Going down in flames...

[The Cinderella Man]

((Closed to Hana.))

Don’t count the teeth of a gifted horse...

It was a sound philosophy, the first rule in the handbook of his ilk, and Victor abided by it this time around as well. Because life didn’t present you with a multitude of options when you were a homeless prizefighter whose fighting record started to count more losses then victories. People had a subtle title, calling themselves wanderers or adventurers when they found themselves in similar position, but down in the essence they were all the same outcasts with sky for a roof and a bench for a bedroll. Bums with a title. Such a life wasn’t really life at all; it was a constant struggle to make the ends meet and oftentimes failing in that simple task.

That was why when he was offered a seemingly tedious job, Victor accepted it with no questions asked. He was hired by a group of shady looking merchants to transport some goods from Radasanth outskirts to a farm estate near the foot of the Jagged Mountains, east of the impressive Corone capitol. His employers failed to fit the archetype though, their faces unshaved and rugged, their attires deviating from the pompous prissiness that most merchants insisted on. On top of that, the amount of money offered seemed ludicrous – five hundred gold pieces at the spot and another five hundred once he delivers the goods.

They had only one request; the seals on the crates had to be untouched once he reached the destination and he couldn’t know what the contents were. And though the knavish appearance and the clandestine reasons were enough to make even the most ignorant pause and ponder about the ramifications of accepting such a job, Victor had no such issues. The money was good, the task was simple and the fact that he might be smuggling illegal substances failed in comparison with his empty pockets. Besides, he was just a middleman, making an episodic appearance in a burlesque that existed before his appearance and would proceed long after he’s gone. And the law always tended to go for the big fishes in the pond.

The day around him was ominous. The clouded sky insisted on being the harbinger of bad things, turning the already monotonous stone streets into a duller shade of gray. People were scuttling through the streets like enshrouded ghosts, protecting themselves from the harsh wind that came tumbling down the Jagged Mountains, bringing the flavor of the snowy peaks in tow. The storm was gathering but it was an occurrence typical for this time of year, making the clouds bulk and disperse within hours. The prizefighter hoped they would do the latter soon or he would wind up being drenched to the bones by the time he reached his destination. As if to foil his positive thinking, the thunder rumbled like a belly of a gargantuan beast up north and the wind slapped him once again.

The weather wasn’t his most prominent problem right now though. The merchants provided the horse, the carriage, the goods, but failed to put the harness on the beast, thinking that Victor would be more then able to do that on his own. Victor was thinking the same... until he gave it a try.

“The headgear attaches to... to the bridle that is tied with... this here thing that should pass through... ah, yes, through this loop and beyond the chinch whatever...” his mind tried to describe as his hands worked on harnessing the tranquil animal. The horse neighed once or twice if he would pull on the leather straps too hard or tried to force a strap where it didn’t belong, but in the end Victor managed to get the job done. “And it only took me, what? Half an hour. Sheesh, serves me right for not paying attention when my dad used to do it.”

Eventually, the prizefighter climbed onto the wagon and took the reins in his hands. They seemed to be slanted to one side and not attached to the headgear at the same height, but that didn’t matter right now. He liked to improvise; he would deal with the problems as he went. The leather reins slapped the horse moderately, Victor clucking the beast forwards, but even as he did so the binds that he so expertly set up detached and made the horse step forwards without the carriage in tow. The beast stopped, shook its head almost in a mockery, making Victor roll his eyes and rub his temples. He would be better of carrying the crates with his hands.

[Hana]

Hana almost felt like a child again.

She remembered once, when she had been four or five years, her mother, Ulani, took her on a trip, just the two of them. Ulani brought the child to her grandparents’ home, in a large camp brimming with the spice farmers of Fallien and their families. Ulani’s sisters, who by then had had children of their own, treated Ulani with a cold courtesy they believed to be deserving of someone who’d married a foreigner and left, but were charmed by Ulani’s spunky, dark-skinned little girl. Hana was fascinated by her beautiful aunts (who were, nevertheless, hardly as gorgeous as her mother in her eyes), but intimidated by their children.

Her little cousins stared at their newfound relative for quite some time. In that time, Hana felt like a spectacle in one of those gypsy caravans that her older sister, Aysha, said would take her away if she didn’t behave. Even so, it was not in her nature to take haughtiness sitting down, and before long she was running around with the best of them, the leader in a heated game of tag.

This time, however, she found herself doubting her ability to conquer the social scene. She could hardly conquer the weather, and found herself constantly trying to ignore the chill settling on her bare stomach. Early on in her journey, she’d been forced to put on her coat, and even now was tempted to actually button up the thing. A brutal wind had decided to assault her on her very first day away from Fallien, whipping about in a way that made Hana’s multitude of tiny braids smack her repeatedly on the sides of her face. She shivered and hugged the coat closer to her body.

