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Chapter Text

Rey woke from deep sleep suddenly, thoughts and consciousness crashing together like a car wreck as she scrambled to rise from the ground. Blinking grit from her eyes, she scanned the shadowy cave around her, checking her body for any restraints.

She stilled when she spotted a man sitting several yards across from her, skinning what looked like the carcass of a jack rabbit. If her heart had been thumping before, now it doubled in force and tempo, thundering through her so loudly her entire body thrummed.

He held a knife, and she had nothing.

At the commotion she caused, he looked up from his work briefly, then returned to the rabbit. With steady, smooth movements of his hands, he made easy work of it, as if he’d done it a thousand times before.

Rey tried to speak, but only a dry croak came out. Swallowing, she winced at the sandpaper feel of it, eyes watering with discomfort.

“Who are you?” she forced out, voice cracking. “What do you want?”

He glanced at her again, saying nothing, resuming his task.

Searching for an escape route, she took in the room around her— a surprisingly wide hole in the ground, if not very tall. Rough terra cotta stone made up the ceiling, floor, and walls. Only a single round opening on the opposite side of the cave with a primitive rope ladder leading up and out provided any exit. A beam of desert sun streamed down through the opening, bright enough to illumine the space with its ambient light.

As wide as the cave was, even hunched in his far corner the man seemed to take up a large part of it with his broad frame. His various belongings rimmed the perimeter, neat and stacked in rows where possible. A rolled up sleeping bag, cans of provisions, and even water jugs she realized, her thirst sudden and intense at the sight. Could she snag at least one and make it out of the cave before he caught her?

Not likely, she had to admit, already woozy from simply sitting up. Although with his bulk, she mused that he must have to really squeeze through that opening in the roof to get through. Maybe she could—

Stars swam into her field of vision, and she closed her eyes, willing them away. Her most recent memories were fuzzy, but she recalled walking for days through the wasteland above with no food or water, or even a head covering to protect her from the harsh sun.

Maybe she couldn’t escape this place like she had the others, but she could bluff.

“If you don’t answer my questions, I’m leaving.”

Pausing, he studied her with narrow eyes, his jaw working as though chewing through his thoughts. He settled on a shrug and gestured toward the hole in the ceiling with the hand that held the knife, as if to say 'be my guest’. And then, he went back to that damn rabbit.

Rey huffed. “You have no idea who I am. I could be a lunatic or a serial killer or something.”

This time he ignored her entirely.

Slumping back against the wall, Rey let out a sigh and watched the man finish ripping the hide from the rabbit and affix the body to a long, thin metal rod, probably to roast. If he bothered to catch wildlife for food, and she remained untethered, her chances of survival already looked better than the most recent hellhole she left.

She’d brave the brutal heat and risk almost certain death a thousand times over rather than wait for it at the end of a chain. As long as she had both her legs, one missing arm couldn’t hold her back from fighting as hard and as long as she could to escape that fate.

And maybe she had no clue where she was, or what this man’s motives were for presumably rescuing her, but she still had breath left in her. That counted for something.

Shaking her head to ward off unpleasant memories, she blurted out, “My name is Rey.”

His hands slowed only a moment, the only sign he’d heard her.

Under her breath, Rey muttered, “Whatever, screw you too.”

Pouting, she gave the cave another once over before closing her eyes to rest, but not before she spotted a plain leather-bound book on the floor tied shut with some sort of twine. The twine fastened a small black stick wrapped in thin parchment paper to the front of the book. Charcoal, she dredged up from old memory. Funny, that this random roamer living in the middle of the Deadlands would bother to keep a diary. There it lay next to his rolled up sleeping bag, a thing of rarity even back home. Why keep a physical copy when it could be downloaded? And so nonessential in this hostile place. What could he possibly have to write about? The heat, the sand? That’s all there was out here.

It also occurred to her that he must have given her something to drink at some point, or she wouldn’t be alive right now to think it all through.

She dropped into sleep without realizing it, and dreamed of warm hands and cool water.

***

The smell of cooked meat woke her, mouth watering and stomach cramping tightly with hunger. Besides wandering around with nothing but the clothes on her back for who knew how many days, when had she last eaten real food? A year? Possibly longer. Time passed with no meaning in the places she’d lived recently.

The Mill, sentenced to endless labor with no purpose. Digging for the deep water, the guards explained. Horseshit, the prisoners muttered back.

The trailer yard, chained like a dog, piece by piece of her taken—

The cramps became heaves, and Rey’s hand flew to her mouth as she rolled over onto her side and fought against the wave of nausea. The stump of her arm she pressed close to her chest, as if she could protect what was left of it.

