It took two whole days for every last person in Nipton to wilt away, but Ju hardly noticed.
It was the endless eternity that came with the waiting for it, that came with knowing she was still here and they were all over there. It should have been so impersonal because she had so much experience with human mortality. With mortality in general.
But it wasn't impersonal.
There was too much fury to really notice, though. It was a toxin, a poison, this hate, and it permeated her veins as her blood pounded her fevered brain against her skull.
Everything ached with the echoes of her rage, which was fading once more back into the dormant normalcy of everyday life. She would lock away that temper she always forgot she had until it was needed, and then once more she would unleash it upon the world.
And unleash it she had.
Because of fucking Vulpes Inculta and his damned Legionnaires.
Something about that red armor, the tunics built together with metals that laid gently over the shoulders to cover the chest and back. The helmets, the Latin.
Oh, God, the Latin.
A foul tongue, one she wished she did not have the misfortune to know.
And she did know it.
The Little Fox addressed her in English as a stranger. It would make sense that he would not know her. Ju was not exceptionally special or beautiful or strong. She was one of the only survivors of her village when they'd been slaughtered, so the fact that she was Chinese was really the only thing of note that he and many in the Legion would have noticed.
She did not want to poison her English by addressing him, so she addressed him using Latin.
The Little Fox wasn't thrown. Perhaps a little amused.
"Scitis linguam meam, Mancipia?" he'd asked, laughing.
Of course she knew his language, she wanted to answer. She'd been a slave. And he knew it right away. Mancipia. Slave.
No, worse than slave.
Property.
That was what she was to them. A number. An object on a ledger. A bad dog. No, less than a dog. A brahman, maybe.
She was so much more than a brahman.
Ju seethed over her shovel, shaking her head to rid her eyes of the memory of the Little Fox's face as it twisted into a hateful smirk at her use of Latin. Even to the Legion, she was a pariah. Especially to the Legion. Viciously, she dug the shovel deeply into the ground, feeling her heart palpitate with the fervor of the motion.
She was very aware that Boone was behind her now, that his eyes were trained on her, but she ignored him. She actually didn't want to talk about it, even though, in a somewhat unprecedented series of events, he obviously did.
Her hands were calloused, sore, and resisting her attempts to dig into the rough, red dirt beneath her feet caused them to protest with throbs of pain. She tried to ignore it, but biology sometimes couldn't be gotten over, no matter what anybody said.
Ju slipped and fell into her shovel, finally, distracted by Boone's proximity. An instinctive cry came from her mouth, a touch too feminine, as her knees met the concrete of what had likely once been the main road: just rubble and ruins. Boone finally spoke, but he was wise enough not to approach her to help her back up.
He began using a tone she'd never heard him use before.
"Why don't you, uh…"
"If you say take a break, I'm going to hurt you," she told him forcefully through gritted teeth.
Naturally, then, he didn't say "take a break."
He didn't even say anything.
"There are more bodies to be buried, Boone," she snapped impatiently into the silence, not bothering to look at him. "We cannot rest until this is done. Do this or get out of my way, please."
He stood there for a few seconds until she pushed by him, or tried to, hands on his chest – but not hard, just getting him out of her way, out of the direct line of sight of her meltdown.
When he didn't move, she sighed exasperatedly, avoiding eye contact. In his usual way, Boone had a way of seeing her through those God-awful sunglasses like they were the eyes of God peering down at her. He could see without looking.
It was maddening.
"What?" Ju snapped loudly.
"You're not at your best," Boone tried reasonably, "and you've been at this for hours. If you don't drink, you'll pass out."
"I don't care – now, move!"
"If you pass out, who do you think will have to carry you? I'm not doing that, Chinese."
Pragmatic, to the last.
Reluctantly glancing over at him, she saw that he was holding out a bottle of water.
She'd given her own to those who had been crucified in their last, dwindling moments. He'd scoffed at the idea. They were dead, Boone said, and he wasn't quiet with his opinions about her "wasting" their last, precious resources as she and he lined the bodies up one by one along the burning building in the middle of the town. She'd not addressed him outright since then. There were others who were still alive who needed help being coaxed more peacefully into death.
