Archive of Our Own ^beta

It's fitting that the world dies with the betrayal of its women.

It's divine retribution if you ask Capable—Capable with her indented fingers, hard-pressed to learn a new chord in the corner of their pig pen. All caged here until they're made perfectly fat for their impending slaughter.

Fat with voluptuous curves and shapes that mimic the lush valleys they've come from and forgotten.

On better days—although, there's a lack of those lately—Angharad sticks to her needlework, incessant, pessimistically optimistic, drowning out Capable's racket as she skewers her needle through the embroidery hoop in her impossibly sponge-soft hands.

She imagines the hoop to be Immortan Joe's head when she punctures into the other side. It shares the same sickly paleness of his skin. Angharad barely has enough color to remove him from it with her threads.

She thinks she wants to embroider some wattles, but there's not enough yellow in the materials they have.

The boys collect what they need, the little half-lives. Some of them bargain for a kiss, or something as innocuous as giving them permission to rub the brides' feet—even though she can see the outline of their cocks bulge with each stroke. She doesn't mind it. Not really.

There's always worse to contend with at the Citadel.

But this morning's worse than all the others.

Suddenly, a swaddle of blonde is being thrown against Toast through the periphery of her vision, which sends the girl tumbling over, and the former's cackling and screaming and pushing her tits up with the Immortan's flaming-red blood smeared across her mouth like war paint—the Dag.

"Fuck you, you bloody fucking brute! You derro, you fucking slagger, you—"

She screams, tears blotting the apse of her eyes, and the gap between her teeth—which would normally allure Rictus Erectus into unsheathing his cock from his trousers, here in front of all the wives—is practically vibrating as she squalls like a bird. Like she's just had her feathers ripped out without any semblance of ceremony this time.

Angharad shudders, not for herself, but for the Dag, who's still standing as erect as she can manage with bruised legs, finding purchase against one of the walls. Her shoulder bumps and thuds against it, and she's still pugnaciously screaming hollow threats, and Rictus, oaf Rictus, just laughs and tells her something akin to being, a good girl, and to, take cock like a good girl, the next time his father sends for her.

As much relief as it can bring, Angharad knows that kicking her feet is nothing more than a waste of the energy she can't afford to spend. None of them can genuinely afford the blood price, but it happens still—that debt.

If all it takes is a crazed word, or a larking screech, or putting up tooth and nail, then no one would be in the Immortan's gilded cage.

Rictus gives a half-hearted shrug before rubbing the Dag's scalp into a tangled clump of hair.

He leaves, and the rest falls into monotony.

"What happened?" asks Capable, who's long since discontinued strumming the same blasted chord.

"We were just roughhousing, havin' some laughs, and well, yeah—the bludger was making me do all the work like usual until he started choking me," she breathes. "I told him I don't like that."

"He likes it when you don't like it," says Toast, clipping her toenails. Flat as a board with her affect.

"Hm, yeah," the blonde wipes her mouth with the back of her sweat-slick hand, "guess he does."

"If only we all had the same problems," adds Capable.

The edge of the needle's off-center. It's only then that Angharad notices it, because she's finally feeling something other than indifference today.

Derision bubbles in the vacant pit of her stomach.

Capable's staring right at her.

"Wait, what does that mean?" Angharad asks, knowing what she means.

Capable's red mop of curls lands across her face after she blows the ringlets up, annoyance curdling her mouth. "Do I need to spell it out for you?"

"Yes, it would seem so."

"I'm just saying, Annie, that you don't ever need to deal with half the stuff the rest of us are put through."

"You don't think so?" asks Angharad, who's actively avoiding Capable's sea-green eyes.

She has to remind herself that the only reason she knows what color the sea is rests in the collection of picture books they've poured through over the years. And yes, those books were given to her by the Immortan, because she'd been exceptionally obedient as a child in his harem.

The Dag can afford to be disobedient. All of them can.

Except her.

"You're his favorite."

Angharad has nothing to say in response to Capable's off-putting silence, which is intentionally made to disarm her, she's sure, but something continues to par at her besides the fact. Something disgustingly ill, crude, and angry.

Fuck—she's not angry. She's starved for some real fucking sympathy in this place. It's always them at each other's throats.

