Piranha Chapter 4: Elly, a rayman fanfic

Chapter Four: Elly

When she woke some hours later, knowing that it was about morning, ship time, he was still lying beside her. She sat up and looked at him. His eyes were open. As they turned to her, she saw tears. He blinked, tried to smile at her, then turned away, wiping his eyes.

"You know," he croaked – his breath caught, he tried again. "I – I don't know your name."

"It's Elly," she said. "And the boss told me you were called Rayman."

"Yeah," he said chokedly, "I've been called that."

"Are you still – why are you so – why are you so sad?"

He was smiling ruefully now. "I'm all right. It's just– it's just hard to keep away the little – sword-thoughts – they ambush... I'm okay."

She was getting up, checking the water goblet on the table (it hadn't been touched), taking it back to the galley for fresh water. She returned with the water, with a small wooden board with bread and cheese and a knife. Watching her, he had to smile, privately – her motions, the posture of her body, the tossing of her tousled, unevenly hacked-off hair – everything about her was so serious, so fiercely determined ... except for the subdued anxiety in her eyes. At the bedside, she hesitated.

"You'll eat now – won't you?"

He sat up. "Yes," he said. And smiled again at the visible sigh of relief that ran through her body.

He wouldn't eat much, but he drank a little water, ate a few mouthfuls of bread. "Later," he said, pushing the rest away. She didn't insist, but took the board back to the galley, leaving the water. He sat quietly, leaning against the headboard of the bed, eyes half shut.

"You look tired," she said. "Why don't you sleep some more?"

He grimaced. "Not now," he said. "Started dreaming again." He sighed, looked around. "I do feel stronger," he said. "I think I can get up."

"I'll help you to the bathroom."

He looked up at her, a little quizzical grin on his face. "Okay," he said. "All right, Elly." Smiling wryly, he took the dirty, ragged, voluminous pink bathrobe he was draped in and tied it more securely around himself. He inverted the sleeves so that they fell inside the robe instead of dangling outside.

Then he let her support his trunk as he gingerly found his feet, and she steered him carefully across the floor to the small bathroom next to the galley. He paused as she half-pushed him through the door.

"Uh, Elly, you know–"

"Should I come in and help you?"

He made a sound somewhere between a cough and a sneeze. "Er–no, that's okay. Just–"

"Don't feel bad about it, I know you're sick–"

He chuckled. "Never mind." He went into the bathroom.

She was waiting in the exact same spot, face to face, only his nose between them when he opened the door again. Startled, he jerked back, almost fell.

"Here," she said, "I'll help you back to the bed." His eyebrows went up but he submitted as she half-carried him across the room.

When he was lying down again, his eyelids already sinking, she stood nervously beside the bed, eyeing him.

"What's wrong?" he mumbled, finally.

She rocked on her feet. Then she said, "You're – you're awfully light. You shouldn't be that light. I can practically pick you up. And – Is your body supposed to be that way?"

"What way?"

"I mean–" She gestured at his limbs, or lack thereof.

He grinned. "You think I mislaid them? Or maybe they were stolen sometime while I was asleep?"

She lowered her eyes, blushed. He said, much more gently, still smiling at her, "Elly. I shouldn't tease you. Just ignore me... I must be starting to feel better."

She was afraid she might have made him angry, but he only chuckled quietly and turned onto his side. After a while his slowed breathing showed he had gone back to sleep. She sat still, afraid that even her getting off the bed might wake him up. While he slept, her eyes combed over him, carefully, nervously itemizing each element: The big rounded nose and huge closed eyes, the separated humps of his torso and feet under the blanket, the powerful hands, one under and one on top of the blanket, and the wiry, springy, bright yellow hair, most of it sticking up in two lively tufts, moving a little with his breathing. Even in sleep, his odd, curiously appealing face showed tension, a play of thought, shifting emotion. A vitality and intelligence more attractive than beauty.

Compared to this peculiar being, all the pirates that she had ever known, robot or human, even Anaconda himself, scarcely seemed to be alive. That was the most forceful thing about him, even ill, even asleep: he was so passionately alive. Though it was subdued now, vitality radiated from him, glowed around him, an almost visible aura.

