Fools' Reciprocity

Under just about any other circumstances, Gretchen would have considered her position a good one.

O'Connell's body was pressed up against her own, her back resting easily against his chest. She could feel his heart pumping anxiously against her, and if they had been in any other situation, she would be quite satisfied with herself. One arm held her against him, the other was gripped tightly about the leather rein of a weary camel. His breath was warm and nervously uneven against her head, barely ruffling her hair with each exhale. He had nearly all the token signs of arousal, but that had nothing to do with her.

In mere minutes, what was left of the two encamped parties had made it astride some unfortunate, half-sleeping animal and urged it to a gallop out of the ruins. Gretchen had stayed close to the group; even if she was fairly ignorant of whatever had happened at Hamunaptra to cause such a flight, she knew she didn't want to get left behind. O'Connell had glanced over the people, taking a quick inventory. She figured right about then that he had to have been a Legionnaire. Only someone used to casualties would take in the living and assumed dead with such detatched efficiency. His gaze had barely flicked to her own at the time. "You can't ride, right." It had been something like a question, though he was too commanding at that point to give the sentence any proper intonation. She had nodded, and he had motioned that she ride with him. Nobody had protested. Nobody cared about something so mundane as who rode with who.

Burns, also, shared a horse with Daniels. Gretchen could not look at the man. She lived in Cairo, true, in the slums. She had seen deformed vagrants and the mangled remains of people who angered the wrong men. She knew the corpses of children who had starved to death in alleys, half-eaten by rats and dogs. She'd heard the crazies, muttering and yelling to themselves in the cramped, dark roads. She knew the streets, and she knew the people and half-people born of them. She had probably passed by men worse off and left the uglier for it than Burns.

Even still, Gretchen had come to terms with those realities. She knew people were cruel and heartless and sadistic. She was aware that not all people were like that, but generally speaking, in her area of expertise, people could do limitless harm to each other. Gretchen understood people. She did not understand whatever-it-was that had taken Mr. Burns' eyes and tongue.

She tried to focus instead on sleep. She wasn't sure why she wanted to sleep so badly, since her mind was buzzing with confusion and everything around her was tense. She knew she probably should sleep; it was the reason O'Connell had insisted on riding behind her in the first place. "If you fall asleep, you could fall off the back." She had wanted to retort with a coy, "And what if you fall asleep?" But she had known better than that. The wild anxiety glinting in his eyes had told her that he wasn't in the mood for a joke, lame though it was.

She also kind of wanted to sleep because of the soreness in her muscles. For a good fifteen or twenty minutes (she wasn't sure; it had felt like an eternity) outside of Hamunaptra, the riders had forced their mounts to maintain top speed, and her legs and ass were feeling it now that they had slowed.

And Gretchen really had little more than her aching muscles to focus on. She knew O'Connell would have easily traded her for Evelyn if given the choice, but she wasn't particularly sorry over that. Wasn't that the story of her "career", after all? She had been a mere substitute for every man that had ever paid for her; what, really, was the difference now?

Still, she liked O'Connell. She recognized that he was a good man in a bad world, and she liked that. At the very least, she liked to believe that somewhere such people existed. She knew better; she had learned too much in the slums to seriously entertain the fantasy of a handsome savior. And she knew that O'Connell probably had his share of little flaws, of irritating habits, his stash of closet-skeletons. But for now, she liked to think that he was the one good seed, the angel from the ashes, the diamond in the rough, and probably a dozen other silly, melodramatic ideals. She just wanted to believe that he had survived the same streets that she and Beni had, and been strong in the ways they had failed. She wanted to think that there was someone out there who could suffer through the rot and grime and make it out okay. If she couldn't do it herself, then she at least liked to believe that there was stability in the hope for it.

