Recap: Khia ran away with Oak and got lost. Good for her.
She's never been alone before.
She's been surrounded by warm bodies, constantly, since birth; swamped by her peers in the basement; accompanied, ceaselessly, by Etch and Gideon, and then Andraste; lastly, finally, she'd been in the midst of Miss' faceless masses, one soldier in a sea of troops. Even in the middle of escape, she'd had Oakpaw by her side and pursuers at her heels. Now, as she wakes up, the glare of morning sunshine in her eyes, she realizes just how alone she is.
There's no heart to beat alongside her own, no breaths to drown hers out. She is unsettled.
As she gets up, she tries to imagine she has someone with her: Gideon, Thad, even Elettra. The effort only makes her paranoid. What if she is not alone after all? She and Gideon had been sure of their solitude, their privacy, their- heaven forbid- relative sense of safety. They'd been so wrong, and Etch had ended up just so dead.
Now she is lonely and paranoid. Khia decides, belatedly, that this is a bad combo. But she has no one to share this discovery with, no companion to vent to.
Khia grooms herself quickly, with a sense of potent urgency. She feels like she has to, like she simply needs to be clean, especially after a restless night in a grimey alley. The city is such an ugly place; she feels corrupted by the mere filth of it, the dirt on the ground, the smog of the air. That fresh forest breeze only seems like a memory now, a faint and elusive lure. If it was a promise, it wasn't meant for her. Khia finishes her routine (truncated, but a routine nonetheless), though her ear is inverted and pinned against her head and a scrap of fur sticks out on her chest.
She has more to think about than fur.
"I should leave now," she says. It comes out unsure. She tries it again, makes it an imperative. I should leave now. I should leave now.
And she does.
She has a vague sense of direction and leans on it entirely. It seems to get her somewhere. The city is still a maze, but now she knows what turns she takes, where she's been, the sorts of places she should steer clear of. Creatures she should avoid. Khia, despite this, is not careful enough.
She walks, and the sun burns her skin through her fur. The pavement stings her feet, which, after her muddled time as a captive, in one place or another, are soft from regular disuse. She doesn't talk to herself again, because her voice carries and bounces off the walls around her. Khia feels miserably alone. This feeling is not destined to last.
She rounds a corner, guileless, unassuming, and bumps into a chest. It is another cat- a tom- with fur that shines reddish in the light. Khia freezes. He smells familiar; like gloom and musk, like many unwashed bodies, like the ripe industrial odour of the warehouse.
Khia's breath catches in her throat as it constricts, and stays there. She doesn't dare crane her head back at some ridiculous angle to see his face, but keeps staring at his chest and the slick fur that brushes her nose. It seems to tremble before her eyes, as though in the wake of some kind of an exhale or sigh, but she doesn't breathe. For a moment, neither does Ru.
It is a long moment.
Head down, eyes averted, Khia makes to move past him, to continue her little journey and be on her way. Rhydderch- her guardian, her captor, her father- deigns to stop her.
"Is that really you, Khia?" He asks the question with the sound of wonderment in his voice. Is it really so inexplicable that Khia, alone and defiant, might survive the odds stacked against her for just a night or two? Can her survival really be so surprising?
"No," she says, though she makes no childish attempt to disguise her voice. It would only sound fake, even to him. She begins walking, half certain he'll trip or tackle her. It seems like a possibility.
Khia fixes her sights on a distant streetlamp. It's a tall, forlorn thing, leaning on some lonely angle, stretching its bleak shadow across the ground. Ru pauses; she can almost hear the deliberation inside him, the hesitancy. But then, as though he hasn't missed a single proverbial beat, he falls into line beside her, dwarfing her steps with the size of his own.
"Where are you going, young lady?" The tone of his voice is positively paternal.
"Nowhere that concerns you," snaps Khia. This is all she needs: Rhydderch, interfering, yet again. "If you'd be so kind, stranger, I must hurry on." Keep up the pretense. Pretend I'm some highly realistic doppelganger of myself.
"I know it's you, Khia." He sounds stern now. "You can't hide from me now."
"Why not?" Khia says, mirroring the cadence of his anger.
"You're my charge, and you still answer to me!"
She sneers at this. She owes this foolhardy tom nothing at all. He locked her away, presuming to know what was best for her; that, he decided, was a cage, and bars, and a lock. If anything, she owes it to the bastard to get out of his sight before she does anything unbecoming, like marr his pretty face with a set of scars.
"Answer to you?" she asks sweetly. "Just how you answer to my mother, or your father, or some ridiculous little army and their endearing mascot? You're everyone's lackey, Ru, but I'm not yours. You haven't even seen me for weeks. You let me sign myself up for conscription, knowing that the army is a doomed cause! You're not my custodian. You're not even my friend."
She looks into his eyes, then, as she delivers the line, the jugular strike. They're wide, and they glisten, as though he is sad. As though he's capable of accessing any real emotion at all.
Then his lips curl up; he looks every bit the liar, the conceited and arrogant fool.
"I don't need to be your friend." He says this as though there's a queue of sycophants waiting around the nearest corner to swarm and flatter him. Perhaps there is. "I need to keep you out of danger."
"Well, you'd need to smuggle me out of the whole city for that," Khia says snidely, lengthening her stride in some dubious attempt to outpace him. His face almost seems to flicker with something, a lightness, present only with a kind of devious brevity.
"You're determined to get out of here, aren't you?" he asks. He doesn't even sound resigned to the idea; he's humouring her, probably, or idly inquiring after her intent to suit his own.
