Only Cowards Stay While Traitors Run
When Last We Met: While Lavender continues to fade in her existence, DG seeks a way to find the Guardian of the O.Z., the high witch, Glinneth. After questioning the Eastern guild, all DG has is her friends' continued loyalty and a vague heading - south, beyond the mountains.
Chapter Nineteen: Under Cover of Darkness
DG had left the village alone, and probably without word; for this, Wyatt wanted to turn on her and berate her until tears sprang from her eyes, such was his ire that everything, including her own safety, had taken back burner to her insatiable desire to save her mother. A more rational part of himself, though, realised it would be futile to turn on her without question of her motives. It took him a great deal of deep breathing to even begin to wrap his mind around the fact that he was just a little bit proud of her for making it this far without his taking notice.
There was nothing for it; damn it, he was walking straight into the mouth of it, practically skipping and grinning for the sake of it, but he wasn't getting out of this, and he wondered – later on, of course, but not just then – if she'd planned it that way when she'd set out after him.
That wasn't to say he didn't try put it off; he'd wound back halfway toward the village before he finally put a stop to his feet, impressed with how quickly and quietly she brought herself to a stop behind him. Standing in the middle of the path, he tucked a hand into his gunbelt and let his head lean back to take in a bit of the sky.
"You're gonna need to find yourself a new hobby, kid," he said, as if to himself.
A moment later, she stepped up behind him, solid enough to touch, though still hazy about the edges to his dark perceptions. "I was practising," she said, quite defensive upfront. He looked down at her, gave her a wry smirk. "Well," she added, "I wanted to see where you were going."
"Hmm." He glanced back up at the stars. "You could've just asked me."
She was silent, lingering behind his shoulder where he couldn't properly see her.
"Still not talkin' to me then, huh. Well, that's all right. I deserve it."
DG snorted, and he turned again to see her covering her nose and mouth with her hand; all he could see over the sleeve of her coat was a glimpse of pale skin, and the flash of her eyes. "I think that's the closest I've ever heard you come to an apology," she said. He could almost have guessed there was a smile in her voice, but the gloomy blue of the night around them wouldn't betray her.
"Well, don't count on it happening again any time soon," he muttered.
"Does that mean you don't plan on doing anything heartless any time soon?" she countered; her words weren't sharp, but conversational, curious. Damn her, the wide-eyed innocence and bright smile that drew away from her dead-panned sarcasms and biting wit. It was by no small effort that she'd charmed her way this far into his life, and his own effort to keep her at arm's length seemed to be weakening with every passing day.
He frowned. "Can't account for what I don't plan on, Deege."
There was no response from her, not right away at least, when he expected her to lash back with another quick remark; she had nothing for him, except for a small sigh and then utter quiet. The night around them moved of its own accord, small creatures going on about their wild existences, the wind playing a chord through the trees too bittersweet for a human ear to appreciate. Even the earth itself beneath their feet seemed to breathe and sigh in constant echo of the singing wind. The kind of night he'd taken for granted as a child, the kind of night he'd taken advantage of as a young man; the kind of night, he remembered with a twinge of regret, he'd dearly missed during the long and empty annuals of the suit.
It was through these woods that he'd brought his family to safety; it was to this earth that he'd been staked and left to die. To this familiar ground, he'd fled after the eclipse, all the while knowing the girl was finally steady enough on her own to feet to weather his leaving without worry of falling.
He'd relied on her strength to carry his weakness, for DG was more whole than he, and it was with no small amount of shame that he'd born that burden as far as he had.
Such were his roving thoughts; whatever DG concerned herself with, he didn't know, nor was he inclined to ask. There were more important things to be concerned with; he couldn't deny that his presence at his side – or hers at his, he hadn't yet decided – was no small coincidence. At the very least, he could balance the scales again, stand at the ready to catch her when she inevitably stumbled along this path she'd set for herself.
He owed her nothing less.
"So we go south," he said.
"I guess we do," she replied. She walked past him, a few steps beyond where he'd anchored himself. Then, she said, her voice uncertain and small, "The books said –"
"I don't know 'bout what was in your books, kiddo," he said, "but I'd wager that most of what was written in them was done after the fact, annuals after the last living memory had passed on." Sometimes fabricated. Mostly accurate.
"History is written by the victors."
He frowned. "Somethin' like that. I can't tell you anything more than what the mutt's told you; isn't exactly my area of expertise."