Despite her inability to adapt, she felt like a child because she was once again put in the middle of an unfamiliar group of faces – rather pale faces, at that! Pale, and exotic, thought the young Fallien-born girl as she passed several other people on the paved road leading up to a tall, striking city a mile or so further. She heard a name tossed around – albeit in more accents than she’d ever heard before, even as a trader’s daughter – that said she was on her way to Radasanth. Glancing around at the plethora of warriors, merchants, traders and nobles clustered on the sides of the road to escape the wind, Hana realized that she’d learned more about this continent from eavesdropping than from what the captain had told her.

She’d had a fine trip across the water between Fallien and Corone, enjoying the sound and feel of the ocean and sharing her story with more travelers than she cared to count. After telling them about her intention to broaden her horizons and make some money for herself, she couldn’t help but add just how much knowledge she already possessed, just by listening to her father, Taye, speak of his former life in B’nesh—

Just then she heard a loud noise, made in protest, it seemed. As she buttoned up her coat over her bare stomach, she saw a carriage just up ahead. Not much of a stylish way of transport, but it looked sturdy, like her father’s handmade carts back home. The driver in this case was obviously frustrated – he was a muscular-looking fellow, brown-haired and pale – these people were all starting to look alike! His carriage’s horse was bound to run off in disgust if he couldn’t be fastened correctly.

Hana felt a twinge of empathy as she watched the man massaging his forehead. She had had plenty of trouble when trying to hitch up the horses at home when their spices were due for the traders. She’d even almost run over her father, once.

“Hey,” she called out, unsure of whether he could hear her in the violent wind threatening to worsen. “You need some help?”

Without waiting for an answer, Hana set herself upon the task of refastening the reins in their proper places. Within a few minutes her fingers worked fast, looping the reins back through their metal rings at the bit until they were both at the same height. As soon as she finished, her brown eyes caught onto another mistake – the binds around the horse’s midsection weren’t inserted where they should have been.

Chuckling aloud, she looked up at the man in the seat and grinned. “No wonder this old mount keeps running off! You haven’t harnessed him to your carriage.” She tilted her head to the side, as if trying to see past him. “You need some help binding this thing, or would you like to use your expertise again?” she asked teasingly.

[The Cinderella Man]

Victor was a boxer and as such probably not the brightest star in the sky. Smart people, after all, didn’t pick a getting-hit-in-the-head business as the profession in which they tried to build a career. But even his rigid, rather simplistic cogitation has been around the block, it journeyed with him from one Corone town to the other, and the conclusion was always the same. People suck. If you’re bleeding to death on the hot cobblestone road, chances were you’re going to be robbed of your boots before somebody would even ask what’s wrong with you. Minding your own business wasn’t just a skill that townsfolk had, it was a goddamn religion and people cherished it conscientiously. And even if they did actually opt to assist you in one way or the other, there was always a catch. You scratch my back, I scratch yours.

That was why, when he was approached by the peculiar, coffee-skinned woman, Victor’s first thought was a question, wondering what she wanted in return. The fact that she was a woman failed to dissuade the prizefighter from his usual mentations. “A woman can get to you in a thousand different ways, Vic, my boyo!” Arslan, his boxing trainer always liked to say, and he was damn right. It was a woman (though at the time she was so much more, an angel, a saint, a goddess. Amen.) that got him into fighting, and it was that same woman that in the end tore his heart out and let it bleed on the smelly canvas of the boxing ring. Delilah wasn’t an angel, she wasn’t a saint. She was the knife that still stood lodged somewhere in between his shoulder blades.

The woman before him, however, seemed to be out to prove him wrong. She got to work resolutely, her fingers moving the apparel with a purpose and trained skill, and in a matter of minutes the horse was once again harnessed. This time the right way, it seemed, and it didn’t make sense to Victor. People usually helped you after they milked you for some returning favor. That was why his usual slightly frowned expression changed into one of mild puzzlement as he descended from the carriage.

“I... uh... Sure. Some help would definitely be appreciated, young miss. Last time I tried to do it, it took me half an hour and...” he paused as he got closer to her, his smirking face looking down at her tanned visage. “Well, I guess you saw what happened.”

The closer he got to her, the weirder she seemed. Now he could notice the myriad of miniscule braids that formed her hairdo, the piercing through the eyebrow that must’ve hurt like a bitch when she made it. He was only in Fallien once, following Doji Kadenzaa on her own personal crusade, but he was rather certain that this girl was fresh out of the desert realm in the south. Of course, he thought, that explained the whole shebang. She wasn’t from around here and therefore she didn’t fit the profile that years of plodding rigorously chiseled into his mind. But like the horse and carriage and this easy-pickings job, she too was an unexpected gift and he wasn’t keen on prying into the reasons for her benevolence. Instead he let her work, sticking his hands into the pockets of his black leather coat and pulling it closer to his body.

