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She still felt as though she were choking, like the muscles in her neck were being mercilessly squeezed until they popped, like her head would explode because of the lack of oxygen. Each intake of air was greedy, almost gasping as she fought to keep breathing, even if the rope was long gone and her heart was beating steadily in her chest.
It had begun to rain.
The water was pooling outside the cell and slowly creeping its way inward, swirling with the dirt and muck and piss and shit…all the things that made up the hovel they were being kept in. She was already shivering. Swallowing around the lump in her throat, the phantom pain around her neck, she reached over and yanked Quynh none to gently into her side.
She’d been quiet since the hanging and Andromache couldn’t be bothered to let her deal with it all on her own anymore. It was the right move. Quynh inhaled sharply, one hand sitting loosely on the base of her throat, just barely able to reach with the chains tied around her wrist. She pressed closer, until their bodies were closely intertwined, what meager heat they were giving off, slowly seeping through their shifts and into each other.
“That was new,” Andromache murmured, forcing the words up and out of her throat. “Can’t say I liked that one.”
There was a long pause and she thought maybe Quynh might really and truly retreated, from herself, from them. But that was dumb, and she knew it, Quynh always took things in stride and a little bit of hanging wasn’t going to faze her.
“How many times did you come back?” Her question was murmured into the space of Andromache’s neck, her nose pressed against the skin, cold to the touch.
She didn’t want to think about it, not really. Casting her mind back to those few hours before, to genuinely contemplate the sensation of dying, was something she learned in the early days not to bother with. Yet, Quynh had asked and in this moment she would do just about anything to keep her talking, to keep her there in the moment so she wasn’t alone…she couldn’t stand the thought of being alone again.
Andromache closed her eyes, thought of the scratchiness of the rope around her neck, the popping in her neck has the weight of her body pulled against the muscles and bones that held her together, thought of the pain in her back that was rapidly drowned out by the squeezing in her lungs and the way her mouth had opened and closed on a silent plea for air. She remembered the darkness that crowded in and the blissful release…and the screams as her eyes opened and her lungs screamed and the darkness….the pain….the darkness….the pain….the darkness…
“Five,” she murmured. “Five times I think before they cut us down.”
Quynh hummed, “four I think, there might have been a few more but it didn’t really feel like my head was entirely back each time.”
She smoothed back Quynh’s knotted hair the best she could, trying to focus on this task and not think of it anymore, instead she carefully, steadily inhaled and exhaled. Even the stench of their prison was a welcome sensation in the end.
“What do you think they’ll try next?”
By now, Andromache was used to her companion, her lover, having an almost morbid curiosity, but this seemed different. Her voice, was quiet, worn thin, not by ropes and lack of air…but something that reached far deeper, something that bordered on despair.
She had fought enough wars, lead enough armies to know what a very real threat it was for troops to grow disheartened, to no longer believe in their cause or to lose their will for life and happiness. It was not a sound she’d ever thought she’d hear coming from Quynh, who hadn’t been plagued by doubts when she realized her immortality. She had wanted to die, to be certain, had thought herself something grotesque, but once she learned she was not alone, and they were good…well she’d never looked back.
“Nothing we can’t handle,” she replied. “Nothing we can’t face together.”
“I don’t want to be stuck here forever; I don’t want to live like this.”
“We won’t,” she worked to make herself sound sure. “We just have to wait for the right chance, and we’ll be free again.”
They would, it was just beyond their grasp at the moment but one day they would be freed and they would do it together…or if they didn’t they would die together, as one, as they’d always been since that day in the desert.
“It had never occurred to me,” she spoke slowly, hesitantly. “That it was not death I should fear but a life that is no life. I never thought a cage would be the worst thing in the world, all the pain we endured and helplessness…it eats me inside Andromache.”
Her heart broke at the words. She should be better than this, needed to be better than this. They had made promises, they were equals on the battlefield and in life, but that did not change the fact that she was older and, in many ways, had been Quynh’s guide, that made her life her responsibility.
She owed her everything, not just for their time together but for the love they had shared over these years. The love they had, was not something Andromache had ever thought she’d have the privilege of knowing, had never imagined there could be anyone like her, anyone whom she wouldn’t have to watch whither and die…and she wouldn’t do it now.
Pulling back just enough to finally see Quynh’s face, to grip her chin with two dirty and stained fingers, to look into her uncertain eyes, she whispered their mantra, “you and me, until the end.”
A quiet, pained smile graced her lips, “you and me, until the end.”
The kiss they shared was short, something that felt too delicate and too soft for the place they were in. They were soldiers and they had not yet left the battlefield, once they were free from this shit hole, Andromache already knew she would have to find them a small house, somewhere outside the city, where they could forget these horrors and learn humanity again…together, always.