Harboring a Fugitive
Chapter 2
Little Lives
It is life threatening. That's all it is.
His promise of protection rings in her head as she sits on the hard stone bench exposed to a beating sun. She doesn't know how long she's been sitting but the sun has set at least once. Thought it was bad before when the ignited oil coiled up her leg and into her body, but the fire, the flames, the image of her own crispy body lingers in her head and she feels her shoulders ache with their confinement, the skin on her wrist being chewed away by the heavy cuffs chaining her like an animal, like a circus act in place while the villagers ignore her, or swear and curse her, or wish ill begotten things on her unborn child. Some of them spit on her when they pass, some throw small pebbles at her and it's pretty unbearable before she passes out the first time.
Then she's lying in bed, a four poster with a beautiful canopy made for a queen rung around the top, but the fire is back and crawling around unbridled on the ceiling, and it's the same ceiling her and Tomin used to stare at when they fell asleep, up until very recently when her new bedroom became the center of the town square. He would cradle her from behind in the early spring coldness, the whisper of winter still present in the morning when frost laps at the windows and the chill whistles in from outside. His hand holding the weight of her stomach, protecting and watchful even as they slept. If she stirred he would be on his feet, ready to aid her in anyway he could. He's made many midnight breakfasts.
The flames are not for him though, and he is not entertained in the bed with her. Instead the flame is whoever put this child inside of her, no copulation necessary, no getting to know her or her wishes, just plucking her up from subspace while she zipped through a blackhole to another galaxy and planted a seed deep inside of her and then tossed her to the ground. She wonders if the baby will play with fire on the ceiling as he does, create great visages from the curling heat to scream at her and threaten to gulp her whole.
When she wakes she's thirsty, obviously, and the sight of a villager helping himself to the square water supply cracks her lips, others come and slurp the rainwater off the silver scoop, some glare at her menacingly and overexaggerate the deliciousness and refreshment, only to her it's not an exaggeration, she yanks at the cuffs and they bite into her skin further, she tries to stand, to stretch her back and the chain lead gives hold. All day she smells freshly made food items, breads, buns, biscuits, muffins, stews, and meats and her mouth waters enough to give her a bit of a drink, but her spit is thick, and her skin is becoming tight.
Finally, she falls into another sleep, but knows it's different, knows this should be the final rest and she knows this because she's back at Cheyenne Mountain, laying in the bedroom they gave her listening to Earth music on a set of headphones she stole from Daniel's office along with two credit cards, his extra set of glasses, an asthma inhaler and a copy of his passwords to the system. The music isn't the normal bard type music that plays at the pubs on planets she frequents, it's an entirely different type of dialect, a different rhythm of melancholic whining that she can picture Daniel listening to quite easily. She doesn't hear him knock at the door because of the headphones and she doesn't see him because her eyes are closed in daydream, in wondering what Daniel was like as a more emotional teenager insinuating that his guardians should go procreate with themselves.
He yanks the earphones from her head and rolls her over on the bed grabbing the white rectangular music player from beneath her. "Oh darling, I love it when you take charge."
"What are you doing with this?" Holds the player out to her, the once straight and perfect cords of the headphones are now intertangled and the rubber has bent away to expose wiring.
"Calm down, I—"
"I'm not here for your entertainment," yells at her, red-faced and missing his glasses and she tries not to think to much about the other pair tucked away in her top drawn between unmentionables. "You don't get to take things from me without asking, you need to start acting like a decent human being."
"I just wanted to hear your music, I thought I'd be able to understand—"
"It you want to understand someone better, just ask them."
"Then tell me about yourself."
In her reverie he does. The anger relaxes on his face and he takes a seat next to her on the bed. He opens up something he calls a playlist and he runs through the general meaning of some of the songs with her, he becomes animated when he speaks of them, stutters like they're ancient artifacts he buried away in a tiny white rectangle to bring up when he wants to remember his mother, his father, his wife. In her dream this is how it ends with them sharing a set of earphones and laughing as he mouths the words to her. In reality, he stormed out of her room and she fell asleep alone and saddened.
