Seven Brothers

[Dana]

(Solo.)

The starry night sky was a blur as Dana stumbled drunk out of the Bleeding Pig, the unbearable blare of music and voices that echoed from the tavern was completely washed out by the nauseating realization that she no longer knew what was up from down. The world was spinning and she held onto the ground for dear life as if she was about to fall off. Someone helped her up and said something, but she didn't know who. Dana began to laugh uncontrollably, snorted rudely, and dragged a clumsy hand across her face to wipe the spittle falling from her lips. Turning from the bar, the woman began to stumble into the darkness accompanied only by street lights as she tried to navigate a cobbled street that was a ribbon that bent and bowed, twisted and weaved. The journey into the darkness was long and the effect the alcohol was having on her was nauseating. With no one to accompany her, Dana did not even notice as she stumbled around the road that eyes casually following her. Footsteps began to follow, but Dana did not pay it any mind. She was too caught up in the thought of how funny it was to watch her shadow dance in the flickering light of those lonely oil street lamps. Randomly she stopped and began to dance with her wavering shadow that loomed ahead of her now and again.

It was a new moon in Radasanth, so darkness reigned the city streets. And this late, nobody but drunkards, thieves and worse wandered the night streets. It was the worse that Dana knew all too well. The people she claimed with mucho bravado and arrogance that she could always take down with a swift kick to the pelvis to pulp their groin. A right elbow to the trachea to crush their windpipe. A left jab to the kidney to cause the excruciating pain needed to make an opening for a strike that would crush bones or snap tendons. She always had the right move at the right time and was never caught off guard. Not ever. An answer to anything and nobody to answer to. Dana was cocky and she grown reckless in her search for that fight that vindicate the years of training, the meditation, the shadowboxing, and the cultivation of discipline for that one moment in her life where it would all really matter. She was tall, beautiful and had nobody to answer to. And at the moment she had let her discipline and all of her careful and painstakingly hard lessons earned slip away.

Dana wavered and staggered in the dark like an explorer taking their first step on new found soil. She laughed and laughed. She had a bottle in her hand and tried to take a swig, but it was empty. That made her angry. Accusing the bottle of something, she hurled the bottle at the wall and watched it bounce off with a thud. "Taug-uf Grass." She slobbered before she wandered back into the slumbering city. She heard a noise and cackled. Somebody from the world above shouted down telling her to shut up and sleep it off. Dana heard the voice, thought it was a God and sank low to the ground, crawling more than half a block to remain unseen out of fear she would be smited.

When she got up and moved forward a hand met with a voice grabbed her by the shoulder. Brushing it nonchalantly off, Dana stumbled over her words and told whoever it was to piss off. She wasn't interested. It wasn't happening. There was other easy meat tonight and it wasn't her.

He did not like that.

Dana kissed the ground as it came rushing up when something hard cracked her across the back of the skull. She yelped in surprise and turned to see who it was, but by the time she was on the ground they were on her. Hands grabbed her by the legs and arms and dragged her into an alley as she clawed, and screamed wildly. One of them turned to look the way they came and turned back to smack her across the mouth with the back of her mouth. Hard. The taste of copper was in her mouth and in sheer, utter terror Dana fought against her attackers. She got a lucky hit across some fat guy's jaw and cracked another on the inside of the knee where she heard cartilage pop noisily, but she was too far gone and too drunk to stop what was about to happen. But she would never be too drunk or too numb or too far gone to not know what was happening as a hand squeezed her breast and lips forced themselves on hers in a slobbery kiss. This was it. This was what her friends joked about. The thing she bravely thought would never happen to her. Not in a million years. She bit, she tore, she resisted, but it was not enough. Everything she fought for, prepared for and boasted for meant nothing as these men caught her at her most vulnerable. Eventually somebody grew tired of her resisting and kicked her in the head. Twice.

Dana was being raped and there was nothing she could do about it.

The loud, violent thump across her ear caused her to both hear and taste static. She cried in pain and whimpered as her cries for help fell on deaf ears. This was the city at night. Rape was as common as thievery and there wasn't a man alive who would go up against five or six different guys who were erect and bloodthirsty. Nobody was coming.