Trembling, she made herself sit up straight and slow her breathing.

The man watched her from where he sat, his hands frozen in the act of tearing rabbit meat from a thigh bone. The shadows had deepened around them, telling her the day had passed into evening, but she could make out his dark eyes trained on her. Studying her.

“What?” she barked, the stab of embarrassment flaring into anger.

A glimmer of emotion flashed across his eyes, but the rest of him remained as impassive as the stone around them. Picking up a thin slab of rock with a few morsels of meat placed on it, he reached over and set it down within Rey’s reach.

She pursed her lips against the pinprick of guilt, but took the makeshift plate. Unsure at first if her stomach could handle it, the moment the food touched her tongue her hunger won by a landslide. Ravenous, she finished in seconds, hardly chewing for urgency. Still hungry, she licked her fingers.

“Can I have some more?”

He shook his head, not meeting her eyes.

Half the rabbit remained.

“But there’s enough,” she pointed out.

Like before, his jaw moved, his mouth working through what he wanted to say. He let out a long breath that sounded like a prayer for patience.

“Few minutes,” he mumbled quietly into the gloom.

Her eyebrows rose at the sound of his deep voice. So he could speak.

Silently, and avoiding looking at her, he held out a small leather bag.

Water.

She grabbed it and chugged, but it held nowhere near enough to satisfy her thirst. Wringing it to squeeze out every last drop, she then glared at the man for his stinginess. There were entire jugs full of water on his side of the cave, and here he was giving her the barest mouthful of it.

With his back toward her, he began to rummage through one of his supply bags and produced a sewing kit and a pair of pants. Crossing his legs and settling into work in the fading light, he delicately threaded the needle with fingers held close to his face.

Rey’s sense of resentment ebbed as she watched him quietly mend his clothes. She, a complete stranger, probably very recently on death’s door, had to be a drain on meager resources.

After a few minutes of silent work, he looked her over and, satisfied with what he saw, gave the smallest of nods to himself and prepared a few more strips of meat for her, setting them on the stone slab she’d set back down on the ground.

Suddenly overwhelmed, Rey blinked back tears that almost spilled down her cheeks.

“Why are you helping me?” she whispered around the lump in her throat.

He’d already soundlessly resumed sewing until the darkness of night overtook the cave. Rolling out his sleeping bag, he then lit a single wax candle with a flint lighter worn on a thin leather strap around his neck. Picking up his journal, he scribbled a few lines into it, holding it so close to the flame that Rey worried it would catch fire.

Blowing out the candle mere minutes later, the man turned over and laid down with his back to her.

With nothing else to do but follow suit, Rey wrestled in the dark with the unfamiliar feeling of indebtedness. Never in her life had she felt she owed anybody anything. Growing up alone on the streets of Ellay taught her to take what she could when she could get it. Only people with privilege could afford remorse. But with this desert roamer… somehow, she had to make it up to him, show him the effort of saving her was worth the price of water in a dried-out wasteland.

A nobody from nowhere had little to offer, but she could try.

Chapter Text

Rey thought the strong afternoon sun filtering through the hole in the ceiling woke her at first. Casting a glance around the cave as she pushed herself up, she found the roamer absent. Only his belongings remained, all as neat as before with even his sleeping bag once more rolled up and tucked against the wall.

The sweat-crusty gray jumpsuit chafed her where the sun had found exposed skin. The fabric was soft and thin from years of use, although when it was given to her, Rey refused to think about the countless other unwanteds who wore that same exact jumpsuit and faced the same exact helpless anger and despair as she did when they first reached their prison.

The dressing on her right arm’s stump stood out clean and fresh in contrast to the dingy sleeve rolled up to just above her elbow. Her wandering in the wasteland turned the original dressing as grimy gray as the jumpsuit. She shook her head at the discomfort settling into her belly at the thought of the precious water the roamer must have wasted to boil the dressing clean. And then to take the time and effort to wrap it again?

Who was he?

An indistinct raised voice sounded from outside and Rey realized what actually woke her.

She crawled over to the rope ladder and hoisted herself up into daylight with a great deal of difficulty, the ground scorching hot to the skin of her forearm as she dragged her body out of the hole. Heat or no, she prepared to come out swinging. 

“Oh my God.”

Harsh light blinded Rey even as blackness rimmed the edges of her vision at the effort of movement. Blinking through both, from where she lay on the ground she saw the giant roamer’s shadow stretching long. A woman regarded Rey from several yards away as though looking at a particularly disgusting insect.

