[ when she arrives at their encampment, the kuruko clan has already been reduced to a pile of bodies. in her people's tradition, bodies are burned and the ashes buried at the root of a young tree. return to the earth, like all things. but these are strewn around still, blood smears and mangled and unrecognizable faces of people who had once known her, who she could now hardly remember. there had been no one left to bury them.
mavis takes an axe and starts cleaving off pieces of the lean-tos that her people had set up alongside their carriages. there's enough wood here to build a fire. the desert is stingy, but it gives enough. when she gets it going, the thick smell of mesquite stings the air, and the few survivors creep out from high up the hill, from the canyon.
the cats. one of them has blood smeared over its mouth. cats are not scavengers, she thinks. they are predators. it comes to sniff her, and she lets it nuzzle its bloody muzzle against her, and then she puts her hand on its shoulders to signal she will follow.
it has tried to bury its master. mavis slings the body over the cat's saddled back and walks it back into town, towards the pyre, where she has gathered the rest. neither of them is alone, now. not only because of each other's company — but because when they return to the encampment, someone else is waiting for them there.
mavis says nothing. stands beside a burned tent, hands and face and white roughspun stained with blood. the cat bares its teeth. ]
( the report had been vague. a drone picking up readings that may or may not have meant something, which meant a team would need to be sent to verify.
the kurkuko clan wasn't one he'd been familiar with — most of his days were spent cycling between pallas and roskait doing the kind of fetch and carry jobs that even a rookie could do in their sleep — so he'd been eager to cut his teeth on something a little more challenging.
he'd not been disappointed.
except that all signs were pointing to the target being in the wind. cast out years ago and believed (hoped) to be dead because it scared them, the things she'd known, because fear was so much easier to reach for than understanding and she'd never truly been one of them anyway.
things got simple after that.
he'd been waiting for the withdrawal order to come through, eyes turned skyward to a night scattered with stars so bright that he could almost see what the big deal was, living out here in the quiet when he'd felt it — that needle prick of awareness. awareness that had resolved into a shape that seemed much too small to be containing all that wild, terrible power.
fuck.
mind ticking over possibilities. de-escalation seems out of the question all things considered, but she's not making any moves to attack, not yet, and maybe.
just maybe — )
I'm going to lift my hands to my helmet.
( the vocoder flattens out any emotion. turns his voice tinny and artificial. )
[ there is one thing in this world that the kuruko clan holds above clan loyalty, and it's the respect and authority won from combat. if ever there were a way for mavis to prove herself to the clan, it would be this: avenging it through violence. it might even be enough to make them reconsider her exile.
or it would be, if any of them were alive to see it.
the stranger's surrender is telling. as are his clothes — the grim, sharp lines and glinting sheen can only come from outside the wilds. and these days, everything outside the wilds is kossos.
a memory of the town council surges back, foggy. the jarl nods solemnly as the weaver's husband calls mavis the enemy. the jarl and the weaver and her husband are all dead now, ash and blood and mangled bone, but here is the enemy. the butcher. right in front of her.
(it's him, isn't it? not her, who had seen this and had no way to stop it.)
she charges with a yell. sand slipping under her worn moccasins, she throws herself at him. her arms flail wildly at her sides. it's not a neat, focus warrior's run because she had never trained with the warriors of her clan. she had trained herself in the desert with flexible mesquite and palo verde branches for whips and devil's claws for knives.
satisfied that this is permission from the blood of kuruko, the lynx charges beside her. ]
( what it lacks in finesse it makes up for in stupidity. because here's the thing, nobody does what she does unless they have a death wish.
he gets an arm around her waist, squeezing hard enough to drive the air from her lungs ㅡ hard enough that he can practically her the grind of rib against rib. )
[ she wheezes. the air goes out, it won't come back in. her lungs won't inflate. his grip is too tight.
mavis flails, all elbows and heels. she bucks like a lynx trying to shrug him off. wild. violent.
and when she can't make a noise, when she can't get a grip on him, the lynx — which owes her no obedience except the respect it saved for her clan — pounces them both, sinking its teeth in one great bite into both of their shoulders and shaking its head, rending the wound.
breathless, mavis can't cry out. but her vision blots black. it's not the worst pain she's ever felt, she tells herself, but she's not positive that's true. ]
— collides with them both, taking them to the ground. the force of impact strikes like a hammer blow, driving the air from his lungs and putting stars in his eyes.
and then there are teeth: sharp, vicious things that puncture his armour like it's nothing. digging into the meat of his shoulder. )
Fuck.
