For whimonda, This is How You Lose Her, PG-13.
Jan 10, 2016 20:32:44 GMT 10
Idleness and kitsunerei88 like this
Post by max on Jan 10, 2016 20:32:44 GMT 10
Title: This is How You Lose Her
Rating: PG-13
For: whimonda
Prompt: Beka AU if she never became a dog (you can take this as meaning she never met Lord Gershom or as her following a ladylike course like her sisters, or anything else,. surprise me!)
Summary: When Beka tries to find help in Corus, somebody else finds her first.
Notes and Warnings: Sorry if this is a bit OOC! Or generally just completely ridiculous.
She goes to the Dogs because she’s tried everyone else, and all of them had said no. A mot fool enough to bed a rat would have to rest with them, the neighbours said, and the best a gixie like you can do is make sure you stay outta his way. When she’d tried the Court of the Rogue the guards outside had struck her to the street, and then kicked her in the ribs to teach her to mind how she looked at those as were higher than her, and she’d been grateful they’d been too frightened by her eyes to kick strong enough to break bones when they did.
The Dogs don’t strike her, at least. Or curse her, or laugh at her, as she'd fretted they might. They don’t help, though, either.
They don’t see her at all. Neither to strike her nor to run her off. The way scales closed mumpers from their awareness, as if they could not see the bleeding stumps where legs should be, hear the moans for alms, or smell the reek of scummer and rottenness that rolls off them, and Beka feels as dirty when one of the dogs removes her hand from the bridle of the horse and gently pushes her away from the Lord Provost’s retinue, all without saying a word to her.
And Beka knows not to cry in the City streets. Not to draw attention to her littleness and her eyes – especially when she is full of the secret of where the Bold Brass hide – but as she chases after the fine horses, wending her way through the bustle of the people who don’t see her, pleading with them to listen even as the riders vanish from her sight, something in Beka cracks and the tears pour from her eyes and make her head hot and her nose runny.
Then from behind her, a melodious, furious voice answers, ‘What’s this about your mother?’
She wheels sharply, only to whiten and turn tail in flight but the knight is too quick for her (a knight in the Cesspool) and grabs her arm and doesn’t let go, no matter how Beka writhes and tries to dig her nails into that arm and wrench herself from the grip as the tales swim dizzily in her head –– the Market of Sorrows, Mama sick and hurt and Will and the littlies left alone thinking she’s run off –– and then the Knight says –– exasperated, but not menacing, ‘Goddess spare us, child! By the Shield of Mithros, I swear not to hurt you!’
And so quickly that Beka doesn’t have time to react, the knight releases her arm only to cup her face between her hands, crouch down and look at her, eye to eye.
Beka’s throat closes up. She knows there are nobles who are Lady Knights, but it is quite a different thing to meet one. With eyes so concerned and dark, no matter that folk get so scared of her eyes, and hands so gentle for all the roughness of her skin that the fear abruptly drains away. The lady seems to feel it melt off her, and gentles her hold.
‘Do you believe me?’
Beka does.
‘About to run when I let go? Though, by the way, I don’t mind you doing so, only that I can aid you if you stay.’
She isn’t. The knight lets her go and waits a moment in case Beka really will run, but help is the one thing she has been seeking, now, for so many days.
‘Very well,’ the lady says eventually. ‘Then I am Lady Knight Sabine of Macayhill. Now, tell me your troubles…’
And under the mantle of the Lady Knight’s listening gaze and aid if you stay and the hope that makes her feel giddy and unafraid, something in Beka’s chest unstoppers. The sun vanishes behind the wall and the Lady Knight buys her dumplings and as they sit on the lip of a fountain, Beka eats and the Lady Knight listens as she unburdens herself of all her secrets.
****
The next day, as the same Lady Knight wipes blood off her sword and onto a dead rat’s shirt, Beka feels as if the new secrets she has become filled with just this afternoon are so great she will never be able to speak easy again, for fear of letting them fall.
Then the Lady Sabine says, without looking at her, ‘You should not have followed, Beka.’
‘I dint,’ Beka denies flatly –– still so overwhelmed she can’t speak as proper as the lady makes her want to try to. ‘I jus’… jus’ kep’ eyes-high. Case ––’
‘You weren’t confident I would fulfil the vow I made you?’ Sabine queries mildly, and Beka can’t understand how she can stay so when all around her the Bold Brass had fallen easy as dice from a gambler’s cup, turned from men to copper and iron and nothing. ‘I understand you don’t have the best experience with adults. But a knight’s vow is a sacred thing, and not made lightly. I would not have promised you aid if I had not intended to give it.’
