forbarrayar | im stuck in folsom prison,

Entry tags:

im stuck in folsom prison,

Who: d. dixon (

pigsfeet) & your highness (

shri)
What: two fuckups twiddle their thumbs in the timeout corner
When: ?todayish?
Where: cetagandan prison
Warnings: sadness

He hates those goddamn stun guns. As he's being dragged through the compound's glittering corridors, that's all he can think. His mind is a mess, and he barely notices being tossed into a cold cell. Like the rest of the compound, it's glittering clean high-tech bullshit. Every surface is spotless and smooth. Daryl wonders who has to shine the floors every day. He's never caught anybody in the act.

For a time, Daryl lies there on the ground. He doesn't have the energy to move. He's not sure he wants to-- the shit he said back there, that's not something you come back from. It's not the fact of it so much as the success; that someone could move his mind so completely from his purpose... he doesn't want to think about it. He wants to close his eyes and rest.

He sees a familiar face edge into view. Merle stands over him, tsking out of the corner of his mouth like always. "You little fool."

Daryl limply attempts to swat him away. "Thought you was dead."

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She's given strict instructions when they appear. Turn to the wall, press her hands against it. Where they can see them. Don't turn around until she's told too. She follows it all with a sigh - what is she going to do like this?

She can't even begrudge him much. It seems he was no traitor to her, done ... something, to get himself thrown in here. When she turns back around and finds him, laid up as bad as she was. What a pair they made. Creaking and aching and bundled up here together. No doubt, they might move him away from her soon. But for while he was here, now, she moves closer. "Not yet. Just like you promised I wouldn't."

Lakshmi dodges that hand as it bats at her, slow moving as it is. "You shouldn't have risked yourself so dearly."

Edited 2017-02-09 07:35 (UTC)

It's not Merle.

That's the first thing. It's not Merle, and Daryl feels a stab of disappointment at the thought. It's the old pain; it's almost been a year. He's used to it.

After that, there's another old, worn feeling, shame creeping at his side. He knows what Merle would say, if he were really here. 'Little fool,' is getting off goddamn light. It's a wonder he ever thought she was him, shit. He must really be out of it.

Daryl pries his eyes back open (when did he close them?), and attempts to rise from the cold floor. His arm shakes with the effort. He looks up at the queen with a bleary expression, worn with disappointment. "Weren't you," he mutters, voice thick with fatigue. He lowers his head back to the floor, forehead pressing into the cool, calm flatness of the ground. "Ain't all about you."

He's... stubborn. She can give him that. Taking in her would be rescuer. "You can lecture me to my arrogance once you're settled. Come on."

She moves forward to where he's struggling to sit up, to move himself off the floor where they've left them. What a pair they make, an old woman and a battered disorientated young man. Blind leading the blind, but it doesn't stop her. She comes to her knees, slipping a hand across her back to his opposite shoulder, and another this side, to help lever him up, tuck him into her side to support his weight. "Up you get, easy now."

It would be kinder to just let her move him around. Daryl isn't much in the mood for kind. Shame still clouds his thoughts. He shoves himself away from her-- she can hardly handle herself, much less him. He stands on his own, his legs unsure, but he's standing on his own power.

"You still dyin'?"

If he talks about it like that, it's remote, almost safe.

Despite his shoving her off, she watches him carefully, nearby with her hands ready when he looks so unsteady. A tone that's distracted for it, waving it off. "Every day." Means it in the way of philosophy, we are things that are always going to die. Means it that she hasn't suddenly gotten better between when they last spoke and now.

"Would you sit down before I have to pick you off the floor?"

Daryl scoffs, rolling his eyes. That immediately turns out to be a bad decision-- his aching head protests with every movement of his eyes. Everything seems dry, his mind, his mouth, even the blood crackling on his nose and cheek.