"Tutor's repeated the same creationist myths of the Ancients to me over and over since we left Finaqua," DG said darkly. "Four powerful witches who fought for supremacy when the world began. Light won out over dark, and the rest is – well, the rest just is. The four had abandoned the O.Z. long before the Gales." She sighed. "He doesn't know how the witch that – how the thing that took my sister was one of those four, but Azkadellia said it was."
"You believe her?"
"Not her. Not Az, I mean," she said. "The Mystic Man. He knew, too. When he –"
Cain stiffened, an automatic response that didn't shake away as easily as he would have liked. "When what, darlin'?"
"He confronted Az – I mean the Sorceress – right before she killed him." She swallowed hard. "He said, 'I know you, witch.' Those were his last words. At least, I think... I don't –"
He felt a heaviness descend in his chest as he watched DG wrap her arms around herself, her head hanging with the memory. Her dark, unfinished admission wormed its way into the deepest parts of his mind where he knew without doubt that the empty, echoing words would never leave him. Even if he would one day forget how small and utterly human that DG seemed that night, her words – the old man's words – would never cease their hold on him.
"DG," he said, and she raised her chin to look at him with eyes highlighted by the pale moons; colourless eyes, no sweet blue. "Seems to me we've had this talk before. Letting the past drag you down isn't –"
"The past?" she said suddenly, sharply; her arms dropped from their defensive cross over her stomach to ball her fists at her sides. "What is the past, exactly, and what's history other than words in a book? Books that the Sorceress had destroyed!"
He closed his eyes for a moment; he wasn't up for this, where the hell was the zipperhead when he was truly needed? "That isn't exactly –"
"No," she said firmly, though there was no anger in her voice, and for that he supposed he should be grateful, "no, this is it exactly. Dorothy Gale slipped over almost two centuries. If the High Four were said to have abandoned the Outer Zone long before the arrival of Dorothy Gale, then why do the stories all say she had the blessing of Glinda, or Glinneth, or whoever!"
"Those stories are nothing but –"
"Fairytales, I remember. Stories for children," she said. "You call me 'kiddo' and then are surprised I want to believe the fairytale instead of the hard-proven history written by an old man, copied from what was written by another old man!S"
Without replying, for there was no right answer he could give, Cain sighed and moved off the path, leaning his back against the straight, knotted trunk of a tree. It was steady and strong, it supported his weight when his own legs were too damn tired to do it any more. Short of the world turning itself upside down, the tree wouldn't give out on him and it was the kind of trust that was wanting in the Zone these days, a beaten ex-Tin Man and a godsdamned tree.
She was still waiting on his response, though, and she wasn't going away. Cain looked up at the sky, down at the forest floor, anywhere but at that faintly hopeful face. In bright sunslight, he wondered if he'd be able to handle it, those piercing blue eyes. Here, hiding under the blanket of night, the lines blurred, and what terrified him most was not the fading of their boundaries but how comfortable he was beginning to find the possibility. That she came closer at that moment was only natural progression, the new way of things. She slid her back down the trunk until she'd folded into a neat and relaxed huddle near his feet; listing against him, it wasn't the tree supporting her, but him.
He looked down at her, thinking that she'd be watching him, expecting; her face was not upturned to take him in, but staring out into the deepest parts of the night. Unsure of what to say, of what she wanted, he waited until she'd gathered up her thoughts enough to tell him, and as was the usual way, he was sorely disappointed when she did.
"Tell me a story," she said. Such a simple request.
He sighed. "Nothing I can tell you that you haven't heard before."
"I want to hear you tell me."
"Deege –"
"Wyatt, please?"
Whatever fight he'd planned on putting up, her soft appeal turned it all back on him. There hadn't been an instance in all the time he'd known her where she'd called him by his given name, always keeping herself at a distance, his surname a safer distance than the familiarity of what few ever called him. Wyatt, she'd said.
Was it truly defeat if he only relented this one little bit? What could it hurt, in the end?
Wyatt. He wondered if it wasn't too late to go back to that 'mister' business.
Cursing himself, his patron, and the very Zone itself, he sank down to sit beside her. With one leg stretched out before him, he bent his other knee, and this was where he perched his hat as he took it off to run a hand over his face. Stalling, building her up to the point that she nudged him with her elbow, impatient like.
"The way I remember it, starts off with a little girl fallin' out of the sky and getting herself caught up in all sorts of trouble," he said, smirking despite himself. "You should know this one by rote."
"Just because you know something by heart doesn't mean you don't like hearing it once in a while," she said sensibly. She looked up at him, gave him a small smile. "Just so you know."