She'd used all her skills in medicine, "wasting" the last reserves of their own supplies to help these poor, lost souls find their way into their chosen afterlife. Ju prayed for each one before moving onto the next until all at once there weren't any more to pray for.
Boone snapped at her the whole time. For a soldier, he did not have the decorum she thought he might. He scorned death. Unacceptable.
That was when she'd found a shovel and thrust it into his hand.
"Time to dig," was all she'd said.
And they'd been doing it ever since.
"I can find my own damn water," she snapped, remembering all this.
She shook her head at him as she waved his bottle away.
He knew he'd fucked up.
At least that was something.
"Look, you need to drink, Ren," he offered as a means of apology.
Wasn't good enough.
Not nearly good enough.
So she said,
"Shut up," shoving the bottle away as he tried to thrust it into her hands once more.
"Fine," he replied, his voice taking on an impatient edge now, "but if you won't take my water, go find your own."
"I will," was her reply.
"Now, Ren," he said with what was clearly a piss-poor attempt at gentleness.
He hovered around her.
She finally stopped.
"Why don't you go do that?" she huffed, still clearly trying to avoid looking at him. "It would be best if we could just get this done. It can't wait."
"Why not?"
"Because everybody deserves a proper burial," she shot back angrily.
There was a thread of unease in the air now, one Boone seemed to sense.
"You've seen this before," he stated, a question, but his tone was crestfallen.
He was perceptive.
It hurt.
"I'm not talking to you right now," she told him. "Now just shut the fuck up and dig."
Ju never cursed. It wasn't feminine, not that it was her goal to be, but it was a morsel of wisdom of her mother's that Ju carried around with her.
That made these words especially jarring from her lips, she thought, because Boone looked like he'd been slapped.
"Look, before…" Boone began. "I was messed up. I'm sorry."
"You're callous," she stated plainly. "I'm angry about it."
"I can tell."
"Then, leave me alone," she ordered.
She began again but fell, this time slicing her hand open against the bottom edge of the shovel.
It stung, but she wouldn't let him know that. They didn't have any medical supplies left, and she didn't want to give him the pleasure of being right.
"Look, we can't talk about this here," she stated, a final plea. "Hurry up and dig so we can get…"
Something broke very suddenly in her voice, and all at once, for the first time in all the long nights she'd been away from these dogs, these animals, tears pierced her eyes with remembering. She wished she didn't have to remember.
She wished she'd never known.
She didn't want to cry in front of him.
"Go away, Boone," she demanded, crunching her eyes together as she turned her back on him.
He hesitated for a few moments.
"Your hand is bleeding," he noticed.
The drip…drip…drip of blood against the road beneath them was the only sound as even the wind paused as the world stood still for their exchange.
"It is fine," she informed him.
It really wasn't. It hurt pretty bad. She wouldn't be able to dig for a while, and it hurt her heart.
"What are you gonna do?" he whispered, dread in his throat poisoning his tone.
She couldn't speak now, just shook her head a little bit. He would know she was crying. Know she was thinking about her time there, with them, offering healing to the very animals that would commit atrocities like this.
She'd thought it a service, once, to bring everybody back from the brink of death.
She'd been so naïve to think everybody deserved a chance.
She was reeling now. The terrible spiral of downwardness was unstoppable, and no desperate attempts to ravel the shambles of her resolve would undo the teary explosion that was about to ensue.
She'd spent a long time looking at dead bodies. It was how they'd learned medicine in her village growing up. They paid their respects and used the bodies for research and study. Even in the Legion, she'd been tasked often with burying bodies of the undesirables – little girls, old men and women, those with disabilities, physical or mental. Infants.
The single word burst into her consciousness like it was a sunburst that couldn't be stopped, and that was it. It was all over.
Something about the memory of beholding dead infants made everything too real. The memory was too vivid, too painful, too personal and frightening, too symbolic of the most horrible and tragic form of death she could think of, that it shoved all the defenses she had aside and demanded to be thought of.
