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Glokta awoke in the early morning, when the sun had not yet risen and only the sounds of men too drunk to find their way home stumbling along the streets protruded through his slightly opened window. And then his own mixed along.
The pain started in his lower back, trailing down into his maimed leg and making him shake like a dog that’d gotten its tail caught in a goddamn bear trap. With every shuddering gasp it grew worse. He’d describe it as being set on fire, if he’d had any breaths to spare to talk out loud. Instead he groaned, cried out, and screamed.
“Barnam!” he wailed, the pain having reached his excuse of a foot and making him almost roll out of bed with agony. Then it started moving upwards, possibly because he was trying to get out of bed by himself and was attempting to support his weight using his arms. The pain shot through his head, blinding him in the eyes, making his breath stick in his throat.
Then the floor crushed into his face. From somewhere far away he could hear a door rattle.
When he woke again, he was back in bed. The sheets had been changed from white to black, he lay in bed with only a shirt when before he’d worn a full garment of bed clothes.
I must’ve soiled the bed again, then. He raised his hand and pinched at his nose, digging his nails into the taunt skin on purpose.
There was a loud hammering at the front door, a fuss encumbered the house almost instantly, yelling and arguments forming and falling apart and then Severard was standing in his bedroom’s doorway, with an incredibly disgruntled Barnam behind him.
“It’s friday.” the practical reminded him as he pushed his hair out of the way, throwing a disdainful glance over his shoulder at the old man. “Prisoners waiting for you. Whole bunch of them.”
Glokta sighed. I wonder, he sourly thought as he scrambled out of bed supported by his servant after sending the boy away, if they will come looking for me even after I’ve died. There’s work to be done Glokta! No time to be lying in the dirt, now!
It was friday then, almost the end of the week. He glared at the calendar hanging next to his wardrobe. Tomorrow was a holiday, the Superiors would get the day off. Oh, the joy! He leaned towards it, focusing on the big X that had already crossed out today’s date. Something had been written under it, in Barnam’s handwriting.
He couldn’t make out what it was, the chicken scratch had faded with time and had been partly covered up by the ink crossing the date off. But he didn’t need to read it to know what it had said.
It was friday, the specific friday he’d been dreading ever since the month had commenced.
His goddamn birthday.
He sat into his armchair so he could work his club of a foot into his shoe, every fibre of his being screaming out in painful protest as he moved. At this point, even breathing hurt. And he wished that he’d breathe in for the final time and drop dead on the floor right then and there.
Glokta had no fond memories of his birthdays. As a child they’d been fun enough, receiving gifts and for one day not having to live up to mother’s expectations, running down the alleyways with the other boys in tow. As a grown-up they’d brought him nothing but sorrow, sleepless nights, and pure fucking hatred.
He remembered walking down the Agriont, his well-groomed brown hair snapping around freely in the wind, his colonel’s uniform perfectly pulled taunt against his then perfectly trained body, his flawless teeth catching the sunlight. And then some person —he’d at the time been convinced he’d never seen them before in his life, he couldn’t even recall what they’d looked like the day after— had briskly walked up to him to, as loud as humanly possible, congratulate him on his birthday.
He’d heard birds chirping in the trees just a moment before, but both his view of the maple as well as their song that he’d been enjoying had gotten completely drowned out by the crowd that had gathered around him. Slapping him on the back, clapping his shoulders, congratulating him on another successful year, wishing him a healthy next one.
“And many more to come!”
He remembered shining his pearly whites at some of them, nodding at the more politically valuable of the crowd, waving his hand in mock recognition at the others. He remembered none of their faces now, not a single name. He hadn’t remembered their names back then either, but for entirely different reasons. He simply couldn’t have cared, now none of them care for me.
Barnam helped him into his shoe, then held out the one for his good foot for him to grab.
Quickly the word had spread through all of Adua. Sand dan Glokta’s celebrating his birthday! Bring him the most lavish of gifts if you want any validation the coming year, sing the loudest during the song, shove the crowd away from him in a fraudish friendship so that he owes you!
