abraxaslogs | in the prison of the gifted [OPEN/JULY CATCHALL]

Susan is quiet when they get back to their cell. Part of her does actually feel, in an odd way, better for the excursion - for seeing the sky, even if it was only for those brief times out of the tunnels, and for having a decent, honest ache in her muscles, the sense of having done some work. She's less jittery, anyway, less full of the aimless energy of confinement.

But that's overwhelmed entirely by the memory of the things she saw down there. Even knowing it wasn't real, even knowing that none of it meant anything, it's still crawled under her skin. When they're led back to the cells, she sits quietly on her bunk for a moment, and then lies down, closing her eyes, her hands folding on her belly. It looks as though she's asleep, until she says abruptly, with her eyes still closed, "If they send us out there again, what'll you do?"

Susan's thought of a lot of things that might come next - more tasks, or punishments, or just days and weeks back in the constant boredom of the cells - but none of those thoughts included being just let out. When the guards unlock the door and tell her, fairly briskly, that she's been vouched for and will be getting her freedom, all she can do for a time is gape. She doesn't trust it, even knowing that it's only freedom to move around in a bigger cage; she doesn't know what's going on, or what the cost might be, and she doesn't like it. She actually considers refusing, just sitting down on her bunk and telling them she'll stay, for all that she hates it here. At least she understands prison.

But that's stupid, and she knows it's stupid. It doesn't matter if she deserves it or not, doesn't matter what the cost is or why she's being freed and not the others. It doesn't matter because it would be worse than idiotic to refuse even that limited freedom - it would be ungrateful. (Not that she's grateful to Thorne, not at all - but to whoever vouched for her, and to her fellow-prisoners who she might be better able to help from the outside? Sure. She owes them something.) It's not a real choice, and when there's no choice, she won't let herself hesitate.

She follows the guards wordlessly out of the cell, with a glance back at her cellmates. Jaime, she's only too happy to see the back of, but Cersei and Eddie she tries to meet eyes with, and tell them without words that she's not abandoning them. And then she's out, and into the castle that before she's only seen in passing, and she is, for want of a better word, free.

Not that she really knows what to do with it. She changes into clothes that are just as strange as the prison clothes, and still stitched with that same stupid Lovers mark; she takes her time in washing and brushing out her (sorely neglected) hair until it shines, and then she braids it back tight to the nape of her neck, and sets out to explore this new prison.

You can see her all around the castle for the next few days, walking briskly as though she might eventually find somewhere to walk to, her grey eyes darting this way and that as she tries to take in everything.

In the doorway of the library, though, she stops dead, wide-eyed and staring. She's frozen there for a solid minute, her mouth slightly open, looking as if she's just seen a ghost. So much paper! So many books! Even as she watches, a young apprentice casually tucks several of them into the crook of his arm, and strolls off as though he weren't carrying a king's ransom.

It takes some getting used to, that's for sure. Almost as much so as what's on offer in the dining hall, where even knowing part of what to expect, she can't quite comprehend the casual ease with which she can just pile her plate with pastries and sweets made with more sugar than her whole town sees in a year. She tries not to be greedy, but the first day she's up in the castle, she eats so much that, not long after leaving the dining hall, she finds herself needing to lean out of the window to throw a not insignificant amount of it back up.

Most of all, though, what she's glad of isn't the wonderful and foreign - not the expensive clothes, or the paper, or the sugar - but just the fact that she can taste fresh air again, outside the crowded confines of the exercise yard. Those first few days, she spends as much time outside as she can, and she can be found sitting out in the garden almost every morning, humming Hey Jude to herself as she braids her hair or gathers flowers, looking for all the world like a normal, happy, sixteen-year-old.

She might be freer than she was, but Susan still feels herself to belong more to the group - whatever divided them as such in the first place - in the dungeons than the "honoured guests" above. She hasn't forgotten, after all, that she's here on sufferance, and she more than half-expects that any day now, they will change their mind and bundle her back into the cells as suddenly and arbitrarily as they took her out of them.

Besides, she has friends down there now.

It's less than a day after she's freed that, very cautiously and empty-handedly, she heads back down into the dungeon. She goes first of all to those she knows, whistling through her teeth to draw their attention if necessary, and offering them an almost apologetic smile. "Hile. Just figured I'd come... check on 'ee. See if I could get 'ee summat from upstairs."

