Trigger warnings for this chapter: references to torture, references to rape.
A day later, and she still had alien blood beneath her fingernails.
She'd scrubbed herself raw and it was still there no matter how much she scraped at it, dried and cracking orange-brown an awful reminder that he was dead. He must have been, nobody could survive losing that much blood; it was everywhere, a wide, clotting pool on the metal floor. There were thin trails of it on the steps, handprints on the floor… It was like a horror film, one of those gory slasher movies.
At least they'd not left his body there when she'd been sent to clean up the mess. She could imagine his lifeless eyes as she mopped it up, and that had been terrible enough, thinking of him blank and empty and shattered and…
Tish now had an hour blocked off in her morning and nothing to do with it. Her mother had told her to sleep, and she honestly didn't know why she wasn't following her advice. The… Saxon would find something to fill her schedule with soon enough, and she'd regret not taking advantage of this tiny bit of freedom while she had the chance. But something made her gravitate towards Theta's dressing room anyway, just as it had the day before—morbid sentimentality, due to the dead, maybe just a quiet sense of loss for the few moments of peace they'd shared together here. And she owed Theta. She owed him her life.
She swallowed a lump in her throat as she ran her fingers over a silky, embroidered sleeve. Theta had hated it here, hated it even more than her, but she was certain he hadn't wanted to die, not even on the really bad days. He could have given her up; she was certainly much more at fault for the attempted assassination than he was, all Theta had done was tell her what aspirin would do, she'd been the one to deliver it. He could have said that and she would have died instead. He hadn't, though, and she didn't know why except that Martha had to have been right about him.
She blinked back unexpected tears. She could hardly have called Theta a friend. Could she? Certainly she'd cared about him, he was a broken helpless little thing, she could hardly have avoided feeling a bit protective; and he'd made her smile, one of the only people who could in this hellhole, and he'd stood up for her as best he could… Maybe Theta just didn't know how to have human friends. He'd tried, though. He hadn't been very human, hadn't always understood how emotions worked, but he'd been kind in his own way. Maybe he had been her friend. Maybe he hadn't. Either way he'd made her feel like she was worth something, and she would miss him.
The door swung open. It didn't creak, nothing on the Valiant was ever in less than perfect condition, but it didn't need to to be terrifying. She spun around, expecting guards, or worse, Saxon—
No. No, she was hallucinating, this wasn't real, it couldn't be real, ghosts didn't exist. But then, if she was going to crack and start seeing things, which really wasn't all that unlikely with everything going on, she doubted she'd hallucinate Lucy Saxon. Weren't you supposed to have visions of people you wanted to see? And she'd certainly never imagine her looking so… concerned. Tender and pained, like she was worried about Theta for his own sake. She hovered as he tiptoed timidly through the door, looking like she wanted to put an arm around him, but didn't. Tish gained a small amount of respect for the woman. Theta didn't like being touched.
He looked like nothing more than a ghost, small and pale and his robes were covered in blood. It wasn't his own, red like a human's and staining the hems like he'd stood in it—maybe he had—and splattered on the sleeves in a way that ought to have been threatening. But he was pitiful, shaking and staring down at the floor, and she didn't think she could ever be afraid of him.
"H-hello, Tish," he whispered, like he was terrified to speak too loudly. Lucy Saxon took a few seconds from anxiously watching his face to give Tish a polite smile and a nod before looking back to Theta—an unconscious tic of a politician's wife.
"Oh my god," Tish breathed. "You're alive, you… how… You're not Theta," she said suddenly. "Or… did you do that thing, where you change?"
"Regeneration," Lucy Saxon said quietly.
"Yeah, that." Tish swallowed, looking this New Theta over carefully. He shrank away from her gaze, but she saw something in his eyes that reassured her. "It really is you, then? You're alive?"
"I'm not dead," said Theta.
And maybe it was because Theta was her friend after all and she'd thought he was dead but he wasn't, maybe it was just that there had been so much death and loss already, but Tish launched herself at him and hugged him as hard as she could.
He gasped almost soundlessly, flinching away from her and sinking to the floor, looking up at her like he was too scared to take his eyes off her.