His actual birthday hadn’t been for another two weeks.
He’d hidden away in the army’s barracks, in Collem’s room, his face pressed into a pillow to muffle his agonised screams. He remembered Collem patting him on the back, stifling his laughter behind a fist. Remembered how he’d showed up outside his mother’s mansion, a cupcake in hand, on the proper date. At midnight, even.
Glokta sagged further into his armchair, willing himself to become one with the furniture and to cease his miserable little existence. It never worked. Blasted thing.
Birthdays were an absolute futile thing. Back then it’d been miserable for an entirely different reason, mainly the fact he’d had to put up with many of the miserable bastards trying to win his favour. Nowadays, it was because he couldn’t see any reason to celebrate that he was alive.
So he got up out of his chair with an agonising groan, moved his hips this way and that, waited for the click and made his way outside and down the treacherous stairs of the House of Questions, disappearing into the hallways and badly lit corridors.
“I confess. I confess! It was-” Glokta shoved the confession paper towards the prisoner, then waved in the general direction of practical Frost. Who, not at all gently, placed a pen between the man’s maimed fingers.
Only 2 fingers before you snapped? Not five? We don’t have to move onto your toes? We’re done already, truly! How marvellous! How absolutely, thrillingly fantastic. He glared at the man trembling before him, and ignored the stink of piss that gathered under the table. He’d been forced to quit stretching out his leg to avoid it, as a result he now enjoyed the senseless pleasure of a burning knee. Happy birthday to me.
The next prisoner had gotten blood onto his newly polished shoes. He’d knocked the bastard’s front teeth out in retaliation. As if they could control where they bled, I know I never could.
Then it happened so many more times that he was convinced the fuckers had found a way to indeed bleed right on top of his goddamn shoes, pants or coat. We’ve maimed them above the fucking table, so why am I slipping all over the place? There were tracks behind him in the form of shoe prints, or a circle to show where his cane had come down. And then there was the simple trail of blood right next to the other two, showing where he’d dragged his bad foot across the stones.
He arrived at the top of a set of stairs, Sult had requested his presence which meant he'd been forced to painstakingly move to one of the upper floors. For what felt like an eternity, and judging by the worried glances of passing inquisitors and practicals it'd actually been longer than the second he'd accounted for, he regarded the stairs. And wondered that if he shuffled towards the edge hard enough, and let gravity do the rest of the work, maybe he would manage to die right then and there, and be done with this miserable excuse of an existence.
The mental image of him planting face first into the steps, rolling down and ending up as a crumpled heap at the bottom looked so comically ridiculous he actually started chuckling to himself. What was the worst that could happen? I have no teeth to knock out, anyways. The passing inquisitor broke into a sprint. He caught a tear rolling out of his bad eye with his thumb, inhaled once, winced because he’d bruised a few of his ribs in his fall that morning, and tentatively put one foot down onto the first step. Hand braced against the wall, trembling.
He fell anyway.
The bath did nothing to ease his aches, instead leaving him shivering. He never stayed in the bath long enough for it to cool down past a comfortable point, let alone go cold entirely. Regardless, Glokta stared at the ceiling as he lay there, one arm slung over the side of the bath, fingers drumming against the metal.
He wondered silently to himself what this day would’ve been like if the war hadn’t happened. If Collem West had been home, instead of miles away fighting those cursed Gurkish. Then he remembered the only reason he’d mended their relationship in the first place was because he had left to fight in that same war. Funny.
He used his new found annoyance to drag himself out of the bath, sitting on the side of it and dragging his legs over until he could feel the cold tiles beneath his feet. Still sitting, he dried himself off as best as he could and helped himself into his bed clothes. His whole body shivered from exertion as he finally lifted himself from the bath to stand upright, one arm braced against the wall to the right of him, as he dragged the loose pants over his still wet ass.
