im stuck in folsom prison,

[pigsfeet]

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."

Comments

[pigsfeet]

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."

[shri]

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."

[pigsfeet]

"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."

[shri]

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."

[pigsfeet]

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?"

[shri]

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."

[pigsfeet]

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.

[shri]

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."

[pigsfeet]

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?"

[shri]

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?"

[pigsfeet]

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.

[shri]

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.

[pigsfeet]

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?"

[shri]

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.

[pigsfeet]

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'.

[shri]

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."

[pigsfeet]

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.

[shri]

"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.