Khia says, "Yes." There's no harm in the truth. It's nothing he can't figure out with his underdeveloped little brain, anyway. She's going only in one direction- up and out- and it's obvious. Still, she kicks herself for continuing the conversation, for letting Ru think he's still got a place in the moment, this street, the space beside her.
He inches ahead of her, leading her along by the tiniest fraction. She turns, and so does he, and they walk until Khia not sure what path they've taken, only that it seems to be an exit. An escape from the great city itself. She's mature enough not to sprint away from him, to retain some kind of dignity in the face of his judgement and disapproval. She'll lose him somehow; perhaps in the fringes of the city, on the very border of the wilderness. Ru was never built for slumming it, for going rough, for forging his own path. He stays on his tracks. He has an unwavering history of compliance, collaboration, and safety. Khia will be alone again by nightfall.
"Why?" he asks. The curiosity in his voice sounds fake. It incenses her.
"Why what?" she bites back. "I don't have all day to teach you the ins and outs of any random constituent, Ru, to make up for your lacking education."
"Why do you want to leave? Last I saw, you were fairly cosy with that defective little tom and his handsome brother in the warehouse. Seemed like you had a nice setup, though the locale could be upgraded, it's hardly an affluent sort of neighbourhood-"
"Shut up!" Khia snarls. "This is all your fault. If only you'd protected Cariad like you 'protect' me, I wouldn't have to do this. But you didn't, and he was sent away to die, and I'm the only living soul ready to do something about it, so if you have a problem, you can back off, Ru, and shove all your lopsided morals up your ass as you go!"
Rhydderch almost misses a step, but he manages to make it look, as he does with everything, smooth.
"Ah," he says softly. "A quest for revenge."
Khia feels like she might fly out of her skin. "No! It's strictly a rescue mission, you airheaded harlot!"
She can't face the look he sends her, the pity that must be on his face. He's wrong; they all are. And he was stupid enough to bring up Gideon, when all she's trying to do is not think of him, not feel the guilt the memory of his face summons. Defective. God, if she were Oakpaw, she'd teach Ru a real kind of lesson: not one with pithy words, but teeth, and claws, to make him learn something. To open his eyes or sever his silver tongue.
She has so much to blame him for- Tillman's, and its cages, Cariad, Etch, Arrah. It's a small miracle she hasn't forced any bodily harm upon him yet.
"I understand," Ru replies, placating now, but the sound of it is still fake. He could be luring her into a trap the next street over, serving, as always, his own interests.
She wants to say let me go, but that implies a sense of ownership or possession. Khia will not be caught, sold, or had. She refuses. If there's anything for Ru to understand, it's this.
"I have to go," she tells him, instead of all this. He has notoriously deaf ears, after all. She might call it selective hearing if she were angling for a more tactical approach.
"I'll tag along," Ru responds, sounding so light and casual that it takes her a moment to catch his meaning, his intent. She wants to recoil, to break rank and run. And yet… the concept of not being alone is a relief, a luminous prospect. Rhydderch is, at the very least, a warm body to throw between herself and any danger coming her way.
Which does she hate more? The isolation, or the tom who has, erroneously, shaped her short life to suit only his own designs? The tom who may as well be her father, the one who loves her more than even his own children. The very tom beside her, full of failings and misdeeds. If only she could count them all.
Khia says, "I don't think so." She means to kill the conversation, to move off onto her own path, alone.
Ru just says, "I don't think so."
Khia gives him a glance, a little side-eyed glare.
"I'm going with you," Ru says. "I won't let you be alone."
He's staring ahead in a determined kind of way, an improbably stubborn set to his mouth, a hardness in his jaw.
Khia can't help but scoff. "Out there? In the wild? You won't last five minutes."
"Neither will you," he counters. "Maybe together we'll survive for ten. I don't know much, but I can at least tell you that ten is more than five."
Khia does hate loneliness, the lack of companionship, the relative promise of safety in numbers. She feels like a kind of herd animal at heart, born and raised in a crowd. But she has hated Ru ever since he sold her brother to a war he won't support, and locked her in a cage in the name of his own conscience. But she must think pragmatically: it's perhaps the one thing he won't expect of her, the only thing she can do to throw him. The way, she hopes, she can find her brother and help him escape with his life. Ru's life must just be the kind of bargaining chip she can use. At the very least she can employ him as chief food scavenger.
"Fine," she says, injecting that single word with the appropriate amount of resignation and annoyance. It's not hard to sound as sullen as she feels. Ru doesn't even look surprised, only faintly smug. Perhaps she was supposed to put up more of a fight. But Khia knows she has a better fight to focus upon- the fight for Cariad's life and freedom. Rhydderch pales in comparison. He'll know it soon, too.
"Great," Ru says, proceeding to steer her past a bridge, down some quaint riverside alley. "This is the way out of the city."
Khia looks around, contemplatively; it's clear now Ru has only been driving her in circles and hazy loops, to sidetrack her, keep her trapped. He really has not changed. She ignores him in favour of staring at the wide world beyond the city; the wildness of it, the vastness, the vague distance of the horizon. She's never seen anything like it; for a moment, withdrawn and pleasing moment, she's happy to be here.
Rhydderch almost leaves her behind as he walks away without pause, unfazed by the sights before him, by the absolute lack of anything Khia can call familiar. She hurries to catch him. Already she is afraid of being alone. Companionship is fleeting, she knows, and their sojourn will likely be short.
She thinks they must make an odd pair, as they walk from everything they've ever known into the from the city into the badlands beyond; Ru, tall and sleek, and so misplaced; her, tiny, ragged, and reaching for a goal that has never been closer. She feels triumphant.
I'm coming, Cariad. I won't fail again.
y'all who do you want to die i'm taking requests