He takes another stubborn step. To answer her question, he slumps down against the wall in one corner of the cell. It gives him a better view of her, and the glass window in front of them both, down the hall out of the prison facility. It's also a bad spot for any camera he's used to, but he's sure the Cetagandans have technology enough to make his knowledge obsolete.

Strangely, that makes him think of Beth. I've never... been to prison. I mean, for something bad.

It doesn't improve his mood. Daryl reaches inside his jacket, and pulls a small object from an inside pocket. He throws it carelessly against the wall. "Got your shit." The little vial bounces and skids helplessly to the other side of the room.

The metal is over nine hundred years old, she thinks, watching how he tosses it across the floor towards her. It could grant you eternal life, thinks as she picks it up in shaking fingers that wrap around the metal.

The man who gave it to me was like you - he too could never look away. Sir Bors, brave, brave, Sir Bors, spilling his blood on battlements. Ripped apart by canonfire and Lycans. Not his war, but he fought it anyway. Like he couldn't do anything else. She brings it, shaking, shaking, this weakness that they've stripped her down to. Daryl didn't know her, and he had helped her anyway. She knew nothing else about him, and that was everything she needed to anyway.

It's taken up, tucked into her clothes. Next to her heart. Doesn't dare to do anything so open as drink it right now. In a moment, in a moment. Stands and walks toward him. Regarding him, and just that. Her footsteps are light - because maybe her bones feel like birds for how frail they were inside of her. Odd, a little, someone had given back her proper clothes. In an effort to warm herself against the cold that was feverish in her, she's wearing her pants and boots under her skirts. "You've saved my life. I can never repay you for that."

He hadn't been expecting that. If he'd known it could save her, he'd have made a more direct course, wouldn't have wasted time working on this or that, getting himself killed. He thought it was some sentimental piece of shit she wanted to see before he died. That's how things go, now days. You can't save nobody.

Yet, somehow, he saved her?

But he couldn't save her. The thanks curdles in his stomach, turning everything sour along with it.

"Don't." He looks away from her, out through the wall of glass.

She keeps watching him, all hunted animal wrapped in the corner like it might afford him safety if he curled himself up smaller. He's hers, now, she knows, looking at him. Whatever that meant in the future. He's in here in part for her even if he insisted on otherwise. Hers to look after. Just like Devi, just like Galahad and Tesla. Maine, Miles, Beth.

"Do you want to know what it is?"

"No." That, at least, is easy. Daryl's not the curious sort, not anymore. Whatever problem she's got, whatever weaknesses she has, it's best she keeps it to herself, especially here. Fewer secrets to be pried from him later, at the very least.

And he doesn't want an advance preview of her death.

He looks back at her, and his expression is more tired than angry. "Why d'you give a shit?"

He couldn't ask little things, could he? She sighs, slowly, making her way across on her creaking bones to the bed to sit on it, since he apparently wasn't going to.

"We're all given choices in life," it comes slowly. Talking hurts. She won't be fixed, over night, she knows. As it is, she can feel it coming now, like now that she had the blackwater, her body had the freedom to crash. But no - a little longer, she must get this man out first. York said they were going to get her out of her and she was taking this man with her. "I elected to - ah - 'give a shit', for if nothing else, I must live with myself." Wrong out of her all too proper vocabulary.

Those are some fancy words for such a little question. It seems pretty high-minded of her, but then, she's some self-styled queen, well, that'd make sense, wouldn't it. He looks her over for a moment, tired eyes finding more exhaustion on the other side of the cell. He's not going to scoff at her idealism. It's some silly shit, but it's hers. It seems like she's fought hard for it.

Instead. "You really a queen?"

She arranges the skirts around her, neat over her knees in practise if nothing else. What a pair they make. His grit and stubbornness, rough - definitely another American, with that accent, he's certainly no englishmen - her exhaustion and inability to stop. She blinks at him tiredly. Well, there was another one that seemed completely unused to the notion.

"Yes. Married into, not born, admittedly. Not that it matters much, in the end." She gives him something passes for a laugh, dry in her throat. "Definitely means nothing here and now."