Hackles raised, Rey threw her an expression every bit as loaded and attempted to stand, stumbling at the sudden swimming sensation in her head. Firm hands caught and held her steady.

“You can’t be serious,” the woman continued.

“Is there a problem here?” Rey shot back, struggling against the roamer’s grip to see around him.

His hands tightened on her. Rey stopped wrestling to get away and met his gaze with petulance, but he only shook his head at her in warning, brows furrowed.

Surprise at his closeness stilled her enough to convince him to loosen his grasp of one of her arms and turn back to the stranger.

Years of the sun’s touch had tanned her skin and lightened her hair, giving her a hard beauty. Like how a mountain lion could be beautiful. Behind her, a sand-blasted golf cart stood a few more yards off with piles of supplies strapped to it. It explained where he got all his stuff from, but why? And where the hell did this roamer come from with supplies to share?

A taut silence caught her attention as a thousand words passed between the man and the woman, not a single one said aloud.

With a muttered, “I’m going back in the hole,” Rey shrugged the roamer off and slid back down in to the much darker cave to brood. Clearly those two had some kind of history and Rey hated being the odd one out.

She lingered by the exit and pretended not to listen in the hopes of catching her roamer’s name. Only a few heavy thumps and the sound of the golf cart’s engine starting and fading reached her before the man began to lower the delivery down into the cave with more ropes.

His careful handling of each item made Rey huff and roll her eyes with impatience, but inwardly thanked him for taking the extra time. Knowing her, she probably would’ve broken something from shoving it all into the hole in her eagerness to squirrel it away and be done with the task.

Impatience— always the root of her trouble. Like back home when she tired of waiting in line at the Local Mart and tried to swipe a mealbar without bothering to notice the riot-crusher smoking a cigarette in front of the store. The lack of an IDme chip implant on inspection earned her ‘undocumented’ status and a one-way ticket to the Deadlands, where all the human refuse of Ellay got dumped at the Mill.

Rey watched with interest when the roamer’s turn came to descend, amused as he only just managed to squeeze through that hole with an unnatural angling of his shoulders. As soon as his feet hit the floor he began to organize and stash the cache. Irritation turned down the corners of his mouth.

An apology wouldn’t do. The fault lay with the lady roamer, anyway, throwing around all that attitude like she owned the damn desert. But the mood between Rey and her roamer had soured all the same.

Hoping to change that, Rey enigmatically stated, “I bet you forgot it.”

He paused stacking tin cans to half-turn toward her.

“Your name,” she explained airily. “You can’t tell me your name because you can’t remember it.” She stifled a laugh at the eye roll he gave her before turning back to his work. “It’s just up to me to guess it. I’ll say names and maybe one will jog your memory. We’ll go through the alphabet, I think.”

No reaction, only stacking.

“Okay. How about… Aaron?”

Ignored again.

“Not it, that’s fine. Alex?”

He shook his head as if in prayer for patience.

“Bill. Caleb. Cassian. No, not Cassian… Donald. Daniel. Uh, Evan,” she rattled off, biting back a smile as his shoulders drooped. His sanity would fail him before the alphabet ended.

“You know what, it’s not that you forgot it, you’re just embarrassed by it! It’s some fancy name you wish you could forget.”

Now he cast a dark look her way, telling her she might be on the right track.

“Eugene. Reginald.” Rey laughed at herself. “Armitage. Hmm… maybe it’s like, a feminine name,” she offered, eyeing his enormous frame. “Like, Stacey. Luanne. Susan!”

The smile on her face felt strange and wonderful, the laughter bubbling up in her a long-forgotten pleasure. The roamer now studied her, the frown gone.

“Samantha,” she pressed on. “Tiffany!” The giggles burst out of her and gushed until she teared up.

“No more,” he rumbled when her laughter subsided. The seriousness of his tone only barely hid the smile playing around his eyes.

“Oh, come on, just a few—”

“No, Rey.” Firmer this time.

Her name on his lips jolted her.

“Okay.”

The quiet that fell between them carried less of the tension from before and Rey considered that a win.

The roamer opened a can of beans and handed it to her, but when he didn’t open a second one for himself she slurped down only half the can and dutifully gave it back.

The quirk of a real smile at the corner of his mouth made her still empty stomach almost feel full.

Chapter Text

“It’s not infected or anything, right?”

