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“Big Barda. Are you awake?”
Before the second syllable of her name was spoken the book in Barda’s hands was snapped shut and slipped beneath the flat of her pillow like it had never been there. She waited, tensed, one hand already curled into the beginnings of a fist so it was there if she needed it quickly. Faint light flickered against the walls of the barracks, in a suggestion of outside chaos; there was never complete darkness on Apokolips, not even in the dead of night.
”Barda?” the voice came again. Barda felt a sigh well up in her, one half-borne of tediousness and half of relief, and she let her body relax itself very infinitesimally.
Auralie.
She looked across to the bedroll beside hers, and there in the dimness Auralie sat, upright in her bed and staring down at Barda. Her ears were bare of the angled gold plates she normally wore, and even in the almost-dark her hair was the colour of burning; fitting, for on Apokolips each and every one of them smelled like smoke.
She looked half-ready to call out again, her mouth moving to form the sound, and Barda sat up and reached between them to press a hurried finger to her lips. Auralie looked down at it, her eyes crossing to focus on the tip of her finger.
”Come here,” Barda whispered, quieter than a thought, and lay back down, shifting her body to the far side of the thin bedroll. Auralie rose and crept on dancer’s feet to lay down atop the bedroll and press up against her side.
“Auralie,” Barda murmured, slowly, like the quieter and less quickly she spoke the more likely it was they’d be in the clear, though she was barely a single inch’s distance from Auralie’s marble face. “Why are you speaking so loudly?”
”Be calm. Nobody can hear us over that,” Auralie said, wisely, dropping her eyes for a moment to the other side of the room. Stompa was making it her life’s mission to shake the walls of the barracks hard enough with her snoring that had Barda not lived with it all her remembered life she might well have suspected ground-tremors.
Auralie’s eyes drew back up between them, and they faced each other like a pair of ghosts. Barda breathed her words as bluntly as she could.
“What do you want?”
“I wish to dance. Will you cover for me?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Barda,” Auralie blinked, “I know you saw.”
Barda rolled onto her back and threw an arm across her own stomach, heaving out a sigh. She stared at the ceiling; rotted and brown, just like every other part of this unending, eternal planet. Everybody bent their heads and kept their eyes on the grimy surface of their grimy world and stayed asleep. Nothing grew here. Everything just withered, and sickened, and died.
“Yes, I saw.”
They should have stopped their speaking then. Always, there were ears listening, and most especially in the dark.
“Did you like it?” Auralie asked, very carefully. Barda didn’t know how to talk to her like this. Gentle.
“What do you mean, did I like it?” she demanded instead, cutting in the silence, and turned back to face Auralie, looking up at her curled around the head of her bed, the edge of her pillow. The blasphemer, right there, watching her with twilight eyes.
“I mean,” Auralie said simply, and softly, “did you like it?”
She looked so much like what they hated. Her skin was smooth as porcelain, which they did not have on Apokolips, though they did on New Genesis. She was beautiful, like a flower beneath a bedframe, and Barda had never really understood what it was she was supposed to do with it. There was no place for beauty here.
“What do they teach you at that place of Himon’s?” she asked, stupidly.
“He teaches us to be free.”
“We are free. We have been gifted some of the most privileged positions on this planet. We serve Lord Darkseid directly.”
If she ground it out monotonously it would become true. It would. If she said it enough times with her eyes screwed up tight she’d believe it.
Auralie’s voice was only a flutter across her face. ”I know you know that is not true, Barda.”
A single, mistaken slip of fluid crept unasked-for from the very corner of her eye, and Barda wiped it away angrily, furious. She wanted to fold herself inside of her battle-armour and then fold her armour inside of her bedcovers and stay there for the rest of time.
”You cannot keep doing this, Auralie.” This. The dancing. The thinking. The freedom.
”But I must. I will die without it.”
There was hardly any point in speaking — every word was a danger, even with Stompa’s snores, and Auralie clearly would not listen, though Barda knew it in every one of her broken bones.
You will die because of it.
“Trust me, Barda,” Auralie whispered, leaning up slightly to smile a soft little smile. Barda had never seen anyone else smile, not like that. The only kinds of smiles she’d ever known were Granny’s relishment and Harriet’s madness. There were the others’ smirks, occasionally, but they were not the same. “Granny cannot be everywhere.”