Fair enough. "Little girl landed, house and all, in the east," he said, pulling up memories of the tale as they came to him. A story with no one right way to tell it; Adora's soft laughter came back to him, scolding him for telling it wrong to their son. He cleared his throat, swallowing the memory back down as hard as it had just hit him. "She landed her house on a wicked witch, dead and buried forever beneath the cellar door. That brought the attention of another witch, this one about as good as they come, and she gave the girl the protection she was going to need. That's where the slippers come into it."
DG shifted against him. "And then she followed the Old Road."
"New road, back then," he said, and she gave a dismissive little sniff. "Found some friends along the way. Sound familiar yet?"
"Our lives aren't a fairytale," she said, wise and deep and sad all at once, and he regretted trying to bait her. "Tell me where it gets different, Cain –" And here, he felt a wave of relief that she hadn't uttered his given name again, "– Tell me where it stops being true, if even any of it is true." She moved then, exposing her back to the night so that she could crouch in front of him, face him dead-on. For all her unreadable emotion, he was glad then for the shadows that hid her eyes, for he ventured then that the fire that undoubtedly raged was fierce enough to burn him.
"Why do you need to hear this again?" he asked. "Why from me?"
She fell back a little, resting on her heels, but she offered him no response.
Cain sighed, knowing he was being a bastard about it; after all, was it really too much to ask?
"The little girl and her friends walked the road to the city, to visit a mystic who would return her home. Instead, he sent her and her magic shoes to kill the second wicked witch." He paused, knowing this is what she'd been wanting to hear him say all along. "And so, she did. She killed the witch's sister, but after all her trouble, the mystic was a fraud who couldn't help her."
DG nodded slowly. He waited for her to interrupt him again, but she managed control of her tongue long enough for him to finish. "And so with nowhere left to turn, the little girl went lookin' for the help of the last witch, the most powerful; not as nice as the first witch, but just as good. And she sent the little girl home."
Bedtime version, short and sweet. Good for instilling values in little hearts – that is, if the war hadn't come to wither and jade the hearts and lives of those little ones. Not a one person he'd met along the road in these months since the war, not one had held such fanciful reasoning in them any longer.
DG, though... DG hadn't known the war, hadn't grown with the shadow of the Longcoats lurking ever over her shoulder. She'd known sunshine, a full belly, love where others, such as his son, had known fear and cold and emptiness. Adora's arms would've been stiff, and thin, not enough.
"Did she go alone?"
DG's voice, sudden and quiet, broke into his thoughts, an actual shattering that sent him reeling.
"What?"
"The girl, did she go alone?" She'd crept up while he was thinking and was close to sitting on his legs now; she knelt with legs folded underneath, hands flat on the tops of her legs.
With a sigh, he gave her half a smile, though he wondered if she could see it in the gloom. "'Course not."
"Good," she said, and then she was standing, a single, swift burst. He stood, though more slow and careful were his own movements, replacing his hat as he went. "Thanks," she said, "I know you don't believe in that stuff, Cain."
"Not so much a case of believing this time, if you ask me," he said. "More like a cause for trust, and no, I don't trust it, and neither should you."
"I don't," she said, "I just –"
"It's okay, darlin'," he said, and he brought his hand to rest on her shoulder. He drew her in under his chin, holding her fast with one arm. She hesitated, initially anyway, tugging back against the pull, but she came easily enough, allowing him to shelter her this brief moment, as if she were certain it was all he'd ever have to give her. Her hands she braced on his chest, folding her arms between them, still with her careful walls.
He didn't need her to explain herself, didn't want her to. He knew all too well, somewhere in the deep cavity of his chest where his heart presumably still pumped on, what hope could do to a person, and how crushing the defeat could be. Eight annuals of torture and loss had let that tiny gleam of hope blind him at the thought of his family still living, and in the end, he'd been forced to lose his wife again, and he'd just barely managed to grab hold of his son before he slipped through his hands forever.
There was no telling this girl shivering against him that she should give it up, hold onto what she had left and let go of what was always meant to leave her. She was too stubborn, and he–
Damn it.
Pressed up against him as she was, she felt him stiffen, and she pulled back enough to get a view of his face. Her hands were still on his chest, flat palms small and barely there through his vest. She moved half a step back, her hands falling away and leaving naught but empty spaces in their absence, but she stayed close, and his hand – heavier now that he was trying his damnedest not to shake – remained on her shoulder.
"We should head back," she said quietly, and he nodded in compliance. He allowed her to lead the way, staying those few steps back all the while, never having the courage to walk beside her as he should. Everything he'd run from was falling back into familiar place, and he was bound here, to her; with no option to turn back. They were going to see where the road led them.
What worse time was there for a heart to vie for a second chance.