In the light of early afternoon, the roamer shook his head in answer as he unwrapped the bandage from her arm. Despite his hands’ calluses and size, he handled her carefully, methodically. Rey tried to remember the last time she’d been touched with gentleness. 

Only the absence of rough handling caught her attention now, so used to it as a constant in her life.  Her experience in the Deadlands proved no different, her reception at the Mill only the first indication of it. 

Shoved from the stale, oven-like bus into the baking heat of the sun, she was met with shouts to form a line from a half-dozen guards dressed in tan, each with a cattle-prod at their hip. One of them held what looked like an over-sized handgun and moved down the line of prisoners, yanking one left arm after another. With no explanation, he pressed the gun to their forearms and pulled the trigger, the machine issuing a pneumatic hiss and leaving behind a thin, bloody crescent. When the guard got to Rey, her arm got yanked and the barrel of the gun pressed uncomfortably against the skin of her forearm, but instead of pulling the trigger, he looked her up and down with a sneer.

“Undocumented,” he spat at her, and flung her arm back hard enough to make her stagger.

Rey would have no little crescent-shaped scar like everyone else at the Mill, because she’d had no IDme chip in the first place. Everyone else lost their identity that day, but Rey had lost nothing— she’d had nothing to begin with.

This desert took anything soft and turned it hard and brittle. So how could the hands working on her now be so… tender?

Tears sprang to her eyes, surprising her. She swiped them away as casually as she could, hoping he didn’t notice. How stupid, to waste water over something like softness.

Glaring at the floor of the cave, she whispered, “Don’t you hate this place?”

Not meaning to say it aloud, only a moment’s pause of his hands gave her any indication he’d heard. Not that it mattered, since he didn’t answer.

He took the bandage and climbed outside to boil it over the small fire pit situated a few feet from the entrance of the cave. Although the use of precious liquid grated against her conscience, Rey kept silent.

No more than five minutes passed before the roamer returned and draped the bandage to dry over a few rocks laid out in a purposeful line. The aridity made short work of it and soon he brought bandage back and began to reapply it to Rey’s stump, which she dutifully held out to him. His closeness pressed on her this time and she felt a blush heat her cheeks.

Her eyes fell on his own left arm, the sleeve of his lightweight shirt tugged high up on his elbow.

No crescent scar.

Before she could stop herself, her hand drifted over and she let her fingers brush the unblemished skin that should have borne the damning mark. He shrank back from her touch, throwing a look of wide-eyed surprise at her.

“You still have your chip?” she asked, a little breathless.

His brows furrowed in confusion and Rey cocked her head at him.

“Your IDme chip.”

He opened his mouth as if to say something and Rey held her breath, waiting to hear his voice again, but after a lingering silence he apparently decided against it and diverted his attention back to the bandage.

“Were you… born out here?” It seemed impossible— everyone had one. Except her, of course, but few people had the misfortune of circumstance to the extent that she did. The worst part of it was that she couldn’t even explain it. It wasn’t taken from her, or lost somehow. She just… never had one.

The earliest years of her life must have been overseen by a guardian of some kind or else she wouldn’t have survived infancy, but her first memories began with her alone, living on the streets. Making her little nest of a home in an abandoned shed in an alleyway. A pile of dirty blankets, dumpster meals, mangy cats for friends. Eventually a kind old woman picked her up and cared for her as well as she could in a miniscule apartment in the backwash sector of Ellay, even going so far as to provide Rey a rudimentary education. The hard truth of it was that no amount of kindness could change the reality of the situation: Rey was a nobody from nowhere and, according to the government, that meant she didn’t deserve to exist.

And now to discover that this man was just like her?

His eyes flicked up to her face and Rey’s heart skipped a beat as he studied her, serious as the grave. As if waiting for her to pronounce some judgment on him.

“I just… I never thought that life went on out here. The wall is the end, you know? There was never anything after it, when you thought about it from the outside.” She remembered her first glimpse of the impossibly huge structure from the grimy front window of the bus, filling up the horizon as they approached. The great divider between civilization and wilderness. Before encountering it for herself it had only existed as a figment of a fairytale meant to scare kids into obedience. 

The fear of the nothingness behind the wall could give any city kid plenty of reason to behave.

Ben’s tension relaxed. 

“You really never had an IDme chip?”

He shook his head.

“Well, you wouldn’t know it, but me neither,” she said ruefully, eyeing what remained of her arm.

Deciding to risk his anger, she looked at him straight on and willed him to meet her gaze. When he did, her heart stuttered again.

“Please tell me your name.”