He’d absolutely refused Barnam’s help, had even forbidden him from entering his part of the house at all, so that he could at least enjoy the evening in dark, lonely silence. He figured that if he needed the help of the old man to put on the bare minimum of garments, he might as well tumble back into the water and drown himself. No, he would do things by himself for today.
He buttoned his loose-fitting shirt halfway up, ignoring the back of it clinging onto his still wet skin. Perhaps I’ll catch a cold, receive more days off. Clutching onto his cane tightly, he limped to the armchair sitting in the corner next to his fireplace. His old home hadn’t had a fireplace, but this place had been awarded to him by the arch lector, and that meant the slightest hints of comfort. Barnam had lit it for him before leaving.
He ended up falling asleep while sitting in the chair, and in the morning when he woke on his first day off as a superior, his back cracked so loudly he could’ve sworn it’d broken.
He would've stayed in bed, usually. If he didn't have to work for the inquisition, then there was no reason to get dressed, nor to get outside, nor anything but sweet blissful sleep. If he didn’t have the nightmares that is.
Instead, he’d promised Ardee he’d visit her. For some reason she'd insisted.
So, begrudgingly, he switched into a less crumpled button-up shirt, brushed his cane free of the dried blood from the day before, and opted to wear one of his older coats from when he was still an army man. His usual one was still drying after yesterday’s fiasco. This coat was also black, as usual. The same for the pants, shirt, and even his shoes. He donned his usual hat and shuffled outside, pain already burning into his back and hips. Pressing his lips tightly onto one another, he grunted with each step, one hand steadily held out in case of another fall.
“What are you slouching so badly for?”
Glokta swore he could hear a fanfare in the far distance when he finally sagged into the kitchen chair. His back beaded with sweat hot against the cool wood.
“Rough day,” he gritted out between clenched teeth, and he brushed a few loose hairs out of his face, “I’ve fallen down the stairs a grand total of four times since the week has started.”
Ardee snorted, then brought the cleaver in her hand down onto the meat in front of her, the smack of it ringing out into the small kitchen and echoing in Glokta’s ears. She rolled her shoulders after the hard impact, her head turning in a circle once to loosen her neck. He noticed the sweat glistening under her jawline and cast his eyes downwards instead.
“Your worst enemy, isn’t it? Stairs. Still, you look even worse than usual. Had a prisoner escape or something?”
It was his turn to snort. “No… yesterday was much worse than usual. I suppose I’m still recovering.”
Ardee beat her eyelashes at him from over the smelling corpse of the headless pig, feigning sympathy. “Did the poor inquisitor have a worse day than the people he tortured? Oh dear.”
Her lips turned down into a pout for just a second, before her eyes rolled and that mocking smirk of hers returned.
Glokta glowered at her from across the table, arms folded in front of his chest, one finger tapping impatiently on his arm. I had a seizure while half asleep, shat myself in the process, then got covered in piss and blood —a combination I’d hoped not to experience again after leaving the prisons — and fell down two flights of stairs after being chewed out by my boss, who might very well kill me one of the coming days for becoming less than useful. All on the day that I’m supposed to be celebrating my life, while wishing all the while that I was dead instead.
He felt his throat constrict as he attempted to swallow, the back of it burning and making it hard to breath. His bad eye set to flickering vigorously, before he punched at it with his thumb and a few tears rolled down his cheek. He wiped those away before they could fall down his chin, his hand came away glistening, he regarded it with a scowl before crossing his arms in front of his chest again and studied the colour of the wall opposite of him.
“As I said,” he ground out in between his remaining clenched teeth, “rough day.”
Ardee regarded him, he felt her eyes burning into the side of his head, as she calculated past his feigned composure and weighed her options. The cleaver spun around in her hands a few times before she chopped it down at the pig again, the metal slightly catching on the wood and making him flinch.
“You’d feel a lot less miserable if you didn’t lower your head so much.” Her voice, which usually felt sweet on his ears, sounded snarky and full of resentment. He ground his teeth down into his gums again, tasting the faintest metallic pang of blood. “Half the time I think you’re going to throw yourself down one of the stairs on purpose, just by the look on your face.”