"Angharad," Cheedo's dark eyes flicker towards her. "Angharad—put down the bloody needle."

Angharad's holding it up to her cheek, digging, digging hard into whatever chunk of flesh she can pierce for all the gauntness she has.

She hasn't begun to move it. She's slightly bewildered that they'd even notice. But Cheedo's always been the keen-eyed.

"Why? Why should I put it down?" asks Angharad.

The girls have now begun to collect together, fingers clutching one another's clammy hands, pleading with her silently. Angharad drags the tip of the needle across her cheek in what feels like short, brisk strokes. It doesn't hurt as much as the Immortan inside her. It doesn't hurt at all when she thinks of being ripped from her sun-bleached mother all those years ago. She wonders why they hadn't taken her as well. She wonders if that was for the best.

Deliberately, precisely, she makes her hatches and nicks, cutting alongside her upper cheek, transferring to her forehead. There's less fat there, if she can even consider her cheek as more fat than it is bone. It stings without the cushion.

Angharad can feel hot drops of blood plunge through her brow—then over her eyelid—with some level of catharsis.

"Because he wouldn't like—"

"That's the point," she snaps, and the uncharacteristic venom flaking off her tongue forces all of the women to crack their skulls up, drinking in her eyes.

Like the hottest part of a fire, Angharad's eyes scintillate into black sapphires, scorching the already-parched earth under the wives' feet.

The five-headed hydra becomes four without her, but the heads monstrously huddle together just the same, seeking solace in each others' presence. The girls hide behind Capable's taller frame.

"For every night he spends with Capable, he spends three with me. And I take no flattery in it," she snorts, "and neither should any of you, sisters."

They agree, of course they agree, and it's the last Angharad ever hears of a singular complaint.

The girls take the opportunity to violently rip the needle from her before she can do more damage, but it's set in stone. She knows it. They're going to come up with a plan to do a runner once Immortan sees how truly undesirable she's made herself to be.

Angharad of the Crown. Angharad the Ruined. Melon-faced Angharad. All apt titles she'll embrace if she's not to be thrown to the warlords—warlords who don't mind that she's stout-bellied with another man's child, warlords who'll lend her to their War Boys and Black Thumbs and anyone else deserving of secondhand scraps.

But Joe doesn't call her anything other than Splendid, his Splendid Angharad she remains, a name like Turkish delight. A name that doesn't fit her Welsh heritage any more than it does this bleak hellscape.

She covets his indifference. She'll take his resentment with a bubbling, effervescent voice if he tells her that she's of no use to him anymore. That she couldn't even get a half-life hard with her cross-hatched face.

But he doesn't change in the coming weeks, perhaps defeatedly seeing no point in punishing the mother of his presumptive heir. If she gives birth to a son, he'll want to plant another seed in her right away. That's how this all works.

That would flare the tempers in the pit of her stomach if her darling baby wasn't nesting there already. Motherhood will soothe her where age has not, make her mellow, sap her strength to rebel, permanently lobotomize her from the moment she witnesses their cornflower-blue eyes crack open. She'll love them on her baby, she resolves. Even if she loathes them on her rapist.

She'll have none of the Dag's renegade flair or vulgarity whipping off her tongue. She doesn't have Toast's resourcefulness now, so she never will.

And as for herself, eyes flitting towards the stacked books the Dag devours, learning German, learning of the world as it was, green and precious and undeniably imperfect, Angharad will stop reading.

That's why the Dag's so enraged, so fucking enraged that she flings herself against the wall with a thwack and rips clusters of white-blonde hair from her head whenever she gets thrown back into the room. If, God forbid, Angharad was going to have a daughter, she'd hope she was an idiot—a precious little idiot, not like the Dag, not like Toast.

Angharad returns to her stitching, weaving the spider-egg thread in between another patch of wattles.

There's a woman in the valley beneath them named after a Fury, or that's what she's heard through thirdhand accounts, at least. And that woman is an exception to the Immortan's insatiable hunger. She's said to have eyes the color of cornflowers as well.

They have to go before the baby comes.

She'll have the half-lives fetch her some blue thread for the last hoop.