And when, after half an hour, his body jerked suddenly, twisted and gasped, his eyes snapped open, and he sat up in the bed, moaned, and covered his eyes with his hands – she almost fell into those eyes, those hands, and had to cover her mouth to keep from echoing his moan. A chasm of anguish, as though she were being dragged rapidly down into an ocean by a huge weight – then, quite suddenly, she didn't feel it. But the misery was still burning in his eyes. It seemed to burn right through the lids when he closed them.

He pulled himself together, literally, all his extremities coming in close to his body. He pressed his hands to his chest and abdomen, lying on his back, looking up helplessly at the ceiling as if some hope might suddenly appear from there. "See, Elly," he murmured hoarsely, "I don't know – I don't know how I'm going to be able to –

"Oh, god, to have lost everything – my home... my planet (oh, my beautiful planet!)... everyone I know... all my friends... I'll never see any of them again. It's hard, hard. But the worst –" He twisted on the bed, covering his eyes again. "It's – did I do the right thing? Did I do the right thing? No matter how many times I go over it, I can't – should I have done it? But what else could I have done? Should I have done nothing? How could I have left them all in those boxes? How could that have been right?"

His eyes opened, fixed on her, and she started back involuntarily. The suffering in them was terrible.

"And how am I going to pull this off," he said, with intense, forced calm, "if I can't believe it's right? How can I possibly have any strength to act if I doubt myself? God knows it's going to take everything I've got – I have to be able to give it everything. Do you see what I'm saying? I've never had to – to act against my own conscience before! I – I don't think I can. Ly – oh, Ly ... even she didn't –" He turned away, pressed himself against the bed. His body was quaking.

She was silent for a moment. Then she said, quietly, "Rayman, if you want to cry, you should go ahead and do it. You're alone. No one will see you here."

He stopped quivering. For a few moments he lay motionless. Then he turned himself over slowly and met her eyes. He had such a perplexing, bemused expression that she couldn't imagine what he must be thinking. She must have said something horribly wrong–

He sat up. That wry smile of his. He leaned forward and took her little chin in his hand, cupping her thin face with his palm. There was that sense of warmth she had felt before, that powerful sense of his attention focused fully on her. Such a strange look in his eyes, not at all happy, and yet with a new colour, a brightness, an intensity of interest, as though he were in fact looking at her for the first time. Even a sort of distant tenderness. A tiny shiver ran through her.

"So I'm alone, am I, Elly?" He took his hand away from her face, though not his eyes. "But I'm not, am I." He looked at her sadly, as if he'd just realized what he'd said. "No. No, there's this unaccountable child here I keep trying to drag down into my own happy little hell." He wiped a hand across his face.

Taking her hand in both of his, he said quietly, "Elly. Tell me about you. Tell me your story."

"I don't have any stories. Unless you want the ones the pirates tell?"

He smiled gently. "I mean, tell me how you ended up here."

"You know that. He sent me."

"I mean – Elly, here, on this ship, among these brutes, in this situation – How did you get here? How long have you been here? How have you survived here?"

She blinked at him blankly, so completely at a loss that he wondered if she actually did have any memory. Then her eyebrows raised with surprise.

"Oh. You mean... The time before. You really want to know about that?" She wrinkled her nose with distaste.

"Yes," he said, "that. Tell me."

Elly said, "The time before... I don't know. I don't really remember. I mostly only know what my mother used to say. She said before we were here on this ship, we lived in something she called a village. I had a father and some brothers, she said. She said my village – when I was small, it was raided by them. The pirates. They took my mother away with them, and she hid me in her clothes and brought me with her. They killed my father and my brothers.

"He–the boss– he liked my mother and he kept her for himself. Nobody paid any attention to me, except her. I do remember those times. She wouldn't let me in his cabin. I ran around and hid and slept in corridors and rooms nearby. She would come and find me when she could. She got me bits of food, sneaked me part of what she had to eat. She wouldn't tell me anything that was happening and she hardly talked to me, only told me to be silent, be silent, only hugged me to her so hard I couldn't eat until she went away.