‘No!’ Beka cries, because she’d never doubt the lady, not now, and then she realises she’s just raised her voice to a noble and she claps her hands over her mouth – but the lady only raises her eyebrows with the kind of questioning ‘Well?’ her mama uses.
‘Begging your ladyship’s pardon,’ she stammers, ‘But I came because…’ her voice is trembling, and it is an immense thing the lady has done for her, but her mama had told her to mind how she spoke of the birds. ‘Cuz I afeart the pigeons coming.’
When Sabine sheathes her sword, and turns to Beka, she already knows she’s misunderstood. ‘Even if informers saw this –– and, don’t worry, none did –– I am a knight of the realm.’
Which is the most ridiculous not-a-reason-at-all that Beka has ever heard – and so, frightening, coming from Sabine’s mouth. ‘But the dogs ––’
‘I, too, uphold the King’s law,’ Sabine interjects, silencing Beka’s protests. ‘My code may not be dog law, but I promise you it is as just. Seven years ago I took my oath before Roger himself…’
And the lady smiles, her eyes large and soft and lovely even as her skin glimmers red with the droplets of blood upon it.
Rat blood.
‘They will not come.’
She continues to smile at Beka, so steady and reassuring that Beka’s worry eases. She thinks again of her mama’s pretty face and how her eyes had swollen to slits, and then looks across to him that did it her. The lady had been cleaner to him than he’d deserved –– just the one thrust of her sword and he’d gone, quick as a moth flown into candle flame. Quicker by far than the mumpers who died in the winters, their bodies burned black by frost. Truly, much more than many received, and much more than he could have hoped for.
‘Not that I’m much bothered by thieves per se,’ the Lady continues, now wiping her hands with a kerchief of silk. ‘But it’s only a cur that’d hurt a woman like that, and curs I pay in kind.’
Beka turns the words over in her mind, silently trying them out for herself… I pay in kind.
It is just.
She suspects she should say thank you, or bob like her mama’d showed her, but even though this is what she means to do, when she steps back she treads accidentally into a red puddle pooling around one of the moth-men, her feet bare to the cooling stickiness, and it makes her feel so suddenly lightheaded that all that comes out is the last thing she’d latched onto in the lady’s words, curious and dizzy as the lady reaches for her to stop her falling.
‘What’s curs?’
The lady sets her on her feet again, carefully, and waits until she is steady before she answers.
And then she smirks, cool and sharp.
‘It’s another word for mongrels… dogs.’
‘Oh.’
And Beka’s teeth gleam when she smiles back.
****
By the time she returns, Beka is old enough to know that there is more to Justice than the dichotomy of black and white which first had dazzled her, but by then the conviction has taken root; has become the scale by which her every decision is weighed. By then –– seventeen years old and more than half her life in service to her Lady, her body honed to the perfect balance of a Sirajit blade –– it has become elementary that she be the one to dispense it.
She knows the dogs are unlikely to see it that way, but then, the dogs have never seen her before at all. Her kind invisible to them, in their poverty, their weakness.
Not that she much looks like her kind anymore. None of them had once Sabine had borne her family away from Corus to Macayhill, providing her sisters with house service, her brothers with horses, and their mother a safe place to die in. For Beka, there had been the first red gift of redress. Later, the art of the sword.
Soon as they pass through South Gate, though, Beka feels the thrill of belonging roll through her, and knows she is Lower City still. Underneath every other thing she has picked up through her years by Sabine’s side –– chivalry to inform her actions without binding them; the defiant integrity of the Hill Country to teach her the difference between outlaw and lawlessness; the ledger of justice, neat in her mind though the curs may march by unheeding –– there is the pulse of Corus, forever matching the steady pump of her own heart, and This is who I am, she thinks to herself. Her hand closing tightly into a fist as if she is making a promise.
Then, ‘Sarden city,’ Sabine grumbles moodily at her side, no longer quite as tall as she used to seem, since Beka herself grew up. ‘Remind me again why we don’t turn around now?’
‘Because the King’s agreed to pardon you,’ Beka responds absently. ‘And then you get to have a choice on where we head next, rather than being booted where you’re bid.’
Her mistress lets out a string of fluid Hurdik curses –– all sentiments Beka herself had wholeheartedly agreed with up until the moment they’d arrived – and from his position on their packhorse Pounce mewls Oh, you know you’d have gotten bored up there eventually... and Sabine’s glare his way is so aggrieved that Beka tilts her head and laughs aloud.
‘I’m sure he’s right,’ Beka consoles, only half her attention spared to the conversation –– the pigeons already whispering to her through the air.
The only thing to be done about that, she knows, is to listen.
‘There’ll be something for us yet.’
****
The next day, as Hasfush takes the last of the Hill Country dust from the creases of her clothes, she learns of the monster who has preyed upon her city.
