One Foot Before The Other

[Ruby]

Part Two - The Middle

“No, no, just no!” roared Ruby Winchester.

The rehearsal came to a screeching, undulating halt. Onto the stage, resplendent in red as ever, stormed the matriarch of the Tantalum troupe.

“What in the blazes was that?” Her eyes smouldered. Inner fire burnt. She glared, with contempt that could kill gods, at the supposed leading man.

Duffy dropped his blade to his sword, no more than a shaft of wood painted silver, and shrugged. As far as he was concerned. As far as he was always, without fail, concerned…his acting was flawless.

“I’m. Still. Sober,” she quoted.

Several orphans clambered out of the large paper and oak framework of the dragon. They looked half-dazed, half confused. They watched the standoff between Ruby and Duffy for a few seconds, and promptly ran away whilst they could. It would be some time before their puppetry was needed again. Arden, on the fringes, watched with more focussed attentions. He tucked his own prop blade into his belt and folded his arms across his chest.

“What? You said ad-lib,” Duffy protested.

Scara Brae, in the grip of an overcast, but intolerably humid afternoon hummed, a radix of power oblivious to the battles ongoing at its heart. Behind Duffy, jagged towers and stained glass, the Prima Vista stood lifeless and uninviting.

“I said ad-lib the actions, not spurt out whatever diatribe comes to mind.”

Ruby checked the script, confirmed Duffy was talking out his arse, and then looked to Arden.

“Repeat all the last page. Now!”

[Duffy]

The thespian torture continued for some time. By the turn of evening to night, Duffy and Arden had rehearsed the first act’s conflict scenes until their fingers were sore and their limbs ached with the weight of the world. When Ruby relinquished them of their servitude, they stumbled to the front of the stage and dropped onto the edge. Duffy fell back, head cracking obliviously against the newly cut planks. Arden winced, but then did the same.

“I’m not sure what’s worse. Fighting the Forgotten Ones, or acting,” the bard mused.

“I feel less judged by a nation’s people than I ever have under her oh so observant eye.” The swordsman’s tone was full of contempt. In an hour or so, both of them would forget the day happened and they would all share a laugh and a joke and a drink or twelve in the bowels of Brandybuck Castle.

True enough, when the troupe had fought for king and country in Radasanth, or as envoys in Akashima’s war torn heart, people had forgiven them for their mortal failures. The devastation in Yanbo Harbour was nothing compared to the relief the people of the harbour city felt at being free of the Crab’s tyranny. The Republic of Corone, free of a corrupt Empire, turned a cheek at the state of its highways and the loss of the Ixian Knights as its defenders.

“It’s been so long since we put our hearts into a play. It’s…sort of refreshing,” Duffy hesitantly admitted.

[Ruby]

Ruby sat stage right. Elegantly poised on the edge of a footlocker of tresses and veils, she reflected on the day’s progress. Six months since she had learned of Duffy’s semi-survival, it still made her ill at ease to be in his company. Having said goodbye too many times, the matriarch could not quite overcome the sadness that filled her heart at his absence in the real world. The Aria, now reborn as a city of creativity felt like a dream. Though bright and bustling, Branna was soulless, unreal, to end at any moment.

“I’m sorry,” she said aloud.

Duffy and Arden froze, their conversations interrupted by two words they seldom heard from their sister. They sat upright slowly, hair eschew, foreheads beading with the sweltering evening humidity.

“Did she just…,” Arden muttered, careful to turn his head so Ruby couldn’t read his lips. Duffy confirmed with a raised eyebrow and slow, pensive nod.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Ruby pouted.

She pushed away from the locker and walked awkwardly towards her siblings. Even after six hours dictating the lives of the Restless Fugitive theatre troupe, she remained fresh as she had looked at dawn.

“You know…,” Duffy stumbled to his feet.

“It’s been a good few years since you apologised…” Arden continued. The mop of red hair flowed wildly in his wake as he too righted himself.

“But this time, hand on heart, I mean it.” Ruby frowned. “I’m trying to overcome the reality of the situation…overcome badly.”

[Duffy]

“Wait. What?”

Duffy, ever one step behind his female counterpart, scrunched his face into a grimace of confusion. He half hoped, in his current state of exhaustion that the ground would swallow him up.

