Painful Love
Never have I cried as hard as this. Tears streaming down my cheeks; snot oozing from my nose in strings, lightly falling to the floor; saliva trickling down my chin with every hard and labored breath. Why am I forced to face such torment? Forced to be used as his punching bag. He pushes me and I regain my composure. He knocks me down and I get back up. He leans in close, stares me straight in the face and I avert my gaze.
I search for something on the wall to give my focus. His hot breath, thick with the scent of menthol cigarettes, chills my bones. He dares me to do something, to retaliate, but I don't. Knowing full well that if I did, he would drive my skull into the ground and tear me apart. I ask him to leave with as much calm as I can muster, but he seems not to listen.
I stand there and take it. Placing my mind somewhere else, I treat the beating with a stoic nature. He can't hurt me if I'm not there. He leaves and I crumble. Slumping to my knees I fall forward and hold my head in my hands. Let the onslaught of tears begin.
The next day he returns to me, his face free of emotion, as if he holds no guilt towards what he has done. He walks up to me, looks me in the eye and says, "You know I love you, right?" I reply with a simple, "Yes." Though deep down I know more could be said. He moves in to hug me and I return the embrace half-heartedly, but he hardly seems to notice. With a final pat on the back, he walks away. Outwardly, everything seems fine, but in my mind I'm counting the days until he again chooses to show how much he loves me.
Rated Aure, extreme violence.
"It's nothing personal," he drawled. "It never is."
Kiljak turned from the screams, muted by a bloodied rag shoved into the mouth of the hysterical woman. His steps echoed through the lonely room louder than she would ever hope to be again. Tears streamed her cheeks, gentle beauty ruined by terror stricken sobs. Why had it come to this?
Grunts and loud yelling came from the next room. Her eyes froze on the door frame, cracked, imperfect, out of reach. Freedom was in her sight, but beyond her reach. The tightly knotted rope cut into her flesh. Each breath shivered.
"There," came the hollow voice once more. The girl tried to cry out again, but it died on her lips. A bloodied hand grasped the doorway, and the pale Fallieni boy pulled himself across the threshold. Dragging behind him, a defiant form flailed in futility. "I told you I would find you. And I have."
Alkor threw the man forward to where she sat on the floor. Tears cracked at the edges of the woman's eyes again as his victim looked up at her. "Lydia," he rasped. A swift kick turned his broken speech into wheezes. Lydia tried in vain to reach him, but Alkor reached forward and thrust her back.
"No," he said softly. "That won't do. Not," he chided, a knife pointed toward her face, "at. All."
She sat in terror as the maniac crouched over Tarik, her beloved brother. Alkor watched her. "I have searched for years," he said, "for the one thing that would buy back my father's love. You stole that from me." He let out a chuckle. "You stole something I didn't even realize I cared about. And in that, you robbed me of my family."
His hand clutched the throat of Tarik tightly, and the boy let out a sound like retching. His hands clawed at Kiljak's desperately. "Patience," Alkor crooned, "it'll all be over soon."
Lydia let out a muffled howl. Alkor slapped her. "Shut up. You don't deserve to cry."
His words burned her. The boy before her was beyond contempt. If he understood her pain, he was apathetic to it. His icy eyes watched her, but she saw no life in them. "You killed Crovian." Alkor said it so simply that his face barely moved. She heard a lifetime of agony in those words, but there was no real feeling to them. "You killed my brother."
She knew him now. Her assailant, a shadow of the boy he was before. They had played as children, two offspring of the desert. Alkor was her first friend, and a boy she once held close to her heart. The bitter quarrel between their families had ripped the friendship apart.
Her father had sent them to steal those infernal swords. Those artifacts were all the sovereign of his family had ever seen. The prospect of tearing the family apart had never occurred to them. It had been a plot, a chance to bring the man down to reality.
Crovian had thrown his life away in defense of two weapons. His sister had fought tooth and nail, but Alkor...
Oh, gods. What have we wrought?
A hot streak of liquid slapped her back to reality. Flecks of crimson painted her shocked face as Tarik bled from his jugular, and Alkor held him down. Lydia screeched, and the gag fell from her lips. "Alkor, no!" she cried, "this is a misunderstanding! We can still save him. Please-"
"Save him? Did you try to save my brother?" The callous reply hit her like a fist. Alkor stared back into her horrified eyes, his face an emotionless mask. "I thought not."
Tarik still jerked beneath his hand, and the Fallieni Swordsman pressed firmly down on his neck. A splash of viscera surged from the man, then he went perfectly still. Alkor closed his eyes. "We were friends, Lydia," Alkor whispered quietly. "I thought that we were, at least."
