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Clancy tugged the backpack straps forward, then taking several deep breaths, he bounced his weight from foot to foot, swinging from that simple movement into ducking and moving side to side, up and down, with the energy that coursed through him. Nervous energy? No. But full of forward momentum all the same.
This was another escape attempt, and he barely managed to stop himself from thinking of it as just another escape. There was something different this time, now that he knew They were actually out there. Banditos, thought to be bogeymen, or dangerously wishful thinking, like the deadly wishful thinking of a peaceful life outside the City. This time… he knew, for sure, that people had made it. That not everyone who never came back was dead at the bottom of the ravine. That not everyone returned to the City in body or in spirit.
“East is up,” he sang to himself as he moved around his room. This old familiar ritual was some sort of grounding, some sort of rebellion against a City of careful, calculated movement. If he was being honest, it was some sort of breakdown, but even that was a rebellion against the City of Feel Nothing. It marked, as it always did, the way that he funneled all the energy he couldn't hide--all the times that he wanted to rip down the walls brick by brick, or throw himself from them instead--into escape. Into cutting ties.
Into trying to cut ties. Into pretending that he didn't, when packing his bag, also pack away yellow flowers in a drawer in his room, for--. For someone else, he tried to tell himself. Not for later, for someone else.
“East is up.” Hands raised in a gesture of prayer, raised to a sky he didn't know how to reach anymore, but reached towards all the same.
“I'm fearless when I hear this on the low.” He wasn't the only one who knew those words, even if he was the only one in this room. Others were fighting wars, even if just in whispers, even if just in their head.
East is up. He took a deep breath and straightened, turning the momentum of his ducking dance into striding out the door, as if he had purpose, as if he knew that he'd make it out--and stay out--this time.
East is up. Salvation on the horizon.
----
Clancy's stomach clenched when he saw them. If he saw them in the wild, he knew now that his fear would mix with a desperate hope, falling down from the sky like yellow petals, hope that they were there to help him. But here, here, they clearly had other business. Business he felt deep in his bones that none of them could afford for him to interrupt.
And so, blind in his desire to evade notice, he turned on his heel and took several steps back toward the passage he had come from.
And watched more yellow figures emerge from the doorway ahead of him.
His stomach sank further into a pit. He could explain, then. He didn't mean to be in the way, only to get out. Maybe even get out the same way they had come in, or he could leave a different way entirely, if they didn't want to risk him exposing their escape route.
So once again, he turned, and this time, took in the details of the people that stood before him. Stepping forward while the rest hung back was the figure with the yellow cross on his chest, crossing just over his heart. The one that had first thrown the flowers.
Clancy's heart clenched like it would kill him. He was standing in the ravine all over again, the day that had such fuzzy details, like he had seen it from two sets of eyes. He could swear he had. But if there was one thing that stood out to him, it was all the yellow. The yellow flowers beneath his feet. The figures lining the ridge in yellow. The yellow flower petals, falling down all around him and in front of him, encompassing his disoriented vision. Tearing through the dark that crept up from his throat towards his head.
Before Clancy could open his mouth to explain, the man pulled down his bandana to reveal the rest of his face, and with no hesitation or explanation, Clancy knew he was looking on the face of a friend. Instinctively he reached out a hand, and before he could think, he was following an elaborate handshake without mistake. The handshake ended with Clancy and the man pressed close into a hug, heart by heart, and a firm slap on the back, before releasing each other to stand face to face.
The ravine was a cold nightmare within a place of freedom where Clancy's mind felt divided somehow. And here, surrounded by banditos in the City that choked them all, he felt like he was dreaming again, but this time, in this moment, he felt more whole than he had ever dared to dream.
----
Clancy's stomach clenched when he saw them, and his head spun. Banditos. Banditos inside the City. Where everyone was their enemy, and he wasn’t wearing any yellow. Would they consider him an enemy too?
After all, even if they recognized him, he was back in the City. They might very well know that he came back willingly, in the end. He had broken away from Nico on that hazy day in the ravine--the day he could’ve sworn he had stepped outside his own body, watched his own self run away while his mind remained pressed against the ravine wall in fear--but it had only been so many days before Keons found him, and brought him home, not through smearing, but with a hug and simple words: “Clancy, child, let’s go home.”
Face blank, Clancy turned back the way he came, heart about to pound out of his chest. He only took a few steps towards his new escape--not from the City, but back into it--before registering the banditos headed his way from that direction too.