“I think she’s trying to tell you things are weird, Duffy…”

The bard turned to his brother, still flabbergasted, then back to Ruby. It dawned on him only then that his own happy go lucky approach to being dead was not shared with his nearest and dearest. His grimace turned to a frown. His frown turned to a saddened glimmer. The skies went a shade darker.

“Not weird, no.” Ruby took a step closer. Her perfect façade cracked, just a little, and let a little discomfort show through the flame and brimstone of her authority. “Just…sad.”

Duffy threw caution to the wind and fell into Ruby’s arms. He hugged her, as tight as he possibly could. He nestled his head in the crick of her neck, smelt her sweat (though he’d never comment), and rubbed her back like old friends reunited.

The stage, now in twilight, took on a sombre atmosphere. The volcanic backdrop of the act’s finale glowed red for a moment or two as the sun tucked itself behind the rooftops of the city, and then all was dusk and shadow. Jasmine and freshly sawn wood was soon replaced by the familiar smell of spring chill and emptied latrines. Branna, though alive at night, was a half-finished love affair.

“Let’s go inside,” Arden suggested.

[Ruby]

“Why?” Ruby blinked.

Duffy and Arden had to think. Why indeed? Arden half wanted them to find solace in privacy. He clocked the lingering audience, keen to see a preview of the show before the opening night, and remembered they were far from alone. Duffy, never quite sure of himself, just wanted things to carry on as normal. At least, as normal as they ever got.

“So you can run away again? Put me to one side? No.” She stomped her heel on the planks of the stage. “Not this time. You bloody well tell me you’re sorry!”

Silence. The last of the audience soon dissipated. Duffy shuffled nervously from foot to foot and Arden ran a hand through his straw-like hair. An impasse. An awkward moment like the thousand that preceded it.

“You want me to apologise for dying?” The bard let out a nervous, ominous laugh.

Ruby’s eyes widened. They threated to burn, a glare Duffy knew all too well. He instinctively covered his groin.

“No. You can fucking stay dead for all I care. What you can apologise for, Duffy Bracken, is not telling me what you were planning all a-fucking-long!”

Truth split the stage in two. Arden, stuck in the middle, stepped back a few paces. Realising they were going to fight here, he remained on hand to stop things going too far. He looked up at the ochre sky, dying in its own glory, and wandered when they would ever be as they were. Never.

[Duffy]

He waited. Tension mounted. He rolled a tongue over his snakebite piercings, as ever he did when he was trying to make sense of the world. To acquiesce to its myriad demands. He had planned for months, his death, and how to subvert Oblivion’s final triumph over the shards – the five people he had created in his own image.

“I was going to die. I had no choice. Oblivion’s curse, his final gambit, stole away all hope.”

Sincerity, seldom Duffy’s tone, filled the stage. It was a grander presence than any leading man on any stage through time’s long march. Ruby, for a brief moment, baulked in her rage. Her fingers uncurled. Her eyes danced with mortal light, and not the flame of hell’s wrath.

“Even if you had no choice, even if Fate’s sway was true…you had every duty to tell us. To prepare us. To let us go.”

Duffy had. At least, in his own small way, the bard had prepared his siblings for his passing. Time after time, beneath White Tree’s branch and sombre funeral regalia, he had slipped from the world and come back. Each time was supposed to soften the blow. A dying man’s last request.

“Sacrifice.”

A long time ago, the leader of the Ixian Knights had tried to educate Duffy on the morals of leadership and loss. Sei Orlouge’s only good word, so the bard had thought, was sacrifice. He had no idea what it meant, then. Now, he knew all too well.

[Ruby]

“Before you fly off the handle, I know we have all sacrificed so much.” Duffy pleaded with words, eyes, and hands pressing air.

Ruby found it hard to disbelieve her brother. After all said and done, since the last Lucian’s Call before Wainwright’s return – before the start of the war with Oblivion, she had never believed him quite so much.

“How do I know you’re not just saying that?” Doubt. Ever a wicked woman’s weapon.

The bard nodded. He deserved that. He deserved everything. As far as he was concerned, however, he had paid the ultimate price. Ruby would wake up tomorrow, on Althanas proper, and know love and hate and all the wonders of the senses. Duffy, alas, would know only duty…a dull echo of a life he had given up to allow others to live theirs to the full.

“Look at me.”

Ruby looked.

“I’m dead. I am, categorically, despite our immortality, dead.”

“He really is,” Arden added, weighing in rarely where lesser mortals feared to go.