"Oh god, oh god, I'm sorry, did I hurt you, are you alright, oh god, I'm sorry—" Of course he wasn't alright, part of her mind supplied even as the rush of words left her mouth, he'd just died, he must be traumatised, how stupid are you, Letitia?
It took her a moment to realise he was speaking too, a quiet litany of please please I'm sorry please stop please and even as he was looking right at her she had the feeling he wasn't really, staring in fear at something long gone, lost in a living nightmare.
"What did I do?" she asked, even though she was certain he couldn't hear her.
"Nothing, Tish," Lucy Saxon said soothingly, kneeling next to Theta with a gentle hand between his shoulder blades, supporting him without restraining him. "It's not you. Theta was tortured by humans, ey's having trouble being around them right now. The Master's been reinforcing the link—mentally too, I think. Theta's going to need some time before you can touch em without making em panic." Her voice was calm, and she spoke the words like she'd recited them. She probably had. Still, it was a strange shift to see in Lucy Saxon of all people. "I'd… like to help you, if I can."
There were so many questions she had at that. Why was Theta afraid of her but not Lucy, for one; why did Lucy suddenly care about Theta, she never had before, why did she want to help, and what did 'reinforcing the link' mean, anyway? How long had Theta been tortured? By whom?
"Ey?" she said.
"Different body, different pronouns," Lucy explained.
"Ah," she said weakly, still absorbing everything. She could accept that, that wasn't the strangest thing she'd heard before by far. "Why do you want to help him—em?" she asked a moment later.
"Why do you?" Lucy asked.
Tish couldn't help but bristle at the question. Because I care about em. I was the one who made him feel safe, I wanted to give him something that felt normal, I don't care that ey's an alien…
Somewhat belatedly, she understood the point.
Lucy was smiling at her; there was incredible pain behind that smile, something inside her that was broken and would never heal, and her eyes held shame and wariness and a kind of resignation, like she never expected to get anyone to smile back at her again.
Slowly, hesitantly, Tish smiled.
Lucy's eyes brightened, and the pain in her smile lessened just a bit. "Here, we've got to get em clean… Where do you keep eir chemises?"
"In the loo," she said.
"Can you get one? I'll get em out of these robes."
Theta whimpered and cringed as she passed, and Lucy murmured placations as she helped em out of eir bloody robes. Standing there in just the thin chemise, ey looked even more vulnerable than usual, eir bare arms covered in dark bruises and eir feet coated in human blood, and Tish wasn't sure she wanted context for the latter.
Lucy directed em to sit, and she ran a damp cloth over eir skin—not quite a bath, but it would do—before asking softly if she could help em out of the chemise. Ey nodded, and she carefully pulled the thin fabric away from Theta's torso; a wound had reopened and the clotting blood had stuck the chemise to eir skin.
Tish didn't think much of it other than to ache at the thought of Theta being hurt; Lucy, who could see the wound properly, blanched and gave a tiny "Oh…" She held Theta's arm away from eir side to dab at the blood, and when it was cleaned up as well as it could have been—the cuts themselves still dark and bloody but the skin around them pale orange—Tish rather suddenly understood, and felt ill.
Someone had carved crudely-formed letters into eir skin: WHORE. She hoped they were dead. Judging by the blood Theta'd been covered in, they probably were.
"Tish," said Lucy, and her voice was softer than Tish had ever imagined it could be. "Chemise, please."
"Right, right." She tried not to be hurt by the way Theta pressed into Lucy for protection as she handed it over. It didn't really work.
But it got easier. Not right away, not quickly by any means. Some days were worse than others, sometimes Tish would do something without thinking or Lucy—just Lucy, now, and it was almost impossible to reconcile the sweet, warm young woman with Mrs. Saxon—would overestimate her ability to make Theta feel safe. Most of the time it was Theta emself who pushed eir limits too far, trying to make Tish feel better.