A flush bloomed across his face and his eyes darkened before he pushed away from her and stormed out of the cave. The solitude he left behind felt lonelier than ever.

The irony of it galled her. To find the one person in the whole world like her, only to discover that he quite possibly hated her enough to refuse to speak. Why bother with any of this?! she wanted to scream, frustration clawing at her.

Letting out a growl of anger, she crawled over to his side of the cave. Maybe she could learn something more about him in his journal. Peripherally she understood that nosing through his personal effects constituted an invasion of privacy, but she couldn’t bring herself to care much. She deserved to know his name, damn it, and he deserved it for being a jerk.

And there his journal sat, enclosed with twine. She undid the knot and slowly opened it, enjoying the way the leather binding crackled with the movement. The novelty of holding a physical book in her hands made her savor every detail— the leather cover supple, the pages themselves a little grainy. She traced the charcoal words on the first page but stopped immediately when they smudged a bit under her finger.

An exact, deliberate penmanship covered every square inch of each page. The strangeness of seeing the written word for the first time since living with Maz hit Rey, so used to digitized font that she had some trouble reading it despite its neatness.

Drawings interrupted the text here and there, landscapes and plants, occasionally animals. Rey began to ignore the text entirely and flipped through to the pictures, fascinated by the detail he put into the renderings. Just like his writing, just like everything else she’d seen him do—detailed and precise.

She froze when she stumbled across the first drawing of her about halfway through the journal. Sleeping.

Her eyes roved over the picture, accurate down to the freckles that dotted the bridge of her nose and cheeks when she stayed out in the sun too long, the wispy tendrils of hair that curled from sweat at her temples.

She turned the page and found another sketch of her sleeping, only this time featuring her side profile, the line of her nose and the jutting of her chin as familiar as the mirror. The following page’s depiction was rougher, as if done hastily. He’d captured her in a moment of staring off into the distance at nothing, a habit others had remarked on and criticized her for in the past. How had he done it without her catching him at it?

After that the text became increasingly sparse as he dedicated more and more space to bringing her to life on the paper in every possible pose and angle.

Rey could understand the arrival of any new or different subject inspiring artistic interest after living for so long in a barren wasteland— but what about the lady roamer from the other day? Where were the profile studies of her?

The journal ended about a fourth of the way through the book. She flipped back to that first portrait, astonished once again how he could make her skinny, spindly frame and peaked cheeks seem almost… beautiful.

Looking down at the short sentence crammed between the drawing and the bottom of the page, she read: ‘She is so determined.’

A bubble of anger popped inside of her. How dare he.

How dare he save her only to ignore her. How dare he feed her, give her water, only to pretend she didn’t exist as often as possible. How dare he draw her like something he wanted to keep forever and refuse to even tell her his name.

“I’ll show you ‘determined’ ,” she grumbled, but before she could imagine just how, the roamer landed back in the cave in a crouch, another hare thrown across his shoulder.

He stilled immediately on seeing what she held in her hands and an expression Rey knew well flashed across his face: fear.

Fury quickly subsumed it.

“Give it b…b—” He closed his eyes and clenched his jaw, hands in white-knuckled fists. “Give it to me.”

A thought dawned on her, and her eyes went round.

“Tell me your name.”

“No!” His roar rang harshly against the stone walls.

“Say it or I tear this thing apart!” She gripped half the journal in her one hand and put the other half between the floor and her foot, bending the binding just shy of breaking point and eliciting from it a creak of protest.

The roamer struggled against his anger. Rey pulled back on the journal a little more to make her point, and his hand reached out from across the cave in placation. She waited as he took a bracing breath, screwed up his face in concentration, and swallowed dryly.

“B…B—” He wrestled inwardly, then let out a strangled, “Fuck! B-B…B-Ben.”

Breathing still heavy, he stared resolutely at the ground and Rey swore for all the world that he was about to cry.

She ventured sheepishly, “You could’ve just lied, you know. Told me a different name.” Holding out the journal to him, he snatched it from her hand and shoved it into his satchel.

Into the following tense silence she said, “They were really nice pictures—”

“You don’t get to say that!” he snapped back.

“I’m sorry, okay?”

The roamer—Ben— made efforts to control his anger and even went so far as to start preparing the hare, but in his distracted state he nicked his thumb with the knife. Cursing again, he threw the knife at the wall and it clattered to the stone floor, the sound harsh on Rey’s ears.

Abandoning the hare, Ben launched himself out of the cave. All Rey heard from above was another loud curse and his footsteps crunching away.

