Join Us, part 2 (Warm-up) *Spoilers for MGC*

Part two of Join Us. Any critique is greatly appreciated. I want to really do my best on the first chapter once I write it up soon.

Run. Run. Run. Her legs moved without thought. The chill of the evening was beginning to set in as the day really neared its end, and her exposed skin started to feel the cold bite as she raced recklessly past shopping stalls and people and children and beggars with tin cups and stray dogs fighting in the alleys and hadn’t she stolen something from that same old man yesterday? She rubbed her shoulders and shivered, trying not to slow down. That big blue coat must have fallen off somewhere back there. It was both a relief and a regret to have lost it, due to its connection with the dead person whose blood now stained her clothes. At least, what she called clothes. The stitched-up assortment of torn material and dirty clothing discovered in variety throughout the alleys of the city was all she had that fit anymore. She used to have better things to wear but she got too tall, and so she had watched how the old women sitting on the curb sewed their clothing, eventually trying it out herself.  It had taken a little thievery to get the materials she had needed, but most of it she had scavenged. The result was what she now wore.

   It had been like that for a very long time, almost as long as she could remember, barely surviving day after day. Her previous life couldn’t have been much different because she could never remember ever being quite without that hungry feeling in the pit of her stomach, that feeling that she wasn’t getting nearly the amount of sustenance she needed. There had been people before, though, in that life, people she had known. People she had loved, she thought.

   But she didn’t deserve to have anybody love her now. Tears were whipped from her cheeks as fast as they began to fall. She had killed a man. True, she had killed him for a woman who terrified her more than anything she could remember ever had, and for the prospect of not waking up in fear of starvation each morning, but she regretted it now. She regretted it more than anything, but at the same time, she didn’t want to take it back. She had discovered something about herself"how far she, as a person, would go to get what she wanted. She would rather have this knowledge than the deluded existence of someone who never faced up to what they did, or what they had to do, because that ignorance was almost as frightening. She now knew what kind of person she was.

   She knew discovered what a monster she was.

   She had stolen things before, sure. And pick-pocketed. But she had never known that she was capable of something like this. She didn’t know exactly how old she was. She knew she was older than twelve. Still, too young to be guilty of something like this. What was wrong with her?

   But she couldn’t keep living the way she was. She knew her form was starting to go beyond its normal skinny stature into the realm of true starvation, where she could count more and more of her ribs each day. She knew she was very short for her age and that it was somehow due to the fact that she was barely able to scrape up a couple of crumbs for the day. And she knew that her body needed more food to make up for all the energy it was using to keep her alive and growing. That man had talked about how he thought people should strive to live, not just survive, but she hadn’t had the luxury of that choice. Hers had been a step lower"to simply die, or to survive. He didn’t understand her predicament. Maybe if he had, he wouldn’t have looked at her that way, with those sad amber eyes…

   As she tore closer to her destination, distracted thoroughly by the fangs of the cold, the weary exhaustion of running so fast, and the blur of tears in her eyes, she tripped. She slid about a foot downhill into the alleyway she had just begun to turn toward and then let her muscles collapse, sobbing quietly at the pain and the cold and the scrapes on her knees and elbows before propping herself up on them and coughing. When she looked up, she found she was kneeling before a pair of black leather boots.

   They were her boots.

   She shivered involuntarily and stood up, not making eye contact. She reached under the thin cloth at her waist and pulled out the bloodied knife, almost against her will, remembering exactly where it was even though she’d tried to forget. Holding it up in her hand, she tried to avoid contact with the woman’s gloved hand as it swiped across her palm, taking the knife with it.

   Her eyes traveled up the length of the cloaked figure, stopping just before the eyes. The gloved hand that still held the knife had it in front of her hood, just above the neck, near where the mouth must have been. She couldn’t understand how her eyes were still visible when the rest of her face wasn’t, but she knew if she allowed her eyes to drift up just a bit further, she would see those hellish yellow eyes and be compelled to lower her gaze again before they looked at her.

   A tongue darted out from beneath the shadows of the woman’s cowl and licked up the length of the blade, taking any of the blood that hadn’t dried yet with it. Once finished, she sheathed the knife somewhere under her cloak and began to stalk her way out of the alley.

   “We’re done here.”

   The girl was torn away from her thoughts of horrified confusion at what she had seen the cloaked woman do as her insides cringed at the deep, silky voice and the message it conveyed. “What? What do you mean? You said you would help me. You said you would give me a place to live so I wouldn’t starve. So I wouldn’t have to be cold. Where is it? Where are you taking me?”

   “Nowhere, little one. You played your part well. Nicely executed. But now I have more important things to do than to have a little Nord pup shadow me all day. Thank you for your role.”

   The little girl’s grey eyes went wide with fear, and then hatred. She never thought she could feel this much hatred for one person. She hadn’t even known she’d had this type of writhing fury inside her. But then again, she never really had time to feel much of anything besides pressing hunger.

   Before she could wrestle down her emotions, she spotted the knife inside the cloak as it twisted and whipped in the growing wind. She had already killed someone today. No one could come back from that, let alone a worthless street urchin struggling to stay alive, and she did feel worthless. That man, Ignatius, had shown her nothing but kindness, and she had repaid him with death. She could never emerge from the shadows of such a dark existence as to be that kind of person. She knew she couldn’t. But maybe she could stay alive that way.

   Before she knew what she was doing, before she even comprehended the deadly resolve of her movement, she had the knife in her hand again, and its sharp edge was pressed to the woman’s throat under her cowl. Somehow she had launched herself up onto her back in order to reach the tender area.