But slowly, it got easier. Theta seemed almost hardwired to view all humans but Lucy as a threat; apparently the Master had been using some sort of weird alien mind-meld to make em afraid of Tish's species. Once they had managed to convince em on that instinctive level that Tish would never hurt em, they managed much better. Theta still jumped at sudden movements, but didn't cringe away from Tish when she moved towards em, and one day ey reached out and placed a nervous hand on her arm in thanks for handing em one of the dozen components of eir robes, and she knew the worst was over.
Lucy sighed deeply.
"Are you sure ey won't even consider it?"
Tish very nearly laughed. "Hasn't let me give em anything but that godawful orange since we met."
Lucy Saxon had been something of a fashion icon before her insane husband had taken over the world and killed millions of people. Sometimes those tendencies flared up again; she was looking at Theta's wardrobe as if in physical pain. "But the blue would look so lovely with eir eyes, or even the gold…"
"Don't even bother," Tish told her. "It's like breaking horses."
Somewhere in her mind she wondered how the hell they'd gotten here. It had taken just over a month for Theta to become just as clingy and dependent on Tish as ey'd ever been on Lucy, and it was hard not to respond to that kind of childlike need; sometimes it felt like she and Lucy had adopted em. She tried to ignore that thought, as there were some things too weird to be vocalised.
A lot of things about Lucy were like that. Tish didn't really know what to do with her. Initially she'd assumed that she was there because the Master wanted to keep an eye on Theta all the time now, as punishment for the ibuprofen, and she'd resented the blonde's presence almost as much as she resented Theta for falling for it. Lucy was standoffish, never really looked Tish in the eye, talked a lot about nothing but in a superior tone of voice that she didn't even seem to realise she was using. It was abundantly clear that Lucy Saxon had no idea how to have friends.
But it was hard not to bond, just a little, over a mutual and unexplainable need to keep Theta safe. Outside their little sanctuary they didn't dare even look at each other; even tucked away in relative safety they rarely made eye contact and kept very carefully to the subjects of weather, whichever events were current public knowledge, Theta, and eir lamentable fashion tastes. Still, Lucy had been making shaky overtures into a genuine friendship—Tish was no longer the only one keeping Theta fed, but some of the gestures went beyond that. Tish had noticed that she almost never got scheduled to clean the master bedroom anymore (Master bedroom? She could never tell if it was a pun or not), and the bruises on Lucy's arms and the quiet restraint in her bearing spoke volumes of exactly how grateful Tish was to be mostly out of his reach. Or at least, as much as was possible on a sealed airship.
She couldn't prove that Lucy was behind her schedule changes, of course. But she was definitely the one who'd initiated one of the most awkward conversations in Tish's entire life; no matter what the mitigating circumstances there was no possible way for a conversation that began with the words "So I've noticed you get really bad cramps…" to turn out even slightly normal. It had been worth it, though; as it turned out, Lucy's birth control did work perfectly well for Tish, though it had taken three days and Theta making snarky comments that almost sounded like ey was back to eir old self before they could look each other in the eye again.
There was one gift Lucy had given her that seemed different, somehow. It was an absolutely gorgeous silver ring, intricate and light, beautiful in its simplicity; the exact opposite of something she'd have expected Lucy Saxon to own, let alone treasure.
"It was my mother's," she'd said quietly, looking terrified that they would somehow be overheard. "Harry never knew I had it, the Master won't know it's missing." Sometimes she talked like that, when they were alone without Theta; before the coup he was Harry, afterwards he was the Master. Tish called him Saxon exactly as she always had, once she was convinced Lucy wasn't there to spy on her. "I just don't want anything to happen to it. Please take it."
She had, because it was the kind of request you didn't say no to and because she was starting to like Lucy, thought they could even have been friends if they'd met when she was just Lucy and Tish was just Tish; of course, they never could have. That was the great irony, wasn't it? The three of them, they could have been friends if they'd met differently but the only way they could ever have met as themselves was like this, where they were all so broken they didn't even know who they were anymore.
But, she thought, lying in the dark and turning Lucy's ring over in her fingers, listening to the Valiant hum and waiting for another miserable day… maybe they really could make something. It would never be normal, it would never be safe, maybe it would never even be healthy. But, just possibly, it could be theirs.