Oh, if only she knew.
“I suppose that’s a rather apt description of me, you do always flatter me so.”
That lopsided smile of hers returned again, even worse now that she was tilting her head sideways at him. That feigned sympathy of hers again. Stop looking at me like that. He glared at her, felt his skin slightly protest as his eyebrows pulled on old scars. Oh how ugly I must look now, I wonder. If her returning scowl was anything to judge by…
"Is it just around me that you're always so miserable?"
Glokta blinked at her in surprise, momentarily halted in his train of thought. Just around her…? He'd been comfortable enough around her to let his guard down, no need to always be on a constant snarky defence in front of somebody who means you no harm. He would have to build those walls back up again. I suppose she's right. Again.
"You'd think you'd have grown a stronger spine, having survived two years in that hellhole." I have. "You struck me as the type to continue living out of pure spite for the Gurkish." I am. "But here you are, the embodiment of exhaustion." She shrugged, regarding the chopped pieces of meat in front of her as if they were more interesting than him.
"I suppose I was wrong."
“How would you feel, then?” he leaned towards her, half tipping out of his chair, one arm supporting him on the armrest while the other clung onto the side of the table. “How would you feel if you’d been the centre of attention for a glorious twenty seven goddamn years? And all the while you found it insufferable, the people suffocating, the pressure of your family and peers tantalising.”
He rose from his chair fully, the muscles in his legs and lower back immediately screaming out in protest, but he ignored them. Ardee stared back at him, eyes wide.
“And now you’re nothing. A shitstain in the history books of some other colonel’s achievements. Now the silence suffocates you, the pressure has twisted into disgruntlement, your own mother won’t call you by your name anymore, let alone call you her son.”
He shuffled his way around the table towards her, hands digging hard into the wood, the cups rattled with the effort as his full weight shifted from one arm to another, heavy breaths pushing spit up against his closed lips as he took another step, when words weren’t occupying his mouth ragged breaths were instead. He’d forgotten his cane by the chair.
“When your birthday used to be the day everybody tried to get to you, one way or another. When the sun shone only half as bright as you did for them, when you’d find claw marks on your arms at night from the people clinging at your clothes. Oh but now,” he laughed, a short uncomfortable dry cackle of a laugh. “Now, it makes them uncomfortable, if they remember at all, reminds everybody that I’m not dead.”
He held his arms out wide beside him, as if to yell ‘look at me now! Here I am!’, he twirled his hands one in a circle. “But I’m not dead, am I? Shame I’m not! A true shame.”
The weight of his body came crashing back into him, his knee buckling below him and then his bad foot followed along. With a soft cry escaping past his lips, he tumbled backwards, hitting his elbow into the table, rattling the slaughtered pig resting on it and sloshing wine over the brim of their cups, the legs of the nearest chair scraping against the floor as he fell into it, his head hitting the headrest with a snap.
The room echoed with his heavy breathing, a soft wheeze accompanying it.
He looked up at her, arms hung lifeless at her sides, eyes wide, staring down at him. Her face had turned impassive, no mocking sympathy, no genuine empathy. Just silence in her expression, somehow it’s even worse. Her hands trembled slightly where they hung in the air, one still gripping onto the cleaver. She hadn’t moved away from the table as he’d approached, no real reason to. No harm to be done by a man as crippled as me.
“For crying out loud, you self-pitying bastard.”
Glokta flinched as if struck, then stared at her with his mouth gaping open, eyes so wide he could feel a tear forming in the corner of his bad eye.
“Shall I cut off that miserable leg of yours, as a birthday present?” She brandished the cleaver she’d been using in front of his face, which made him finally snap his lips back together. Lifting his face away from the stinking metal, he cast his eyes downwards to the floor.