At least she knows it doesn't matter. He's not sure he could stand her if she insisted on putting on airs, even after... everything. Christ. He doesn't want to think of that, either.

"This ain't your world," he says, "is it."

She shakes her head, no, it is not that. Just one more person stuck - Outsider or Exotic. Stuck here in a war that was not their own.

"No more than yours, I'd wager. The Barrayaran's took me instead. Myself and a number of others."

"But you're still fightin' for 'em." His voice is devoid of judgement. There's more amusement-- under a fine layer of fatigue-- in his tone than disapproval. "You ain't queen, but you're still queen."

He seems to be coming back to himself. Less drawn in, good - good. He's no good to her while he's licking his wounds, and if he's being amused at her then it's safe. Easy. She can laugh at herself and her endless wars.

"I have... sympathy for them." She lets out a breath she'd been holding in the effort of trying to express it in a simple, plain way. Duty, loyalty, the blood that had been paid for both. "I lost my throne a long time before I ever came here."

After a point, he has to uncurl himself. His pride hurts, sure, but that's why it's easier to focus on her bullshit. He listens to her admonish herself with quiet humor. This is a point someone's made before. Maybe the story's nothing new, either.

"How long?"

She's frowning a moment, trying to count backwards. Exhausting. The years between, all gone like rivers flowing. No, but she won't give him an exact number because it'll just lead to more questions. Questions she doesn't want to answer.

Ask her no questions, she'll tell you no lies, isn't that how the saying goes. "Let's just say it's long enough to be practised in being ignoring homesickness."

Daryl rolls his eyes a little. He leans his head on the cool glass. "You gone get real good at it here." He looks back over at her with curiosity, though his head still rests on the glass prison wall. "'Less you been to other planets before."

Tell him she hasn't. He's so goddamn sick of aliens.

That - oh, he's the same of her too. Surrounded by all these people that find it so normal to be off their own worlds. Like boarding a train or a ship. Perhaps it would be normal to her too. But the stars were the dreams of scientists and writers and those that fancied themselves somewhere between.

The rest of them had to live ankle deep in this mud. Her nose scrunches. "I've been trying to ignore the thought, actually."

Daryl shifts his head to the side, as though tasting the answer. His thought process isn't naturally slow, it's a purposeful delay. When it comes to word over deed, he prefers to be premeditated and deliberate. Unless he's angry, that is-- but he's not, or, well, he's less, now. Too tired to keep the fire burning.

So he thinks it over before he says, "About never getting home?"

She plucks idly at the threads of her skirts, fine and beautiful brocaded material. After her fighting and sleeping in it, not so well kept now. But it wraps over her normal clothes securely to keep her warm against the chill that won't leave her.

Never would she be this kind of cold in Jhansi, even when the winters snapped sharp air, no, it was warm and empty and flat. Home, she thinks, and she wants to see it once more before she dies, she knows. Jhansi in the summer, the beautiful carved walls of the Rani Mahal, the high scraping towers of the Fortress. Her painted walls. Home, home, and her ladies sparring in the courtyard, Damodar running to catch against her leg to tell her this or that he had learned.

Home, home, home. She breathes out again. Stop rattling, she thinks at it, stop rattling so, she pleads with it, we will see it again -

"I think on that often. Even before I came here. Though it seems even more out of reach now." Snaps one thread at the hem in a satisfying little yank, wrapped around her first and second finger. "Do you think of it?"

Home. Daryl sniffs, a cold scoff into dry air. Home is wherever Rick and Maggie and Glenn and Michonne are, and he wishes he could bring them here, not the other way around. But he knows he can't. He knows better than to think everything's all going to work out.

And, more important perhaps, he knows better than to get poetic with the lady's question. She means the physical place, and he isn't going to change her mind on that.

"This shithole's a goddamn paradise," he mutters, "can't think of a better place to die."

