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When she’d finally found her, almost tearing the door of her cell from its hinges as she ripped into it, Manon had thought she was dead.
Painfully thin, the bones of her body sticking out in places where they shouldn’t, her face gaunt and drawn and hollow, eyes closed, slumped against the wall with more cuts and bruises than skin it was an easy snap judgement to make.
Only the shackles locked tightly around her wrists and ankles had given it away; though admittedly it had taken a second for Manon’s reason to break through the initial stab of what, for half a heartbeat, had tasted like fear, for her to understand the feeling of relief that had rushed through her at the sight. They wouldn’t bother chaining up a dead woman.
But even now, now that she’s gotten her out, that she’s sitting in front of her upon Abraxos’ saddle, her body warm and soft against Manon’s, with her red cloak wrapped tightly around her thin, starved frame, she still can’t quite believe that she is alive.
Alive. It still seems impossible. This had been a fool’s errand, a fool’s hope from the very beginning and though Manon had never let herself believe any other alternative, the fact that she was alive still sent a faint thrill through her whenever she paused to consider it.
Broken, maybe in ways she can’t see yet and might never comprehend. But she had survived. Everything they had done to her, everything she had suffered through she has survived.
Perhaps mortals deserved more credit than she had ever bothered to give them. They did seem to have a certain resilience; a stubborn refusal to simply give up and die even when the world seems to so ardently desire it. A shiver runs through her at the thought of how hard this world has fought; raging and cursing and howling, in its desire for the young woman nestled in her cloak to not only die but to die screaming; broken, shattered, in ruins.
But she had disappointed the world and whatever cruel gods might govern it for she had refused. At every turn she had refused. Again and again she had refused. With her last breath, Manon felt sure, she would still find a way to refuse; to have things on her terms; to go out with a smile on her lips and a flicker of defiance forever lingering in her soul. But she had been forced to refuse that end so many times already in her short life and Manon’s blood seems to run a little slower and colder at that sobering thought.
On the pretext of adjusting her position on the saddle, Manon shifts closer to Elide, drawing her in against her, the gesture intimate, protective.
***
Elide closes her eyes, pressing back into Manon’s oddly comforting warmth, oblivious for the moment of the fact that her saviour is an immortal witch who’s veins run thick with blue blood and violence, who’s killed more times than she can count with her iron teeth and nails. In that moment, Manon only feels like hope to her.
When she had come for her, when the door to her cell had finally been thrown open after weeks of being caged and alone with only darkness and shadows for company, she had thought they had come to make an end to it, to her, at last.
After so long with nothing but a never ending night and haunting nightmares for company she could have welcomed that end, thanked them for it even. But when she had raised her head to defiantly meet Perrington’s cold, dark eyes one last time she had found herself gazing up not into those two interminable pits of harsh cruelty but into very different eyes.
The ones she had met had been Manon’s; a molten, liquid gold, as though some gods had stolen pieces of a sun to gift to her, blazing with a furious intensity Elide had never seen in them before. It had been exhilarating somehow, and terrifying in equal measure, but that feeling had calmed the moment she had realised that that burning anger had not been directed at her but rather at her tormentors. Then it had made her feel safe and protected, a feeling she hadn’t truly known in over ten years.
Silhouetted in the gaping doorway of her cell, white hair unbound, whipped around her face from the chill wind that tore through the room at all hours of the day, shrieking through the cracks and the bars of the tiny window, red cloak streaming from her shoulders like a river of blood free flowing from her body, burning with a strange glow no doubt borne from her fevered state, Elide had, for a moment, believed she was in the presence of some goddess of old as she raised herself from the frigid stone to stare into those impossible eyes.
Then a violent shudder had wracked her body and she had slumped against the wall, unconscious. When she had come round again there were two men dead in front of her, throats slit, blood pooling at her feet. They had delighted in tormenting her when they had guarded her. Elide hadn’t been sorry they were dead.
Looking up then she had found Manon barely an inch from her. The ghost of what she might once have recognised as a smile before that word lost all meaning had flickered across her face then.
“Manon,” she had whispered, the first word that had left her lips in weeks, the first sound that had not been a scream or a howl that had left her in what had felt like centuries, the first prayer she had uttered since she learned the gods didn’t care about people like her.
“Manon,” the only word she had; the only word she knew, the only one she needed.
As she said it for a third time, “Manon,” she could have sworn a smile had ghosted across the witch’s bloodied lips in response.
A flash of iron nails later and her chains were gone. Her bones had seemed to ring with the echoes of their freedom, something they hadn’t felt in so long; something they were sure they would never feel again.
Then Manon had lifted her into her arms and barked commands to the Thirteen Elide had been unable to comprehend as her battered body had cried out in pain and pitched her into the numbing darkness she had come to know so well once more.