After that first visit, when she's sure that she won't be searched too thoroughly, she starts sneaking things down with her. Some are gifts she's been asked for, or thinks people she knows will especially like - bonbons and a hairbrush for Eponine, a comb and ribbons for Cersei, even a fresh pair of sandals for Eddie. Others are just what she's able to snag: sweets, pastries, playing cards and games to pass the time.

She'll stop, when she can, to talk - even to those she only knows in passing. They're all on the same side, after all.

"Go away!" Eponine snaps.
She's sat hunched over, her face buried between her drawn up knees and her arms firmly over her head. Her back's to the door of the cell and she doesn't immediately look round when she hears Susan's voice.
When she does eventually though, she meets Susan's smile with a scowl.
"So you have joined them what locked us away? Pah!" She spits hard at Susan. "Turncoat."

It's not exactly welcoming, but Eponine's just been dragged out of solitary. She's not washed in weeks. Her hair's matted and she's spent almost three weeks in a room with a concrete slab for a bed, constant lights on and only her own mind for company.

Coraline had just been on her way to the dining hall when she catches the sound of vomiting on her way there. She's not terribly surprised, then, to see someone leaning out the nearest window launching everything back up. Vomit doesn't bother her, but the girl blocking her path does, just a little.

She leans a shoulder against the wall and folds her arms. "You ate way too fast after being in jail, didn't you?"

On occasion, she catches herself in the insane thoughts that another trip to the wurm-riddled mountain might not be the worst thing, when all it competes with is the monotony of the cell. Perhaps an attempt to flee would have been worth it – but as soon as she thinks it, she comes back to her senses. If they had managed to evade any waking wurms, they would still have the cold and lack of food, never mind that there is nowhere to go. Nowhere specific, that is.

No, this – staying here – is her best bet, for an escape or a rise beyond, as Susan has proven. She had not been too confident that the girl would ever return to the dungeons after she had been so unceremoniously dragged from them, but a first visit she paid, and left with a promise of a second.

One might almost think Cersei looks glad to see her. It is, she would assure herself and all those who cared to listen, just the temporary reprieve from the all-encompassing boredom.

"Do you come bearing gifts?" She does not mean it, not truly. Surely the girl would not have smuggled a thing so soon after her release.

"You got out!"

Susan and Alina had not talked much during the mining trip, and she was silent except for quietly whispering to Mal after their disastrous escape attempt, making sure he stayed conscious and upright after hitting his head on the rocks.

"Amos is still in the dungeons, and Mal got put down here with us, so I figured our group didn't exactly earn any good will..."

She is thankful that at least one person is not unduly suffering on account of her bad judgement.

Susan straightens up, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand, to look at the girl addressing her. She's red-faced, embarrassment stinging her to defensiveness.

"It's queer food," she snaps, her tone sharper than she intends, and immediately feels worse for being so defensive to a child. "Twisted up in my stomach, is all. All that sugar." Not that it'll stop her from eating more of it. Or that the younger girl is wrong about her eating way too fast.

Susan isn't surprised by the venom, or the feeling behind it, but she still recoils from it, her smile disappearing in an instant as Eponine spits. It's the spitting, more than the words - though those reach straight to her own guilt - that really hurts. It's too familiar.

She tightens her jaw until it aches, and reminds herself that it isn't 'Ponine's fault. She'd do the same, or close to it, if she were on the other side of the bars - and 'Ponine looks like she's had a rough time of it lately. Ye can't be friends with someone only when they make it easy, she tells herself, and approaches the bars again, not smiling, not quite looking at Eponine. The guilt is gnawing in her belly, the unfairness of it.

"If they told 'ee it was an option, ye'd take it." There's no doubt in her about that, but there's no real reproof, either - her voice is quiet and only a little taut. "If ye truly want me to go, I'll go, but I'm giving 'ee this first." She reaches into her shirt, pulling out the kerchief-wrapped little parcel she packed up for Eponine, and (a little frightened of what Eponine might do in response, but determined not to back off from it) sticks her hand through the bars to hold it out.

"Do 'ee think me a liar, sai?" Susan's tone is a little teasing, a little like a challenge. She smiles at Cersei, as if to say don't worry, I'm just kidding, and looks this way and that to check none of the guards are watching, before digging out the ivory comb she's tucked into the band of her leggings, red and white hair ribbons trailing like streamers from the handle. Again, she glances to and fro, then pushes it through the bars.

