This is an odd chapter. It's not going to make very much sense and it's basically dumping you lovely readers into a situation you weren't in any way prepared for in the last chapter. However I wanted to do this realistically from Dune's perspective, since she has no friggin clue about what happened either.
Slit's perspective will explain everything in the next chapter (already partially written and promising to be long AF) and it'll hopefully give you the context you need to understand this.
Also, if you turn your head and squint you'll see why she uses the word Ducky as a term of endearment.
The world was alive, roots entangling around my bones and pulling me down into the earth. A part of it all. Cool, sodden soil replaced my flesh, seedlings pushed and twisted their way through the sutures of my skull, and a willow tree grew from my fertile mind.
There was peace and there was clarity. The disease in my skull meat from which was borne a persistent denial of the truth that the world was ugly, black, horrid, poisoned, and devoid of good had slid away. I was whole again. Scars scoured and scratched off, soul cleansed, ails cured. I was not crazy anymore.
I saw into the vast expanse of eternity. Time was no longer linear but curved around, forming a spiral which presses through itself and stitches it's blunt ends together. Birth and death. They are the same.
"Up ya get kiddo. Lazing around in the shade of a tree when there's so much yet to see and do. An' your brothers are waiting to see you, been waiting around for their slowpoke sister for ages."
Mum? Yes, I felt her hands thread through my fingers and pull me up from the earth, wrapping her arms around my ribs tightly whilst a second set of hands wiped the grit out of my eyes.
"Jesus you're filthy. What were you up to? Making mud pies with your face?" The hem of a shirt replaced the calloused fingers swiping over my face as I struggled to recognize the voice which spoke now. Thick drawling accent from elsewhere. Pa? When I could see I was sure. Tawny hair reseeding back towards his crown and eyes like pools of clean water.
"Aw, what'cha cryin' for baby duck?" He said. It was then that I knew I had died.
Ma pulled back and looked into my eyes, brows knitting together seriously over her dark brown peepers. yet her lips quirked into a smirk. "It can't be that bad. Coming home and seeing it whole again."
Around us, grass grew, flowered, and dropped seeds in the span of seconds. Beginning the cycle anew again and again.
I looked up, seeing the willow tree branches spreading wide and letting down its leaved tendrils. In the boughs sat two men who were not much older than boys to be fully truthful. Russel and Flick, older half brothers who used to carry me on their shoulders. They smiled down with mischief in their eyes and thorny seed pods trapped in their shaggy hair.
Over Mum's shoulder, I saw the shipping container Ma and Pa had made into a house before I was born, sitting serenely on the hill.
"Don't you die on me! Feckin' shit. Shit!"
Lightning crashed, wind whirled and howled all around, tearing the familiar people away and replacing them with horrific scars bearing down at me. Something hot and sour pressed into my mouth. I saw spittle fly out of the cracks in his face in wet threads as air was forced down my throat.
War Boy. Sandstorm. Thunder. Fear.Fire.
Without warning, I was falling. Tumbling down into a dream that wasn't a dream but a recollection that stood in stark contrast to the fantasy which was home. I was dumped into the sand head first. The sound of iron shackles rattling around my wrists and mum's tired face pleading for forgiveness as the men undid my restraints.
I knew what came next, this is the clearest memory I possess. I tried to run, bare feet treading through loose sand and sinking too deep to gain any measurable speed. I could hear the engine revving, the flames crackling, and the slavers laughing away as they screamed passed in a blur of red and quicksilver.I was burning. Set aflame and then mowed down under a tire.
"Breathe damnit!"
I was home again, but it wasn't right. Fog strangled down the light and turned everything into a sickly gray swamp of forgotten joy and shattered good intentions. I stood there, sinking in the muck until it swallowed up my legs, my arms, my eyes. I fell through the world again, landing once more in the grit of unforgiving sand, just another layer in hell I supposed.