"And I hung around where the men were eating and drinking and I grabbed whatever they left, whenever I had a chance, and now and then somebody noticed me and threw some scraps at me for a joke. I hardly ever got to see my mother but sometimes I heard her crying or screaming from his cabin."

Rayman was watching her closely, but said nothing. She went on impassively.

"After a while she died, and I had a lot of trouble getting anything to eat. I was always hungry – that's mostly what I remember, always being so hungry. I was scared sometimes, but mostly just hungry. The robots never paid much attention to me, but when I got bigger, some of the men started to notice me, and they fed me more often. They would pinch me, laugh at me, sometimes push me around, but mostly they didn't hurt me on purpose.

"Then they started to get interested in me for sex, and that was the first time I was able to ask for food. After the first few times, I found out that they would give me something first if I asked for it, or sometimes not until after. Then after a while they would let me take a little food when they ate, even if I didn't do anything for it.

"I was lucky he never seemed to like me, so he left me alone. But he knew I was there, because once he ordered me brought to him. He took off my clothes, looked me over. Then he threw my clothes back at me and said I would do after I was washed, and someone took me in to a man, some big man who was visiting the ship. A few times after that he ordered me sent in to one man or another, visitors that he wanted something from."

"You were spying for him?"

"Spying? What's that? I wasn't anything important, just a gift, you know. Those were usually the worst men – oh, the worst. Worse than the pirates." She closed her eyes and winced.

He looked at her sombrely, took her hand again. "Not an easy life, Elly."

She said, "Not easy? No, it hasn't been so hard really. Not since I got bigger. At least I don't have to go down to the planets and fight and get killed like the pirates. And the boss hasn't paid much attention to me. That was lucky. And only once or twice has somebody tried very hard to kill me, and I was lucky – both times, there were pirates there who stopped the guy and killed him instead. They might just as well have helped him. I've never been tortured, I've never been sold off the ship... I don't really know how come I've had such luck."

Looking at her, at her innocent acceptance of such a life, Rayman felt a deep gnaw of shame at his own grief for his own loss – the loss of a life so rich, in friendship, in beauty, in happiness. Though that didn't make his loss any the less bitter.

He closed his eyes for a moment. As his body grew stronger, recovering from torture and illness, he was becoming more and more aware of the real cause of his anguish. The evil just lurching into sight, so enormous, so sickening, he still could only glance at it for instants. That vast black thing that was encroaching on him, that was beginning to bare its grinning teeth at the small bright spark it was about to engulf into its immense, pathless, lightless, stifling depths.

He took a long breath and again put his attention on the girl.

"So, Elly ..." he said, smiling quietly, "I guess I'm not the only piece of flotsam to wash up in this cabin ..."

A flash of hope surged through her eyes, so nakedly that he felt a twinge of despair. "Does that mean you'll let me stay?" she breathed.

"I didn't think that decision was up to me. Elly, do you know who I am, what I'm doing on this ship?"

She gazed at him consideringly.

"I don't know who you are. I can't really tell. All the men I've been given to before were – it was easy to tell, they had power and the boss wanted to have some of it. Or to have power over them. But you– I heard some pirates say that you'd been – But that's not possible."

"A captive. A prisoner. I'm a – I belong to Anaconda."

Her brow wrinkled. "It can't be true. If you were a slave, you couldn't have power. But you do."

He smiled at her with very sad, though also mildly amused, eyes. "Oh, I wouldn't say that, Elly. I have no power at all on this ship. I'm about as close to nothing and nobody as it's possible to be."

She shook her head. "If you were, he wouldn't send me to you. And–" She swallowed, and pulled her hands into her lap, huddled a little. "You–you have some kind of power, Rayman. It isn't like Anaconda's, or Blargh's. I don't know what it is. But you have it. – I've never met anyone like you." As she turned her wide, timid, wistful eyes on him, again he felt another internal wince. He had seen that kind of look before in his life, and although he understood it, it was not one he wanted to see now.

He gave her a little grin. "Don't get funny ideas about me, Elly. I'm just a guy who likes to lie around and snooze... play games... tell tall stories... mess around in boats..."

"Boats? What's a boat?"