   “You can’t do that to me. You don’t know what it’s like living out here all by myself. You showed me something about myself today, something I didn’t like, but that’s a part of me now, as much as I hate it. And as much as you might hate it right now too, you helped to bring it out. So whether you keep your promise to help me, or I keep it for you by taking what money and clothes you have on you after you’re dead, you’re going to have to own up.”

   Dull pain suddenly burst throughout her abdomen as she was elbowed off of the woman’s shoulders and onto her rear at the back of the alley. The knife was gone, fallen out of her hand. She glared up at the cloaked woman, panting as she held an arm around the base of her ribs. She expected to see her leave, to see her last chance at survival pass out the window, but instead she turned around. Her cloak whipped out to the side and her cowl shifted as she cocked her head.

   “I’m impressed, once again.” She placed a hand on her hip and tilted her head back up again as she leaned down to pick up the blade where it had fallen. “Sorry to give you such a fright, little one. I needed to make sure you had it in you before I took you with me, that what you did to Ignatius wasn’t just a temporary act of desperation. Because if you’re going to come with me…” she stepped forward and knelt down so her fiery yellow eyes were uncomfortably close, “…you’re going to have to do that again. And again. And again.”

   The girl stopped cradling her abdomen long enough to stare wide-eyed in horror at the ground after hearing the price for her freedom. It had hurt to kill that man. She didn’t want to ever hurt like this again. She scooted back, away from those yellow eyes, stomach churning. The cloaked woman spoke again at seeing her hesitance to answer.

    “I don’t have room for people driven by temporary, desperate acts of preservation. I need people who are strong, who have the makings of someone who can kill without remorse. Because that’s how you’re going to earn your keep with me, if you choose this. That’s your only chance to escape this skeever-hole of a life.

   “So are you going to take it?”

   It was difficult to keep from just dissolving into tears. She was completely expended, from the energy spent on the run and from the brief fight, the horror of the situation she was in, the regret at the choice she knew she was going to make. She deserved to die in this dreadful back-alley. She deserved to die with the cold, and the starvation, and the hurt. But by the Nine, she didn’t want to. She had made this choice already. She had chosen to survive.

   She hated this, what she was now, and she knew that she was only going to hate it more as she did what this woman wanted and killed more people. But this person could live, and the desperate little girl she had lived as almost forever could only curl up and die. The two weren’t so different"after all, she hadn’t been completely free of transgression. She had always stolen things before to keep the flame of her life going, but she’d only done it when she was very hungry. But this was stealing life, stealing people from the world. Knowing that she had the guts to keep on doing it only terrified her more.

   Maybe one day, when she was fully grown and could fend for herself, she could find the little child from her past who had known love and bring her out again. She had to do this now, to stay alive, but who said she had to keep doing it forever?

   Those deadly yellow eyes staring out at her from behind the shadows of that black hood told her that it wouldn’t be so easy.

   “Okay.”

   She could almost see the venomous smile seeping through that silky voice as the other shadow in the alley praised her for her bravery and determination. “Well done. Not many have the strength to take such a step as you just have. The ones who don’t usually die. But enough of that"If you’re going to come with me, I have to call you something, right?”

   “I don’t really have a name. I think I must have been very young before I was forced to come here.”

   “Of course you were. Very well then, we’ll come up with one. I suppose I’ll call you Mouse until we do"it suits as a nickname for now. After all, Capricorn hardly knew what was happening until you were standing right above him with this knife, short as you are.” She chuckled. Mouse didn’t think she’d ever heard a laugh that sounded so cold until just then. “Quiet as a church mouse.”

   Mouse felt numb inside as she was dimly aware of being helped to her feet and having part of a cloak wrapped around her shoulders. As she was moved out onto the dark streets she looked up into the face of the hooded stranger. “What should I call you?”

   “You can call me ma’am, for now. But once I stop training you, you can call me Amaran.”

Author's Note

Feel free to give me your honest opinion, this section of the chapter--in fact, the whole chapter really--is a rough draft and I would deeply appreciate any information provided as to how I can improve it.

Reviews

[JR Darewood]

Wow, this is really, really good.
I wasn't expecting you to take us to the little girls thoughts, especially not so deep. You evoke intense life experiences in just a page, it's a pretty amazing feat.
I'd be hard-pressed to come up with a way to improve it-- it's already beyond my skill level!

[Lemunculus]

Wow, thank you! And you're much more talented at this stuff than you give yourself credit for. Thanks so much for reading!

[EurasianFlavour]

"She knew discovered what a monster she was"--> typo? now? I noticed a couple of grammatical errors, strange sentences, and you have a bunch of random quotation marks thrown in (was that a formatting issue?) in both halves of this chapter, but those are easily fixed with general proof reading and editing.

As for the story, I think you did a great job describing the emotional turmoil this girl feels--the mixture of determination and self-loathing. I've never played Skyrim so I don't know if these are characters from the game or not, but I'm looking forward to reading more. And the ending of the previous section was very unexpected. Well done.

[Lemunculus]

Yeah sorry about all the grammar issues, This was actually sort of a warm-up rough draft for me in preparing for how I'm going to tell this story. When I write the actual chapter I'm going to be much more careful, because with this, part one and part two, I was trying to figure out what kind of person I wanted each of these characters to be, because I didn't know before I wrote this. I'll go ahead and leave these up but I need to rename them warm-ups and warn people about spoilers, lol. Thank you for pointing out the mistakes because I want to make the actual chapter much better than this.

[EurasianFlavour]

No worries. I knew this was a draft. That was the only obvious mistake so I pointed it out, but the only "critique" I had was that there were some minor errors that would be polished upon a second reading...so not really a critique at all!

[Lemunculus]

Okay, I'm glad I don't have a truckload of stuff to edit! I hope you like the chapter when I come out with it, I'm writing it right now.