Blue Remembered Hills (ch19)

[igenlode]

My leg has pretty much healed, save for a large round burn mark on my shin; it swelled up into the most gigantic spherical blister for four or five days and then went on weeping slowly for a few days before drying up. Fortunately nobody ever sees my shins, so they didn't even know there was anything wrong.

Trying to bathe while keeping one leg cocked up in a chilly way on the side of the tub is quite a challenge, especially when it comes to soaping underneath! I managed it twice...

Work continues on the still-unnamed Swedish story, in which Christine has finally met Kulla the cow (who isn't very impressed with an intruder in her bed); I'm tempted to go with Frökenstjärna as her (unofficial) name for the calf — 'Little Miss Star' — but they're not on that sort of terms yet! Her feelings about Erik are all over the place, from crawling horror to an optimistic "I can talk him out of this", though without the canonical pity, at least as yet — it's been a little odd writing this in conjunction with the similar confrontation scenes from "Blue Remembered Hills", originally written years ago but of course drawing on the same limited Leroux source material in its attempt to get Erik's logic/speech patterns...

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Chapter 19: Breath for Breath

What she was doing could kill. Cris knew that. Knew that Erik was taller than she was, and stronger than she was, and very, very fast, and that she could not afford to hold anything back at all.

She hit him as hard as she could with a little sob of breath, striking out at the place behind the mask where the scalp showed bare and vulnerable, and tried not to think of that fragile shell of bone, and the tissue of that great mind helpless beyond... She’d held off this moment for too long. She could not fail in her one chance now.

Erik went down with an animal grunt, mask falling askew, and did not move. Cris choked back a pang of horror at what she’d done and fled to Rall, pulling frantically against the bands that held him. She couldn’t find the control box, and he couldn’t lift a hand to help himself...

His head had fallen forward. But when she tried to clear his mouth, tried to hold the mask to seal his airways and let him breathe, he resisted with the mute stubbornness of delirium.

“Please, Rall, please—” Her own breath was deepening in panic, and she couldn’t let it. She had to keep it steady and shallow, minimise damage, let her inborn adaptations struggle with the poison from outside. He knew the drill as well as she did. He had to co-operate—

Rall turned his head aside weakly as she tried to force the mask on him, convulsing in her hold. “Not... me.” It was all he could manage. “You...”

“Rall, I can survive this — you can’t!” She wasn’t even sure he could still see her. Cris cradled her hand along his cheek as if that could ease the pain, trying to tell him in that one helpless touch all that he meant to her. “Rall, please, live. Please, live for me.”

She felt him quieten beneath her hands into obedience with trust that caught at her heart, and got a few clear breaths into him, holding the mask tightly up to his face. Then she dragged the strap free from round her own neck and began to fit the breather back onto him properly as quickly as she could, wincing at the drowning sounds from struggling lungs. He needed treatment. He needed to be out of this position, and under some medical unit. But there was nothing she could do but snug up fastenings as closely and swiftly as might be, making every touch between them a fingertip-caress to stand for the kisses she could not give him, and reading them back a thousandfold in his steady eyes. The pledge of it was an aching promise.

Erik had meant to take her outside. She would have needed a breather there. She would need one here soon, very soon; the dry burning in her throat told her that. Even the last dregs of this storm-haze would kill her in the end. She had to get that hatch shut.

But one glance told her it was useless. The panel sagged outwards onto sand-drifted rock, its structure buckled beyond repair and its weight far beyond her strength. He’d meant this exit as a last resort; it had none of the seals and servos of the Dome airlocks, and there was no back-up cabinet of breather masks.

He must have them somewhere, Cris told herself urgently, trying to think it through. No-one installed an open hatch to the Outside in his own quarters without the masks that would be needed if it failed... There was a harsh noise beside her that sent her stumbling back, and something yielded and moaned beneath her feet. She almost fell.

The Ghost. She clung against the console where he’d threatened her, where those two taunting choices still blinked in mindless patience, and stared down as his body contorted: the splayed black body, and the white headpiece fallen aside.

He’d always seemed so powerful, so all-knowing — so utterly alien in his ugliness, she recognised, ashamed — that she’d never thought of him as just another masked off-worlder. And yet she had always known her Angel had been born far from Newparis and the poor provincial limitations of her home... Think, she told herself, think. He’d taken Rall’s mask for her to use, and he’d opened the hatch to take her Outside. But he’d made no move to supplement his own breathing. Rall had begun to suffer almost as soon as the atmosphere came in. Erik had not; and yet here at her feet he was suffering now. Suffering for the loss of his mask—

She knelt beside him, hearing bubbling breath, and reached for the fastenings as once before. This was no standard-issue breather, and she shrank from the idea; but surely it would give her the time she needed.