Ruby darted a glance at the swordsman, but forgave him for showing interest. She snarled.

“I am all too aware.” She pointed over the bard’s shoulder.

Duffy turned to examine the eastern horizon. Branna, a city on a mountain top, overlooked the illusory plains of the Aria. A corner of the Tap carved out by Forgotten One’s borrowed progeny.

“What am I looking at?” he enquired, missing the point.

“This…this haven of bards. Only you could erect a tomb so self-indulgent.”

[Duffy]

“In his defence Ruby…”

The spell singer raised her palm and silence the swordsman’s protestations. She honked up her dress and walked, tantalisingly slowly towards Duffy. Her eyes did not deviate once from his pudgy face.

“An entire city. An. Entire. City.”

“My dream was always to gift the love of the stage to the people of Scara Brae.”

Duffy trailed off. He looked around the remnants of their epic rehearsal. Whilst Ruby and he always failed to see eye to eye over the small details…here, the trio stood amidst a grand vision. The Restless Fugitive, the successor to the long dead Tantalum Troupe would deliver a tour de force to the noble class of Scara Brae in three weeks’ time.

“We did that together,” she pleaded. “Pettigrew and Liasa have created something far beyond the majesty of our days. They are us, reborn, and without the weight of experience we have had to suffer so long!”

A tear. Singular emotion. Duffy saw it before Ruby realised she had let the façade slip. They both, in unison, began to cry. Joyous tears, of realisation more than terror and fear rolled down their plush red cheeks. They salty kissed cheeks and invited Arden to join them.

“Really?” he said, rolling his eyes.

“Look at us!” Duffy suggested.

They stood in a triangle, the swordsman, the sister, and the wayward son. The area in front of the stage was now empty, and the city’s light dead, buried, and reborn in eerie twilight.

[Ruby]

They had fought together for the right to bare their names. They had fought together for the right to see the sun rise and the sun set. They had fought, in a darker time, for freedoms amongst the fair citizens of Radasanth, Akashima, Scara Brae, and long ago Raiaera.

“Heroes.”

Duffy and Ruby turned to Arden with half-formed surprise. They forgot, for just a brief moment, their fiery exchange.

“We’re heroes. Wherever or not we accept our fate, Sei was right all along.” Arden produced a scrap of paper from a pocket in his slacks. “Look.”

They converged, a trio of vagabonds and vitriol reformed as a trinity of forgiveness. Short lived, it served to illuminate each of the trio about their misgivings. Ruby saw the writing first, and immediately let loose the tears of wear. One single tear turned into a torrent.

“Oh he’s a sly one…,” Duffy mumbled, just before he too found himself crying.

On the stage where they hoped to rekindle the lost art of thespianism, the former Tantalum trio remembered back, long ago, to when they had first been introduced to the silent mystic ahead of an evangelical empire. Sei Orlouge. A hero self-professed, but in true, a hero as true and righteous as ever history’s multitude had produced.

“What am I missing?” Arden asked.

Ruby and Duffy chuckled nervously. They reflected back to the Cell, where Duffy had first crossed paths with Sei. He had sacrificed his position in the tournament for Duffy’s sake.

[Duffy]

At the end of the tournament the mystic had sent a message to the plucky thief. It said, in simple spidery script, ‘One foot before the other’. At the time Duffy had disregarded it as pious bullshit. Having listened to the Hero of Radasanth’s diatribe for much of their fiery engagement in the tournament arena had had cast it aside. Now, after all said and done between them, it made perfect sense.

“Do you think he knew?” Duffy raised an eyebrow.

“About this? No.” Ruby sounded too certain for either sibling to question her. “I think he just meant…you know, you’ll find your feet someday.”

Ruby had been there, that day, cheering on her brother in the stands. She saw a message deliver to Duffy in the dugout but had never guessed what it said or who the sender was. Like a bolt from the blue, yesterday felt fresh in her mind.

“I want you to be happy, Ruby.”

“Oh, there’s no danger of that.”

Duffy rolled his eyes. “I mean it. What I did is inexcusable. I should have warned you. But, you have everything in place to get on with your life as best you can. Better, perhaps, with all the people ready to lift you higher.”

She stayed silent, perhaps for too long, and the silence undid Duffy’s renewed confidence.

“Duffy. The only person on this earth that can elevate me anymore…is you.”

Arden smiled. Duffy and Ruby walked closer to one another and, without ceremony, hugged.