A stutter. He didn’t want to talk and then threw a tantrum because of his stutter?

But his anger concerned her. What if his hospitality ran out? She had nowhere to go. The Deadlands raised cruel people, and this roamer, despite his prior kindness, might still be one of them. He had no reason to keep her around aside from brushing up on anatomical studies.

Dusk settled, darkness creeping into both the cave and her thoughts. She grabbed the scratchy wool blanket Ben had given and did her best to sleep, but her stomach rumbled and her mind whirled. She didn’t dare to take any food for herself without his permission for fear of angering him further.

Why save her? cycled over and over. What motivated him to rescue what could only be a drain on his meager resources? When life in the Deadlands was barely living at all, only a scraping by while you still had the strength?

Maybe he’s lonely.

She let that sink in. The lady roamer had left after dropping off the supplies, and nothing in this cave suggested anyone but Ben lived here.

And those drawings. He clearly saw something in her that she did not.

Her eyes finally drifted closed after the last of the light of day stole away.

She couldn’t care less about a stutter as long as there was someone to talk to.

Chapter Text

The sun beat down on Ben’s neck as he stomped away from his hole in the wicked noonday heat. It was the exact wrong time of day to be doing anything above ground, but his anger propelled him forward. He nearly exploded in rage when he stubbed his toe on a rock, but instead of losing control he forced his jaw to relax and he stilled, allowing his fury to flow through him and out with a long exhale.

Things always seemed to go wrong just when he let his anger get the best of him.

Maybe a year ago, he’d gone east to see the Storm. He told himself it was only a scavenging run, just longer than usual, but he knew that was a lie. His heart sought the means to an end.

It rose up from the flat hot ground, sand swirling so fast and thick it seemed solid from a distance. Wind always blew in the desert, hot wisps that only made him sweat more, strong gusts that kicked sand up into his eyes. The wind that blew outward from the Storm had an unfamiliar edge to it, a warning that reached Ben even from over  a mile away.

He paid it no heed and urged his dirtbike onward, bending low over the bike to reduce resistance. Soon the Storm blocked out the sun and cast a half-shadow on the cracked earth. The closer he got, the harder the wind blew, but he made his mind go blank.

At some point he abandoned the bike and his helmet. He still didn’t think, just walked on until he could go no further, the Storm pushing against him as he tried to put one foot in front of the other. His clothes whipped against his skin, hair stinging his face, but a rising emotion in his chest pressed him to fight the force pushing against him. His feet skidded backward along the ground and he lost his balance, falling hard to his knees and his fingers scrabbling for purchase. Tears sprang to his eyes, and the feeling in him climbed higher and burned brighter, until it started to claw its way out of his throat as a wordless growl. He struggled to stand, keeping his center of gravity low, and the growl crescendoed to a roar.

Ben screamed into the great howling Storm and fell back to his knees.

So just kill me then!

But the Storm said nothing back, only pushed him away.

Even the Storm didn’t want him.

Spent, Ben stumbled back to his bike, but just before he flipped over the engine, the whine of another engine reached his ears even over the wind. As he swung around to face the new noise, pain exploded from the back of his head and the world went dark.

***

until

         a  w ake

dampness, darkness

sunless stone

sl ugg i sh

         t  h  o ug  hts

pain in his arm in his head

straps binding him in place

spinning

         u    n  f o c  u    s

faceless wights with

         - needles! -

taking his blood he feels {weak}

drinking their water he feels ti r  e    d

But one time they forgot the water. And his head cleared. And he got out.

And his heart kicked into overdrive, woozy but still bigger and stronger than the pale hands that tried to tie him back down. And then light. He hadn’t died underground but the long, long way home almost finished the job. He knew enough to head west, the sun guiding him when the stars could not. He stopped counting days and instead counted footsteps

One foot on the ground in front of the other

         Harsh breaths

in the silence

of empty desert

he misses the hare

once

misses the hare

         again!

catches the scorpion pinches off the stinger but the claws pinch his tongue

         {weeping}

but then!

the beast of the earth freshly dead in his hands the raw bloody body easy to sink his teeth into eyes rolling back in his head with

hunger hunger hunger

food food food

hands glisten red

half beast himself

[what is surviving

where is goodness

where is hope

so heavy, too heavy to hold

he must have dropped it somewhere along the way]

shoveling sandy dirt with aching hands in the shadow of a rocky outcrop

water pools and he falls face first into it to

drink and drink and drink

biting the pointy tip off the agave leaf pulling out the fibrous twine inside

headless grasshoppers strung up in a row around his neck

One foot on the ground in front of the other

and then!

it’s close

half falls through the hole in the ground

collapses among his things

tins of food and jugs of water

but lays so still for so long

and doesn’t get up

and doesn’t

even

cry

***

When Ben stumbled across the limp gray form on the ground about half a mile from his hole many months later, he nudged it with his foot and cursed at the movement in her fingers. She’d collapsed in the pathetic shade of a rock, and he wrestled with the choice to bring her back or not. Leaving her on death’s door was no sin.