She had only woken up a few minutes ago, astride Abraxos, with Manon behind her, flying away...Away, so far away that she might, one day, be able to escape the rotting, festering horror of that place that clung to her like a second shadow.
***
When Elide’s shaking became so violent that Manon felt as though she was trembling like every man she had ever killed she coaxed Abraxos into landing, which he did, with obvious delight, in a field that had once belonged to a farm but was now being reclaimed by nature and bursts with a vibrant array of wildflowers.
After ordering, and then arguing with the Thirteen, Manon sees them airborne and on their way once again before she helps Elide from the saddle. Wincing, she sinks down to the ground the moment Manon releases her.
“Are you hurt?” she asks, perhaps too brusquely but Elide doesn’t react to the tone.
She shakes her head, “Not badly,” she rasps, her throat as rough and coarse as the sand in the Red Desert, “I’ll live,” she says, meeting Manon’s gaze and Manon has no doubt of that.
Nodding once she moves back to Abraxos, now happily engrossed in a large tuft of violets, Manon rummages a moment before withdrawing food for them both. She tosses Elide her half then slumps down unceremoniously in the grass to eat her own. Elide tentatively settles down beside her and nibbles gingerly at the lump of bread and salt meat Manon had given to her. From the way she eats it Manon knows she’s learned in the past few weeks to pace herself with her food, unsure of when she’ll see another meal again.
A muscle jumps in her jaw and she has to restrain herself from snapping her iron teeth down in a visceral response to what was done to the young woman huddled beside her. Rage such as she hasn’t felt, hasn’t let herself feel, in over a century stalking this world surges through her blood in a heady rush as she considers what they put that girl through, what they were intending to put her through.
She takes out her anger on the strip of salt beef in her hands and Elide’s eyes flicker towards her. On some instinct she shuffles in a little closer to Manon, letting their bodies jostle lightly together. Manon watches her for a long moment but she keeps her eyes set on the distant horizon.
The sun is starting to sink beneath it now and a thick blanket of clouds covers them, dimming the light and meaning that Elide is no longer squinting, her eyes no doubt burning, not used to the pure rays of sunlight and brightness that fills the world after so long confined to darkness.
Without looking at her, Manon wraps her cloak around Elide’s slim shoulders again as a breeze lifts her hair and makes the wildflowers around them sway. What they had done to her, locking her away like that, a bird in a cage, would have driven her to madness. It had been bad enough when magic had been stripped from the land and her wings had been clipped, but to be stuffed in a cage, confined to darkness for the rest of her miserable life.
Closing her eyes Manon swallows past the disgust in her throat and pushes the thought away, turning to better study Elide. The psychological wounds of what they did would haunt her for some time and Manon could do nothing about them, but if she was physically injured...
“Are you sure you’re not injured?” Manon asks her, eyeing her up and down from her toes to the top of her head, trying to see past the heavy dress she wears, courtesy of Kaltain.
Drawing her knees up to her chest Elide shakes her head, resting her chin on her knees, “No,” she says, her voice still hoarse and ragged, “No, I’m alright, I’ve dealt with much worse before...” her hands drift, almost unconsciously, to her bad leg, and Manon’s eyes follow the path of her hands until she looks on the old injury as well and another coil of rage constricts her stomach at that.
“Having dealt with worse doesn’t mean you’re not injured now,” Manon growls in a low voice, eyes flashing as she raises them to Elide’s face again.
Elide turns to look Manon in the eye too and surprises the witch by reaching out and softly, tentatively, brushing her fingers over the back of her hand, as though half afraid she’ll rake her with her iron nails for the gesture.
Manon tenses, more in surprise than anything else but doesn’t pull away and Elide dares to gently entwine their fingers together, the softest trace of a smile lighting up her features and even that transforms them. She looks stronger and surer and...Beautiful...When she smiles for Manon like that.
It’s an odd feeling. She can’t recall anyone looking at her like that before. Fear she has seen, terror, even disgust. Hatred was common place, it was expected, it was welcomed even but this...She wonders if Asterin had felt this way with the man she had loved. She wonders what that had felt like and if it was anything like this, anything like the way Elide looks at her now and the way she wants her to look at her that way again.
“I’m fine. Really,” Elide says, and her small, deft fingers, calloused and rough from the hard labour they had been forced to do and from tugging at her shackles and scraping against the harsh stone walls of her cell during her imprisonment, gently squeeze Manon’s.
Manon stares down at their entwined fingers for a moment then, tentatively, squeezes back.
***
Thunder rumbles overhead, an angry god roaring at the trembling world spread out before them and Elide can’t help but flinch, clutching the folds of Kaltain’s dress more tightly around her, as though that could protect her from a hostile god’s ire.
Manon glances at her briefly but says nothing as she directs her gaze skywards. Elide mimics her, looking up too and seeing the looming expanse of shifting black clouds, an endless abyss, the strange shapes and shadows more starkly outlined by the harsh flash of lightning that blazes above them, illuminating the heavenly, ethereal shroud that seems to blanket the world.
