Work Text:
Dismas held still as best he could as Vatteville cleaned, stitched, and bandaged what remained of his left arm.
“’Twill recover,” they said. Their mask was off. Their station was hot from the mixtures and titrations festering on the shelves. “Don’t go out for two weeks.”
Dismas grunted.
“’Course.” They lifted his coat; helped him into it. Tied his scarf around his face. Tucked a slip of paper into his front pocket; “for Reynauld.”
Dismas nodded. Might as well tell them now. He’d been sitting on the drawings ten days now. His throat itched.
“Vat.” Hoarse. He always sounded hoarse. “Tell y’something.”
They looked surprised. People always did, when he talked. Made him want to shut up again. He didn’t.
He fished out the paper. Back left pocket – hard to do with his arm all wrapped and shredded. Unfolded them. Not his best work. He’d been frenzied. Exhausted.
“Where’m from,” he said. “Somewhere. South… west.” Pointed down-left like he had a map. “Had. These animals.”
Opossums. But he didn’t think he could say it. Maybe in a minute.
Vatteville waited for him to regain his voice, touching the pages with one finger, gloveless.
Dismas pushed the pages into their hand so he could pull his scarf tighter over his mouth.
“They. Carry,” he said, pointing to the relevant drawing, “th’babes. Until – grown.”
Vatteville, still listening intently, angled their head towards the bench along the near wall. Maybe – maybe he would sit, Dismas thought, and pushed his back against the wall. Vatteville stood before him; they didn’t much like sitting down.
“Never saw’m – a’more’n – eight. Or so,” he continued, focusing on the slide of fabric over his lips. “But once. Saw’n. Had – twice.” Sixteen, he thought desperately, sixteen, but he couldn’t get that one out either. “All. H-heavy.”
Vatteville frowned, observing the drawings, eyes flitting side-to-side as they calculated roughly the load that the mother opossum had carried. Their teeth met in their lower lip.
“They – climb,” Dismas went on, gesturing because he knew his tongue hadn’t done the L-sound properly. “But she – s’heavy – stuck. A’ground.”
He grimaced at the need to pause yet again to collect himself, but Vatteville didn’t mind; never minded. “Not – her babes. Took from – ‘dopted. Extra.”
His arm hurt. As opposed to him getting used to the pain over time, it seemed to be flaring up worse than it had in the Ruins. Hot and sticky. Raw. “I,” no, “you – not. Carry s’many.” He growled; ‘coyote’ wouldn’t come. “Fox got her.”
Vatteville was silent a moment, still intent on the drawings. Stroking the page; tracing a gentle finger across the triangular snout. Dismas ducked his head; always felt stupid when he talked.
“What would you have me do, Dismas?” they spoke at last. Not the words themselves, but the softness of tone, startled Dismas into looking up; they viewed the drawings with a look of tender agony. “Let them die?”
Dismas looked away again; he couldn’t bear it. He wanted to apologize but he didn’t think – the words never – his mouth didn’t work. But the sorrow on their face – their default, the thoughtful crease between their eyebrows, was gone. He had— “Hurt—” No, damn it!
They snapped up to look at him; “No, no… ‘Tis just—” They shook their head. “Dismas – where else would they go?”
Dismas shook his head; buried it in his hands. Stupid.
A moment later, Vatteville was taking him by the arm, guiding him to his feet. “I’m not hurt, Dismas, truly. I am as stuck as you are – as are we all – I, I – I can’t—” their voice gave; they shivered. “I cannot abandon them, no more than the mother could abandon those babes.” There was a heady pause in which Vatteville drew away from Dismas; they never maintained contact long outside of occupational duties.
“I’ll walk you to the barracks,” they said, pulling their mask over their face. It was more of a statement than an offer; Dismas wouldn’t have refused regardless.
On the walk they flanked him on his right, their arm briefly bumping his every few steps. Dismas was struck by the thought that Vatteville slept at their station, halfway across the Hamlet from the barracks. Suddenly they appeared very small, four inches the shorter, masked and cloaked in the Hamlet streets, an accidental arm’s-brush the only nonworking touch they shared. And they’d been here the longest, apart from Reynauld and himself.
The Heiress, too, kept her distance, Dismas recalled, preferring to drop contact with her hired fodder. He had remarked of this to Reynauld – not in as coherent a phrasing – and he remembered the stoic monologue that had followed.
“I was with the nuns, once, in an Abbey, when I was young. I asked them, as a juvenile would ask, why the Light did not commune with us, Its creations. For did it not love us? Or, barring that, for it was not surprising that such an ancient and powerful Thing would outgrow love, did It not acknowledge us as Its own?
“Some of the sisters did not like the question, and pretended that they did not hear – one of them said I only had to listen for the Light, and I would hear it. But I received my answer not from a man or woman of the Church, nor even an adult, but from an urchin boy I passed crossing the plains.
“He was holding what I thought to be a rat, poor sustenance, and I thought to offer him some bread. But as I approached I saw in his thin arms rested the corpse of a dog – nay, a pup, scarce-weaned. I asked him: Was she yours?
“He said, ‘I wish only that she weren’t, and that I never loved her. For now, being unable to eat her, I will starve.’”
Dismas had understood what he’d meant, of course, even if he was a far cry from religious – yet he hadn’t thought to apply it to a circumstance like Vatteville’s. The Light and the Heiress had an unquestionable hold over those they avoided. Vatteville – well. They were one of them, were they not? One of Dismas and the rest, another pawn.
Yet he saw now, with an uncomfortable twinge in his left forearm, that perhaps there was a sense of power – nay, responsibility – that Vatteville did perhaps see the rest of them as theirs – theirs to save.
And painfully, because he expected only rejection, he raised his right arm in the manner of a nobleman offering it to some high lady. And, to his great shock, and in a way that was somehow both reluctant and relieved, Vatteville took his elbow in hand, and held fast to him for the remainder of the journey.