Barda only stared at her.
But she can.
This was why they were not allowed such things, why they only existed among the enemy. It was dangerous to believe that you were different in the slightest, or that you were invincible. Auralie was already hanging half out the door, and all of them could see it. But there was no leaving. There was no embracing of your base nature unless your base nature was brutal. They had been bred for war, beaten for power, and they had given every piece of every part of who they were to Granny Goodness, to the Furies, to this grand and glorious servitude. It was more than a blood-oath. It was the oath of a soul.
And Auralie wished to untangle hers.
Didn’t she see? They were already too well-woven. They were all of them looped around each one of Granny’s fingers.
In the field, Auralie was lightning. Tactical and intelligent and fearless and attentive. Captivating the way few others had ever been. But Auralie hesitated. Auralie cried in the barracks.
Auralie was one of the very fastest among them, but they would enter a warzone like tyrants, like hurricanes, would leave bodies littering every inch of the scarlet floor, and she would falter, suddenly, like she’d been suspended in time. And lately, on the last few missions, Auralie had refused to kill.
Barda had hidden it as best she could from the other Furies, leashing the battlefield like her playthings, using every bit of the prowess bruised into her until she was bloody, though Lord Darkseid knew why.
“You don’t know what you’re doing.”
“Yes, I do.” And she looked determined, the flame of her hair flickering to match the shadows outside, the light in her eyes entirely foreign. It was so very strange to see up close. Barda yearned for it, and hated that she yearned, and hated that she hated it. What was it like, to be so kind? What was it like to try to hold onto joy?
She pulled back from Auralie slightly, watching her face settle in her conviction. This close, her skin held the long-ago smell of crushed petals.Everything smelt like death here, but she smelt sweet.
“You cannot be out long. You have to be back soon.”
Auralie smiled again. “You are kind, Barda.” It settled in her stomach like the weight of a stone, and then grew in her chest like a breath.
Then Auralie rose and walked like a wraith, like the branches of some faraway tree, gliding along the floor. Stompa’s snoring was usually a deterrent to comfort, or quiet, or indeed getting a single wink of sleep in the slightest. Now, it was a cover.
It was moments like this that drove home to Barda just how much Auralie was holding back. It was like her soul had woken up, or like she had found it among the rubble. She did not have the hunger the way the rest of them did; instead of hunger, she had dreams. She did not want their missions. Did not want any of it.
And she could not leave, unless they made her.
Don’t go out, Barda thought desperately, weakly. They’ll catch you. Don’t you remember, you foolish girl? Lord Darkseid is.
”I will only be gone for a single blink of the blood-moon,” Auralie said, and then she slipped through the split in the entryway without looking back. She was light on her feet. She never once fell.
Barda lay there unsleeping, thinking of Himon, thinking of Scott Free, thinking of stupid Auralie. This infernal bind she had found herself in, alongside all of these bleeding-hearted dreamers, these weapons of destruction, when she had never once dreamed something of her own.
That’s not true, is it, Big Barda?
She squeezed her eyes closed. Her heart reached out to them, and she would not let it.
It is, Granny. I swear it is.
She felt beneath her head the press of the book from New Genesis, the book of love. The book of fiction. The book whose words flew like birds through Barda’s dreams.
Auralie had destabilised her. She’d done it the moment Barda rescued her from the raid in Armagetto all that time ago, the moment she’d started to be free. Planting the scent of flowers in her head once again, even among the barracks.
Well, Barda would rip it out, even if it broke Auralie. Even if it broke herself too. They couldn’t risk it. They couldn’t stray. Looking up was a danger in this place; you would miss your step, if you did not keep your head down, and you would fall. The leader of the Female Furies could not afford any of it. She was a shell propped up by only rage.
This was the last time. It would have to be. She vowed it. She would talk to Auralie again, no matter how long it took to convince her that this was a death march. What was dancing so you would not die, if you would die for it all the same?
Even if the answer to Auralie’s breathless Did you like it? had been on the tip of her tongue.
Of course I did.
Barda would keep Auralie afloat, but she would not let her fall. And she knew, and Auralie knew. They all did. If you fell, you could not get up again.
For on Apokolips, there would be no mercy.