[DRB]: Little Bird
Dated: 9/7/1899 (2024)
The darkness of the pre-dawn hours found Filly Maddison in a hotel room, housed by unfamiliar walls and hunched at the side of an unfamiliar bed, drumming her fingers slowly against the mattress.
She hadn't gotten much sleep. How could she, really? It was the morning after a nightmare.
There was a mirror in the room, facing her. Long and narrow, it captured her likeness at the edge of the bed. A shell of a girl, her shoulders collapsed and the wild waves of her hair framing her face like it belonged to a neglected animal.
Filly slipped a cigarette from her pack and retrieved her matchbox. She couldn't help but notice the tremor to her fingers, still lingering from the night before.
She took a match and struck it against the side of the box, ears tuned to the terrible scraping sound. It didn't catch.
The scene played on the backs of her eyelids-- The scramble across the Heartlands. The final arrival at Fort Wallace. The threat to Oliver's life. The police chief's smug face looking down on all of them.
Filly struck the match against the box again. Again, it didn't catch.
How desperately she'd searched. How desperately she'd combed every inch of the compound, Commissioner at her heels. How fervently she'd argued with him that Oliver had to be there. How powerless, in the end. How powerless to stop any of it.
She readjusted her hold, eyes hardening as she struck again, again. Finally, it caught ablaze. Fire danced across her eyes, casting strange shadows over her face in the mirror.
The memories continued without her permission. Heartlands. Wagon stop. Someone catching sight of that bastard Raymond Blair as he passed by. The way everything shifted in an instant, how laughter and chatter had vanished and been replaced by the reflex to chase like a dog set after prey.
And chase they did. Catch, they did.
Brought him right back to where it had all happened.
Her breath hitched as she relived the argument, how much anger and pain had come pouring out of her.
What the law had done to Oliver had left a hole in her chest that welled with seething rage the likes of which she'd never experienced before in her life. The likes of which she never even thought she was capable of.
Law had caught Oliver, bound him, hidden him away where he could be threatened and interrogated. And all the while, they'd led her and the others astray as they fought tooth and nail to get him back.
They'd done everything in their power. Gathered hostages, agreed to meet, gave an honest place with clear intention. Only to be fooled. Outplayed. Lied to. Jerked halfway across county on a lie and forced to give up or get their leader killed.
They'd laughed in his face, Oliver told them when he'd finally returned from Sisika. Laughed in his face at how they'd toyed with his people, while they kept him at gunpoint on the prison gallows.
Too many people with too many parts to play in that. But now they had one. Caught, bound, taken, surrounded, helpless-- powerless. And no one was laughing anymore.
She could still remember it all viscerally. The way her blood pounded in her ears, the others' voices behind her drowning in the cacophony of Filly's ever-rising anger and pain and injustice and--
Do it, he'd said.
Take out your gun, and shoot me in the head.
There was a gun in her hands. She was raising it up to his head.
Filly hissed as she suddenly came back to the present, the flame having eaten its way all the way down to her fingers. She fumbled what little remained of the match, quickly smothering it beneath her shoe. It left a dark stain on the wood floor at her feet.
With a heavy sigh, she pulled her hand in close, nursing the minor burn.
Her fingers were still trembling. Still trembling.
She couldn't stop her thoughts. Couldn't slow the endless train. These memories came harder, faster, as though the absence of light only crowded her thoughts in closer to her.
It was all a cycle of pain and hatred-- endless branches of pain causing pain causing retaliation causing pain-- it never ended. It never ended. He called her weak for not pulling the trigger, but to kill him would make it worse, to kill him would make her a cold-blooded murderer and him a martyr, it'd never end--
She'd tried, hadn't she? Tried to set things right, tried to remove herself from it all, tried to pull back, reached out to the one man she trusted to turn herself in to and--
Filly's breathing was getting away from her, starting to rasp in her throat. She had to take the unlit cigarette out of her mouth, bringing both hands to the side of the bed and clutching tightly.
Law showing up to their home. Being found. Why had Oliver let them come in? The horror of meeting Raymond's gaze once again. She'd ran, she'd ran, but it was no use and--
--they were there because someone had shot the man she trusted. Her own people had sought him out, tried to take him hostage, and shot him.
Her head filled with arguments, explanations, her pleading cries to a room full of deaf ears that she hadn't been in on it. Even now her heart sank at the memory of his face, at the memory of the final words he'd said to her in the cell before leaving her there.
Filly couldn't feel her hands. Couldn't feel the side of the bed. Nausea and lightheadedness gripped her as she struggled to breathe and calm herself. She was not a little girl. She could not cower or cry.
But cry she had. She'd slumped against the bars of her cell and allowed her shoulders to fold in on themselves, no fight left in her.
Nothing left in her as Raymond had knelt down in front of her, lifting her chin and asking if she remembered what he'd told Alice he'd do when he caught Filly.
It didn't matter anymore.
There was no pain he could inflict that would hurt anymore.
But he hadn't hurt her, had he. He didn't draw blood, didn't break a bone or get even a scream out of her. ...Just one telegram.
A telegram, and a long, fruitless wait, handcuffed to a chair at the back of a cave.
Sitting in the darkness, her thoughts eating her alive.
Waiting for a heroic rescue
that never came.
Little bird singing her sad little songs in her sad little cage. Used. Abandoned.
She wished she was a dog. The kind with teeth. Jaws that could chew off her own handcuffed wrist like a fox in a beartrap.
But there was no fight left in her.
Blood would have been easier. Bruises would have been kinder.
And now here she sat, home from Sisika but alone in a hotel room. Wheezing against strained lungs and choking on her sobs.
Her shaking hands put the cigarette back between her teeth, fumbling with the matchbox for a new light. She struck it against the side.
It didn't catch.