Work Text:
creation
She thought they would never be caught.
They’re asleep by the fire, Otan’s thin legs a sturdy pillow for her head, her breathing soft enough to lull him to sleep. Their camp is quiet, the rowdiness of a drinking game dwindling along with the firelight and the supply of grain alcohol stolen from a wealthy Polis merchant.
Emori is almost asleep when rough, angry hands jerk her awake. She feels her brother shift, then swear while her head is knocked to the ground, unceremoniously waking her from her half-slumber.
“What the hell?” she asks, half-awake, fully angry. It’s been months since they joined Baylis’ crew and weeks since they proved themselves as loyal. She thought they were finished with these pathetic games of well-worn mistrust. “I was sleeping.”
“You were stealing,” Baylis snarls. Emori realizes one of his seconds has a knife to Otan’s throat. Baylis’ own glints in the light from where it rests near Emori’s heart. “One of you took something from us. A piece of tech.” He presses the knife down. Emori feels her blood sing with fear. “Where is it?”
“Go to hell,” Emori snaps. “We didn’t steal anything.”
Baylis cracks her across the face. The handle of his knife cuts into the soft skin of her left cheek, right above the tattoo. She bites back a cry, baring her teeth instead.
“I said,” Baylis hisses, “where’s the fucking tech?”
She knows where it is. It’s in Gideon’s hands, halfway to the island. Their theft was insurance for a life after this -- a life after Baylis and the others tire of the frikdreina and her brother and cast them out, the latest in a years-long story every mutant knows well.
She looks over her shoulder at Otan. Did you do it? His eyes ask.
No , hers reply. Did you?
He shakes his head ever-so-slightly, fear creeping over them both. They know they are lying. They know what happens to thieves.
Emori is chained in the dark, kept immobile by knots and metal too strong for her aching muscles to break. They come with knives, with crude whips and seawater to burn the wounds they make. She groans, but doesn’t cry out, cries out but doesn’t scream, screams into the silence, but doesn’t beg-
Doesn’t beg until Baylis returns -- this time, with her brother, and she wants to cry because he looks like hell, bruised and beaten, shoulders slumped and eyes dull -- and even then, she says nothing until he moves over her, holds a knife curved like a scythe under her right eye and presses down and down, smothering her, making Otan bloody his wrists to reach her, and in the distance she hears herself begging, but never once confessing.
He throws them out after that. He and his crew take everything they own as payment, and they run.
Emori doesn’t speak for days. Her pleas wasted all her words.
retention
They return to the desert -- the only place that covers their tracks without being asked. They have nothing but the clothes on their backs and the half-full canteen Emori swipes from an abandoned pile of supplies on their way out of camp.
Their first day back, Otan kills a Wastelander -- those soft idiots who think they can live on this barren land -- and takes his horse.
You idiot, Emori thinks, watching the Wastelander’s blood seep into the sand. You can’t live out here - only survive.
She watches until his blood runs dry. Otan lets her.
She likes the horse. She doesn’t name him, but she likes to stroke his soft nose, listen to him whicker and sigh when she feeds him a dried piece of fruit or gives him the last of her water. It soothes the empty ache inside her to make something so innocent happy.
Otan finds her a scrap of cloth to cover her face while the wounds heal. The sand still scrapes against the scabs, and Emori knows they will scar but can’t bring herself to care. She tells herself it’s because her beauty doesn’t matter, but she knows somewhere deep in her gut that she will never feel anything right again.
When she wakes in the middle of the night with a swollen, pus-filled wound from the crescent scar under her eye, Otan groans and swears, punctures it with a semi-clean knife and stitches it crudely, all the while scolding her for letting it get so bad.
“It could have gotten infected,” he tells her while she grips her knee tightly against the pain of the needle on her flesh. “You need to be careful.”
“I don’t care,” she whispers, shifting her eyes away from her brother’s face. “I don’t care.”
He sits back on his heels, wiping her blood off on his shirt. “You were brave,” he says, and she sees her pain mirrored in his eyes. It’s the closest thing to praise she’s gotten from him in a long time, and she takes it, holds it close to her chest and tries to sleep.
They meet Gideon by the water. He’s willing to keep their deal, but they have nothing to trade, so he sends them back out into the Dead Zone to scavenge and steal. Emori revels in it, in the uncomplicated art of the con, the only thing she’s good at aside from pretending she isn’t hungry or thirsty - something she is doing right now as Otan lays a trap for their next mark with an abandoned cart they find near the bottom of a hill.
“Stay here, give them a story and lead them east,” he says, pointing over his shoulder. “Understand?”
Emori doesn’t want to be alone. She only has a knife for protection, and her strength is waning fast. It’s been days since her last meal, and her body knows it. Deep down, she is afraid.
Their horse whinnies. Emori reaches out to pat his side. “I understand.”
He rides away. She winces at the flex and pull of the stitches in her cheek. Her other wounds ache and burn in the sun. She pulls the cloth over her mouth and waits.
realization
She didn’t know there were scars until she catches a glimpse of herself in the water’s reflection.
It’s been more than a few days since she met the boy in the desert, the one she doesn’t allow herself to think about, the one with the laugh caught in the back of his throat and the awkward smile and the stutter and shaking hands as he offered her water.
She gave him directions to the place where he could find her. His companions were searching for the City of Light, but he wasn’t, and she hopes against all that one day, maybe today, she’ll return to the island, and he’ll be there. She doesn’t think he’ll be waiting for her, but maybe she can convince him to forgive her for knocking him out.
It was a survivor’s move, after all.
She leans on the boat’s rail, the searchlight illuminating the dark water below, and looks down, hoping to catch a glimpse of the silvery fish that sometimes swim beside the boat, hungry and curious.