She'd buried infants there in the Legion in servitude and now she was free, but it didn't matter.
Because there was still death, no matter where she went.
It was too much.
This was too fast.
She'd just gotten out of the Legion.
And all that implied.
How and why was she here now, looking at this, burying bodies? The clarity of it was abruptly astounding.
She was free.
Her family was dead.
Her lover had abandoned her.
She'd been betrayed.
And now she was here, after all that, free, still burying bodies.
A hand on her shoulder broke her, and she cried out in surprise, finally moving away.
"Don't touch me!" she shouted harshly.
Her voice, clearly broken, echoed rudely in the hollowed out buildings of Nipton, the embers now just that: remnants of a fire that could have easily become as savage as what they'd witnessed here. Ju dropped the shovel by her feet, which clanged rudely against the concrete that shelled the ground beneath them. She took just one step away from him. Ju needed that space.
"You're crying," he stated gruffly.
"I'm not crying!" she ground out.
A silence.
"You couldn't save –" he began, but she shook her head.
"Don't!" she snapped. "Don't do that! Don't comfort me!"
This wore at his temper.
"Then what the fuck do you want me to do?" he shouted, his lower voice rumbling more harshly through the ghost town.
"Go away!" she shouted. "I told you that already!"
"And if I do that, you're going to run yourself into the ground! You're being a fucking idiot – and we both know you're not one! Why is this so important to you?"
She felt tears pierce through her eyelids now as they left salty trails in their wake.
"It just is! Why is it not important to you? Death doesn't matter now that Carla is gone? How does that make you better? Is that what she'd want?"
"Don't you fucking talk about her!" Boone roared. "You didn't even know her! You have no idea what she'd want!"
All at once, sanity rushed back into its place.
"You're right," she conceded. "But I do know the way you've acted here today and yesterday was unacceptable, and I don't want to be around you anymore right now."
She began to walk away, and she heard him pursue her.
This pleasantly surprised her, but it didn't matter right then.
"I'm going to leave," she snapped at him, turning back to face him, the ice in her tone freezing his feet where they stood. "Don't follow me."
He clenched his jaw when they met eyes for a second before she jogged away, running like she always did. Running helped make it all go away.
She didn't cry.
At least, not in front of him.
"Don't follow me," she'd ordered.
Boone's chest felt tight. He wasn't the one who'd murdered all these people, and yet he was the one who had the power to make her cry. It was equal parts gratifying, infuriating, exasperating, and uncomfortable.
He was uncomfortable. It was true.
Maybe she was crying by herself. She sounded like she was crying, but she hadn't been when they'd met eyes. Her voice was crying, but not her eyes, not yet.
Maybe she thought he'd be insensitive. Maybe she was right. He probably wasn't very nice in the aftermath of it all. Adrenaline. Rage. Maybe Boone hadn't considered that his obstinate satisfaction with this wouldn't be shared by everybody, that maybe even though Ju knew, she wasn't in the same place he was. That not all death was the same.
It was a lesson he'd forgotten.
A person never got used to dead civilians. It was just a fact of life. But if a person drank enough, they might forget, just a little.
Boone had forgotten, and that had been made abundantly clear by the way she'd looked at him after he'd said something particularly unkind in the wake of their battle.
Bitterly, Boone took a swig of the whiskey he'd found. The smell here was unbearable, and the whiskey helped take it away. But he couldn't exactly leave. His hands were worked so hard that they struggled to grip the smooth glass bottle as he tipped it again to drink, and he knew if she came back and he was resting that she would be upset, even though he'd finished the last of the graves after she'd left so that she wouldn't have to.
Their work here was done, but Boone knew she would want to stay. As it seemed to be just because that was the way it was at its simplest, what she wanted mattered, and what she wanted usually went. Not that she was a princess or his boss. But she was a good leader.
And a perplexing woman, to say the least.
He found himself dwelling on her in these last few days.
It was like she was a different person in a fight. He'd watched her closely through his scope, at first feeling an itchy trigger finger nearly bettering him as she had strolled boldly up to the clear leader of these Legionaries. Not a hint of resignation or fear. She wasn't afraid of death. It made Boone strangely proud, even though he knew he had no claim on her.
