0300 Hours

Spoiler Warning: This short scene I wrote yesterday takes place after Gre7g's book Fair Trade. It may also not make sense to anyone who hasn't finished the story entirely.

Since the proportion of people who finished Fair Trade and are in the $3 tier is probably small, I'm providing this for anyone to read. Hope you like it! Comments are appreciated.

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Tish turned, her shoulder falling against the crude mattress, and she was awake, interrupting the dream of long, strange, turning hallways. She was certain her mother-sense had kicked on—the sense that Rahua was moments away from waking her up for one of the seven thousand reasons a cub awoke in the night.

But no, Rahua was still asleep, nestled against Kanti’s stomach. It was nice to see. It hadn’t been all that long since Kanti had returned, and despite her optimism, for a while Tish was worried Rahua wouldn’t take to her real father. The whole incident inside the walls must have frightened her as much as it had everyone else, and she would have snuggled next to anyone remotely familiar. Even Tish kept seeing those hallways in her sleep, somewhere halfway between a dream and a nightmare. It took time to sort out all the new information, new experiences, after being resigned for so long to seeing the same walls day after day.

But what had woken her? Tish turned to her other side, her eyes adjusting to find that Suni was gone from her usual spot. Carefully, Tish sat up, until she saw the light coming from behind the standing screen—excess fabric from the base of Sarsuk’s window curtains—that separated the medical station from the rest of the one-room chamber. They hadn’t bothered with many partitions in the bunker, but over the long period of time Saquel had lain on the medical table, sick and unsightly, they had to make some concessions.

Tish sat up, careful not to rock Rahua, stepped around the cushions on the floor and padded quietly across the chamber.

“Suni?” Tish asked, keeping her voice quiet.

Suni turned her head, her expression that of placid acknowledgement and little surprise. She was messing with both her strand and the computer terminal behind the medical bay. Tish had already known that Suni wasn’t sleeping well these last few nights—the rings under her eyes were indication enough of that. But the under-lighting from the screens made her look like she’d been awake since they’d first gotten the news about Kanti.

“Do you need to talk?” Tish asked.

“More than anything,” Suni said. Her eyes darted away, distracted by something on the screen, or perhaps stray thoughts. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you for a while, but it’s never seemed like the right time or place. I mean, with Saina… or well, Kanti… coming back and all, you’ve been busy getting reacquainted with him, and…”

“Suni, I’ll always make time for you. You know that.”

Suni didn’t respond for a long moment. Tish took the opportunity to take a seat on a box, fished from what was supposed to be disposable packaging from one of Sarsuk’s instant meals.

“Are you having nightmares?” Tish guessed. “I think we all are.”

“You could call it that,” Suni said. “Feel a bit stupid for it, but—“

“It’s not stupid to have nightmares,” Tish said. “Doesn’t matter how strong you are. It takes time to adjust.”

Behind the strand’s light washing over her face, Suni’s ears wilted. “You’d think I’d have gotten used to it by now. I’ve had enough awful things happen to me these last years, and my whole life. And now, Kanti’s back, and I… I should be happy, shouldn’t I? Everything’s back in place. The worries should be decreasing, the nightmares should be fading. I should be thinking about the future now! I haven’t ever thought about my future, save the brief moment Dekka was here. And it’s strange, that now… I can almost feel myself looking forward to it again. I want to.”

“But?”

“But something’s wrong.” Suni looked up at Tish. “Or at least… incomplete.”

“You sound like you already know what it is,” Tish said.

“I should hope so. It’s been crowding out my thoughts for long enough.”

“So, what is it?”

Suni said nothing. Her throat flexed, her mouth twisted and her ears wilted all the further. She opened her mouth once as if to speak, but couldn’t bring the words forward, and instead turned away.

Tish didn’t know exactly what was going on—after all, it could have been one of a thousand things they’d experienced in the last two months. But Tish also knew that Suni would share anything with her at this point. After all, Suni had opened up to Tish about her life back on the ship, and Tish had comforted her after Dekka’s death. So, if Suni couldn’t bring herself to say it to Tish…

“…It’s me, isn’t it?” Tish asked.

“Tish, no,” Suni immediately retorted. “Or at least… it’s nothing that’s your fault.”