"What's a boat? Why... it's sort of like this ship... only very small – mine was only big enough for two or three people – and it floats on water, you know, on a planet, instead of flying through space. Mine was made of wood."

He could see her trying to bend her mind around transforming the vast pirate spaceship into a tiny floating bowl. Then, something slowly ignited in the depths of her eyes, they grew very wide, her mouth formed an astonished O.

"A boat... a little... wooden... Oh!" She stared at him so stricken that for a moment he thought she was in pain. Her hands went involuntarily to her mouth. "I see it! It's... it's from the time before... so that's what that was!" Her pale golden eyes were huge and round; for the first time he noticed what a pretty colour they were. "I've dreamed of it! I know what a boat is, I've seen a boat! A little boat... I've dreamed of it sometimes, and I had no idea what it was – who that man in it was... That man who looked so big... It was my father." She closed her eyes, almost gasping now as she tried to talk. "My father in the boat. I think I was in that boat too. I was so small... So little... Crossing the lake... In the little... boat. My father's boat. It had... oars." She gazed again at Rayman, transfixed. "I can see it, just as it was. We lived by water. A ... lake. My father had a boat. He had... nets... he caught things in the water..."

He smiled at her. "How about that, Elly!"

A tear wobbled down her cheek. "Rayman... I remembered. I remembered something about my home." More tears. "Oh, I'm seeing more and more of it. The lake, the woods around it, our little house, the road leading to the village... Oh, it's like I've never seen it before, and like I've never left it... I see my mother, my father, my brothers... Oh, Rayman... I had no memories of my own, I only knew my mother's words. They were just words, they weren't real. I never saw what anything looked like. Or felt like. Or knew ... what a family... was like." She was smiling a little now, though through still more tears. "Oh, everything, the whole thing, the whole world, everyone, all the people, the village, it's all there again, it's so real, oh, I can see my mother's ... beautiful eyes... hear her voice..."

Rayman smiled at her kindly, squeezed her hand.

But as she clutched his hand in return, as her eyes focused on him, the look in those eyes, of naked awe, as though he had personally bestowed the memory on her by some arcane magic... It made him want to cry himself.

But at least, after such a long sleep, bit by bit she was awakening.

It was some time before Elly was able to pull herself out of her emotions to return to her proper duty. She was able to do it only after she realized abruptly that Rayman was standing in front of her, holding out a cup to her as she had done earlier to him. He had gotten her a drink!

"You probably need this by now," he was saying. "Memories can make you awfully thirsty..."

"You mustn't do that!" she gasped, scandalized. She snatched the cup and slammed it onto the table, jumped off the bed and shoved him, almost flung him sprawling onto it. From a very awkward position he gaped at her.

"I'm your slave," she snapped at him. "You don't serve me!"

"Okay–okay–okay," he winced, submissively, holding up his hands.

"And you shouldn't be walking around! You're not well yet, are you?"

He was rearranging himself in a somewhat more organized fashion on the bed. "Not entirely, Elly, but I'm getting there. And I can't stay in bed much longer."

She was bustling around the cabin now in a fury fuelled by guilt. He had caught her not doing her job! What would happen! She strode back to him with a tray of food and plunked it down in front of him with such a look that he didn't say a word, just obediently began to eat.

After several mouthfuls, though, as she was starting to look slightly appeased, he ventured, "Hm, Elly – how about you?"

She jumped. "What?"

"Have you eaten anything?"

"...No..."

"Well then. I hope I'm not violating protocol, but will you please eat with me? It'd make me feel better." He smiled internally at her suspicious look. He put on one of his most winning expressions. "Please?"

Silently, she went and got herself a tray and returned to the edge of the bed. Sitting stiffly, she tried to eat. As her anger had subsided... now she hardly had the courage to look at him. The slightly mischievous glint that danced in and out of his eyes at moments only made her the more nervous.

Still, by the time they were both finished eating, she was able to take the little smile he aimed at her and offer him a tiny, timid, apologetic one in return.

After their meal, Rayman lay down while Elly cleaned up. As she returned, he opened his eyes, smiled rather comfortably, but didn't get up.