The chocolate-tanned lass certainly knew what she was doing, he would give her that much. She knew what went where and about three strong wind gusts after she begun, his wagon was finally ready to roll. He figured somewhere in all the tying and strapping, she was bound to fire the usual request for something or other as a payment for her services, but there was no such thing. That consequently made Victor actually feel like he owed her something, because the balance in his head wasn’t used to such benefaction.

“I’ll be damned,” he finally spoke again, taking the horse by the bridle and pulling it forwards just enough to see the carriage behind it move as well. “I guess it’s easier to do it properly when you actually know what you’re doing.”

The sky above them rolled another thunder down the Jagged Mountains, the clouds above them turning midday into evening with their glumness. The rain seemed to be hanging right above their heads, itching to shower the land bountifully. Most people got this message that the nature was sending, fleeing from the streets and withdrawing into the coziness of their homes. The girl’s braids flew rampant in sync with their coats that got tousled by the fierce wind. He could’ve just bow his head like a gent, thank her and try to outrun the rain (as unlikely as it was). But the feeling of debt combined with her intriguing exterior forced him to do otherwise.

“Say, you wouldn’t be interested in earning five hundred gold pieces in a hurry?” And only when he spoke those words, he realized how wrong they could be interpreted. He decided to remedy this before he got a slap in the face and a kick in the groin. “I... uhm... I have to deliver this cargo to an estate a couple of hours of riding towards the east, and as you could already notice, horses and carriages aren’t exactly my...expertise. We’d be back in Radasanth before nightfall if all goes well.”

[Hana]

Even smack dab in the middle of the spicefields of Fallien, Hana wasn’t so isolated that she had never seen someone more pale-skinned than herself. Of course, most of the people she knew were lighter than she was. The looks she had inherited from her father had associated her with words like ‘chocolate’ and ‘russet,’ shades of brown rarely seen even in Fallien, where the peoples’ skin were burned dark by the sun.

Every now and then, however, there came one or two – sometimes even an entire caravan – of pale-faced traders looking to do business with Hana’s father, Taye. Pale-skinned, all even lighter than the golden Fallien dwellers, and every trader could hardly bear the heat on their backs. Some even fainted. Hana’s family chided the newcomers for their lack of intelligence when it came to being well prepared. Without the proper coverings, their skin would surely peel underneath the unforgiving Fallien sun! Even so, most of them were invited to stay at Hana’s home to recuperate from sunstroke, and each time, the young girl observed them studiously. Now she saw the same likeness in the man before her.

He was much taller than she was, like most of the people she’d seen on this continent, taller by a foot, at least. And he was dressed as though Corone were about to go through a heavy snowfall, though the sky above them didn’t dissuade her from thinking it just might happen. His dark coat matched the color of his hair and his eyes, deep brown and trying to hide his mild curiosity as he glanced at the braids on her head, her multiple piercings, the dark skin. Hana smiled again as she gave the reins one last tug to make sure. She certainly was a unique person in these parts, just like she had been back home. She imagined how the man’s mouth might drop at the sight of her tattoo and less-than-typical clothing.

At the rate the wind was going, he might get to see them anyhow, what with her partially unbuttoned coat coming undone in the gale. The black girl stroked the side of the restless old horse’s neck, trying to soothe him so as to keep him from spooking in the violent wind, as she listened to the dark-haired man’s offer.

“Five hundred?” she said, obviously attracted to the idea. Less than a few hours in the Corone countryside, and she’d already been offered a job? Julian will be eating his own words, she thought gleefully. Her brother had never had much confidence in her as an intelligent traveler and free agent.

And, well, she was clearly better than this guy at handling a horse and carriage. This was precisely her area, and after fifteen or so years of working with both horses and carts, her knowledge ought to pay off.

“That would be great!” she answered loudly, trying to speak over the whistle of the wind, her hair thrashing about. “Money is what I came here to make.” Patting the horse on its haunches, she stepped forward to the much taller man before her and shook his hand ardently. “Lehana Sinji, but Hana is better. Don’t have to spend so much time wrapping your tongue around the consonants,” she added with a grin, but it soon vanished as she felt something wet on her forehead, Looking up, she could see drops of rain landing sparsely on the ground, the clouds bleak and heavy with an impending shower.

“We should get moving,” Hana said to the man, scaling the side of the carriage’s seat and sitting on the opposite side. “I hope this thing is built better than my dad’s. Sitting on carts always makes my butt sore by the end of it,” she remarked candidly. Though there was a little hood over most of the seat, she didn’t expect to stay entirely dry, and pulled her coat over her head and shoulders a bit, exposing her stomach and allowing the cold to seep in.

She didn’t entirely mind, though. When one has spent her entire life with a brutal sun beating down on her skin, it is refreshing to experience even a chilly blast of wind and rain.