But instead he’d picked her up, lighter than she should be for her size. She might just die anyway, if she didn’t end up robbing him blind or killing him in return for his cruel decision to make her face life in hell.

She survived on willpower alone. Which felt… familiar.

He drew her as she was, as the desert had brought her to him, as stubborn and abrasive as the weeds that dared to bloom in the wasteland. The journal had originally been a way to pass the time, but at some point it became a tether to his sanity. That she now filled its pages meant something, but even poking at that train of thought made his stomach roll with anxiety. Because she couldn’t stay.

Still unconscious but stronger for the meager sips of broth he managed to get into her mouth, one time she’d fought him and he almost lost. Knocking the small bowl away the moment it touched her lips, she thrashed against his restraining arms with a strength that should have been impossible in her state. A wild flail of the heel of her hand had collided with his face and nearly broke his nose. Even weeks later he still had scratch marks on his shoulder from the tussle.

She occupied his thoughts. Her mere presence overwhelmed him, even while she slept. When she woke, he found her petulant, invasive.

Inexplicably, he also began to draw more and more wildflowers from memory.

So when she’d held his journal hostage and forced him to reveal parts of himself he wished no one ever knew, the anger sent him up and out into the desert to march around as if running away would fix things.

He knew it would not.

She watched him with careful eyes when he returned and he kept his distance, looking for his knife to resume dinner preparations. When his eyes fell on the hare he had to press his lips together against a laugh.

A total butchery of the skinning job lay pathetically on the stone slab that doubled as a cutting board, tufts of fur here and there left on the carcass. One-handed and with an impressive persistence she’d done it, the knife lying next to the body still dirty.

Another reminder that she hadn’t grown up in the desert.

He braved a glance at her and saw her shoulders curled in defensively, as if waiting for him to berate her efforts. Instead he murmured, “Thanks,” and took the slab and the hack-job up top to start the fire. Those careful eyes followed him all the way up and shortly she climbed out, too.

Lighting the tinder with his flint necklace, Ben breathed into the flame to help it catch. Each time he started a fire this way it felt like his breath was a prayer. Fire was life out here. You could survive for a while without it if you knew how, but it wasn’t living.

Headless grasshoppers strung up in a row.

He shook his head and refocused on the fire. Another breath, another prayer, and it took. With the remainder of the fur properly removed, Ben placed it over the flame to roast. Silence descended as afternoon faded into evening, broken only by the crackle of flames and the occasional pop of fat from the roast.

Ben sat with the quiet and discovered it didn’t feel empty. Not with her.

“Two people tried to escape with me,” Rey finally voiced, whisper light. “They didn’t make it.”

Ben drew his brows together, daring only a fleeting glance at her where she sat crosslegged about a yard away from him. As close to the fire as she could possibly sit without getting burned, she stared at the ground, her face hard.

“Why are you out here alone?” she asked.

His heart twisted in his chest.

Shoveling sandy dirt with aching hands.

“No choice,” he forced out, using the poker on the fire just for something to do with his hands.

“I don’t understand,” she gritted out.

Sound by sound he pieced together his answer, heart rate rocketing. He hated talking, hated the way his mind seized up on words. Hated the expectant way people had to wait for him to finish even the simplest of sentences.

“Got voted out,” he finally said. “My mom… she’s in charge. She let it happen.”

“Voted out of what?”

A horrible pause while he jigsawed the phrase. The only good thing about navigating through the puzzle of speech was the practiced, emotionless way he could say things that burned him inside.

“Citadel. My home.”

Harsh breaths in the silence of empty desert.

“Why?” True confusion pulled her brows together.

“It’s…” he gave up trying to find a way around it. “…For w-women,” he fumbled. “Only.”

“That’s weird. Why?”

He made a face at her, peeved at her childish questioning.

“They decided it. Some men hurt them, they found safety. Then…” I was born. He waved his hand as if to brush that train of thought away and instead rotated the roast. “You’ll go there, too.” He cleared his throat. “Soon.”

