Work Text:
It’s maybe a week since A. Buttle was so rudely uninvited to the end of the year ceremony. And Florie came back with a hanged head bearing the wounds of the betrayal. She felt almost too angry to give her the second chance, at first. Once a turncoat… it’s not to be trusted, A. Buttle said. But Hope saw some use. Help her in some new bandages, he said, do you know how to do that?
So now Florie is sitting there by the heater, shivering from… something. “Shouldn’t we go back to the clinic?” Buttle asks. “No, no she’s there.” Florie gives big eyes up at Buttle, fear obvious, then looks to the ground and seems suddenly self aware of her expression, trying to pull her face back into something that exudes anything but vulnerability. Shifts her eyes and mouth around and seems to settle on anger. The scowling is shifting her bandages.
Arvakr’s comrade’s frostbitten hands. She had seen it happen in Katla. Her people knew how to stave off the cold, but sometimes if people were real stupid, or real unlucky, it would happen. Dead nerves and blisters. She saw it happen again to soldiers around her, unused to the snow and ice. And so she began to apply bandages to their brittle, waxy skin, watching their disbelief as their cracking skin did not hurt at all.
The worst case she had ever seen, as she pulls the bandages off. Half Florie’s face blistering, bandaged down her chest and one arm. Hands seem spared, mostly. Some wounds on her arms are pulled open in the unwrapping and she seems to grit her teeth waiting for the pain and then the disbelief at the lack of it like she has seen so many times.
Then a face of horrible, horrible pain that takes Buttle away from the memory. “It’s so ugly…” No soldier had ever complained to Arvarkr about the ugliness of their blackened hands and feet. No one cared about the ugliness of trying to make it through the Graadian winter. They were so far past beauty there. Beauty is something for peacetime, for Apartment block A, beauty must be bought by those hellish reàl that seem to occupy everyone’s minds and pulled them away from the destined revolution. You covered the scars for parades.
Does she bear scars? Mirrors are scarce in the sewers. Checks her own arms and the scars take shapes. Cuts and bruises from sewer altercations. Callouses around her finger- from holding guns? From leaning on her cane? Some older scars that are sometimes there, sometimes aren’t. Drags her fingers across her throat. Florie sounds different too. Burns or something else.
A scratchy violin plays an old tune, a classic from a Graadian opera. Mandatory viewing for all its citizens if you can afford it. Arkadiy sits on the chairs quietly. She’s a good kid, and her parents made a very very big deal out of the show today. Pennies pinched to entrench some culture. Proud eyes to be able to say that they’ve seen it, they made its mark.
Too heady for a kid her age. Big heads cover the stage and all she hears is music as the dancers shuffle between necks in their tutus and feathers. She hums along to the music and kicks her feet and is shushed to silence by her mother, looking around apologetically for her kid’s behavior. Silence, watch, teach her something about what is beautiful.
Buttle sees Florie on stage, the lights brighter than what she has ever seen in the sewer. A familiar crackle in the air like the edge of the pale, a blue spark too near the heart of the show. It catches to the tar and smoke rises, pale expands from the torch and the fire starts to consume. No, no the fire is sticking to florie, like fiery mold creeping up on her. The crowd is only consumed by screams and something, lights on, too bright for the pale and bright bright red.
Smoke fills the venue and Anton sees the pale coming at them. Screams dull in the blue light, but the torch is driving the pale away like a beacon of sound, an anti-trench as people rush off or on in order to get help or get out. Soldiers running from fire and the crackle in reality, not quite knowing if they’re running in or out of the pale. Anton stands to aim his gun at the danger like he’s been trained to do. The danger never takes a human shape.
Something glides along the smoke and it’s winged and beautiful. It whispers to Anton now, beauty so loud it demands attention, the play, the hungry beauty swallowing their comrades into madness. Buttle’s hands are shaking and pressing into Florie’s skin. Wincing from Florie, pain, fear? Buttle is afraid as well, an innocent kind of scared, like that last scene in the swan lake, the opera is getting bloody and strange, and she was too young to know it’s not real. A beacon of screams and bright red chasing off the blue and silence of the pale. Memories of phoenixes or swans or fucking shrikes.
Buttle is back for a moment. Florie lost that scowl again, her face soft with pleading eyes for some warmth from Buttle as she clutches her cracked, blistering arm but still meeting Buttle’s cold stare as she is still half lost in Anton. The sound of a cane on the ground, not her own, and a whisper. Do not stand for the betrayal. She becomes the judge. Speak of betrayal and pain, of guilt. But comrades are comrades. Hope seemed pleased with their scary dog. Feathers form into wings and Florie starts clawing at her back, catching bandages and ripping some. The fire trying its best to heat the cold sewer is casting a shadow. Shivers involuntarily remembering the cold of Katla. Hot and cold like a fever. It’s all feathers now and fire.
The wings take shape now, clicking of boots. You were a soldier… you will fight it again. They are not her thoughts, they form involuntarily. Against what? It cannot be fought, it cannot be fought, Buttle whispers back to her thoughts. “I can fight it” Florie has taken the bandage from Buttle and is wrapping her own arm now, no longer waiting for Buttle to get out of her own head. “I can fight it all.”
—-
I remember you wondering out loud what might have happened if Buttle díd witness the swan incident. We can’t change the past, but we sure can hallucinate about it! Merry unspecified revacholian winter holiday!