A/N: I like posting on Mondays because Mondays tend to suck. Then again, my kiddo was born on a Monday. Then again...birthing a human sucks no matter which way you slice it. And they did! Slice it.
Hehe. Forgive me. I'm not quite exhausted. Anyway. ONWARD.
"This is absurd." Edward closed his eyes, trying not to think about how badly he needed to pee.
The stranger had plied him with whiskey. Not a lot of it—alcohol was precious stuff. Enough to take the edge off. It hadn't helped so much when she cleaned his wound. That had hurt like nothing he'd ever felt before, but it had helped him fall into an exhausted sleep as she stitched him up.
He woke alone, with his hands tied behind his back in an expert knot. He was comfortable enough—resting on a cot for the first time in weeks. But it was possible he was in trouble. Had the stranger left him there to rot?
But then, why had she stitched him up first? Maybe to give him a chance. He would eventually slip out of these binds, right?
The theory didn't hold water though when he looked around the small cabin. The stranger's supplies were still neat and orderly. It was more likely that she didn't want him absconding with her things, which meant wherever she'd gone, she'd be back.
With the baby he wondered, his heart twisting sickeningly. Was that what she'd gone to do? Finish what he'd interrupted?
Heartsick and frantic, he'd struggled for a good hour. The binds were tight, and defeated him easily, especially given the agony that radiated from the wounds in his side and leg. He ended up in more pain than when he'd started and exhausted for his efforts. The lack of food in him definitely wasn't helping. He had no strength left at all.
He was resting, his back against the wall, when the door to the cabin opened. The stranger entered, and Edward was so relieved to see the child in a carrying pack on her hip—gurgling cheerfully—that he almost missed the fact the stranger had a gun trained at his head.
"Jesus Christ, you have trust issues." Edward was too wary to do anything but loll his head against the wall. "You don't even trust your own knot?"
She lowered the gun and walked to the sink, slipping off what Edward realized was a line of fish that had hung around her neck. "It's not impossible to get out of."
"Sure, whatever." He squirmed. "Look, you think maybe you can get me loose so I can take a piss without your help, or you want to do that for me too?"
She hesitated a beat, and he saw red. "Seriously. Two more minutes, and you're the one who's going to have to clean up the mess."
The baby, giggling as he worked his way out of the carrying sack, climbed to his feet and teetered in Edward's direction. "Fshhhhh," he said, patting Edward's shoulder.
The stranger walked to both of them, and Edward couldn't help but flinch when she drew the knife from its sheath. She pushed him forward, and he couldn't help the moment of fear that she would bring the knife down into his back.
She didn't, of course. The knife sliced through the ties and Edward brought his arms forward. She skittered backward, knife held at the ready. He rolled his eyes. "I'm trying for the no sudden movements thing, but I do have to move. Look at me." For how he felt and the cold sweat that had chilled him to the bone, he knew he had to look like the undead at this point. "Do I look like I could cause you any trouble?"
Her eyes flashed, and she stepped forward. She got a solid grip on his arm and helped him to his feet. "Just hurry up." Her expression softened only perceptibly. "I'm going to make us something to eat."
Bracing himself on the wall, Edward made his way outside. He found a tree to lean on and moaned, only partly in agony, as he relieved himself. His wounds throbbed, and he did his best to keep the weight off that leg.
Resting his head against the rough bark of the tree, Edward looked over the terrain. He thought for a long minute about the merits of running off. The woman was wound so tightly, she was just as likely to kill him by accident as on purpose. Then again, if he ran, he wasn't likely to get far in his condition. She would think he was running to someone and kill him. Or he would become some bear's easy lunch.
And there was still the child to consider.
Anyway. She had said something about food. Food was a priority at this point. He needed his strength.
"Sit there," she said the second he stumbled back into the station. She pointed to a chair she'd set so he'd be in her line of sight. "Elevate your leg."
He sighed but didn't argue. Anyway, his leg was killing him.
The little boy crawled to his chair and pulled himself to his feet but looked and spoke at the stranger. "Fshhhh. Fshhh."
"I've got to cook it first," she said. "Here." She walked to them, her hands in fists. Stooping, she set a handful of berries at the baby's feet. Wordless, she handed a second handful to Edward.
"Thank you," he said, taken aback as he accepted the berries, his fingers brushing hers.
She gave a curt nod but stepped quickly back to the counter without saying a word. For minutes, he watched both of them. The baby tried to bend down to pluck the berries, one by one, up, but didn't last long before his balance gave out. He sat heavily on his bottom, just as happy to munch that way. In the way of babies, he experimented with his food more than he ate it, squishing a berry between his fingers and smashing another one into the floor.
Edward, on the other hand, ate slowly. Ravenous though he was, he didn't want his stomach to rebel.