When she wakes up the second time she's back in the bed, the four post bed with the lovely canopy run around the top. There's no fire man threatening to masticate her in the ceiling, there's no fire at all anywhere but in the hearth a few feet from the bed, flickering and crackling. She's been cleaned up and had a change of clothing back into the nightgown he procured for her on her first night in the house. The dirt and grime from the dusty square mixing with her sweat as been cleansed away from her body, her sunburnt collarbone has had a salve applied to it, irritation lingers on her thighs and legs were urine soaked through for too long. Her muscles are tense and simultaneously underused, her head swims and her stomach roars for food, for water, for attention. The fetus, nearly viable out of womb, bangs on pots and pans for sustenance.
"Please forgive me," the declaration is hardly above a whisper and blends in with the popping fire and the tone of wind through cracked glass. He stands by the opposite side of the bed to not frighten her, perhaps in case she wishes to be through with him and she partly does. If this was a marriage of any other circumstance she would stargate the hell out of her and her child until a commerce planet came into view and she could relax and disappear among the populace. It's happened before, it's bound to happen again, but there's no stargate and this isn't the galaxy she knows. Everyone wishes to cause her harm, her baby harm, and there's only so much she can do as a solitary person.
So she accepts his weeping apology, accepts the cup of clear, cool water and sips it in gratitude like it wasn't partly his doing that she hadn't had water for three days. Stokes her mouth full of stew so quickly in repetition that he takes the spoon from her and feeds her as an invalid less she vomit up all her delicious nutrients and then they'd have to start over. When she's fed and clean and free of thirst, he climbs into bed next to her in his night clothes and she doesn't curl up against him as she usually would, enjoying the scent of leather and metal and heat and sweat, but she stares at the ceiling just praying to keep fire faces away. His hand lands on her expanded stomach, large with child, who's child, anyone's guess, and he whispers to her, "I am sorry I left you for so long. It will not happen again."
Only the fire and wind answer his question because her eyes are hard trained on the ceiling, searching and wanting answers. Wanting a way out. "Do you feel well, has the baby resumed kicking?"
She doesn't answer, the taste of boar stew still fresh in her throat, her stomach full but unbloated and her trust absolutely shattered in the man she took for a husband without knowing the barest thing about. When she closes her eyes, she's lying on her back on a bed with earphones in and her stomach is delightfully flat and Daniels' eye glasses are still in her unmentionable drawer, he's beside her, his hand jostling her knee as they chuckle at lyrics at the twang of a guitar or the tweet of a flute. She feels safe. She feels content. She feels loved.
"I can't believe the baby survived that." Samantha's face shows no morals or regret over her question, the insinuation of her child, her probable biological prowess growing within her, still thriving on boar stew and beet biscuits and all sorts of crunchy root vegetables, because the child is insatiable, and the child is only partly human, her partly human which according to an upset Daniel is barely human at all.
Borrowing the cadence, the no nonsense tone because their time for communication is ticking closer as is her due date and she really does not want to give birth in this bed, she adds, "Part of me was hoping it didn't."
Samantha averts her eyes, perhaps knowing all too well about horrible situations and bringing little lives into them. Knowing what it's like to trail clues through alleys until finding a hidden door, knocking and asking for help because her third husband was brutal, and she would not allow her baby to be brutalized by him as she was.
"I'm kind of surprised that part of you was hoping it did," Mitchell ensnares himself in his honesty, his words too blunt, too insinuative about her nature. "I mean, given how it was conceived."
She swallows and thinks of Tomin's heavy hand on her stomach in the last three weeks since he brought her in from the square, how she's flinched away at his touches, how several years before the touches of her third husband were worse, harder and she cried a goodbye to her firstborn before drinking a tonic and falling asleep.
"It's hard to explain." She squints away her tears, Daniel's tears, and can't directly put into words how she has nothing left in this world, but the child forcefully implanted in her.