[The Cinderella Man]

Victor considered telling Hana about the other requisition his employers made, but decided that she didn’t need to know that their cargo is probably not fresh carrots and tomatoes in crates. Given her enthusiasm and rather extrovert demeanor, she was bound to pry deeper into the matter – like women usually did – and before long, he would become curious under the tide of her questions. And that is what he didn’t want to be. As it was right now, he was playing ignorant and that was the kind of attitude that got the job done. Or got a person killed. He hoped for the former.

She shook his hand with substantial vigor and strength and it surprised the prizefighter. His sister Yavannha – who was growing up to be quite a philosopher back in Scara Brae and somewhat of a bitch as well – always liked to say that you could judge a person by their handshake. If it’s limp and uninterested, the person is weak-willed. If it’s weak and sallow, the person is prissy and too big for one's breeches. If it’s strong and fervid – like Lehana’s clearly was – the person is bound to be bold and self-confident. Victor mostly called it baloney because the method was mostly hit-or-miss, but in this instance it certainly seemed true because the woman was already up in the carriage seat, speaking about her butt and how it had a tendency to get sore after long rides.

“A damn shame,” the boxer allowed a rather jesting thought, his mind replaying the image of her climbing up on the wagon. “Since it’s not really a bad tail end. Not too bad at all.”

None of that came out though, not in a form of a smirk and definitely not in spoken words. He maybe was a man and somewhat of a bum, but one didn’t have to be a knight to have manners. Instead he climbed up next to her, eyeing the bulldog clouds that started doing their job, announcing that there is a very good possibility that they would be drenched by the time they left the outskirts of Radasanth.

“Well, pleasure to meet you, Hana, and I’m not just saying that. I’m Victor Callahan,” he spoke once he got settled in the seat. “As for the wagon, I have no idea. They gave me the horse, the wheels and the cargo and told me where to take it. I guess we’re about to find out if it makes a smooth ride.”

It didn’t. Even if the sky didn’t unleash cats and dogs on them, the trucking of the carriage down the cobbles wasn’t too comfy at all. And when they left the city limits and the slick stone turned into boggy dirt, it became even less of a pleasurable ride. Because of the fierce wind, the rain didn’t fall; it cut its way through the air at a mean angle, slapping their faces with every gust. Of course, the whistle of the wind and the rapping of the thick raindrops on the canvas of their wagon strangled every attempt at dialogue, further amplifying the misery of the pair. And suddenly the five hundred gold pieces didn’t seem like too much for this job. There was nothing that Victor wanted to do more then get out of the soaked shirt that clung to his bulk beneath his coat, getting more itchy and chaffing with every thought of a fireplace and a roof over his head. And given the duration of their journey and the humdrum rain-soaked environment around them, such thoughts weren’t few and far between.

In between mental bitching that his mind did, he vaguely wondered how was Hana handling this. Compared to the dry heat of the sandy dunes, this kind of environment must have been a significant deviation from what she was used to. He wanted to ask her about it, but a thunder crashed so close it made him wince, dissuading him from any inquiry for the time being.

Luckily for Victor’s rapidly degrading mood, the stormy clouds that looked so ominous above them dispersed just as fast as they gathered about an hour before. The rain stopped almost as if somebody turned it off, introducing the sun through a crack in the gray dome. It came and went, beaming over the sopping earth, but it was a harbinger of kinder weather. It did little to aid the soaked pair, but it was a welcome change from the forbidding overcast that seemed to be moving further south. Victor ran his fingers through his hair rapidly, shaking off some of the dampness and once again thinking that it was a wise decision to get a haircut about a week ago.

“Gods, I thought it would never stop,” he spoke, his voice finally unhindered by the ruckus of the storm. “I guess you aren’t used to this kind of weather. You’re from Fallien, right?”

He looked at the peculiar girl and suddenly the queer tiny braids that formed the gist of her hairdo didn’t seem like such a bad idea. Woven so tightly it made the prizefighter wonder just how much time did it take to make them, they weren’t great at accumulating the moisture. If it weren’t for the obvious dampness of her coat, it would hard to decipher that she was just through a storm.

TAP-TAP

Victor at first didn’t register the sound, discarding it as raindrops that found a hole in the canvas and were not tapping on the wooden crates behind their backs. And just as he was about to completely push it out of his mind, waiting for Hana’s answer...

TAP-TAP-TAP

Definitely not the rain. But did he really want to know what it was exactly? No, probably not. Probably best just to let it slide. Hopefully Lehana wouldn’t hear it and whatever it was – something alive perhaps, his mind pondered – it would get tired after a while.

[Hana]

A flash thunderstorm was something Hana hadn’t seen a great deal of, and while she had instantly decided that it was something unpleasant, it was far better than the weather she was used to. She could live with dry heat as long as she had the proper shelter and equipment to keep herself hydrated. And the nights were cool, as well, but not too much so. The Fallien desert, especially the spicefields, maintained a symmetry that kept its inhabitants from drying out and shriveling up in the torrid heat.