The only way out is through. And if they think he’s an enemy--. The Bishops had tried, and sometimes succeeded, in making the banditos not legends, but monsters in the shadows. But even if they thought he was an enemy, even if they didn’t believe him-- anything would be better than staying in Dema.
He turned back to face the first group, sending a wordless prayer to the sky that he could convince them that he was not a citizen of Dema--or was trying, desperately, to not be--and saw the one that seemed to be the leader, with the tape across his chest.
In an instant, he stood back in that ravine, back pressed into the cold damp rock, standing with a hand--a weighty, unfamiliar hand--pressing on his shoulder, pulling him against the wall as if from behind. He saw the banditos lining the ridge, the figure wearing the cross. And what seemed, hazy and dreamlike, the figure’s double standing behind him, resting his hand on the first’s shoulder. Somehow, in that moment, Clancy had known that that was the same heavy, strange hand he felt on himself.
But as the man with the cross approached him, holding a torch, Clancy only recognized the one man's presence, not the hazy double.
The couple seconds that it took the man to reach Clancy felt like eternity, but once he stood in front of Clancy, he pulled down his bandana, revealing… a face that held only kindness. A face that brushed aside the fear of being seen as an enemy, and replaced it with the feeling that had always escaped Clancy in Dema. The feeling of having a home.
Clancy reached out a hand, and the other man met it with a familiar gesture that felt like an ancient friendship.
As Clancy was led through a handshake, there was still a prickle of fear poking at his mind: the idea that this could be some sort of trick. But there was something so real about this kindness--as real as his need for that kindness--that he did his best to push the fear away.
Not fully out of his mind, but far enough.
----
Clancy's stomach clenched when he saw them, and as he realized that they had already seen him (as well as blocked every path that way), he turned on his heel, moderating his pace. Not yet. They couldn't find him yet.
But there were more banditos there, covering the direction he had come from, covering every direction he could go. Wrapping him up like a jumpsuit.
Because that was what they were, weren't they? Like his jumpsuit in the City, they were a protection, one against both the City and the beautiful but terrifying wilds of Trench. They were protection, and he-- he wanted out, but he didn't know if--.
Accepting their help was an entirely different matter.
As Clancy turned back to face the original group of banditos, he also in an instant stood back in the ravine, the moment that he had exhausted every strength in him, except the strength to promise to fight another day. With the Bishop's fingerprints on his neck, spreading to remove his own identity, he had staggered behind the Bishop on his horse with nothing but the promise that the cycle, if it did not break, would never end. If the cycle did not break, he would not be the one to be left broken.
But there he had stood, in fact very broken for the time being. Until he saw the flowers at his feet, and looked up the figures lining the ridge. The ones who were free. The ones who had made it. The ones he would never be, and surely they knew he would never be them, but at least, in this moment, they saw him make a promise to fight. Witnesses to the fact--
To the fact that he would break himself on the rocks of this ravine, time and time again. That deep down, the Bishop was leading him still.
But instead of witnessing judgment on an outsider, what he saw when he looked to the figures lining the ridge was a figure with a cross, like a compass, on his chest, throwing down petals the color of--
Rebellion. Life. Hope.
The petals fell around him, and he felt something in him--not break, but break through. These people, these people--. There was something about these people and the petals they threw that grew something deep inside his chest.
That, and an inexplicable presence he felt, as if one of them was standing by his side, hand on Clancy's heart.
And he turned and ran, away from the Bishops, and maybe to the banditos. To the ones stealing him from death.
And here he stood in front of them again, guilty of having not made it out yet, and feeling guiltier that deep down, he could not stop imagining this escape attempting ending like the last. He tried to tell himself it would work this time, but if the banditos took him in now--.
Then he wouldn't have the chance to earn that help. To prove that he deserved it. Or-- to fail, and prove that he didn't. If they helped him now, he'd just prove afterwards that he didn't deserve it, that he was born choking.
But there was their leader, the one with the cross on his chest, holding a torch and coming to him. He pulled down his mask to show a face, a face that despite himself, Clancy felt desperate to trust. To accept help from.
Clancy held out his hand to the one bearing the torch. His mind flashed to the flowers tucked away in his living quarters. But here, in the firelight, maybe all dead things could burn, and new hope could grow.
The torchbearer met his extended hand as if it was second nature, and met every gesture afterwards, in some sign or handshake that both of them seemed to know without knowing. The handshake left them with their right hands clasped, pressed into a brief hug, before standing face to face again.
Maybe he wouldn't fail. Maybe he could accept this help. Maybe he had a purpose in this people.
And maybe they all, including Clancy, had work to do.