The woman stared at the body of her lifeless brother, unable to speak. "Now, this is just business. Like that night back home. You took my brother. Now, I've taken yours. Are we even?" He laughed. "No. No, I think not."
He leaned forward, face to face with his first real friend. "Do you hate me?"
Tears in her eyes, she shook her head. "It was never supposed to be like this-"
"Hate me," he told her, "hate me like I've hated you, all these long years." Alkor grabbed her hair and thrust her toward the corpse of her brother. "Look what I've done," he hissed. The smell of Tarik's corpse wafted across her nostrils, and she dry heaved. Bile rushed up into her mouth. She expelled it violently. "Look at it."
Her wet lips smacked as she struggled to speak. "Please," she whispered weakly, "please stop..." her living nightmare did not end, as Kiljak pressed her face to her brothers. She felt his still warm lips against her cheek, but no breath came from him.
"This is what it feels like," he told her, "to lose a loved one."
She gasped at the cold sensation that etched across her neck. "And this," he whispered in her ear, lips against her face, "is what it feels like to lose everything."
Alydia Ettermire
02-26-15, 02:26 PM
Twenty years ago…
Karliik scowled at the mountain of evidence in front of him. Less than a month prior, one of his best young detectives had been found murdered at the docks. His entire force had dropped everything else, pouring all of their collective skill and determination into finding the culprit. At long last, the evidence wound around only one suspect, sure as sunset and tight as a noose.
He just didn’t want to believe the identity of the person he’d caught hanging.
His second-in-command looked at him, at the stack of papers and physical objects piled on the Chief’s desk, then at the door where she sat, waiting. “Before you go in there, do you truly think she is capable of this?”
The Chief shook his head, red eyes closing in frustration. “I don’t want to believe it, Zezrar. But with all of this…” he sighed, removing his tan fedora and running his fingers through his silver hair. “She’s got Bron Retla, of all people, convinced that she’s dirty. What if it’s us she has convinced, instead? That she’s not? We don’t know anything about her background, where she comes from. Just that she was a thief when I found her.”
Hazel eyes probed inky face. “Starving children steal. But you raised her. If you don’t believe she did this and go in there anyway, you will have thrown away the best part of your life for nothing.”
“No.” Karliik sighed and stood, shoving his chair back with a hollow scrape. He looked around the office, at the desks in various stages of disarray. “I love my daughter, but the evidence is clear. She threw away the best part of my life for nothing. Now we need to know why.”
Leaden steps took him to the solid iron door, and he paused with his hand on the knob. Beyond it lay the hardest conversation of his life, and he had no choice but to go through.
~*~*~
How long had she been locked in this airless room? How long had she been stripped of her hat and coat and left in the black slacks, white blouse, and black vest she wore beneath them? How long since the Chief had ordered her in there?
Twenty-one days before, she’d been sent out to the docks to investigate a homicide. To her great horror, the corpse belonged to a fellow detective, a friend for more than half her life, and the man with whom she’d spent the evening prior.
The man with whom she’d fought. But that didn't mean she wanted him dead.
Her stomach churned at the memory of that dawn at the docks, the sight of Aonar Kenate’s usually flawless face beaten, bloated and blackened from its night in the river. She hadn't been able to come back to the case for several days, but when she had, she’d gone at it with rabid vengeance, seeking any whisper, any murmur, any clue.
She’d been horrified to find the evidence piling up to frame her. Desperate for time, she’d shuffled the objects and statements while trying to build her own case, seeking out anyone else who might have had a vendetta against Aonar. He was good looking and charismatic; there’d been dozens of women over the decades. He was also a determined and methodical investigator; many criminals had had been apprehended, convicted, imprisoned and/or executed on the strength of his work. He had enemies. One of them could have easily…
But the frame closed fast and hard, and the man who had raised her, trained her, given her an education and a chance at a good life… he’d thrown her into this tiny room himself.
And now all she could do was wait for him to come interrogate her.
The lock clicked, resounding loudly through the silent room. The prisoner at the table jumped a little. Her eyes, big and uncertain as a child’s, looked into the Chief's stern face. His red eyes bored into her soul, cold and unfeeling.
Alydia felt her stomach twist in her gut. Every parent and child had moments like this, misunderstandings or disagreements that changed and shaped their relationships for the rest of their lives. Somehow, the younger detective doubted that very many of them took place in prison where one was accusing the other of murdering a fellow officer. Even if she could present her case…
SLAP!