However, when someone like Hana was involved daily with tasks that required manual labor and gratuitous straining of the muscles, the dry heat could get to her. She was muscular and more than capable of being a farmhand, but she was still a big girl. It seemed that the pressure of the sun against her skin always made her far more uncomfortable and sweaty than her brother and sister, who were graced with their mother’s slender build. Hana and her father got stuck with the muscular bulk, which had its shortcomings as well as its uses. For instance, Hana’s body density never did well during a long haul of bags of spices from the field to the caravans when the sun was pounding down on her back.

And that wasn’t even the worst of it. After having experienced the stinging, blinding whirlwinds that were the product of a sandstorm, Hana decided that a thunderstorm was infinitely better. Although the rain slapping her in the face hurt just as much as several grains of sand, at least it was cold and brisk. The dampness soaking through her coat was more refreshing than perspiration saturating the back of her shirt. And best of all, a thunderstorm wouldn’t fill her mouth with sand if she accidentally opened her mouth too wide. Even in her wet discomfort, Hana was almost enjoying the coldness of the sky and the bright, marvelous (if not heart-stopping) flashes of lightning.

She obviously couldn’t say the same for Victor, however. The man was plainly cringing from the weather, his back hunched and his eyes intent on the road, trying to ignore the violent skies. The young Fallien woman couldn’t stifle a laugh, however, though it was swallowed in the whiplash of the wind, every time Victor’s body jerked at a bolt of lightning.

Feeling another stab of sympathy for him, she leaned forward, feeling the rain sliding across her scalp between her braids and soaking her shirt. She pulled at Victor’s reins until they were pulling just tight enough to keep the rain-drenched horse closer. She sat back, satisfied, but even wetter than before.

As if on cue, the rain slowly began to calm down, slowing to little drops that Hana could barely feel, and then stopping completely. The gray landscape suddenly brightened itself into a myriad of shades of green, now allowing the young woman to see the miles and miles of trees, their leaves limp with draining rainwater. Even the grass on either side of the cobblestones was shining in the clear sunlight. Corone was more beautiful than she had expected.

She glanced over at Victor, who was sitting straight up now that he could look ahead without being stung in the eyes with rain. He was a younger man than she’d thought he was, younger and more vibrant without the gray rainclouds hovering just over his head. In this light, he wasn’t all that bad-looking either, the dark hair contrasting splendidly with light skin, but his tentative demeanor kept him from – from something, she wasn’t sure what. He obviously was careful to stay the way he was.

Well, we’ll just have to change that, thought Hana with a covert grin. She would keep herself from being an obvious flirt, like she sometimes was, but Victor looked as though he could use some prying open in that head of his.

“Yeah, I’m from Fallien,” she said in answer to his question, peeling her coat off of her dampened skin. At least the rest of her was relatively dry, a surprise after the flash storm. “From R’uuya, actually….you know, the spicefields. My dad’s a trader, if you didn’t guess already. He’s from a desert country on a different continent, but he came to R’uuya and never left, because my mother is one of the most beautiful Fallien women you’ll ever see,” she mentioned smugly, though she tapped her arm and added, “I don’t look a whole lot like her, of course. She’s much lighter. She and my sister—“

A noise from the back of the cart interrupted her, but she dismissed it as the crates knocking together from the unsteadiness of the cobblestones. “She and my sister look almost like twins, though. And as big and pregnant as my sister is now, she’ll probably have a whole litter of light – alright, what is that?” she said, spinning around in her seat to stare into the back of the carriage. She was already irritated with the wetness on her skin; she didn’t need the crates bumping together every five seconds while she was talking.

But this hardly seemed to be just an ordinary knocking of wood upon wood. This was the kind of tapping a person might make when trying tentatively to catch someone’s attention. This was someone’s finger tapping against something in their carriage.

“Victor…” she stared into the slight darkness of the cart, eying the crates closest to her. With her ears trained on the area behind her, she finally caught – but just barely – something crying. Muffled, but plain, there came a final noise between the taps.

Something human was whimpering in their carriage.

Her brown eyes narrowed and apprehensive, she looked hard at the man beside her. “Victor, what the hell was that?”

[The Cinderella Man]

When Hana started to speak in a clamorous bold manner that seemed an undisputable aspect of her demeanor – which Victor didn’t mind a whole lot, he was silent enough for three people – he thought that the peculiar sound from the back of the wagon would cease. Or at least get overruled by her voice. And for a while it did, and she spoke tenaciously of her home, her parents, her family, as if they were friends that met after years of being apart. It was queer for him to be involved in palaver with somebody so blunt, so he mostly took the info in and nodded at what he thought were the appropriate places for a nod.