He tries to make it unclear, in his tone, whether or not he's speaking in sarcasm. He doesn't want anyone else to know the way the Earth died screaming. They don't deserve to.

She might be more of a bleeding heart ( or rather, she is, isn't she? An utter joke to say she's not. She's still here, fighting for the Barrayaran's wasn't she? ) But she lived in slums, in hell where people die constantly for crossing the wrong street on the wrong night. Heard that statement too many times for the impoverished and the forgotten. Coughing up their black lungs after they've buried their tenth child. Where at least it was better to be dead than still living in nightmares they couldn't escape -

- their last wishes were simple, when it came to it. "I can." Her eyes are down, her voice quiet. Doesn't feel herself grip into material tightly until she's doing it, and she forces her fingers apart like clamps.

Daryl is bitter and disappointed, and like calls to like. This woman reminds him more and more of Rick with every passing minute. Something draws him to that, if only for the comfort found in familiarity. She has that same sense of disenfranchisement Daryl and Rick have, but like Rick, she uses it like a weapon. Somebody screwed with her once, Daryl guesses, and after that, she promised ain't nobody ever was again.

So he just looks up, and gives her space to rule the room. "Where?"

It takes an effort to let her hands settle. She wants to close over her weapon, hers - not a borrowed sword, not one of their strange guns. The weight of the blades she was trained with. The heavy set pommel of a blade in her hand. Weighted the way she preferred. Both quick and powerful.

"With those dearest to me. To say goodbye to them. I do not care if it was in a field, or in the worst blackened sewers. That is what I have fought my life for, that is how I wish to die."

Because she will die. The blackwater might put it off. But it had never been a lacking consideration for her. All things died, even the Knights, even her. To the stories, she already had, once. Maybe the second time, no one would know, but it didn't matter, as long as she had that.

Daryl looks at her with a critical, scrutinizing expression. What she's saying... it appeals to him on some level. Not for the morbid implications, but for the fight. He's always been fighting. He doesn't know how to stop. Sometimes, late in the lonely darkness, he think he doesn't want to win some battles, he just doesn't know how to stop clawing, tooth and nail, for survival. If he's nothing else anymore, not even a survivor, he's a fighter.

More softly than before, he says, "fightin' to die your way's still dyin'.

It's a fair enough assumption, she supposes. Nods, slowly. "I suppose it is, if you want to take it that way. But... I know we all must die, at one point or another. That is what happens." The irony of her saying that is not lost on her. But she had never acted like she was untouchable. Even when Devi or Galahad did not want to hear it. 'Rani, please, do not say that. You cannot - ' Desperate, to have her live forever.

She could not shelter Devi from the truth of it, not now that she was grown and at her side, fighting these battles with her.

"But I... will not let go of it all, until I am ready to do so, at my own time, and if it is not my time but I still must - then I will go down hanging on to my last breath because I never knew how to do anything else."

It sounds more like Daryl's own problems, his own ethos, than he cares to admit. You keep going, because you don't know how to stop. The major difference, it seems, is that this lady has a plan for when the end finally comes. Daryl's only goal, himself, is to go down swinging.

"How d'you wanna go?" This is more morbid than he usually cares for, but he appreciates the distraction. Anything but thinking on what he said in that room, to that awful woman.

"Fighting for my people."

That answer comes quick as a blade strike. No hesitation. She is what she is and she has never pretended otherwise. Not looking at him, he is just a question, and it takes nothing to be there again. Gwalior, Kelpi, Kunch, Jhansi. One long string of battles. Of screaming herself until her throat cracked, of feeling her teeth ache from holding reigns between them, the horse rearing under her and the filigreed handle of the shamsher digging into the palm of her hand as she gripped it. Alive, and dying at the same time.

The way her stories said, and one day, one day she will do that. She will be worthy of them, and their love for her. They will have their freedom, free from the fear of the creatures that feed in the night. She will give them all of it.

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im stuck in folsom prison,

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