Her eyes searched his face.

“You want me to leave?” she said in a way that made him think of broken things.

“There’s nothing for you here.” It slid out of his mouth before he could examine it for pitfalls. He blushed.

Her silence at that gave him some time to decide what to say next.

“You’ll like Citadel. It’s safe, hidden. There’s food.”

“Is that where the other girl comes from?” The question had a hard edge to it.

He met her eyes, matching her in anger. “You c…c-can’t stay.”

“Why?” she shot back, already gearing up for a fight. The light in her eyes reminded him of her spitfire performance for Kaydel.

“This isn’t life,” he countered, his own voice rising.

“I’m alive. You’re alive. Why the hell should I have to go when you stay?”

“No choice.”

“I don’t buy that. You’re making up some rule in your head. Why would someone bother to send you supplies if they didn’t want you to come back?”

He shook his head at her. “You don’t get it.”

“Then explain to me why she brings stuff for you.”

“She gets exactly—!” He bit off the rest of it and ground his teeth. Kaydel gets exactly what she wants out of me. He couldn’t meet Rey’s eyes now.

Yes, Kaydel still came. The supplies she brought with her prolonged his existence and he took them every time. A part of him wanted her to stop showing up, but she also brought her company, even if not in the way he might want.

She took him roughly, almost unkindly, and the first time he tried to kiss her she slapped him in the face. She left when they were done and he’d felt even emptier than before. He often thought about refusing her, but she always got her way.

Even if it hurt.

Ben could almost hear the gears turning in Rey’s brain, and embarrassment bloomed in his gut. He shouldn’t let Kaydel treat him that way, but he let her every time. It wasn’t good, but it was something, and maybe that’s all he deserved anyway.

Pinches off the stinger but the claws pinch his tongue.

Rey must have figured him out by now, a loner with nothing to look forward to but a slow death in dry hell because he was too weak to do anything about it.

Too weak to let her die where she lay on the ground.

His clothes whipped against his skin, hair stinging his face.

Even the Storm didn’t want him.

The crunch of hard dirt sent a jolt through him, and he looked up to see Rey scooching closer in the firelight. She settled close to him, thighs a mere inch apart, and he could only sit frozen to the spot and watch incredulously as she reached out to that spot on his arm where she thought something should be. Her fingers drifted featherlight over his skin and sent shivers running up his spine.

He thought his heart might just pound itself right out of his chest.

“Do you remember much of it? Of Citadel?” she whispered.

He could only nod, unsure of what she wanted and why she came so close.

“What’s it like?”

Maybe he hated talking, but at least conversation served as a distraction from her fingers on his arm. He chose the words so, so carefully. He didn’t want his brain to glitch. Not about home.

“It’s… hidden inside the mountain. There’s sunlight, small lakes… rivers underground.” The memories hurt like an old wound, but if he could share something worthwhile with her this would be it. “It’s enough to grow food.” The phrase didn’t do the memory justice as he recalled the makeshift greenhouses that used mirrors upon mirrors to create the sunlight needed to feed hundreds. The way the air thickened with moisture within the walls, and it felt like his skin would drink in the water even while he stood there. There were plants and plants, and they even had enough water to grow non-fruit-bearing flowers just because.

“It’s secret,” he finished somewhat lamely, regretting that he could only say the most superficial things. “Safe.” He wanted to tell her it’s beautiful, but knew his brain would catch on the word and he didn’t want to tarnish it with his clumsy mouth.

When he finally looked back at her, he caught her staring at him with a strange look on her face, as though she’d been struck.

Water pools and he falls face first into it to drink and drink and drink.

He shifted his arm away from her touch and her breath hitched but she didn’t leave his side. Instead, she slowly let herself lean into him, her head on his upper arm. The weighted warmth fought off the cold of desert night.

All too soon the roast was done, and there was no excuse good enough to let perfectly good food get burned. He shifted and she moved back toward the hole to the cave.

They ate quietly as usual, but Rey stayed very still when Ben finally unrolled his sleeping bag and went through the motions of preparing for sleep. His little candle lit the cave just enough to see her by, motionless and watching him.

“Can I stay close tonight?”

The delicate note of vulnerability in her tone struck something in him, and he only paused for a moment before unzipping his sleeping bag to lay it flat on the ground like a large blanket. She brought her own wool one over and draped over the both of them, nestling into him with her back touching his.

She promptly fell asleep.

Ben had more trouble than that, his mind tumbling with thoughts, but he succumbed to sleep after some time.

Plants and plants. Sunlight.