The only time he felt inclined to speak was when the chocolate-skinned girl mentioned that she looked nothing like her gorgeous mother. He begged the differ. From what his cursory glances revealed – and he was tempted to fire a couple her way once she took off her sopped coat – Hana was by no means an unattractive girl. Sure, there was a bit more of her then when it came to normal women, but Victor always thought that expressions like normal and beautiful were strictly subjective. She looked a bit unusual with her weird piercings and the large picture tinted over her stomach, and there was a bit more muscle in her curves, but nothing that would significantly thwart her fairness. In fact, it actually gave her a certain exotic beauty that put her above all the normal girls that came a dime a dozen.

And then, when he was certain that whatever squirmed in some crate behind them finally gave it a rest, Lehana’s sentence was cut in half by the tapping sound again. She reacted in a manner she spoke, harshly and abruptly, turning around and inspecting the back of the wagon. “Busted.” his mind commented and the irony of it was that he had no idea what he was busted for. She looked at him long and hard, her black eyes filled with doubt and anxiousness, maybe even a tinge of anger. He couldn’t look into them for long. It seemed that their blackness would devour him and expose the mystery that he tried to keep hidden.

“I... I don’t know,” he finally spoke, eyes on the road and the reins once again loose in his lethargic hands. “I think we’re not supposed to know. They never told me what the cargo really was. But they did make it clear that the seals on the crates must remain untouched.”

The wooden box behind him whimpered again and Hana was still boring a hole in his temple, and Victor wasn’t curious anymore. He felt guilty. It’s one thing to play the big dumb brute and wash your hands from something you didn’t know about, but it was another when you knew that there is something amiss, and you fail to act. That’s when bad things happened, when good men failed to act. Was he a good man? Delilah always said that he was, that he was one of the last pure souls or some similar mushy mumbo-jumbo that back then seemed sacrilegious to him. But back then he was flying on wings of affection and such benevolent speeches were taken in stride. Right now he was just trying to make it from one day to the other, and five hundred gold pieces would enable him to prolong that for at least a month or two.

His eyes hesitantly turned to Hana and now there seemed to be some definite anger brewing there, accompanied by the haunting muffled sniffles from within the crate. Victor shook his head and rolled his eyes in surrender. It’s always the women. They always got him in so much trouble with their irresistible eyes – just, truthful eyes – getting him either beaten to a pulp or running for his life. Asuka did so, Doji did so, Feru did so, Delilah did so... The history seemed cocked, locked and ready to repeat itself with the Fallien woman.

“Alright, damnit! Fine. We’ll take a peek. We probably won’t get the money, but whatever,” he spoke, a bit irritated, but a bit anxious as well as he pulled on the right rein and made their carriage take a detour into the nearby trees. What if it was just an animal and they squandered one thousand gold pieces on that piece of information? No, that wasn’t the outcome that worried him. What did was: What if it wasn’t an animal?

[Hana]

For a brief stint in her childhood, Hana wanted to please everyone. She had been in a stage where she was constantly apologetic, especially to the strangers who would take up rent in her house from time to time. Of course, it was long before she got used to the visits from foreigners, and she was still a naïve little girl. It took her some time to learn that she didn’t owe everyone an apology, and once she had adjusted to sticking up for herself, she no longer needed to please everyone. Instead, she began to believe that everyone should be pleasing her.

It was for that reason that she could stare down Victor without a guilty conscience. Why in Jya’s name should she feel bad about ignoring some insignificant little rule in a case like this? There was something eerie about it, something that was obviously bothering the both of them, and Hana had no misgivings about taking liberties with their cargo. She wanted to know what was in that crate, and by the Gods, she would find out.

“What’s this about not getting the money? That’s ridiculous. I mean, honestly, they’re not going to hold your pay hostage because you peeked through a box. If you ask me, that’s sketchy,” she asserted with certainty. “And besides, they can’t not pay you now. You’ve gone through all this trouble already.”

As he steered off of the path, complaining about their potential losses with an exasperated note in his voice, Hana eyed him shrewdly. He seemed to have been as confounded by her unflinching stare as anyone else unlucky enough to fall under it. The girl couldn’t help feeling bad for him then – she seemed to find herself doing that a lot today – because he really did look as though he were in need of this job. As strong a man as his demeanor and constant silence said he was, she had the feeling that emotionally, he was as weak as whatever nameless creature was sitting pitifully behind the wood of that crate.

But for all that weakness, even if it was just speculation on her part, he was an undeniably good guy. He deserved a mind at ease.

“Don’t worry, Victor, it’s probably nothing too bad,” she said gently, climbing over the seat to land softly in the back of the cart. It squeaked loudly as she hit the boards, creaking with her weight, but she focused on the create before her, which had stopped making noise. From this spot in the cart, she could see that they had stopped in the still-wet grass just inside a ring of trees off the road. The Fallien girl took a moment to admire the greenness of everything after the rain, and then looked back up at Victor.