( his vision burns white at the edges as his nerves catch fire. it's not a fatal wound — not yet — but with the way it's snapping its head, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that it's a matter of minutes if not seconds before that changes.
turn the pain into power. an instructor's voice in the back of his mind, and it takes every ounce of desperate strength for him to lift his free hand, fist balled, and strike at the thing's head.
once.
twice.
a third time. striking at it like he'd cave its skull in given the change. because he would. he absolutely would. )
[ mavis reels — the pain rends her mind open, makes it easy for her to pull on the fraction of a memory. it's like slipping into being him for a moment. it's the worst part of the furor, really. the slipping sense that everyone else is leaking into her and she can't stop it.
the lynx's jaw releases, and mavis' head clears up a little as the blood pours out of her shoulder. it flinches back, getting out of the range of the kossian's blows. mavis takes advantage of his loosened grip. reaches up to smear her own blood across his helmet visor, obscuring his vision as she cracks his head back against the barrel beside them. ]
( the world tilts. static blasting across his senses as his head cracks against the surface of whatever she drove him against. stone? wood? either is possible.
aristaeus clings to consciousness with a white-knuckled belligerence. the blood loss won't be enough to kill him. probably. but there's all kinds of factors to consider, including giant fucking cats.
so he gets his feet under him. awkward and ungainly for those first few seconds until his head clears — he'll pay for this later, of course, when the blowback hits, but right now the power is buzzing through his veins, blunting the worst of his pain. )
[ she clutches a hand to her shoulder, drawing away from him. distance, first. she has to size him up. she has to keep distance between them because he's stronger than her, bigger than her.
but there's something there, blurring into her mind. ]
You — [ she feels light-headed. is it the blood loss or the cold realization? ] You came here for me.
( the answer is obvious enough without him having to say it. it's nothing short of a miracle that's kept her hidden this long. if he fails there'll be others sent in his place.
assuming she survives. )
Let me help you.
( how long can a little thing like her last with a wound that big and ugly? a few minutes at the most. less if she keeps moving like that. heart hammering against the cage of her ribs as she tries to put distance between them.
his fingers twitch. rotator cuff might be damaged but he has some function left. he could make her stop, if it came to it. pluck at her nerves until she did what he wanted, but the injury makes it too risky. imprecise. )
[ quiet, as if she were considering it. but it's only disbelief. there's not an ounce of her that would ever go near him, willingly. he had done this. he was responsible. (she did this. she is responsible. she will reconcile these thoughts later, alone, when he is not so loud.)
the crackle of flames fills a silence between them just before she charges him with another yell. this time, she grabs a weapon from a strewn corpse on the way, a dagger pulled from the boot of a boy who she used to sit beside during clan meetings. did he remember her name? did he blame her when he died?
she strikes at the kossian with it — brings it from the side that his blood-smeared helmet visor will obscure his vision, maybe give her a little edge. ]
[ the kossian's warped voice is every worst thought she's ever had, projected right into her amygdala. booming. mavis bares her teeth, as if snarling might help her hold tighter to the knife. but the muscle strains and the tendons seize. her grip is lost, and it clatters against the steel of his armor on its way down to the clay dirt between them.
she grips his wrist back, instead, twisting her body to throw him across her hip and into the ground. sinking to her knee to build more momentum into the throw. her shoulder screams, and she buckles with a grunt.
black spots in her vision, again. she can't keep this up. she reaches blindly for the knife, ready to clamber onto him with it so she can end this. ]
( lightly curious. the sense of him close enough that she could almost reach out and touch should she desire, but of course that's just an illusion because he's not remotely near. )
Three warriors came back from a skirmish with the Efa clan.
[ she closes her eyes. she can still remember their faces, but she'd never learned their names. they looked so tall. the connection between them ripples with the image. she doesn't have the control to hold it back from spilling over with the words. ]
( a pause. the sensation of fingers carding through her thoughts, gentle, searching. )
You were raised by the Kuruko? ( a lilt at the end that turns what would otherwise be a statement into a question. the kuruko are gone, now, bone and ash, but their presence linger in her all the same. )
How does abandoning a child to their fate make them strong? ( the scent of chalk dust. the taste of blood in her (his) mouth? the low rumble of a voice. older. authoritative. turn the pain into power. over and over, a stuck record. a mantra.
so perhaps he's not as ignorant of such things as he'd like to pretend. )
If they didn't teach me to survive, the wilds would have killed me. What's the point in saving a child just to lose them later?