Dana squirmed as one of them grunted for them to get her pants. Hands clawed at her loose fitting trousers, her traveling pants and tore them away. Her skin was cold and clammy as she felt the night breeze upon her skin. She slobbered and moaned after one of them hit her so hard she could feel the bones in her nose crunch. She heard the sound of a belt give way and pants hit the ground, and before she uttered her fifth "No!", he was already inside her and on top of her. She felt disgusted when that man leaned over on top of her and kissed her, the smell of whiskey hot on his foul breath. She kicked out her legs and tore her mouth away, but nothing she did mattered while he thrusted away. She felt violated while the others who held her down played with her breasts, ran their hands along the tight, sinewy muscles of her legs and thighs. Somebody took a knife and cut at her hair and Dana could half remember the sound of one of her assailants holding it to his face and smelling her odor. They took her and devoured her as if she were easy prey. Dana tried to ignore the noisy sound of somebody jerking off near her and blocked it out by squeezing her eyes shut and thinking of anything and everything that would spirit her away from the worst night of her life.

But nothing worked as they ravaged her body. She wished noisily for her to black out, begged them once to slit her throat and be done with it. But it never came. They took turns. Each of them waiting impatiently for the other to finish so that they could crawl on top of her. Sometimes they twisted her in sick, awful positions, but they were usually eerily consistent. They took every part of her and were unrelenting. This moment in Dana's life, all of it awful and horribly vivid would be etched into her memory. She would remember it all. She caught their faces in the dim light of the lamplight. Remembered scars, pieces of clothing. It was all a blur now, but not even the noises they made when they came would ever truly be forgotten.

In her mind, the torture of being raped lasted for an eternity. But eventually one last grunt and collective laughter and they melted away. And that was the worst part. Naked, exposed to a new violent and more terrible world, Dana fought the searing pain to close her legs as she laid on one side. Her clothing was in tatters, there was blood and snot and worse everywhere. She was truly alone now and sober. The shock hadn't even worn off before she began to cry. Crying turned to sobbing with rage, and that eventually turned to scream.

Eventually somebody willing to help found her in the greasy daylight.

[Dana]

Several months later..

Dana found it hard to describe what it was like to be robbed of her innocence. It was like having a tiny glass ball that was given to you by your parents, told it was fragile, she was never to break it and that she had to hold it for the rest of her life. And then a fat, greasy hand reached out, took it from her and squeezed until it broke.

Yeah, it was kind of like that.

Dana had been laid up in a hospital after her rape for weeks. It was funny, she thought. It was her rape, the police kept calling it. She owned it. That violent and terrible thing that was the worst nightmare of every woman the world over now owned her because it happened. She denied that and punched the first officer who had tried to pin that on her right in the jaw. Cracked it in two places. It was not her rape, she had screamed. She was raped. That ugly word forever branding her, befouling her. Tainting her. Why should she own such a horrible thing? But it didn't matter. Even in her first days in the infirmary she could tell everything had changed. Men looked at her differently. The way they talked to her was different, as if she were now undesirable. An untouchable. She even overheard from the nurses that some of the male doctors even blamed her for what happened! She wanted names. Faces. Something tangible to crush between her fingers or break under the heel of her foot. But it was no use, it was everywhere. This rape had poisoned not only her but the world she lived in and it had made it ugly.

The first three days of her stay in the hospital were the worst. The doctor had read off her injuries like she were buying something very expensive and was intending to break it. She had broken three ribs, two fingers, her collarbone, her right arm, her nose, sprained both wrists,, ruptured blood vessels in her eye and injured her left knee. She had lacerations across her entire body, broken several teeth, sustained internal bleeding and had vaginal damage as well as tearing to her anus. The doctors were mystified that she were still conscious the first day before they started to give her opiates. The pain was agonizing. She could not sit, lay or stand without being in some kind of pain, so a compromise had to be made more often than not with how she positioned herself would be least likely to cause her enough pain that would make her vomit. It was nauseating. The doctors worked on her like she was their own special project. Setting things right again and in the worst way. Bones had to be rebroken and repositioned. Noses had to be readjusted. Violently. Ointments and salves and tonics and poultices were applied to her. Twice a day someone had to come in and check her stitches, reapply bandages and worst of all treat her vagina and anus.