Huge hands rolled me over, pressing flat against my chest and threatening to crush my ribs to dust. It was a child soldier, a man-boy from the Citadel painted in white death with two terrible scars twisting his face into a never ending snarl of terror and hunger.
He vanished again, like a specter that was there and then not.
As I picked myself back up I found that I was standing at the apex of a hill of sand. My namesake. The familiar fog crept in at the foot and climbed toward the summit like rising water. I wasn't alone. A creature stood at my side, grinning like mad with teeth like razors, wearing my mother's vest and carrying her rifle over its shoulder.
"Staying or going? Up to you ducky. Lots of shiny scrap to pick up still."
She was me. I watch her tromp down the slope, whistling a tune and fading into the mist that swept throughout my eroded mind.
-0-
When I opened my eyes I saw stars momentarily, then blackness pulsing and swarming over the world in front of me like a hive of furious ants. Finally, when the shadows receded I could see the support struts and wooden framework which lined the dirt burrow of the local doctor and prevented the tunnels from collapsing.
Wilson's place.
Something heavy and feverishly hot was pressed in around me. It stunk like someone who prefers to wash with sand rather than a damp bath cloth. It was a thick, musky rank that could curl nose hairs, under that was the scent of machine lube and guzzoline. I'd know this reeking funk anywhere. It was Slit.
My temple was flush against his windpipe. I could feel his throat bob as he muttered something in unintelligible V8 cult speak. His most thoroughly scarred arm was slung over my ribs and my legs were propped up on his knee. The hell is this? It's not normal. Not right. Ducky and I sleep back to back and never touching. The blessed times when one of us was being coddled it was always him sprawled over my legs to receive many careful touches, and we never stayed that way through the night.
Dune is not to be held and squeezed.
It took some convincing to will my arms to obey commands. Everything was so slow, every muscle and thread of sinew working on a three-second delay. When I managed to twitch my hands to push them between us Slit jerked awake, sitting upright and allowing my head to loll over in the absence of his mass to lean on. This was what I wanted, to get him the hell off of me but I hadn't expected my neck not to work.
"Uuunnn?"Get out of my fucking face mongrel. That's what I meant to say as he leaned in and lifted my eyelid with his filthy thumb. Now my eye itched with his sweat and grime and there was nothing I could seem to do about it with these arms which behaved like dying snakes, writhing without purpose.
"Hey.Hey, old man. Wake up. She's movin' around."
His hand circled my wrist like a scalding cuff made from steel. It was a reminder of the shackles Mama and I wore before the world went sideways and twisted in on itself within my soiled brain. I didn't like it.
"You're gonna rip that needle out. Quit wriggling." He sounded furious, his lips tight and quivering over stained teeth but his eyes betrayed something else that I had never seen before. I couldn't identify the look on his face. It was like yet another senseless divergence from reality. Ducky doesn't get looks that mirror worry on his hard, beautifully ruined features. This expression is unbecoming of him.
I looked down to my hand, futilely trying to pull it out of his grip. There was a cannula stuck into me there, a dust yellowed tube leading to a bag of fluid hanging from a nail in a support beam.
Wilson soon appeared, leaning over me to take his turn pulling up my eyelids and waving a lit match back and forth across my vision.
"She's not blinded. Good sign. Might be hard of hearing from now on, though. Just have to wait and see. We thought you were gonna leave us, kid!" Wilson said it a bit louder than necessary. Even if things did sound a little muffled and distorted I could still hear them just fine when they were two feet from my goddamn face.
How had I gotten here? What the forkin' hell happened? I didn't know, I didn't have the story. You'd have to ask Slit.
Aaaaand sorry if I scared you guys with talk like "I was not crazy anymore." Dune might have kicked the fourth wall a little bit on that very last sentence so she's definitely still whacko.
I'd also like to thank my readers for all of the lovely comments and compliments and kudos and chrome things. You guys are the very best. You're shiny, chrome and awaited.