"I've got sweetmeats, too. Chucklit and marchpane, if ye want 'em?"

In response to the temper, Coraline simply grins. It's not (entirely) mean, but it's a bit petty, as she turns her gaze away in an exaggerated roll of her eyes. "If you're not used to sugar, maybe it's a good thing it all came back up," she says with a breeziness so overdone it rolls back into sarcastic. "If you're not used to sweet shit you would've gotten a sugar rush instead, and that would've been an even bigger headache later."

Susan's smile fades at that, though - she knows it's not meant as reproach (or at least, hopes it's not), but it still feels like an accusation, because it's an accusation she's been making of herself throughout. Because it isn't fair, and she must have done something to be the beneficiary of that unfairness.

She tries to keep the smile up anyway, for Alina's sake, and because to look miserable feels like ingratitude. She is, after all, the lucky one. She needs to remember that, and remember the duty that comes with it.

"Guess sai Nadine made a real good case for me," she says, after a moment, and clears her throat, glancing to and fro to be sure she's not being closely watched by the guards. "Are they treating 'ee all right, if there's that ill-will? They ain't hurt ye or aught?"

"How'd ye mean, sugar rush?" Susan's never had the opportunity for such a thing before - even the sweets and pastries she managed to get hold of in the jails were, sugary though they were, so small that the effect was manageable. They made her a bit hyperactive and jittery, sure, but not enough to notice - no more than the confinement had been doing, anyway. Her curiosity, then, is genuine, even if it's still tempered with that sourness that comes with embarrassment.

She blinks in surprise, and it takes her a moment to realise the other girl is fully serious.

"...sometimes when a person eats too much sugar, it's more than their body can handle, so they get all, like. Energetic and hyperactive and a bit crazy, I'd always get a headache. It sucks, because then you crash later when the sugar in your system runs out and you're extra tired."

"It's never going to be an option. Not for me."
Eponine looks up at the ceiling in despair, fighting back her tears.
"They're - they said. They're not letting me out. Never. I can't - can't be trusted, and so well that are right. I told you. Rotten, rotten, rotten. The devil's daughter and all. And I tried to run and she sent me back to here and oh god, such a room they shut me in."

She shakes her head. "I were gonna come back for you, when I had a place to stay that weren't the street. When that stupid man, Estinien, had got himself done over by a street gang. But now you're one such as them and I will be locked up forever." Her sob sounds strangled and she covers her eyes with her arm.

"I hate it here, Susan. There's no one left, only them what will die and them what will rot."

Eponine's silent for a minute, trying to control herself, before she heaves herself from the ground to properly face Susan eye to eye. She's emaciated: the days of starvation she endured to escape the tunnels, as well as their lack of food on the way to Hayle, and the starvation diet she'd been on in solitary have taken her toll, and the little weight she'd managed to gain since arriving had been lost.

"Susan, I can't be here any more. Please, Susan. Please help me." Susan's hand, the package is ignored for now at least.

Alina's face tips, brows pulling together just a touch, subtly puzzled at Susan's momentarily faded smile. Maybe it's something else bothering her, though. Alina has never been great at fitting in, maybe this is just a social exchange that she isn't totally understanding.

"That makes sense. Mal was the only one I knew well enough on the outside and..." Obviously they aren't taking recommendations about good behavior from him. Not that Alina has done anything to be a model prisoner.

"We got about a day of solitary after getting back from the mines," Alina shrugs. "Other than that it's been the same."

Alina may look and feel worse each day but that can only be partially attributed to the treatment. For a moment, Alina considers telling Susan about the visit she got from one of the assistant mages, sneaking her candy and extra food, but she doesn't really know Susan that well. She keeps that secret for herself for now.

There's that defensiveness again. She's sick of feeling so lost, so small and stupid and like she doesn't understand this world she's been thrust into. It wouldn't be so bad if nobody else understood, but there's a child - a child - standing here and explaining things like any idiot should know them. It settles in Susan's stomach heavy as a stone, that sense of her own alien ignorance.

"We don't have sugar in such quantities," she says, her voice sharper than she intends but less bitter than she fears. "Not where I come from. Don't reckon there's enough in all Mejis to get such an effect."