And she vows not to rest until she has rid them of the snake with her own hands.
Rating: PG-13
For: whimonda
Prompt: Beka AU if she never became a dog (you can take this as meaning she never met Lord Gershom or as her following a ladylike course like her sisters, or anything else,. surprise me!)
Summary: When Beka tries to find help in Corus, somebody else finds her first.
Notes and Warnings: Sorry if this is a bit OOC! Or generally just completely ridiculous.
She goes to the Dogs because she’s tried everyone else, and all of them had said no. A mot fool enough to bed a rat would have to rest with them, the neighbours said, and the best a gixie like you can do is make sure you stay outta his way. When she’d tried the Court of the Rogue the guards outside had struck her to the street, and then kicked her in the ribs to teach her to mind how she looked at those as were higher than her, and she’d been grateful they’d been too frightened by her eyes to kick strong enough to break bones when they did.
The Dogs don’t strike her, at least. Or curse her, or laugh at her, as she'd fretted they might. They don’t help, though, either.
They don’t see her at all. Neither to strike her nor to run her off. The way scales closed mumpers from their awareness, as if they could not see the bleeding stumps where legs should be, hear the moans for alms, or smell the reek of scummer and rottenness that rolls off them, and Beka feels as dirty when one of the dogs removes her hand from the bridle of the horse and gently pushes her away from the Lord Provost’s retinue, all without saying a word to her.
And Beka knows not to cry in the City streets. Not to draw attention to her littleness and her eyes – especially when she is full of the secret of where the Bold Brass hide – but as she chases after the fine horses, wending her way through the bustle of the people who don’t see her, pleading with them to listen even as the riders vanish from her sight, something in Beka cracks and the tears pour from her eyes and make her head hot and her nose runny.
Then from behind her, a melodious, furious voice answers, ‘What’s this about your mother?’
She wheels sharply, only to whiten and turn tail in flight but the knight is too quick for her (a knight in the Cesspool) and grabs her arm and doesn’t let go, no matter how Beka writhes and tries to dig her nails into that arm and wrench herself from the grip as the tales swim dizzily in her head –– the Market of Sorrows, Mama sick and hurt and Will and the littlies left alone thinking she’s run off –– and then the Knight says –– exasperated, but not menacing, ‘Goddess spare us, child! By the Shield of Mithros, I swear not to hurt you!’
And so quickly that Beka doesn’t have time to react, the knight releases her arm only to cup her face between her hands, crouch down and look at her, eye to eye.
Beka’s throat closes up. She knows there are nobles who are Lady Knights, but it is quite a different thing to meet one. With eyes so concerned and dark, no matter that folk get so scared of her eyes, and hands so gentle for all the roughness of her skin that the fear abruptly drains away. The lady seems to feel it melt off her, and gentles her hold.
‘Do you believe me?’
Beka does.
‘About to run when I let go? Though, by the way, I don’t mind you doing so, only that I can aid you if you stay.’
She isn’t. The knight lets her go and waits a moment in case Beka really will run, but help is the one thing she has been seeking, now, for so many days.
‘Very well,’ the lady says eventually. ‘Then I am Lady Knight Sabine of Macayhill. Now, tell me your troubles…’
And under the mantle of the Lady Knight’s listening gaze and aid if you stay and the hope that makes her feel giddy and unafraid, something in Beka’s chest unstoppers. The sun vanishes behind the wall and the Lady Knight buys her dumplings and as they sit on the lip of a fountain, Beka eats and the Lady Knight listens as she unburdens herself of all her secrets.
****
The next day, as the same Lady Knight wipes blood off her sword and onto a dead rat’s shirt, Beka feels as if the new secrets she has become filled with just this afternoon are so great she will never be able to speak easy again, for fear of letting them fall.
Then the Lady Sabine says, without looking at her, ‘You should not have followed, Beka.’
‘I dint,’ Beka denies flatly –– still so overwhelmed she can’t speak as proper as the lady makes her want to try to. ‘I jus’… jus’ kep’ eyes-high. Case ––’
‘You weren’t confident I would fulfil the vow I made you?’ Sabine queries mildly, and Beka can’t understand how she can stay so when all around her the Bold Brass had fallen easy as dice from a gambler’s cup, turned from men to copper and iron and nothing. ‘I understand you don’t have the best experience with adults. But a knight’s vow is a sacred thing, and not made lightly. I would not have promised you aid if I had not intended to give it.’
‘No!’ Beka cries, because she’d never doubt the lady, not now, and then she realises she’s just raised her voice to a noble and she claps her hands over her mouth – but the lady only raises her eyebrows with the kind of questioning ‘Well?’ her mama uses.