"You're tired," she said. "Go to sleep."

"I am tired," he agreed. "How long have I been in this cabin, Elly?"

She thought. "The doctor told me he thought you hadn't eaten or drunk for three days, before I was sent here," she said. "And I came to this cabin yesterday night, you woke up after a few hours... Now it's evening, I think. So I've been here about a day. So that makes four days?"

He closed his eyes. "I'm going to have to start – my job pretty soon..." he muttered. And, after his cheerfulness of the past hour or two, it was as if a gust of freezing wind had blasted across his body.

"Rayman. Go to sleep," said Elly, gently. Startled, he opened his eyes. In that brief instant he had almost lost track of her presence. ...And the gentleness in her voice was something he hadn't heard before.

"Elly," he said quietly, "I want you to understand something... It means a lot to me that you came here. If you hadn't showed up... I'm not sure I would've been able to ... escape my own mind... my own thoughts ... I don't know if I would have recovered."

She said, matter-of-factly, "I came because Anaconda sent me."

He rolled his eyes. "No thanks to him. He had no idea what he was sending."

She gazed at him in perplexity. He smiled at her.

"Why don't you get some sleep too. Go ahead, lie down. This bed's more than big enough for two runts like us."

She frowned, then said, thoughtfully, "Funny... I guess really you aren't all that big... Somehow you seem so much bigger than you are. Like you ... fill up the room, somehow."

Abruptly, his eyes filled with tears. He closed them, clenching his fists. She watched, alarmed, as he fought for a moment, struggled, gave a small sob, and then turned onto his side, hiding his face.

"Oh, Elly," he moaned, "Oh, god, Elly, I thought I had looked it in the eye... the beast... the future... I was fooling myself, I hadn't. And now it's coming ... That big sick yellow eye is hunting me down..." He huddled into a compact ball on the bed, mostly bathrobe.

"What is it, Rayman? What's wrong?"

He sobbed again. "Oh, Elly, what will be left of me? Oh, my god, how will I do it? How will I be able to do it?"

Anxiously, she reached over to lay a hand on his side.

As her hand touched him, he seized it, he flipped himself over, he grabbed hold of her arm and pressed his head against her side, clutching her body with a painful grip. Hesitantly, she put a hand on his head. He clung on to her even harder. She could feel him minutely trembling.

"Rayman," she said.

"No!" he gasped. "No... no. That guy – he's dead. He died. He died in that box. His life is finished." A hoarse breath. "And now – whatever I am – I have to continue on – some sort of afterlife ... in hell." He was silent for a moment, still gripping her as though frozen into place. "Elly... What do I have to become... to be able to ... to be able to cope with that. With living in hell. Belonging to hell. Oh, god, Elly!"

His voice fell away, but he held on to her, heavy tremors running through his body, his breathing harsh, effortful; and neither of them spoke for a long time. She didn't dare stir, although his clench on her was becoming so painful she began to imagine the bones of her hip giving way.

But, at last, he loosed his grip. Slowly, he moved away from her and sat up on the bed. He wrung his hands together a little, as though they too hurt. He looked at her sombrely, a silent apology in those dark eyes; and also, behind that, a new hardness.

"Well," he said, "I began something, didn't I. I started it. That's how it is. I have to finish it. That is how it is." There was a pause. He lowered his head.

"It's not like I'm so innocent ... I've been in wars ... I've done a lot of violent things ... but..." For an instant the anguish crept back into his eyes. He sighed, and literally shoved the thought away, gesturing across his forehead with a big hand. He gave his head a shake, and looked at her with firmness. "Elly," he said. "I'm going to need help. Will you help me?"

"I'll–I'll do anything you want."

He smiled at her a little, with a dawn of that tender light in his eyes that made her breath catch. But then he pushed that too away. His voice, though, was very gentle when he spoke.

"You know, Elly, little girl... I think you're kind of fond of me... and I am of you, too. I like you a lot." He lay down, closing his eyes, obviously weary. "I'll still be fond of you... try to remember that... when things change."

She stared at him. "Change? Rayman... I don't understand."

He didn't open his eyes. "You will."

[End of chapter]