Cris lifted free the stiff monstrosity and fitted it against her own face. It was too large for her and the wrong shape — shaped, she realised starkly, to Erik’s deformity — but the bliss of filtered air had her gasping inward again and again, filling cramped lungs to their full capacity with a rush of clarity that told her just how near to the limit she’d been.

And with that unfogging came the cold shock of understanding. Erik — helpless, unconscious on the floor there at her side — was dying. He was drowning even as he had meant for Rall to drown, choking on the frothing poison of his lungs in pain and degradation and ignominy, and she had done this to him. She had struck him down and then she had taken the last half-vestige of protection that he had left; and now she was the masked Ghost, staring down, and his ruined face gasped and distorted in all its naked human need.

It was merciful, a frozen, vengeful part of her mind told her: more mercy than he’d ever shown those within his power. He’d known nothing since the impact of that first blow; he would die without ever having been aware that he suffered. Not for Erik the horror of useless sacrifice that he had forced on Rall to punish them both...

That blind mouth whimpered, working to no avail for the air that it could not find, and Cris cried out and leant to put her arms around him, cradling the lolling head up against her shoulder. She could not bear to watch and let it happen. No human creature could.

She’d taken the deepest breath she could; now she thrust the mask back at him — even unconscious, his face seemed to quest towards that familiar shield, and she could have wept for the pity of it — and held him close, forcing him into recovery drill. His body, limp in her grasp, was heavier to handle than she’d thought, for all its lean frame. She was forced to pull the mask away and take another gasping inhalation of her own, aware of the cold clamminess from Erik’s stale breath, and felt a rush of hopelessness and revulsion.

But she would not, could not allow it to end like this. Not by her act. Not when it was in her power to save him.

Half-blinded by tears held back, she went on with the drill — head down; compression; one breath to four — aware of time ticking away between them. Precious time, that she needed to secure Rall’s release, to find an escape for them both and a way to seal this place... but the wire-taut agony of Erik’s limbs was easing against her hold, and the rictus of his mouth had slackened to the poor pitiful death’s-head gape that was the closest he could come to normality, and the sounds he made were deeper and blurred, not that terrible mewling supplication. Cris held him and hoped; and there came a moment when long fingers clung and tried mutely to retain the mask when she had to take it from him to breathe.

There was no strength in his hold, and she pulled the apparatus free. But his eyes had opened, focussing a little at last, and they tracked her as she took her own deep, deliberate lungful and yielded the mask back to its place. She held his gaze, and watched memory return, and understanding.

She did not know if he had the strength to overpower her, but he did not try. He lay quiescent within her arms, breathing with a laboured rasp, and only the depths of his eyes gazing up into hers gave any hint of awareness. They held consent, and pain, and a clinging plea that was almost childlike in its need; and they left hers only once, when he struggled upright for a moment against her support to throw a glance at Rall, black-masked and motionless in the bonds that held her caged here, even as the thread of Erik’s life held her down at his side.

Cris followed the direction of that glance, and saw the strain and unspoken urgency in the look that Rall sent her. He obviously didn’t trust the Ghost one jot; but behind the hot jealousy in those blue eyes was constancy and truth, and he made no sound.

Erik had turned away. As she bent over him his gaze returned to hers almost in resignation, save that this time the bitter self-knowledge there held no hope at all.

Cris rocked him gently as she would a child, breathing shallow and light and taking the mask from him only when she must, and waited. Weak light from outside streamed in through the gaping hatch, and a trace of sand stirred glittering on the floor. The storm had passed over them all, and left death ebbing in its wake. There was a freedom beyond, which she could not take; and so she waited in that shared silence of assent until the Federation should come... or those offworld allies, if they still lived. One, or the other. She had done all that she could do, and the choice was no longer in her keeping.

Comments

[betweensunandmoon]

I like how Cris can't bring herself to let Erik die, even though she knows he deserves it.

Blake and Gan better get there fast...

[igenlode]

She's prepared to hit him over the head, even though she knows it might kill him -- she might not, at this stage, have been devastated to have learnt that he had died 'off-stage', as it were -- but it simply isn't in her to watch a man dying in slow-motion in front of her and not lift a finger to save him. I'm not sure many people would be cold-blooded enough just to stand there and watch (Erik would!)