It's impossible to be angry at Eponine under these circumstances. Any sting or venom her words might have held is lost in those starving hollows under her cheekbones, in the dullness in her eyes. Susan grabs the other girl's hand through the bars, as best she can without dropping her cargo, and squeezes it, horribly aware of the bones under the surface, like sticks in a thin muslin sheath.

"I ain't one such as them," she says, quietly but with a furious, burning intensity. "Ye hear me, 'Ponine? I ain't. And I don't ken how just yet, but we'll get 'ee out of here. On my father's name, we will." And she means it. That oath might not mean a great deal to 'Ponine, but it means more to Susan than she can say; her father's blue eyes, creased at the corners with weather and laughter, seem to stare at her from some other realm, pinning her with her duty. It's something more complicated than friendship, than love, or even than pity, that drives her to feel such a responsibility - or maybe it's more simple than any of them. Maybe it's just that she doesn't quite believe, in her heart, that there's anyone else. Maybe it's just that 'Ponine needs a friend, and that Susan is the nearest.

Maybe it doesn't matter. She meets the other girl's eyes, steady as she can, and presses her lips together.

"You ain't gonna die here," she says - not a promise, this time, for it's not a promise she can make. It's more of a statement of intent. "You ain't gonna, not if I can help it. Take the food, 'Ponine." Again, she pushes the parcel towards Eponine, glad that alongside the sweets and fripperies she thought to include more substantial pastries. "I'll bring 'ee summat more savoury, soon as I can. Meat'll do ye good, get some strength back in 'ee. And there's horses in the stables, good ones. When ye're stronger, when I figure out how to break this fucking lock, we'll run. We'll take the big dapple-grey, and we'll ride hell for leather and never look back. Alright?"

"They're gonna hang me, Susan."
It's not the first time she's thought that capital punishment is her destination, but it's definitely more real than ever in her mind.
She squeezes Susan's hand hard. "I'm not afraid... only that it will hurt, or they shan't do it right and it'll be worse. It might be nice to sleep at last. But to stand with the rope on me... I'm not scared but... I..."

But what else is there to say?
Eponine takes the parcel from Susan, if only to appease her friend. She sets it carefully on the bed before shuffling back to the bars.
"What's it like there?"

She smiles at the thought of the pair of them fleeing on a horse. "I wonder where we'll go. Not Hayle. The guards found us there."

"Oh." It's hard to know what to say to that. Honestly, down here it's hard to know what to say to anything, how to navigate this strange new situation where she's suddenly found herself unfairly advantaged. They've been punished, and she's been rewarded, and again she has to ask herself: why?

She sighs, scratching her jaw, and takes a deep breath of that ill-smelling dungeon air that she was so grateful to be out of. "I wish ye'd gotten loose," she says at last, quietly. "Truly I do. It was a bad sort of place, but better than here, I reckon." Then, a little shyly, not wanting to offend: "I can, uh... if ye need it, I can see about gettin' some medicine, too." Alina really does not look well.

As it did when Eponine talked about her man, Susan's heart breaks a little. It's that quiet desperation, that certainty of a bad end. Susan, who's always considered herself a pretty cynical sort - whatever Aunt Cordelia might have to say on the matter - is coming to realise that she's never known quite that kind of despair, and it aches to hear it in someone else, that absolute lack of hope.

She shifts and hunkers down as Eponine turns away, settling herself in for a longer stay here outside the bars. Again, she thinks of Sheemie, of that sadness she always felt to see him, that resignation to a life of drudgery and pain that, even through it all, hadn't quite been beaten into Susan herself. I'll make ye smile again, she thinks, with a force that surprises her. I will. One way and another, I will.

"Not Hayle, then," she agrees, after a moment. "I saw some maps, though, in the library - they have a library, 'Ponine, more books and more paper than I'd think were in the whole world! - and I reckon we could turn a horse's head south-east. I'm faster than they are on horseback, even with two. I'm sure of it." Again, she reaches through the bars - both hands, this time, reaching for both of Eponine's. "We'd ride south-east and through the woods, and we'd find someplace where folk ain't too familiar with this place, and where no-one'll pay mind to a couple small-time horse-thieves. And there'll be no cells, and no strange siguls on our shirts, and no talk of hangings, for I won't let 'em. I won't let 'em kill ye. We're too fucking young to be killed." It comes out more heavily accented than usual - t'be kilt - and although her tone is almost that of a joke, there's an intensity of emotion in her eyes.