He watched the woman as she worked, once again noting how sure her hands moved as she deboned the fish. The knife she'd used to stab him rested in easy reach, just in case he got any ideas. Testing a theory, he shifted so that the chair he sat on scraped against the floor. Sure enough, her right hand came to rest with her fingers on the hilt of the blade, and she glanced at him. For some reason, though he knew damn well he shouldn't antagonize this woman, Edward flashed her a cocky grin. She narrowed her eyes but said nothing as she turned back to preparing the fish.
"Fshhh, fshh," the boy chanted excitedly in between baby babbling. He'd crawled over to the stranger and pulled himself to his feet using her pant leg. Edward smirked, charmed as he pounded a tiny fist against her ass. The woman's smile was tender as she looked down at him, and the baby grinned back, his mouth covered in sticky fruit juice.
It was such a bizarrely domestic scene. The fact Edward had started out the morning hungry and had been stabbed matched with the brutal place the world had become—no real shock there. But that the woman who'd stabbed him was currently cooking them a hearty dinner while the little baby she'd tried to kill tugged on her pant leg was more than a little surreal.
"So what comes next?" Edward asked, watching her thread five good-sized fish onto makeshift skewers. "You have a plan?"
To her credit, she didn't feign ignorance. "You need a few days to heal at least. It'll give me enough time to get some supplies together. When we're ready, we're going to hike down to the main road together." She picked up her skewers and moved to the fireplace. "Then, you're going to take a walk into the geyser basin."
"What?"
"Relax. You just have to be careful. Though, I saw that burn. I take it you had a run in before." She shook her head. "But the main geyser basins still have walkways. I'll leave your pack and other supplies at the walkway entrance."
"And you make your getaway from the big, bad wolf in the time it takes me to get through the geysers."
The fire roared to life under her capable hands, and she thrust the fish into the flames. "Don't take it personally."
"I don't. It's a decent plan."
The baby crawled up to the woman again, pulling himself up to lean on her shoulder this time. "Ba. Ba. Baaaahhh."
"Give me just one more minute, and I'll get you something to drink," the stranger said, turning her fish skewers in the flame.
"What about him?" Edward watched the way she reached back, absently patting the boy in consolation before taking the skewers in both hands again. "He still gets the death penalty?"
Even across the room he heard her breath catch. She was silent as she finished the skewers and stood up. "I don't expect you to understand. You want to live in whatever naive fantasy world is going on in your head, I can't stop you. Meanwhile, I live in this fucked up, mess of a world. I don't want him to die. It's not his fault he's so helpless. It's not his fault that he's the nail in the coffin of anyone who takes him. The one and only thing I could give him was a quick, merciful death rather than let him be torn to shreds by a predator." She thrust a skewer at him, her eyes brimming with fury and hate. Not, he thought, for him, but of how awful this world could be.
"I understand," he said, swallowing around a thick lump in his throat. He took the skewer from her hand, his fingers again brushing hers briefly before he pulled away. "Did you think about taking him to one of the compounds? Any of them would take a baby." The compounds, where people lived in cooperation with each other, were really the only place a helpless baby could hope to survive.
The stranger laughed, the sound bitter. "You want me to wander onto a random compound?"
Edward grimaced. Naive, she'd called him. He understood why. He was quiet, taking careful bites of the fish, watching as she broke pieces off her skewer to feed the baby. It was a cruel, harsh world they all lived in, but his reality—both because he was a man and because of where he'd been when this all went down—was so different from hers.
"This is good, by the way. Thank you," he said, taking another bite of the fish.
She shrugged. "It's cooked. That's all."
"But you caught it." He considered the fish. "Does make you miss butter and lemon pepper."
The stranger just scoffed. Edward let another minute go by before he tried again. "We have a lot of lemon pepper stored. At my compound. Where I live."
She froze, her spine going rigid, and he realized what that might have sounded like. "I didn't mean for that to sound so threatening. I'm no threat to you. My home is far away. And even if they did send someone after me, they wouldn't know where I am. I…" He rolled his eyes, feeling his cheeks heat. "I got lost. Really lost." He paused a beat. "You would be safe there. Free."
"Safe," she muttered under her breath, rolling her eyes.
He'd expected she wouldn't believe him. "Would you let me take the baby then?"
She stared at him, her eyes hard. "You think you can keep him alive any better than I could?"
He really didn't. The idea of it made his heart pound and his stomach twist with anxiety. "Stranger things have happened. Are you saying you'd prefer he have no chance at all?"
"I'd prefer not to be the one to decide that. If you want to take him, that's ideal for me." She handed the little boy another piece of fish. "Out of sight, out of mind. I never wanted to be the one to pull the trigger." She pulled the child onto her lap. "Just remember—I tried to give him a clean, easy death."
A/N: Heheh. Back soon, my friends.