She sees herself instead, and bile rises in her throat at the sight of the half-circle scar under her eye, the gashes along her jaw and cheekbone. They don’t look as harsh as she guesses they would under real, harsh light, but they nauseate her and terrify her all the same.
Otan blows the boat’s horn. Emori glares at him over her shoulder, then relaxes when she sees them start to near the shore. Gideon is there, as is another figure, a man with dark skin, and another whose back is to them.
Her whole body stiffens, tenses like a rope about to snap. There’s so many of them and one of her, and the newly discovered scars marring her skin itch and burn as a reminder of just how dangerous men could be.
The smaller man, the one whose back is to her, turns, and she squints into the dark to catch a glimpse of pale skin and high cheekbones. Is that-
“John?” She maneuvers around Otan and can’t keep the smile off her face when she sees him, thin and incredulous, but obviously, remarkably the same. “I don’t believe it.”
“Emori?”
She breaks into a smile of relief at the voice, that voice , because it belongs to the boy she’s been begrudgingly missing for weeks. It's too good to be true, she decides, and even better than that when he climbs up next to her and leans on the rail, their arms almost touching.
"Jaha found the City of Light," he says, gesturing to his companion, who is kneeling at the back of the boat, a strange silver thing strapped to his back.
She looks at him, raising an eyebrow. "Did you?" When he shakes his head, her heart sinks. "Are you alright?"
Her concern must startle him; he looks at her with a sharpness that makes her flinch. "Y-yeah. I'm fine."
She nods. They stand there, side-by-side, and watch the fog roll over the sea. It's the first time in months she has felt at peace.
retribution
The man tied to the chair isn’t Baylis, but Emori doesn’t care.
After the story of theft and darkness and pain clawed its way out of her stomach and into John’s ears, she spent night after night tamping down the nightmares, the paralysis that seeped into her bones and tricked her hands into being bound by invisible ropes.
She will never feel trapped like that again, she vows. But that’s a futile promise now, now that they’re in this house and this lab with people that might take her and lock her into a glass coffin to bleed and break and die.
No. She doesn’t want this. She will not plead for her life. She will not let herself become a sacrifice for the people that hate the only one she loves.
So she will lie, and she will steal, and she will do everything she was punished for in the dark because if she is going to live, she will gladly pay the cost, because not a damn thing hurts her anymore, not after that night, the one that not even John knows about.
And if she uses not-Baylis as a stand-in for all the pain and fear she has kept hidden in the pit of her stomach, that’s her business.
After the first few hits, John stops pacing and watches her. She feels his eyes on her bloody hands and revels in it, in the terror she feels coming off the unknown man in waves. It’s easy to pretend he is Baylis — the trauma is fresh, the wounds only a little less — and it’s even easier to ease the knot in her stomach with fists instead of truthful words.
John could not stand to look at her if he knew. She would be a dirty thing to him, something used up and sad. She will not be anything less than strong. She will not beg. She has spent too many days and nights at the world’s mercy, and she is so damn tired.
John knows this. He lets her run herself out until her fists and knuckles scream for mercy. She feels the pain, winces at it, but doesn’t want the adrenaline to fade.
Oh , is it rush to make someone else beg before her for a change.
absolution
She studies herself in the mirror that hangs across from the bed she and John share. It’s big and empty, like the house around them, but it’s so soft and makes John smile, so she can begrudge them both this impractical comfort. Just the thought of John’s contented smile as he curls under the warm blankets makes her smile; she watches in mild fascination as her reflection’s lips quirk up ever-so-slightly.
Her eyes are dark. Her lungs ache - that dull, clean feeling after a heavy storm or a good cry. She breathes in, out, and touches the line of her jaw, the top of her cheeks. The scars are finally fading, little more than memories that her fingertips chase. The stitches Otan never removed are lumpy under her right eye, but the scar itself is nearly healed, the combination of sun and time erasing the last reminder of the worst night.
“Did it help?” John asks softly, coming up behind her, pressing a kiss to her temple and winding his arms around her waist.
She leans her head back, tipping her head and nosing at his neck until he leans down for a kiss. “Yes,” she says softly, precisely, and he smiles in the mirror. It’s a mean smile, a proud smile.
“He deserved it. For hurting you,” he says, and the ache is back because how does she deserve someone who loves her enough to fight for her?
She hums, reaches her good hand up to tangle in his hair, watches in fascination as his reflection’s eyes close reflexively. “Many people have hurt me, John.”
“You should beat them all,” he says, pressing a kiss to the soft skin of her arm. Then, after a moment, “Why were you staring at yourself in the mirror?”
She takes a deep breath. “I used to have scars. My reflection is strange to me now.”
He nods, sighs. “I remember. The one under your eye looked like it hurt like hell.”
“Why didn’t you ever ask?”
He shrugs. “If you wanted me to know, you would tell me.”
She turns, wraps her arms around his neck, walks him backwards until he’s sitting on the edge of the bed and she’s standing between his legs. “I want to tell you something. And you’re going to hate it.”
He says nothing. She lets the story pour out of her like a waterfall. When she’s finished, his hands are gripping his knees tightly, and there’s a vein bulging in his neck. The phantom scars she searched for earlier burn.
“I swear to fucking-” he starts, then stops. “I’m going to kill him,” he says with vehemence.
“No,” she says, catching his arm as he starts to stand up. She feels like lead, like she could collapse at any second. “Come rest with me.”
She doesn’t ask for it, but he hears her, looks down at her with a soft gaze and leads her to bed, pulling her to his chest and caging her with his arms. Vaguely, before sleep pulls her under, she marvels at his selflessness. Were the roles reversed, she would not be strong enough to forsake revenge for another’s comfort.
Or maybe she would be. He has always been her exception.
The last thing she feels is his thumb tracing her cheek. When she wakes, she could swear the last of the scar has disappeared.