KMarieMac
She walked toward him coolly, her skirts swishing against the stone floors, eyes glittering in the lantern light. The dagger in her hand glinted, too, and he swallowed hard.
"So. It's been you, all this time."
She nodded, once, and pressed the blade against his throat. As the metal sliced a clinical, bloody smile between his jaw and his adam's apple, her voice echoed softly through the hushed room. "Even caged birds still have their claws, my love."
She watched as Felicity scraped the last bits of dough off the sides of the bowl with a wooden spoon, and wondered how long it had been since she herself had done such a thing. How long had it been since she had actually stood in a kitchen and kneaded dough? Or washed dishes?
Strange, she thought, the turns life takes. One day you're working in a kitchen, just as you have every day for years, and then you blink and you've been fighting a war for decades, and haven't set foot in a kitchen in ages.
She takes a deep breath, and clears her throat. Felicity stops, and turns at the sounds. Her eyes widen.
"Hi."
Breathe in. Breathe out. The blow strikes him sharply between the ribs, the blade slips in and out with awful precision, and he drops.
His ring arrives in a box at their doorstep the next day. She holds it tightly, chest hollow, eyes dry. Her husband weeps until his energy is spent.
The box is placed in the back of a cupboard. They do not speak of it again.
But the silence that falls on their house says it all.
"I won't do it. I won't!"
"It isn't really your choice, if I'm being honest, milady. The court has made a decision, and it is your duty to see it done."
"But he is innocent, Gordon! Surely you can see that!"
"Simply because he is your friend does not mean he is innocent, Lizzie. All the evidence points to him, and the law is clear. An attempt on your life, or the life of someone close to you is treason, and it is punishable by death."
I'm Canadian. Some say that my country has no national identity, except for the phrase "We're NOT american." I don't want to be defined by what I am not. And at any rate...the people of the USA are not the ONLY americans. Canadians, Mexicans, Central Americans and South Americans are all American, too. So really...I AM American.
She slammed him into the wall. "Run the ruddy diagnostics again, then!"
He gulped, and the sound was audible. "The thing is ma'am...I've run them three times, and the results are the same every time. She's dying. That's just how it is!"
She frowned. "I'm the one who invented the tech. I am not asking. Run the diagnostics again!"
There was a time long ago when, characteristically for we are a selfish race, humanity believed that the world was the centre of space. A man dared to challenge that and he was called a heretic. But now we know that he had learned a truth about the beautiful creation God designed for us to inhabit. What parallels can we find to this today? Why do we selfish blind creatures insist on crying blasphemy when we should instead be testing and considering. Truth is found. Not made.
Around and around we spin, clinging to the skin of a tiny blue and green orb in the sky, and we don't even know that we're clinging. We feel like we're standing still. And isn't that the way of things? We feel like we're the only ones in a situation, or who feel the way we do, but in fact we are all constantly and permanently in motion, movng together in a soup of starlight and black vast wonder.
"I thought I'd never see you again"
His voice is rough, like the hands that used to be soft and uncalloused, more used to books and hours in libraries, than manual labour.
She reaches out to grasp them, and savours the feeling of them, roughened on his palms, and where his thumb joins his index finger, from much time spent at the plow, making furrows in the earth.
The work, hard as it was, seemed oddly to suit him.
Her hair used to be long. It used to be long enough for her to sit on, thick, too, like burnished bronze and silk all wrapped into one object. She feathered her fingers through the blunt ends, and sighed. No more.
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