“I can try and reseal this once we’re done with it. I won’t get you in trouble, but if I do, I’ll back you up.” She looked back down at the crate, and in the brief silence after she spoke, she heard breathing. But it was not the animalistic breathing of a mammal heaving a heavy breath – it was a shudder of a breath, a frightened sigh.

A little more anxious now, she pulled her iron dagger hastily from the side of her waist and dug into the crack between the top and the side of the crate, breaking through the seal. She heard little noises coming from beneath her still, but kept going around the entire top of the crate, her facial muscles clenched in concentration.

When both sides of the seal were broken, she wrapped her nimble fingers around the corners of the lid, pausing for a moment. She already had a feeling that what she was going to find would do nothing to soothe her nerves. Hana lifted the top of the crate upward and, with a grunt, threw the top over the side.

The first thing she saw was hair. Long-ish brown hair hanging down, disheveled. And the head beneath the hair lifted itself up to stare at her with big, petrified eyes in a round little face.

It was a little girl, a human girl. Her hands were bound in front of her, dotted with a few splinters from the wooden crate, and a gag in her mouth. She cried out, the sound stifled by the cloth between her lips.

The young Fallien woman fell back onto her knees, her mouth falling open despite her attempts to remain composed. “Victor!”

[The Cinderella Man]

This won’t end well...

Even after Hana’s reassuring words, Victor knew that everything was going downhill in a hurry despite the fact that their wagon was now standing completely still, nestled in a batch of trees that smelled of humidity and leaf decay. The people that hired him weren’t the kind that let things slide, gave you a pat on the shoulder and told you to do better next time. Not those knaves with their false smiles, itchy fingers and slightly frowned looks. When they said that the seals weren’t to be touched, they meant it. And when they didn’t say what repercussions might occur if the seals were, in fact, touched or broken, it didn’t mean that there weren’t any to be afraid of. It meant that there were some, but you didn’t want to go beyond that door. And there is nothing quite as terrifying as a closed door.

Hana obviously had no such worrying thoughts. She jumped in the back, paused only to hear another whimper and proceeded to break free whatever was making the noise. Victor joined her tentatively, taking a seat on what seemed like a sack of wheat and letting her do the work. She was, after all, the one who wanted to see the contents and throw their money away. He wondered briefly what would’ve happened if he proceeded from Radasanth alone. Would he succumb to his curiosity eventually or would he block it out and hum some tune to cover the noise? Probably not, but it was a possibility. He maybe was a good man once upon a time, but rough life often gave birth to insensibility and he felt the seed growing within him for a while now. This time Lehana was here to pluck it out. What would happen the next time around?

When Hana finally took of the lid from the noisy crate, all mulling that currently revolved in Victor’s head like a set of cogs stopped instantly. Because there was a girl in a crate, a barely living and barely living young girl with a filthy rag stuffed in her mouth. Her eyes were haunting, disbelieving, bloody from the crying, the eyes of somebody that didn’t know anything but the fact that she didn’t want to be here. Her faded gray linen shift – that seemed large enough for a grown woman, let alone a skinny ten year old – was tattered and smeared with dirt marks. Hana shouted Victor’s name in dismay and accusation, but at the moment all that the prizefighter could do was stare in those lost, frightened eyes of the dirty-faced girl.

“I... I... Bloody hell. I didn’t know,” he finally muttered, making a precarious motion towards the girl to remove her restrains. Her already wide eyes became even wider in a split second before she scurried towards the other corner of her wooden prison, uttering another muffled whimper.

“Easy there, little one,” Victor said, gesturing with his hands that he means no harm. He was now squatted next to the crate with what he hoped to look like a benevolent face and what he hoped to sound like an amicable tone. “I won’t hurt you. I just want to take those ropes off, alright?”

It wasn’t alright. When there was no more room to move away, the girl buried her head into her knees, sobbing audibly and shivering all over. Victor, never a mushy emotional man that cried at funerals, felt like something ripped his heart out and started to peel its layers off as if it was an apple. He paused his approach for a second, looked up at Hana who was still caught in an apparent state of shock, then proceeded to untie the rag that prevented the girl from speaking. The knot was tight, making the fabric of the gag cut into the girl’s cheeks, but he managed to loosen it and ultimately slip it off. When he did, she coughed, but the sobbing continued to stab at his heart, making him feel like human crap.

“You’re safe now,” he said to the lass, taking out his combat knife with an intention to cut the binds that made her wrists bloody and sore. But even as he pulled the weapon out, the moist brown eyes that peeked through the tousled curtain of her hair went panic-wide and this time, without the gag, she managed to scream. Her hands clutched to her chest as she once again pushed against the interior of a crate. Victor regretted pulling out his menacing-looking knife and regretted even buying it during his expedition in Fallien. Whatever this girl went through, she had some obvious trauma and prizefighter’s lack of subtlety thwarted his attempts to help the girl.

