Outline of a Life [Earthsiders]
Dec. 25th, 2006 04:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freosanRela, bits of other characters. PG. About 1 000 words.
When she is five, she staggers out of the smoking ruin of her house and turns, unerringly, towards the city. She doesn’t stop to pack, she doesn’t even stop to think: she just walks. Nothing she can face now is worse than what’s just happened.
She hides for almost a year, and days after what she’s pretty sure was her sixth birthday she’s picked up by a mechanic. He asks her for her name and when she can’t answer, he gives her one, and he introduces her to the other kids in the city.
She barely speaks until she’s seven, and when she does she turns out to know every person in the city under the age of ten. The adults love her and the kids rally around her. She reads books and draws slightly inaccurate maps and teaches herself better English. From a charred book, she reads about gods and avatars and natural laws, and forgets the bit about Brahman but remembers the part about karma.
When she is eight, she has her own posse. They run around the city getting into trouble. None of them has a real home; the adults take it in turns to feed them, take them in for the night, make sure they know where the bomb shelter is. She’s the only one who’s never spent the night in a house.
By nine, she’s scared the hell out of the adults by spying on them. She swears never to do it again and works her way around it by sending other kids to do the work. She spends the time she could’ve spent sneaking around just walking through the city, taking mental notes.
By ten, she knows the city better than the back of her hand. She leads her children’s army into the kind of danger that used to cause bloody revolution. She gets scolded and praised in equal measure and can beat the snipers in a shooting match four times out of five.
When she’s eleven she’s reintroduced to her mechanic. His name is Futatsu, but no one calls him by all of it, and he shows her his blueprints, planes and rockets and colonies. He gives her a nickname, too, and she learns what her own blueprints should look like.
By twelve, the entire city’s calling her the little lady. She has leather gloves with the fingers cut out and combat boots three sizes too big, and the other children listen to her like she’s a priestess. She’s stubborn, she’s bossy, and she walks down the middle of the main street when everyone else is ducking into corners.
Three days after she turns thirteen, half her peers are massacred in a firebombing. She goes to the funeral, she cries a bit, she dyes her hair the colour of flame and she spends the better part of a year listening.
By the time she turns fourteen, she knows every damn rumor and trace of gossip that’s ever gone through the city. She starts talking again, but keeps the hair colour.
When she’s fifteen, the Boss formally adopts her, or as formal as they can get under the circumstances. Her orders get less arbitrary and her tone gets more authoritative. She learns to use rumors as well as listen to them, and one day she finds a boy sitting in the kitchen she’s using, and gives him a name but calls him a puppy.
Three months into her sixteenth year she kills a man for the first time. She spends four hours in a cold river trying to get the blood off her hands. She spends three days walking the streets trying to get it out of her mind. Her puppy follows her like a shadow and glares death at anyone who tries to talk to her.
When she’s seventeen, she has her first boyfriend. His name is Ross and he was the first person she met in the city besides her mechanic. They have awkward, sticky sex in his bed, and she leaves afterwards, but comes back the next day.
She turns eighteen, finds out she’s pregnant, and goes to Dirk, the doctor, and has a very pointed argument. She disappears from the public eye for three weeks. When she comes back she breaks up with her boyfriend, yells at her puppy and spends the next twenty-four hours walking the streets alone.
When she’s nineteen some bastard soldier murders her mechanic. She drags his husband home, speaks at his funeral and cries in her puppy’s lap. Six months later she finds herself in his widower’s bed. He teaches her how to hold a sword, and she becomes a little more graceful and a little less blunt.
At twenty, she ends the war. The EarthSphere bastards don’t realize it until six months later, and she snipes off the ones who’re too slow on the uptake. She walks down the middle of the streets until everyone else realizes that they can too, now. Once someone spits at her feet and her puppy shoots him through the shoulder.
When she’s twenty-one, she gets Boss to set up a peacekeeping force. Through no fault of her own, they start wearing armbands to identify themselves. The bands are all dyed the same colour as her hair. Her puppy looks at her with a sheepish expression, and keeps his orange-tinged hands in his pockets.
When she’s twenty-two, Boss and her swordsman get killed on the same day in some stupid territorial fight at the borders of the city. She doesn’t cry until long after the funeral, when she and her puppy are looking through Boss’s effects and she finds a list of eight names. It wouldn’t mean a damn thing to anyone else.
By twenty-three she’s practically a household name, or at least a household title. She makes peace treaties with neighboring cities and practices a particular brand of social engineering that she believes in so strongly and so completely that everyone around her picks it up, too. She deals in debts and favors and makes sure people always owe her more than she owes them.
When she’s twenty-four she gets shot, just a leg wound, but it takes her out of action for a month. Her puppy runs errands and talks to people for her, while her peacekeepers keep her informed about suspicious movement. When she’s finally able to walk again she disappears for almost three days, walking through and around and under her city.