She holds her hands up in mock surrender, but there's no sting to her being sarcastic about it. "Okay. That's... you know, weird, for me. But it's not like I don't believe you."

She leans back and looks slightly pointedly out the window. "Do you want me to, like. Introduce you to some of the food, so you know which ones have less sugar and stuff for next time?"

Susan can feel herself blushing, and she's honestly just glad that the younger girl has chosen to look out of the window and not at her, for the moment. She folds her arms around herself, clearing her throat and trying not to think too much about the vomit-taste in her mouth.

"...Reckon I'm figurin' it out myself, actually," she remarks drily, after a moment, and sighs. "I just overpaced myself, is all. Aunt Cord always did say I could be a glutton, time to time."

"I mean, yeah, probably. but like." She looks back at the girl, trying not to smirk at her pinkened cheeks. "We were just in jail for a few weeks. You gotta start slowly when you start eating again after something like that or you'll just keep getting sick. Your stomach's all shrivelled up."

It takes a moment for Alina to catch up to what Susan's talking about. Medicine? She hasn't seen herself in a minute (not many mirrors to look in), so she doesn't realize quite how rough she looks. A second later it clicks. How quickly she'd forgotten that she was the perpetually sickly child.

She turns her head, rubbing idly at her eye and shaking her head.

"No, you don't need to do that," It won't help, but she doesn't feel like explaining why. "But... if you could get some parchment and ink..." Not for any real reason other than she wants to stay occupied.

It's exactly the right thing to ask for, apparently: Susan brightens noticeably, eager to share her own excitement. "I can," she says, in a tone of some wonder. "I sure can. Gods, they've got such stacks of paper they could wipe their asses with it, upstairs. They'd never miss a sheet or two, nor care it's gone." She leans in, as if sharing a secret. "Yesterday, I saw one of their 'prentices write half a sheet and then throw it away. Can ye imagine it? Not even turn it over, just ball it up and toss it out like it was junk."

Her father had a notebook of real paper, once. She remembers watching him write his figures in it, working them out on a slate first, writing close and small to save the precious paper, turning the page and writing crosswise so as not to waste even the smallest portion of that book, which had cost him the best part of a year's rent. The profligacy they show in Thorne - with paper, with sugar, with everything - delights and horrifies her in equal measure.

"I'll get 'ee a pen and papers," she confirms, just in case it wasn't clear enough, and nods firmly. "What is it ye want 'em for?"

"We weren't exactly starvin'," Susan says tartly, and immediately regrets it. She wasn't starving. She wasn't stuck, either, apparently. She had benefactors, had allies, had enough to keep her going. She doesn't know if the same was true for this girl, and she knows all too well that it's not true for everyone down there.

She sits heavily against the windowsill, raking her hand over her face, guilt twisting in her gut. Then again, maybe it isn't guilt, but another pang of gluttony coming back to bite her. Who can say, really?

"Say sorry," she says quietly, after a moment. "It ain't... I didn't mean to snap. I didn't see ye down there. When'd you get out?"

Eponine sits too, sinking down as her hands run down the bars until she lands heavily on the floor. She's worn out, exhausted from lack of sleep, from lights constantly on, from her own screams to be let out.

"A library?" She repeats the word, knowing dimly it's a place of books, a place she's never seen... never will see. She looks down at her lap, takes a shaky breath to steady herself, before looking back at Susan.
She goes on and Eponine can see, can feel, that Susan is trying to hard to comfort her, and she so desperately wants to reciprocate, so desperately wants to say something, anything, that will keep Susan with her...
She lets Susan takes her hands, her filthy fingers interlocking with Susan's clean ones. Eponine stares. If she was clean. If she was pretty. If she was nice and kind and -

She lets out a strangled sob that's half laughter and she realises that Susan's staring at her, waiting for an answer to whatever she's said, but Eponine's mind is hazy, her ears closed and that voice is whispering all the bad things she's ever done in her mind and she can't concentrate.

"I... I'm old. Old, Su - Susan. I can't - I don't want to. I..."

She closes her eyes as she leans her head against the bars.