Gretchen also knew that O'Connell couldn't exactly grab Evelyn's attention right now. She and Chamberlain rode ahead of them, a heated debate bouncing between the two scholars. Every now and then, Jonathan would steal a nervous glance at their American guide. The cool, clipped words were fired back and forth with assassins' precision, and Gretchen could tell, just from the way O'Connell sat so erect and kept his eyes on them, that her fellow Yank wanted to intervene and save Miss Carnahan from the professor's snooty attacks. But Evelyn was holding her own, and O'Connell knew he didn't have the education to silence them. Under normal circumstances, education probably didn't matter much to him. He had muscle and guns and those were convincing enough. But Chamberlain and Evelyn were arguing curses, and mythology, and legends and dead kings. What knowledge could an American ex-Legionnaire have to end a debate between the likes of them?

"So what now?" the question had been echoing in Gretchen's head since Ardeth had grimly pronounced the fate of the world; it was just now that she was able to speak it.

O'Connell sighed heavily. "We get to the fort, and then we get the hell out of here, I guess."

Gretchen let a pseudo-silence clatter between them, the British arguers still loudly caught up in outsmarting each other. She ran her tongue over her lips slowly.

"I don't have any money to go."

He did not even pause. "We'll get you out of here."

A strange sense of comfort slipped through her veins. Gretchen pursed her lips and tried to think about something else. "I don't even know where I'd go."

"Yeah," he muttered quietly. "Me either."

In a way, she wasn't surprised. "I've been here so long...and I've done so many things..."

O'Connell scoffed, though not at her. He seemed to be considering himself. "When I left home, I'd never even held a gun. I killed people here...I mean not just in the Legion, but in a bar fight. I beat a guy to death."

Gretchen swallowed. "I was engaged...I can't even count how many people I've screwed."

His arm tightened around her in what she liked to believe was a protective way. "I should've never left home."

She blinked against the blurriness in her eyes. "Me either."

She felt more than heard O'Connell clear his throat awkwardly. "Do you, uh, do you have any family?"

Gretchen's brow furrowed strangely. It seemed like an eternity since anyone had tried the usual small talk with her. "My ma's still alive, I think. I haven't heard from her in years. I had a brother and some sisters. They're probably all married now."

O'Connell grunted. "I grew up with my dad and mom. I ran away when I was eleven years old; I stowed on this steamer and ended up here. I think the second I was off the boat I had a nun dragging me to some orphanage."

She kind of smiled. "They've gotten good at that."

"Yeah," he breathed.

The wind whistled passed their ears. O'Connell stood up in the stirrups, squinting at the horizon. Slowly, he lowered himself back down.

"We're not too far from the fort."

Gretchen nodded.

"By the way ..." his voice was strained with whatever was weighing on his mind. "I'm real sorry. About Beni, I mean."

She blinked, confused. "What about him?"

O'Connell swallowed. "Well ... it must have gotten him in the ruins somewhere. He's not with us."

Gretchen glanced over the group in interest. "Oh."

"It just seemed like ... you know. I thought it might bother you. I'm sorry."

She wanted to retort, with a little laugh, that it didn't bother her. That Beni had been nothing more than an annoying runt who was constantly demanding that she scratch his back if she wanted him to even consider scratching hers. She wanted to say that he was nothing and nobody to her; that it was just as well that he fall off the face of the earth. She wanted to say that Beni, like everyone else, was completely expendible to her.

But that just wasn't so.

Beni had been a lot of things, and few of them good--least of all to her. But if O'Connell had been the one to make it out of this wretched place a better, noble man, then Beni had been the one whom she had always believed would make it out. Beni was supposed to survive.

If he couldn't make it, what hope was there for her?

"Oh," she finally managed. "Yeah...hmm...Though, I mean...you probably knew him better than I did."

O'Connell kind of laughed in the back of his throat. "I don't know. I don't know if anybody really knew Beni." He took a breath, and let it out reluctantly. "When you're like that...when you're just...you know, greedy and selfish like that, you just don't get the chance to know people. You're too worried about yourself."

Gretchen closed her eyes against the darkness. Something in her eyelids burned. "Yeah..."

"If you die like that--I mean, what do you say about a guy like that? Can't say I'll miss him..."

She sighed. "Me, either."

"But you have to admit, it's a loss. Living your life that way--it's a loss."

Gretchen rode in silence the rest of the way to the fort.