[ how many times had the wilds almost killed her anyway? days of starvation. the sound of branches snapping in the dead of night when a hunter from another clan came upon her. ]
( an edge to the words. angry. it angers him that his people are judged so unfairly. judged for bringing order to the chaos of the wilds, bringing justice to the children like her, the ones wronged and abandoned. )
[ she prods at that connection. deep in his mind, she can still feel that teacher with the sharp features. his presence remains. just like aristaeus' brothers in arms. ]
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mavis takes an axe and starts cleaving off pieces of the lean-tos that her people had set up alongside their carriages. there's enough wood here to build a fire. the desert is stingy, but it gives enough. when she gets it going, the thick smell of mesquite stings the air, and the few survivors creep out from high up the hill, from the canyon.
the cats. one of them has blood smeared over its mouth. cats are not scavengers, she thinks. they are predators. it comes to sniff her, and she lets it nuzzle its bloody muzzle against her, and then she puts her hand on its shoulders to signal she will follow.
it has tried to bury its master. mavis slings the body over the cat's saddled back and walks it back into town, towards the pyre, where she has gathered the rest. neither of them is alone, now. not only because of each other's company — but because when they return to the encampment, someone else is waiting for them there.
mavis says nothing. stands beside a burned tent, hands and face and white roughspun stained with blood. the cat bares its teeth. ]
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the kurkuko clan wasn't one he'd been familiar with — most of his days were spent cycling between pallas and roskait doing the kind of fetch and carry jobs that even a rookie could do in their sleep — so he'd been eager to cut his teeth on something a little more challenging.
he'd not been disappointed.
except that all signs were pointing to the target being in the wind. cast out years ago and believed (hoped) to be dead because it scared them, the things she'd known, because fear was so much easier to reach for than understanding and she'd never truly been one of them anyway.
things got simple after that.
he'd been waiting for the withdrawal order to come through, eyes turned skyward to a night scattered with stars so bright that he could almost see what the big deal was, living out here in the quiet when he'd felt it — that needle prick of awareness. awareness that had resolved into a shape that seemed much too small to be containing all that wild, terrible power.
fuck.
mind ticking over possibilities. de-escalation seems out of the question all things considered, but she's not making any moves to attack, not yet, and maybe.
just maybe — )
I'm going to lift my hands to my helmet.
( the vocoder flattens out any emotion. turns his voice tinny and artificial. )
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or it would be, if any of them were alive to see it.
the stranger's surrender is telling. as are his clothes — the grim, sharp lines and glinting sheen can only come from outside the wilds. and these days, everything outside the wilds is kossos.
a memory of the town council surges back, foggy. the jarl nods solemnly as the weaver's husband calls mavis the enemy. the jarl and the weaver and her husband are all dead now, ash and blood and mangled bone, but here is the enemy. the butcher. right in front of her.
(it's him, isn't it? not her, who had seen this and had no way to stop it.)
she charges with a yell. sand slipping under her worn moccasins, she throws herself at him. her arms flail wildly at her sides. it's not a neat, focus warrior's run because she had never trained with the warriors of her clan. she had trained herself in the desert with flexible mesquite and palo verde branches for whips and devil's claws for knives.
satisfied that this is permission from the blood of kuruko, the lynx charges beside her. ]
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he gets an arm around her waist, squeezing hard enough to drive the air from her lungs ㅡ hard enough that he can practically her the grind of rib against rib. )
Call it off.
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mavis flails, all elbows and heels. she bucks like a lynx trying to shrug him off. wild. violent.
and when she can't make a noise, when she can't get a grip on him, the lynx — which owes her no obedience except the respect it saved for her clan — pounces them both, sinking its teeth in one great bite into both of their shoulders and shaking its head, rending the wound.
breathless, mavis can't cry out. but her vision blots black. it's not the worst pain she's ever felt, she tells herself, but she's not positive that's true. ]
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— collides with them both, taking them to the ground. the force of impact strikes like a hammer blow, driving the air from his lungs and putting stars in his eyes.
and then there are teeth: sharp, vicious things that puncture his armour like it's nothing. digging into the meat of his shoulder. )
Fuck.