"There's nothing in here to do it with. No knife, or broken bottle. No noose. I don't want to die like that. Not with a noose. I hear you piss when you hang. I don't want people to laugh."
She licks her lips. "I thought on it, once. In Paris, when we were under a bridge. So much snow, and I had lain - and it weren't enough sous. And Pa - my arse were warmed on his belt but - oh, it were cold. And the Seine were there, steps away. If it weren't for Azelma, Susan. One step, two - one more, but she shouted and I were soaked and cold and - but here? At least it's warm. But nothing to..."

She closes her eyes again. "I - Susan, please. I would rather my own hand than theirs. Just a drop. Like rain. It shan't hurt."

Susan doesn't know all the words she's hearing, doesn't ken Paris or Seine. Doesn't have to. She leans in as close as she can, until through the bars her forehead brushes against Eponine's, and she closes her eyes. She can feel her heart break, creaking under the weight of what she's being told.

If she can disentangle one hand from Eponine's, she'll do so, but only long enough to bring it up to cup the side of the other girl's head instead. Just like this, she used to stand with the horses, her brow to theirs, just the way her father did before her. There's a magic in it, with horses, helps to calm them - as if you could draw some of their fear out through their brow into yours. She doesn't know if it works with people, but it's all she can think of. And she has to do something.

"I wasn't lyin'," she says quietly, without knowing she's going to say it until it's out of her mouth. Without knowing exactly why she's saying it. "When we stole the bonbons, when I cried, I wasn't lyin' to that guard. I lost my baby when they brought me here. When they dragged me to the Reaping-fire and spat in my face while I burned." She opens her eyes, meeting Eponine's as best she can, close as she is. "Dyin' hurts, 'Ponine. It hurts, and you... you look out at your life, and you see everything there's still to do, and you see all the things you might've done and might've been, and I didn't figure I had much left to lose with Roland most likely dead and the child burning to nothing in my belly, but it fucking hurts." She's crying again, though it's not the showy tears she brought out for the guard; the tears well up and fall silently, her voice thick. "It fucking hurts to let go, at the end, and I reckon it'd hurt however ye did it, and I ain't lettin' ye die, 'Ponine. Not by their hand, not by yours. Sure as fuck not by mine. If we kill anyone, thee and me, it'll be the bastards who put us here. Not thee. Not thee."

It gets through to her.

It's probably about the only thing that could, that thought of knowing she's not alone, that someone else has experienced this - this feeling of the world disintegrating all around them and being helplessly dragged into the very depths of what humans can stand. Or not.

"Are you a ghost?"

Not for the first time, Eponine wonders if she's imagined Susan, if somehow she's dreamed her up in her desperation for someone, anyone, who can understand and not judge her. Her voice is strangled.

"I don't care if you are, for your touch is so kind, Susan. My Ma'd stroke my face so, once upon a time. But please, if you are, tell me. Please. I think I am going mad, for there is so much - so much here. And you to be murdered with a babe inside? At least it were warm if you were on fire. But the sore? And the baby too?" She shakes her head.
"Were it quick at least? I don't mind a bit of pain in the end. It is good to feel something, isn't it?"

"I ain't sure what I am." Susan hasn't thought about it. Truth be told, Susan's put a lot of effort into not thinking about it. There's all kinds of words for someone who used to be dead and isn't any more, and none of them are reassuring. She's pretty sure, at least, that she's not a ghost. Ghosts probably don't shit, or sleep, or get stomach-aches from too many sweetmeats.

What she's decided, for the most part, is that it doesn't matter. Whatever she is, she's here. She caresses Eponine's hair, and shakes her own head.

"It wasn't quick." She's spoken about the baby before, to Cersei and a few others, but not about the fire. It surprises her, now, how easy it is to talk about it, as though it was something that had happened to somebody else. "Didn't feel it, anyroad. Felt like it went on forever. It hurt like hell, and then it stopped hurting - stopped hurting my body, anyroad. But I was still there, and I couldn't..." Her brow furrows. "I always figured I knew what death meant, before. After they killed Da, they brought him back all broken, and I looked at him and I knew there wasn't shit to look forward to after we die. But when I was on that bonfire, when I could smell my hair burnin', I saw it. And it ain't the Clearing and it ain't peace, it's just... it's dark, and cold, and terrible, and I felt it pull me in, before they pulled me out of the water here." The words come fast, but steady, as though they've been waiting to be said. "Ye don't want to die, 'Ponine. Ye want peace, sure. Ye want to rest, and not have these bastards circling all the while. But that ain't death."