[Hana]

Hana had always had a sort of rap for getting into trouble, but she hadn’t expected it to follow her all the way out to the Corone countryside. She didn’t know what to think after seeing that her and Victor’s carriage carried human cargo, so she sat with her elbows on her knees, watching guardedly as Victor fumbled with the girl’s binds. She couldn’t help but stare at him, the suspicion in her eyes rather obvious, but after a moment, she knew it was ridiculous.

Of course it’s ridiculous. It’s Victor. Victor’s a good man, she thought. He said himself he didn’t know. Hana’s instincts were more than successful in trying to alert her to the fact that just the mere presence of this little girl meant trouble – of what sort, she didn’t know – and a lot of it. Whatever the girl was being shipped for could be nothing good, considering the circumstances, whether it was slavery or something more disgusting and unbearable for the Fallien girl to think about. Forget it – the whole thing is disgusting. Trying to brush those disturbing images from her scattered thoughts, Hana could only watch as the muscular man tried to soothe the young girl into cooperation.

But she drew the line at brandishing weaponry. “Take it easy, Victor. Think before you wave that thing around,” she said, not without a hint of irony, as she herself wasn’t especially well-known for thinking before doing. Her fingers wrapped around the side of the crate, Hana peered inside at the brown-haired child, who had pulled herself together as tightly as the human body was meant to go. Her shrieking had slowed to a deep heaving of the chest accompanied by whimpering.

Hana couldn’t stand seeing those big brown eyes staring back up at her in sheer fright. She’d always been fond of kids – their innocent questions, their unashamed honesty, their ability to free themselves from the unsympathetic reality of the world around them. No child should have had that right taken away, least of all this frightened little thing weeping in the middle of their cargo.

“Hey, sweetie,” she said softly, sitting up a little more so the girl could see her. “It’s okay, we just want to get you out of those ropes. We’re not going to hurt you.”

The girl was looking up at the odd Fallien woman with those same frightened eyes, but she said nothing, only choked out a sob.

“I promise, I’m a good guy,” continued Hana, smiling and holding her hands up as if accused. She grabbed her field dagger from the ground and, cautiously, brought it over the side of the crate. It wasn’t cautious enough – the girl was going to go into hysterics again, she could see it. So the young Fallien woman reached across the crate and took hold of the rope between the girl’s hands (not an easy task, considering the child’s tight position), cutting through the binds quickly and withdrawing both hands from the crate when she finished.

The little girl, who had been crying out from her first sight of the dagger, breathed in raggedly and looked at her hands. She sniffed heavily, but didn’t move; only looked at the odd, dark-skinned woman before her.

“You see!” declared Hana lightly, making sure the dagger was back on the floor before she dangled her hands over the crate’s edge again. “I’m not bad. Neither of us are bad,” she added, glancing at Victor. She smiled, encouraging him to follow her lead. They were never going to get anywhere with Victor’s sour face on all the time. “You just take the rest of that rope off your wrists, alright?”

The girl seemed to consider it, her breathing still uneven, then pushed against the binds on her wrists. They fell, finally, to the floor of the crate, after rubbing into the open wounds on the girl’s arms and making her cry again. Calluses and bloody sores wrapped around her wrists like some sort of disturbing jewelry.

Something rose in Hana’s throat, something that made her feel like she had to throw up or cry, maybe both. “C’mon,” she said firmly, extending her hands slightly towards the girl, who flinched. “Let’s get you out of there, huh? It’s alright, really.”

Surprisingly enough, the girl latched onto Hana’s arms, her skin hot with tension and fear. Without much difficult, Hana stood up slowly, pulling the girl out of her prison and setting her down on the floor. She felt the girl’s weight swaying a bit, so she didn’t let go. Steering her to the front of the wagon where Hana and Victor had been sitting, the Fallien woman picked the silent, lightweight girl up and settled her into the seat. It was like moving a pile of clothes instead of a person.

“Okay, there we go,” said Hana, beginning to feel as though this were to be a long, one-sided conversation. “You want something to drink, or eat—“

An immediate nod from the pathetic little head was enough.

“Victor, you got any water or food for this kid?”

“Cadee,” the girl croaked. Hana looked back at the child for a moment, her mouth hanging open a bit in surprise.

“Cadee? Your name is Cadee?”

The girl looked hesitant to answer, but gazed bravely at the Fallien woman. “Yes.”

“Gods, listen to you. You need a drink, honey.” She turned back to Victor, her face grim as she thought of something else. “Victor,” she began, softly enough so that it would be difficult for the girl to hear if she weren’t listening closely. “What’s in the rest of this cargo? I hope it isn’t any other kids. I don’t think they would have survived by now. I don’t hear anything. And who the hell gave you this job?” she asked, more out of curiousity than anger. "I know it wasn't your fault. But she's in bigger trouble than we are."