( his vision burns white at the edges as his nerves catch fire. it's not a fatal wound — not yet — but with the way it's snapping its head, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that it's a matter of minutes if not seconds before that changes.
turn the pain into power. an instructor's voice in the back of his mind, and it takes every ounce of desperate strength for him to lift his free hand, fist balled, and strike at the thing's head.
once.
twice.
a third time. striking at it like he'd cave its skull in given the change. because he would. he absolutely would. )
no subject
the lynx's jaw releases, and mavis' head clears up a little as the blood pours out of her shoulder. it flinches back, getting out of the range of the kossian's blows. mavis takes advantage of his loosened grip. reaches up to smear her own blood across his helmet visor, obscuring his vision as she cracks his head back against the barrel beside them. ]
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aristaeus clings to consciousness with a white-knuckled belligerence. the blood loss won't be enough to kill him. probably. but there's all kinds of factors to consider, including giant fucking cats.
so he gets his feet under him. awkward and ungainly for those first few seconds until his head clears — he'll pay for this later, of course, when the blowback hits, but right now the power is buzzing through his veins, blunting the worst of his pain. )
I don't want to hurt you.
( but he will if he has to. )
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[ she clutches a hand to her shoulder, drawing away from him. distance, first. she has to size him up. she has to keep distance between them because he's stronger than her, bigger than her.
but there's something there, blurring into her mind. ]
You — [ she feels light-headed. is it the blood loss or the cold realization? ] You came here for me.
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assuming she survives. )
Let me help you.
( how long can a little thing like her last with a wound that big and ugly? a few minutes at the most. less if she keeps moving like that. heart hammering against the cage of her ribs as she tries to put distance between them.
his fingers twitch. rotator cuff might be damaged but he has some function left. he could make her stop, if it came to it. pluck at her nerves until she did what he wanted, but the injury makes it too risky. imprecise. )
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[ quiet, as if she were considering it. but it's only disbelief. there's not an ounce of her that would ever go near him, willingly. he had done this. he was responsible. (she did this. she is responsible. she will reconcile these thoughts later, alone, when he is not so loud.)
the crackle of flames fills a silence between them just before she charges him with another yell. this time, she grabs a weapon from a strewn corpse on the way, a dagger pulled from the boot of a boy who she used to sit beside during clan meetings. did he remember her name? did he blame her when he died?
she strikes at the kossian with it — brings it from the side that his blood-smeared helmet visor will obscure his vision, maybe give her a little edge. ]
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got you.
he grabs her arm on the second strike, keeping it angled away from him. lifts his leg to kick at her side. )
You're going to die here. For what — them?
( disdain evident in his voice. his fingers are wrapped around her wrist, now. squeezing. )
They don't deserve your loyalty.
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she grips his wrist back, instead, twisting her body to throw him across her hip and into the ground. sinking to her knee to build more momentum into the throw. her shoulder screams, and she buckles with a grunt.
black spots in her vision, again. she can't keep this up. she reaches blindly for the knife, ready to clamber onto him with it so she can end this. ]
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— not rly a text thing except in spirit;
( lightly curious. the sense of him close enough that she could almost reach out and touch should she desire, but of course that's just an illusion because he's not remotely near. )
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[ she closes her eyes. she can still remember their faces, but she'd never learned their names. they looked so tall. the connection between them ripples with the image. she doesn't have the control to hold it back from spilling over with the words. ]
They told me my parents were dead and I was free.
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You were raised by the Kuruko? ( a lilt at the end that turns what would otherwise be a statement into a question. the kuruko are gone, now, bone and ash, but their presence linger in her all the same. )
(cw: child abuse)
Yes.
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( the curl of disdain is brief, giving way to understanding and something very nearly sympathetic. )
(cw: ableism)
[ the flash of faces of the people gathered to debate what to do about her vision. she was young, still, but not that young. ]
They were making me strong. If I couldn't do it on my own, I didn't deserve to survive. Everyone is responsible for making themselves.
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( a soft, thoughtful little hum. )
How does abandoning a child to their fate make them strong? ( the scent of chalk dust. the taste of blood in her (his) mouth? the low rumble of a voice. older. authoritative. turn the pain into power. over and over, a stuck record. a mantra.
so perhaps he's not as ignorant of such things as he'd like to pretend. )
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[ how many times had the wilds almost killed her anyway? days of starvation. the sound of branches snapping in the dead of night when a hunter from another clan came upon her. ]
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( an edge to the words. angry. it angers him that his people are judged so unfairly. judged for bringing order to the chaos of the wilds, bringing justice to the children like her, the ones wronged and abandoned. )
Ask me something.
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( but the one looms large in his mind: an older man, sharp features, a soft voice that nonetheless carries the weight of authority. )
Not always, but more than you'd think. There are worse ways to suffer than exile.
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[ she prods at that connection. deep in his mind, she can still feel that teacher with the sharp features. his presence remains. just like aristaeus' brothers in arms. ]
I think it would break you.
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