‘Begging your ladyship’s pardon,’ she stammers, ‘But I came because…’ her voice is trembling, and it is an immense thing the lady has done for her, but her mama had told her to mind how she spoke of the birds. ‘Cuz I afeart the pigeons coming.’
When Sabine sheathes her sword, and turns to Beka, she already knows she’s misunderstood. ‘Even if informers saw this –– and, don’t worry, none did –– I am a knight of the realm.’
Which is the most ridiculous not-a-reason-at-all that Beka has ever heard – and so, frightening, coming from Sabine’s mouth. ‘But the dogs ––’
‘I, too, uphold the King’s law,’ Sabine interjects, silencing Beka’s protests. ‘My code may not be dog law, but I promise you it is as just. Seven years ago I took my oath before Roger himself…’
And the lady smiles, her eyes large and soft and lovely even as her skin glimmers red with the droplets of blood upon it.
Rat blood.
‘They will not come.’
She continues to smile at Beka, so steady and reassuring that Beka’s worry eases. She thinks again of her mama’s pretty face and how her eyes had swollen to slits, and then looks across to him that did it her. The lady had been cleaner to him than he’d deserved –– just the one thrust of her sword and he’d gone, quick as a moth flown into candle flame. Quicker by far than the mumpers who died in the winters, their bodies burned black by frost. Truly, much more than many received, and much more than he could have hoped for.
‘Not that I’m much bothered by thieves per se,’ the Lady continues, now wiping her hands with a kerchief of silk. ‘But it’s only a cur that’d hurt a woman like that, and curs I pay in kind.’
Beka turns the words over in her mind, silently trying them out for herself… I pay in kind.
It is just.
She suspects she should say thank you, or bob like her mama’d showed her, but even though this is what she means to do, when she steps back she treads accidentally into a red puddle pooling around one of the moth-men, her feet bare to the cooling stickiness, and it makes her feel so suddenly lightheaded that all that comes out is the last thing she’d latched onto in the lady’s words, curious and dizzy as the lady reaches for her to stop her falling.
‘What’s curs?’
The lady sets her on her feet again, carefully, and waits until she is steady before she answers.
And then she smirks, cool and sharp.
‘It’s another word for mongrels… dogs.’
‘Oh.’
And Beka’s teeth gleam when she smiles back.
****
By the time she returns, Beka is old enough to know that there is more to Justice than the dichotomy of black and white which first had dazzled her, but by then the conviction has taken root; has become the scale by which her every decision is weighed. By then –– seventeen years old and more than half her life in service to her Lady, her body honed to the perfect balance of a Sirajit blade –– it has become elementary that she be the one to dispense it.
She knows the dogs are unlikely to see it that way, but then, the dogs have never seen her before at all. Her kind invisible to them, in their poverty, their weakness.
Not that she much looks like her kind anymore. None of them had once Sabine had borne her family away from Corus to Macayhill, providing her sisters with house service, her brothers with horses, and their mother a safe place to die in. For Beka, there had been the first red gift of redress. Later, the art of the sword.
Soon as they pass through South Gate, though, Beka feels the thrill of belonging roll through her, and knows she is Lower City still. Underneath every other thing she has picked up through her years by Sabine’s side –– chivalry to inform her actions without binding them; the defiant integrity of the Hill Country to teach her the difference between outlaw and lawlessness; the ledger of justice, neat in her mind though the curs may march by unheeding –– there is the pulse of Corus, forever matching the steady pump of her own heart, and This is who I am, she thinks to herself. Her hand closing tightly into a fist as if she is making a promise.
Then, ‘Sarden city,’ Sabine grumbles moodily at her side, no longer quite as tall as she used to seem, since Beka herself grew up. ‘Remind me again why we don’t turn around now?’
‘Because the King’s agreed to pardon you,’ Beka responds absently. ‘And then you get to have a choice on where we head next, rather than being booted where you’re bid.’
Her mistress lets out a string of fluid Hurdik curses –– all sentiments Beka herself had wholeheartedly agreed with up until the moment they’d arrived – and from his position on their packhorse Pounce mewls Oh, you know you’d have gotten bored up there eventually... and Sabine’s glare his way is so aggrieved that Beka tilts her head and laughs aloud.
‘I’m sure he’s right,’ Beka consoles, only half her attention spared to the conversation –– the pigeons already whispering to her through the air.
The only thing to be done about that, she knows, is to listen.
‘There’ll be something for us yet.’
****
The next day, as Hasfush takes the last of the Hill Country dust from the creases of her clothes, she learns of the monster who has preyed upon her city.
And she vows not to rest until she has rid them of the snake with her own hands.