She squeezes Eponine's hand again, feeling the horrible thinness of it. "I ain't sure what I am," she says, again, and bites her lip. "But I'd be a friend, if ye'll let me. And when this place is at our heels and we've gotten someplace better, with open fields and no fucking wizards, mayhap there'll be a better sort of peace there."

"I'm sorry."

A tear escapes Eponine's tightly closed eyes. Neither woman - girl? - should have experienced any of what they've been through. Certainly, Susan shouldn't have experienced such a torturous death. The tear drips onto the floor between them.

"When I die, that's what's waiting. Not black. Hell's fires. That's where I'm going. It's where bad people go. I heard it in church." She snorts.
"I only went to take the coin and all. Maybe bad people never get peace?"

Eponine can't help Susan. She can't help herself, let alone anybody else. It's not fair, though, to make Susan remember the terrible things that have happened to her, or to comfort Eponine in her despair.

"We stay together, yeah? Me and you?" It's a nice dream, and it's what Susan needs to hear, and what Eponine desperately wants to believe. "No matter what? We are like sisters, almost? To look for one another now?"

Susan wants to say that it isn't true. Hell, Na'ar, whatever it's called: bad people don't go there. I killed Dave Hollis, who never did wrong. I left his wife a widow, and ain't Janet dealt with enough? And poor Olive, who died for me, that stain's on my soul too. If anyone would have seen hellfire when they died, shouldn't I?

But she's said enough about her past, and now Eponine is crying, and Susan's crying too, and that's enough of that. No sense in dragging it out, in digging for pity from a girl who has her own troubles. She manages a little smile, and nods, her forehead still pressed against the bars.

"We stay together," she agrees. "And I'll... I'll come down here every day, long as I can. I'll bring 'ee things, and we can talk. Not about church and death and hellfire, just... talk. And we'll get through." She strokes Eponine's face, and smiles again, watery and unsteady. "Always did kinda want a sister."

She folds her arms over her chest, leaning her weight against the wall with the same gravity as this girl, turning her gaze away idly. "Just after the festival. No one came to give me stuff, but I'm used to going hungry."

She doesn't sound bitter - because she's not, not really - just neutral. Facts are facts. "I've been in prison before, kind of. Some tricks stick with you, you know?"

Susan opens her mouth, and then closes it. Perhaps the other girl isn't bitter, but for a moment, Susan sure is - aware of a sudden, petty wash of resentment at what feels to her like an accusation, and of a sharp defensiveness that makes her want to snap that she isn't some kind of spoiled rich girl, that she's been hungry before, too, that none of this is new. Her fists clench at her sides, then loosen, her lips pursing.

"Ye're too young to have been in prison," she says, at last, and there's more doubt in her tone than is maybe fair, more of a vicious desire to catch the younger girl out. "Ye're only a kid."

She might not recognise the specifics of Susan's anger but she recognises anger and part of her relishes it. She'll have to bother the girl more when she's low on Glamour.

Out loud, as it were, Coraline just shrugs. "What can I say, I have an amazing skin care routine." She looks at the taller girl with a defiant evenness, tilting her chin up slightly to meet the sharp gaze readily. "Not every cell has bars. Sometimes it's a person you can't run away from or they'll kill you."

Susan looks at her for a long moment, her lips pinched tight. Again, under the anger, that sting of guilt, that knowledge that she's lashing out at the wrong person.

Not every cell has bars. Sometimes it's a person. Sometimes it's a town. Sometimes it's the weight of an obligation, your aunt's sharp tongue reminding you what your duty is, the crack of arthritic knuckles and the smell of sour breath. Sometimes it's the knowledge that if you look in the mirror at your own face, you'd see the prison's guard looking back, sour-faced and thin-lipped. Aye, she's known a few different kinds of prison in her time, and she can't argue. Just feel that wash of shame, and that low resentment.

"Ye're too young," she repeats, but this time it sounds less like a challenge, and more like a desperate negation, like she can make it be true if she says it. Like kids aren't in prisons of obligation everywhere.

Coraline just looks away, and in her eyes there's an exhaustion well beyond her years. The battle-weary eyes of a soldier home from war, or a matron who's seen one too many of her children leave home and never return. Tired, and resigned, and old.