The sound of file after file slamming onto the little table brought her focus back to the matter at hand, and she looked at the growing pile of evidence in front of her. The Chief pulled his chair back, scraping cast iron loudly against cheap tile. He lowered himself into it, glaring across the table at his ward. “For tampering with evidence alone, you’d never work in this office again. For all of this... Tell me why you should be imprisoned for the rest of your life instead of sent to the executioner’s noose.”
“I did not kill Aonar, Karliik.” Alydia looked at the Chief, face open and adamant. She could be hard to read at the best of times; much of the work he sent her on required that she not tell him too much. But without the broad red hat to obscure her eyes or some piece of paper or bit of research distracting either of their attention, she looked both angry and vulnerable.
“Then who did?” The Chief’s tone could have cut prevalida. “If you've had all this time to prove that it was anyone else, who is it?”
His ward’s shoulders slumped, her thick curls shaking in time with her head. “I do not know. None of my sources or their sources or theirs saw anything. All I know is that we went to dinner, we walked back home at around midnight, he suggested we go somewhere else for other –" Aly sighed. Always be as specific as possible, no matter how uncomfortable those specifics were. Rule eighty-three. “He suggested that it had been a ‘perfectly good date’ and that we should go to an inn in the Foreign Quarter to have sex. I disagreed, he got angry. Unreasonably angry, I thought, since we had never had any sort of romantic encounter, and that night was the first attempt, at some gentle prompting from his mother and his superior officer. Our superior officer. We argued, we got quite loud. He walked off when you opened the door to see what the yelling was about. You saw me walk the other way.”
She buried her face in her hands. “I was upset; I needed to clear my head. But I went on a quick patrol of the old Industrial district, and the last anyone had sight of him, he was headed to the docks. I should have just gone inside.”
“You didn't. And with your other behavior, with the abilities I know you have, and with the amount of evidence… not even the amount, Alydia, the depth of the hole it buries you in! I can’t believe your account. I wish I could.”
The Chief stood up, putting his hat back on his head and turning for the door. “Because if I could believe that my daughter didn't do this, I wouldn't have to send her to trial and probable execution.”
A loud scrape and a bang sounded from behind him. He turned reflexively, reaching for the gun he’d left outside with Zezrar – she was an excellent thief, after all, and it wouldn't do to let the accused get her hands on a weapon. Alydia was standing, glowering at him with tears balancing on her eyelids.
“Aonar was my friend[/b],” she gasped, voice breaking. “For half a century, he was my friend. And you have been my father. I would sooner die than hurt either of you. Give me more time, Chief! You can’t believe that –“
“It’s out of my hands now.” His tone brought her up short. “You are to be taken away tonight. To whatever fate the law deems...necessary.” He left quickly. Having to send her away like this, for this, shattered him into a thousand pieces. He wished desperately that she had found another suspect – framed someone else they were looking at if she was guilty, or caught the real perpetrator if she wasn't. Either way, it looked bad for her and the decision had been made.
~*~*~
That night saw Alydia curled up in a cell with only the sounds of her sobs to stir the silence. It was a tiny space, big enough for her to lie down or pace a couple of steps, but no bigger. When she’d lifted the thin mattress into The Dark, a hundred bedbugs had fallen to the floor. She’d spent an hour stomping them to death, and didn't think she’d managed to kill the little nymphs. Other than the barely adequate bed and a chamber pot, the room was dark stone and empty. The door was solid iron on top and bottom, with bars in the middle for meals to be shoved through.
The disgraced detective didn't expect she’d eat many meals while imprisoned; Alerian justice was notoriously swift.
Worse than the impending loss of her life, she’d lost the trust of the man who had raised her. From the time he’d adopted her, she’d worked hard to become just like him. Just as clever, just as cunning, just as intense in the pursuit of criminals. Though he’d adopted her as his daughter, she’d vowed that she would only take his family name as her own when she was as good a detective as he was. She wanted to be worthy of the honor.
Now at least his family name – the name that would die with him – would not be besmirched by the deed of which she stood accused. Alydia del Ettermire she had lived, Alydia del Ettermire she would die.
“Is that helping?” A baritone voice sounded just outside her cell, drawing two desperately lost blue eyes to the source.
“Bron?”
In the sunlight, Bron Retla ran an antique shop. He paid taxes, documented the sources from which he acquired his inventory, and kept himself out of trouble. He managed that so well that it had taken the Chief a better part of a century and many, many lower-level arrests to begin to suspect him. Decades of work as a “dirty cop” had finally brought Alydia close enough to pin him – and she’d been about to compile her case and drop the hammer when Aonar’s death derailed all her plans.
But Bron had no hand in Aonar’s death. She’d worked that angle.