She’s twenty-five.
When she is five, she staggers out of the smoking ruin of her house and turns, unerringly, towards the city. She doesn’t stop to pack, she doesn’t even stop to think: she just walks. Nothing she can face now is worse than what’s just happened.
She hides for almost a year, and days after what she’s pretty sure was her sixth birthday she’s picked up by a mechanic. He asks her for her name and when she can’t answer, he gives her one, and he introduces her to the other kids in the city.
She barely speaks until she’s seven, and when she does she turns out to know every person in the city under the age of ten. The adults love her and the kids rally around her. She reads books and draws slightly inaccurate maps and teaches herself better English. From a charred book, she reads about gods and avatars and natural laws, and forgets the bit about Brahman but remembers the part about karma.
When she is eight, she has her own posse. They run around the city getting into trouble. None of them has a real home; the adults take it in turns to feed them, take them in for the night, make sure they know where the bomb shelter is. She’s the only one who’s never spent the night in a house.
By nine, she’s scared the hell out of the adults by spying on them. She swears never to do it again and works her way around it by sending other kids to do the work. She spends the time she could’ve spent sneaking around just walking through the city, taking mental notes.
By ten, she knows the city better than the back of her hand. She leads her children’s army into the kind of danger that used to cause bloody revolution. She gets scolded and praised in equal measure and can beat the snipers in a shooting match four times out of five.
When she’s eleven she’s reintroduced to her mechanic. His name is Futatsu, but no one calls him by all of it, and he shows her his blueprints, planes and rockets and colonies. He gives her a nickname, too, and she learns what her own blueprints should look like.
By twelve, the entire city’s calling her the little lady. She has leather gloves with the fingers cut out and combat boots three sizes too big, and the other children listen to her like she’s a priestess. She’s stubborn, she’s bossy, and she walks down the middle of the main street when everyone else is ducking into corners.
Three days after she turns thirteen, half her peers are massacred in a firebombing. She goes to the funeral, she cries a bit, she dyes her hair the colour of flame and she spends the better part of a year listening.
By the time she turns fourteen, she knows every damn rumor and trace of gossip that’s ever gone through the city. She starts talking again, but keeps the hair colour.
When she’s fifteen, the Boss formally adopts her, or as formal as they can get under the circumstances. Her orders get less arbitrary and her tone gets more authoritative. She learns to use rumors as well as listen to them, and one day she finds a boy sitting in the kitchen she’s using, and gives him a name but calls him a puppy.
Three months into her sixteenth year she kills a man for the first time. She spends four hours in a cold river trying to get the blood off her hands. She spends three days walking the streets trying to get it out of her mind. Her puppy follows her like a shadow and glares death at anyone who tries to talk to her.
When she’s seventeen, she has her first boyfriend. His name is Ross and he was the first person she met in the city besides her mechanic. They have awkward, sticky sex in his bed, and she leaves afterwards, but comes back the next day.
She turns eighteen, finds out she’s pregnant, and goes to Dirk, the doctor, and has a very pointed argument. She disappears from the public eye for three weeks. When she comes back she breaks up with her boyfriend, yells at her puppy and spends the next twenty-four hours walking the streets alone.
When she’s nineteen some bastard soldier murders her mechanic. She drags his husband home, speaks at his funeral and cries in her puppy’s lap. Six months later she finds herself in his widower’s bed. He teaches her how to hold a sword, and she becomes a little more graceful and a little less blunt.
At twenty, she ends the war. The EarthSphere bastards don’t realize it until six months later, and she snipes off the ones who’re too slow on the uptake. She walks down the middle of the streets until everyone else realizes that they can too, now. Once someone spits at her feet and her puppy shoots him through the shoulder.
When she’s twenty-one, she gets Boss to set up a peacekeeping force. Through no fault of her own, they start wearing armbands to identify themselves. The bands are all dyed the same colour as her hair. Her puppy looks at her with a sheepish expression, and keeps his orange-tinged hands in his pockets.
When she’s twenty-two, Boss and her swordsman get killed on the same day in some stupid territorial fight at the borders of the city. She doesn’t cry until long after the funeral, when she and her puppy are looking through Boss’s effects and she finds a list of eight names. It wouldn’t mean a damn thing to anyone else.
By twenty-three she’s practically a household name, or at least a household title. She makes peace treaties with neighboring cities and practices a particular brand of social engineering that she believes in so strongly and so completely that everyone around her picks it up, too. She deals in debts and favors and makes sure people always owe her more than she owes them.
When she’s twenty-four she gets shot, just a leg wound, but it takes her out of action for a month. Her puppy runs errands and talks to people for her, while her peacekeepers keep her informed about suspicious movement. When she’s finally able to walk again she disappears for almost three days, walking through and around and under her city.
She’s twenty-five.