"I've been too young for a while," she says; her voice remains light and dismissive, but it almost seems distant. "It's not like people care, except when they use it as an excuse to lord it over me."

Then she blinks and that look in her eyes is gone as she shifts her shoulders slightly, like she can shrug that weight off. "I've been dealing with this sort of shit for as long as I can remember, anyway. It's not like it's new."

"I guess it never is," Susan says quietly, and sighs, closing her eyes. She can taste the bitter backing of acid in her throat, and it strikes her, as if for the first time, that they were all too young. Herself, and Roland, and his friends, and even Sheemie. The girl in front of her probably isn't even all that much younger than Susan herself. She's done a good job, in her own life, of not letting herself see that she, too, is a kid.

"How old are ye?" she asks, after a moment, her eyes still closed. And then, because some deep part of her mind is nagging at her about the look in Coraline's eyes and the tone in her voice, the way she'd said a while: "I mean, truly?"

There's another long moment of quiet, before she gives a huff and resettles against the wall, hands in her pockets. "That's a good question, actually. I'm fourteen, but. I was fourteen for a really long time. I think for like, ten years? Something like that."

She says it so casually, like she's talking about the weather. "I was only away from home for like three years, though, so maybe I'm seventeen? Who even knows."

Susan opens her eyes, looking at the other girl for a long moment, as if trying to gauge whether she's being mocked. At the same time, though, she can't really bring herself to doubt it. It doesn't seem like mockery, or like a lie. It seems real. And... really, is it the strangest thing to happen so far?

"Ye're older than me." That actually feels, in an odd kind of way, like the strangest thing of all. "Whichever way it falls, older than me."

Alina balks at that. So wasteful! Ana Kuya would have taken a hand to her bottom if she saw Alina waste paper like that. Each sheet was was filled to the brim, every pencil sharpened down to its ends until it was unusable.

She wears a huge grin at this good fortune. Of course, maybe unconsciously she reinforces her comparison between Thorne and her stint in the Little Palace, where they had the audacity to pretend like wanting was an exercise in discipline rather than a suffering of circumstances. It's easy to pretend like scarcity builds character when it's temporary and by choice. Alina has had enough of scarcity by now, thanks.

"Saints, I don't know, I'm just so bored down here," it feels weird to admit that out of all of the things that are not fun about being in prison, boredom is her first complaint. But she is a teenager after all. And speaking of teenager things... "Plus, I don't get much time in the yard with Mal so I thought it might be better to have something to write notes if I need to."

Just casual friendship things. Don't worry about it Susan.

"Well, it's not like I was home for those three years. I got taken in 2018, and now it's-- it was 2021." Here is not now is not then and there. Fucking time-space bullshit.

She looks back at Susan with an even curiosity. "How old're you? Can't be much more than me then, right?"

The numbers don't mean much to Susan. If they ever counted by such a calendar in her world, it was long ago - back when the pumps in the oilfields still moved, mayhap, and before the world began to move on. She dwells on it a moment, anyway, not looking at the other girl.

"Sixteen," she says, at last. "Seventeen come Wide-Earth." If dead girls can still count age. She wonders if she can, or if she's the one who'll be stuck where she is, the way this girl is saying happened.

Worry isn't what passes over Susan's face, although the rather sly look of understanding might not be an improvement. She remembers the way Mal had looked at Alina from the start, and she sure as hell remembers their disarray when they'd come back from wherever they'd been off together.

"Sure," she agrees, with a smile that's trying very hard not to be a smirk. "Sure, I ken that." Then, remembering with a sudden fondness how Sheemie had helped her and Roland, in those too-brief weeks of their courting: "I can pass him things, too, if ye'd like. In between yard time, I mean. I'd like to help." It's not at all the same thing as her and Roland, really - there's no such secrecy, no such danger in being caught talking, for Mal and Alina - but there's a part of her that feels like it's just to help another couple along in their own time of hardship. If she can.

in the prison of the gifted [OPEN/JULY CATCHALL]

June 19 | CLOSED to Cell 7

June 21 onwards | OPEN | all over the place, brief emeto CW

Visiting the dungeons | OPEN

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goes straight for the emeto, lmao

gifts!!!

handwaves some mining interaction (lemme know if i need to edit)

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Trigger warning for suicide and Eps' life in general

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