With another echoing snarl, the havens open up and the three of them are showered in icy cold rain that strikes Elide’s skin like blades. Abraxos shifts behind them and obligingly extends a wing to shelter them from the storm raging around them.
Elide however gets slowly to her feet and limps away from Manon and Abraxos, out into the middle of the field where the rain drenches her through to the skin, plastering her dress to her until it resembles a second skin more than anything else within moments.
Lifting her arms as though to embrace the downpour engulfing her; she takes a deep breath, filling her lungs with the fresh smell that swells to fill her surroundings. Raising her head she opens her mouth and lets loose a hoarse, wild laugh, a sound she had never thought to hear again in the miserable black pit her world had contracted down in to.
“Are you ill?” Manon’s voice is sharp as she too ducks out from under the cover of Abraxos’ wing to stand in the rain by Elide.
Lowering her arms slowly but without turning around to face her, Elide says quietly, “I missed it,” Manon draws alongside her, stilling as she speaks, her rich golden eyes fixed on her as she continues, “The rain, I mean,” she says, gesturing unnecessarily around them, “I used to hate it,” she breathes, hugging herself, not sure why she’s saying all of this, certain Manon doesn’t cure but she doesn’t interrupt or leave her side and Elide goes on, “It made me cold and wet, my hair, my clothes, my shoes- and that always made my leg worse. It covered the world and made it dark and miserable and I couldn’t stand it.”
A shudder quakes through her body and her voice drops and trembles despite her best efforts to stop it, “But after a while in that cell, when I had started to lose track of how long I’d been in there, when the world could have ended and me with it and I wouldn’t have noticed, I began to long for it...”
Manon shifts, almost imperceptibly beside her and Elide could have sworn she’s moved in closer but she doesn’t turn round to check and doesn’t look at her either as she continues, “I wanted to hear the sound of it against the rocks, I wanted to smell it on the air in the early morning, I wanted to see the sight of it swelling rivers and lakes, I wanted the feel of it on my skin...I would have given anything for just a glimpse of that, of anything...Because it would have reminded me that I was alive, that there was still a world out there...”
She takes a deep breath that shudders through her newly freed body, “I never thought I would experience that; experience this,” she gestures at the world around them, roaring and howling it’s defiant existence, “Again...But I have and I will,” at last she turns and looks straight into Manon’s burnt gold eyes as she says steadily, “Because of you.”
They’re both quiet for a long moment, gazing at one another, “I didn’t think anyone would ever come for me,” Elide whispers, reaching down and taking Manon’s hand again, “I didn’t think anyone would even notice that I was gone. I didn’t think anyone would care,” her voice broke slightly on the last word but she made herself keep looking at Manon as she breathes faintly, her voice almost stolen away by the fierce wind and pounding rain that shatters around them, “But you did.”
She moves in closer to Manon, still tightly gripping her hand, as though it’s a lifeline, as though it’s her only anchor on this world.
She doesn’t know why she does it, doesn’t know where she finds the courage to do it- she had only meant to say thank you to the witch who had saved her life, and more, but somehow she’s kissing her.
***
Manon’s whole body tenses when Elide moves in to her, a look blazing in her eyes that speaks of life and hope in the instant before her lips brush Manon’s. Tentative at first, cautious and uncertain, hopeful and daring but wary and hesitant all at once. Then something in her tautens and snaps and then she’s surging forwards and kissing her properly, deep and intense with a reckless confidence Manon had never suspected she possessed.
Something in Manon stirs in response to the kiss, a dormant creature dwelling in the ancient echoing hollow where her heart should have been brought to life by the warmth of Elide’s lips and the scent that surrounds her in a feeling she’s never known before; the feeling of coming home.
The rain lashes around them, seeming to bind them together in this infinite moment but Manon can barely feel it anymore; as separate from it as she is from the ground and the air and the sky, from anything that isn’t Elide.
Her scent fills Manon’s lungs, intoxicating every breath she manages to snatch between the meeting of their lips. The taste of her overwhelms every other sense; the taste of life, of freedom, of hope. The feel of her soft, warm form pressed flush against her is the only thing that seems real.
On some instinct Manon mirrors Elide when she lifts a hand to tentatively tangle through her silver hair. When they finally break apart, both breathing hard, they eye one another until Elide lets a tentative smile spread across her face. Slowly, Manon lets her lips quirk into a faint answering smile.
Behind them, Abraxos gently nudges Manon with his snout, jostling her into Elide, forcing her to wrap her arms around her to stop herself from toppling over. Pausing just long enough to turn around and growl at him, Manon then faces Elide once more, lightly brushing her cheek with her thumb before curling her other hand around her hip and pulling her in tight as she kisses her again.
****