an apologetic vampire in her arms, and she wasn't going to work on becoming at home with that, either, and thus commented on the first thing that came to mind.

"'Course I am," said Mal into her hair, "'m bloody cold. Bloody cold." The last words were very accentuated,

Of course, Polly had known Mal was shorter than her by an inch or two. But she hadn't known. Mal was one of those people who didn't look small, in any way, at least as long as they were awake, because they always seemed to take up more space than they should. This was probably directly correlated to their self-confidence, Polly thought. God-damn annoying self-confidence.

Bloody vampires.

"We've got to get going, Mal," she said. "Please. Don't go all seven-year-old on me, please, Mal. I'll take the pack for a while. Just move?"

Even now, snow started to pile up around their knees in an entirely unacceptable manner.

"'m tired," said Mal, and seemed to mean it. But she moved a little, and then she moved some more, and they managed to walk for almost another hour before they were were completely and utterly snowed in.