Then, Ren spoke to them.
A lot of them only spoke Latin. They'd been around long enough that this was okay, that English was actually a second language to children in the Legion. A lot of them knew English too, but they'd never speak it to outsiders, especially to minorities like Ren. It would have been an indignity.
Boone had squeezed the barrel of his gun when he saw the smirk of satisfaction on his face as burning corpses writhed and screamed behind him, hung on makeshift crosses – to set an example, no doubt.
But as soon as the smirk was there, the leader wasn't there anymore.
Ren was on top of him. She had a knife in her hand, and, like an animal, she'd descended, first toppling him with a stab to the neck and then slitting his throat once the man was down beneath her. Bullets flew immediately, and he willed her to duck as he breathed in. Breathed out.
Executed.
One after another.
But she didn't duck. Not once.
She took that Legionary's gun and shot each of them with just as much accuracy as Boone had. Like a regular old spec ops, maybe a little less refined, she didn't hesitate to kill.
She was a killer. It made Boone suspicious.
But when he'd made his way down into the aftermath, hustling in a way that made him a little sheepish, and he couldn't find her, a moment of discomfort came. He'd shot her. Her, of all people, the woman who'd helped him, the only woman who'd helped him after Carla and not wanted anything from him. He'd killed her, and she was gone. She, the giver, the listener, the talker.
He liked to listen to her talk, he realized, even though she didn't talk as much as he might have thought.
The discomfort turned into something sour in his stomach, and he had to bite his lip before he couldn't take it anymore.
"REN!" he'd shouted.
Nothing.
"JULI?"
Still nothing.
"WHERE ARE YOU?"
She didn't emerge, but she did make a sound, maybe to help him along. It was undeniably her; Boone knew it right away. She was always grunting and heaving trying to lift things that were too big for her.
He was more relieved than he thought he probably should have been. At least in the first couple of seconds.
Her very first priority had been getting down those poor fucks who'd been tied to those crosses, and after Boone was satisfied that he'd not shot his new friend, he let her hear it. The bastards were all gone, and Boone thought it was stupid. Had to be stupid.
Another shot of whiskey in the now helped to dull the ache of the memories of his unkindness.
The now also brought other memories that he didn't mind so much.
Her eyes.
They were brown. Simple.
But they were passionate and forceful in their ability to communicate.
The fire in her eyes was contagious, and, even though Boone protested as she poured every last bit of medicine they had into those who were dying, he didn't stop her after he noticed. In fact, he admired her, followed her mutely, watching her tend to the wounded like a matron or a mother.
No, she wasn't a killer.
She was kind. And compassionate, even when Boone wasn't. She whispered things to those who were dying. She knew a lot of prayers a soldier would know, and it made Boone remember her first claim.
"Used to serve with a unit," she'd said.
"Not like any fucking soldier I've ever seen," Boone had replied.
Boone winced now.
She wasn't like any soldier he'd ever seen. Because she wasn't a soldier.
She was a medic.
That put a lot into perspective. Her careful consideration of cooking, of water. She always boiled it before bottling it, if she even did that. She fell frequently – in fact, she was really pretty clumsy. But she never complained, always applied some herb or other to ease the wound's pain. She knew where to press, how to press, what to sew, where to inject.
He wanted to ask her about it, even though Boone knew he had no right, no claim to her, even though – especially after this – she kind of felt like his Battle Buddy.
The next moment, as Boone leaned back to take another swig of whiskey from his bottle, he heard her voice a few buildings over, a hint of distress in it, cry out in surprise or pain, he wasn't sure.
Alarm shot through him. He had to make sure she didn't die long enough for him to figure her out, or he knew it would haunt him forever. He felt like he owed her, and he had to return the favor. She was a bright light in the darkness.
He had to get to her.
Keep her safe.
Thinking this, and with a coldly racing heart, Boone shot up from his spot by the fire he'd clumsily thrown together in her honor, and he charged forward into the night to look for the source of that voice.