“You’ve been determined guilty and slated for trial. I’m offering you a way out.”
She stood, walking to the bars. “How did you even g-"
“I have my ways. As will you, [i]Detective, if you come with me. I don’t care if you killed him or not, but it does no one any good if you die for it. Hurry up.”
Something shoved into the bars – her hat. She took it, turning it thoughtfully. “But the Chief…”
“You’re as big a disappointment as you’re going to be. If he doesn't believe that you aren't violent after living with you for the last hundred years, you won’t convince him otherwise by staying here. You might just find a way to clear your name, given time.”
Aly looked at the hat, her fingers tracing its smooth red brim. If she ran now, she would never be able to go home again. If she stayed, maybe the Chief would find the real criminal at the last minute. Maybe…
“Quickly. We’ve not got long.”
Maybe… Maybe not.
The former detective pulled on her hat, securing it and then vanishing into the world of shadow, only to reappear on the other side of the bars. The olive-skinned Alerian criminal mastermind helped her into her coat and led her out of the prison.
“I’ve got a contact in Salvar,” he told her once they were clear and walking along the dirty, greasy river that wound through Ettermire. “You’ll go to Knife’s Edge, then secure transport to Radasanth via Scara Brae. Disappear for a little while. This will eventually blow over.”
“No. If I am to be a criminal, then I’m going to be visible. Everyone will know my name and what I do.”
Retla rubbed the bridge of his nose. She’d been difficult as a detective, of course she’d still be difficult. He’d deal with that, one way or another. “Just lie low for a few months. Otherwise you’ll be brought right back here, and I cannot rescue you again.”
“Noted.” Alydia pulled a key out of her coat pocket. It was a heavy brass thing, one that belonged to the Chief’s house. The house that had been her childhood home. The house from which she was forever barred.
Rage boiled in her. How could he believe she would hurt a friend, however badly they had argued? How could he believe she was a murderer? Had he always thought she was a bad egg? Even while he was raising her to be an upstanding member of Alerian society? How could he?
Her hand clenched around the key and she drew her arm back, throwing her arm forward so she could discard the key into the river.
She couldn’t release. Try as she might, her fist wouldn’t uncurl around that chunk of brass.
“You might as well keep it,” Bron remarked mildly. “Either a day will come that you’ll wish to return, or a day will come that you’re ready to let it go. Today is not either of those days.”
“I will never wish to return,” she replied, steel in her tone. “Because my father hates the idea of crime more than he ever loved me.”
~*~*~
The Chief sat in his living room, looking at the stairs. The entire wall was covered in pictures – drawings Alydia had made as a child. Every single one of them was still in place. There was even a photograph of them – an expensive and new practice, but a worthwhile addition to the home. They stood together in their hats and trench coats, arm in arm. She smiled at the camera as if daring the world to throw everything it had at her. He looked fierce and weary.
As he sat in the empty shell of a home, knocking back drink after burning drink, all he felt was weary. He had raised Alydia, and if she had not actually committed this crime, he had betrayed her personally and professionally. Even if she was, he had betrayed her parentally. He had handed over his only child to what would be a certain death. He would have to watch her hang. How could he live with himself in the wake of that? How could he keep getting up and pursuing criminals, training law enforcement, if his own protégé – the orphan he’d raised from a little girl – could turn on him so harshly?
A sharp knock came at the door, and the Chief stood unsteadily, weaving his way to the door and looking through the spy hole. “Zez. Tol’you ’M not workin’ today.”
“I can smell the whiskey from here. How much have you had?”
“Not a'nuff.”
“I came about Aly.”
The Chief felt a cold hand slide its way around his heart. She hadn’t been tried yet, however flimsy an excuse it would be. Had her sentence already been passed? “Whuzzit?” he demanded. “Tell me, Zez!”
“She’s gone. Escaped.”
Rage and relief roiled within him in equal measure. So she would survive. But how could she turn her back on everything he’d taught her like that?
Even if I turned on her first…
“Arrigh’. Be in soon as poss’ble. We’ll get her.” As soon as he sobered up enough to perform his duties, he was back on the hunt. He had a duty to uphold, as little joy as he would take from it. He had accepted responsibility for her a century before. Until he died, that responsibility remained.
I’ll get her.
1st - Alkor (17341)
For covering the topic in a condensed submission and strong imagery.
200 EXP
200 GP
2nd - Alydia Ettermire (8606)
For strong literary technique, usage of topic, but covering too much with scene breaks.
560 EXP
150 GP
Alden (16670)
Not as powerful as competitors, but stayed to topic. Grammar and clarity needed more attention.
100 EXP
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