“You are always going on about how miserable you are, and how amazing you were back in the old days.” She planted her hands firmly on his armrests, her face pressed up close to his. “When are you going to start taking responsibility for making now less miserable?”
When I stop shitting myself every morning.
Glokta glanced up at her for a second, catching a quick glimpse of her furrowed eyebrows, her hard set jaw, her lips pushed into a tight line. He pushed his remaining teeth into his empty gums and bit —to the best of his abilities— down onto his tongue. He wished the ground would swallow him whole, burry him right then and there and be done with it.
Good job, you old fool. You find one still lit candle among the rubble and you snuff it out, might’ve well stepped on it. Might as well have napped it in half. Piss on it while you’re at it.
With a bang the cleaver landed on the table, it startled him enough to jostle his entire body, he followed the shining metal with his eyes for a moment as it skidded to a halt on the wet wood.
Her nails dug into his jaw, and not all too carefully, he felt a twinge in his neck protest as she pushed his face back upwards, eyes staring hard into his and daring him to look away again.
“You’ve been dealt bad cards, I get it. Haven’t we all?" He could feel her pulse through her fingers, racing, adrenaline probably cursing through her every vein. She shook slightly, still, could feel it in his neck as it shook along and protested in pain again. "Shuffle the cards until you win."
“You’re one to speak,” his hands had been resting in his lap, carefully folded away from her, but they trembled ever so slightly to the point he had to dig his nails into his palms to calm himself, don’t snap the candle in half, stop it, “you’re the one drowning in alcohol every day.”
He regretted the words the instant they left him. Her eyebrows, which had been pulled together tightly in a frown, now softened and returned to their rightful place. Her lips trembled once, then they steadied, he saw her jaw tightening where she dug her teeth into her cheek, her hand next to him slowly formed into a fist, her nails scratching the wood noisily. Ever the strong one.
“At least,” she started, every word carefully exhaled with each calming breath, “I’m not making the people around me as miserable as myself. If anything people find me more fun when I’m drunk. What do you have? You walk into the room and people become depressed.”
He felt her nails pressing into his skin, still. It hurt, ever so slightly. He’d gotten used to much worse, if anything he found himself craving more. A woman kicking you is still a woman touching you. He frowned in disgust at himself, his own nails dug into his hands again.
Glokta sniffed once, cleared his throat, which had turned unbearably dry, and parted his lips to say something. Relight the candle, bring her back. He shut them again. What could I say? She’s right after all, she almost always is. She knows she is. His bad eye flickered, slightly distorting his vision and making the corners of it burn. Stupid, treacherous jelly. A single tear ran out and down his cheek again. He untangled his hands to wipe it away. Ardee used her thumb to catch it before he could, then settled it back onto his chin.
"I'm sorry."
He hadn't uttered those words since he'd left the prisons, had sworn to himself to never utter them again to anybody. Not to Sult, not to the superiors stationed above him, not to the person about to kill him and not even to himself. Least of all to himself. He'd sobbed them to his captors almost daily, when they cut off another one of his toes. When his answer wasn't satisfactory and they'd grab onto his hair, ready to slam his face into the table again. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
"I apologise, Ardee. I am not more miserable when I'm around you. I'm sorry I gave you that impression. It's quite the contrary."
They stood there, him sitting in his chair, his breaths still ragged and his foot on fire. Her leaning over him, one hand still gripping his chair, the other mercilessly digging into his skin, trembling only slightly less than before. She breathed loudly but steadily, her exhales landing softly against his skin.
“Did you come here only to complain about how miserable yesterday's been?”
“I was hoping you’d distract me, actually.”
Ardee pushed air out of her nose, her lopsided grin once again decorating her face. Her genuine, lopsided grin. The one he liked so much, how that grin could’ve been of service yesterday.
“For what it’s worth, mister downcast, I remembered your birthday. I’m making stew, if I boil the meat long enough it’ll tear apart at the mere sight of your miserable teeth.”
“My birthday was yesterday.”
“Shut up and help me chop the vegetables.”