It was disgusting how much she continued to bleed and she was told that there was a very real possibility that one of her assailants had bruised her so hard that they had bruised the interior of her uterus. How big could he have possibly been?! It was degrading to have her legs spread apart to receive her treatment. And it took a full week, day and night, before Dana was brave enough to face that again. And even then it had to be a woman to do it. Old. Ugly. She couldn't talk or look at her. And even then through choked tears she tried desperately to ignore the violent memories of that terrible night. It was painful to experience that and worst of all, she relived it. Again and again. Day by day. For weeks until she was out of the hospital.

But eventually, the physical wounds scabbed over and ugly scars were left all over her body as a reminder of what a mistake she had made. And worst of all, despite everything that had been done to her and as hideous as she looked while she was in recovery, when they fixed her she was still gorgeous. When the nurse broke the news to her before handing her the mirror that she was still a "Lovely young lady" that would make a full recovery, Dana wrenched the mirror from her, looked upon her horrible face and began to cry. Beauty was really a curse on the world, and no matter how flawed or scarred she was, there was still a man out there that desired her. Yearned for her. And that was the problem. Even though the physical scars eventually faded away, the mental ones remained. She was now a victim, now and forever, and everyone treated her like it. The police. The doctors. The nurses. Her friends. They all pitied her.

Pity?

Where was the strength? The devotion? The jealousy? Dana was somebody before she was raped. Someone that turned men's heads. Somebody that every woman who ever aspired for more than having her legs in air aspired to be. Now? Now she was a monster that everyone tiptoed around and talked really nice about, while concealing those thoughts to the blackest depths until she was out of earshot. It was unbearable. And more than once Dana had thought about killing herself. A violent life ending violently. Would somebody put flowers on her coffin? What would her friends say? Caught in her despair, good friends reached out and comforted her. Made her stay in their homes. Nursed her and waited on her. And even if that black depression began to subside, there was still that void inside of her that needed to be filled. Somebody had taken something from her, and eventually, Dana wanted to take it back.

[Dana]

The police had told Dana several times whenever she asked, and she asked many times, that her rape was still under investigation. There was that word again. But it didn't matter. They had nothing to go on. No eyewitnesses except for her, and whatever she described didn't add up to anything solid. At least not yet. It was frustrating knowing that she held the key to everything and all she had to do was put the right pieces in the right places in order to fit everything together. But when would that happen?

An appropriate answer is about a month. For Dana, it seemed that was about long enough for her to collect herself and get over the worst of her trauma. She had picked up the pieces of herself that those terrible, ugly creatures had discarded and began to put that glass ball together. She had to. And while she was doing that, at the urging of one of her good friends, Freda, she went and found work to take her mind off things and get her out of the house. She worked odd jobs, and because of her physique, it was hard to deny her much at all. She worked in a quarry for awhile. Helped build a bridge. Set the stone for a road. Planted trees. Cut trees down. Fished. Tried her hand at hunting, but it was too much for her. But eventually it all came together.

It was out on the docks at the harbor. Dana had a fishing net and spear in hand, had joked with a fisherman about something, and was getting on their boat when it happened. A smell of ozone, a tingling of hairs on her neck. And then she saw it. Across the other side of the wharf she saw a face. That same fat, ugly face that moaned when he came on top of her. She hesitated a moment with a feeling of animal fear that threatened to grip her, but she pushed it away. She remembered that face. She knew that man. Rage bubbled inside of her, her jaw grew taut and before she knew it, Dana threw down the net and dashed after him. He wasn't paying attention at all. And the people he was with were too busy regailing their latest tale to be distracted by the gasps of shock and the sound of a woman pushing people over rushing towards them. The noisy sound of waves crashing against the rocks near the coastline was more than enough to help muffle that out. And even then Dana closed the gap on her prey. She wanted vengeance. She wanted him more than drawing her next breath. She wanted his blood in her hands and she wanted that fat cretin to suffer.

Dana bounded across the dock, and shoved people out of her way. She was met with loud protests as she made the turn across the wharf. And it was only when she knocked a barrel loudly over that she caught the whites of the man's eyes who raped her. He was confused for a moment, but only when recognition washed over his face did he turn to run. But it was far, far too late and Dana would rather drown herself then let this chance slip through her fingers. Beginning to waddle away with a yell for his friends, the fat man turned away as Dana hefted her fishing spear and held it back, the embodiment of burning vengeance. Time slowed to a crawl, and Dana could feel the blood welling in her ears as she thrust the spear forward and it began to leave her hand.