“Suni, if there’s something wrong between us, you need to say it and I need to hear it. I won’t get angry. Not with you, not at you, and not around you. I promise.”

Suni sniffled and wiped her nose on her wrist, only to take one of the medical towels and clean herself properly immediately after. “Okay, so, you know my mom’s boyfriend.”

“You don’t have to explain much,” Tish said. Suni’s defacto stepfather had abused her in rather horrible ways, and so it was a relief that neither of them had to deal with that geroo ever again. Tish probably would have turned his head into a smooth paste if they did.

“And… you know my mom.”

“She turned a blind eye to everything.”

“…I’m wondering if it wasn’t more complicated than that. See… for most of my life, I considered my mom to be the sane one. Yeah, I know, I told you that she was, for all practical purposes, at fault as much as her boyfriend was, and I definitely feel that way still. But even so, she wasn’t the one who abused me.”

Suni paused for a long moment to wipe her eyes. Her breathing had calmed as her thoughts finally started to coalesce into a narrative.

“She was there like, I suppose, any mom was, to listen to me, to patch me up when I was hurt, to feed me, to hug me and tell me that I was her sweetheart—so long as I held my tongue about what he did. I’d only managed to confront her about it maybe three times in my life, but everyone around me, her included, thought it distasteful, said I was lying, said I was doing it for attention. Three times. And then I stopped.”

Tish nodded. It was a distressingly familiar pattern, perhaps even a similar reason to why Tish herself kept needing to be the strongest one in the room. Many geroo wouldn’t listen to her as an ugly, mannish female, but they would listen to their lungs compressing as she smacked them in the sternum. Suni, unfortunately, had no such genetic advantage.

After another long pause, Suni continued. “I thought maybe this was normal. I thought maybe I was a little happy during the day, so long as I didn’t bring up the issue again, my mom would at least be a good mom. I was starting to slowly buy into the idea that I could hate her boyfriend privately and that was all; I’d have half a good life.”

Suni glanced away again—not that she was looking at Tish during this at all, as her eyes seemed to focus anywhere other than the honey-colored geroo. “Maybe for some geroo, they can compartmentalize their experiences, and so live two lives, largely separate from each other.” She balled up her paws separately to make an illustration of the point. But then she brought those fists together. “But after I turned twelve, it slowly dawned on me that this wasn’t how my mind worked. It didn’t matter how often my mom said ‘I love you’, it was always colored by the feeling of his paw on my throat. I couldn’t help but connect these two things together.”

Suni shook her head. “At the time, I thought it was because I was more interested in the truth than others. In order to compartmentalize, I would have to, like my mom, ignore the fact that these two things were related. I was always the smart cub, after all, so I resolved to do the rational thing. And so, it only made sense when the opportunity came up, that I could just… walk out of that situation and never look back. That was the only sensible thing to do.”

Suni turned her head up, her eyes fixed right on Tish’s again. “And then, despite how very, very smart I’d been, I found myself right back in the middle of that situation again.”

Tish hadn’t been exactly sure where Suni was going with the story, but the moment she said that…

Tish had known for a while that she’d become something of a mother figure to Suni. She was grateful for it, and if Tish would brag about anything, she would swear up and down that she was most certainly a better surrogate mother for Suni than her real mother had been. So, it seemed absurd that Suni would compare her to… to that geroo!

Tish had to forcibly calm herself from raising her voice, which she didn’t like. It was just so accusatory. “Suni…” Tish said. “I hate Saquel for what he did. You know that. I wouldn’t defend him!”

“I know,” Suni said. “You’re sensible like that. The moment that you realized something was wrong, you didn’t let yourself be blinded by what you wanted to believe was true. And that’s why I’m not blaming you. I can’t blame you. You’ve made up for your mistakes. You’ve corrected them. That’s a damn sight more than most people would do for me.” Suni sniffed as she choked out the next words. “And yet… I had to live with a version of you who, for two years, thought there was nothing wrong.”

Tish’s ears fell, and her original bristling at the accusation faded. “…Oh,” was all she could say.

“And that’s partly my fault,” Suni said, wiping her eyes. She was shaking now. “Maybe I should have trusted you. But every time I did, just thinking about opening up and telling you my suspicions about Saquel, the ways he looked at me, and later my conclusions about the sourang and how he must have known… I thought about my mother.”

Tish clasped a paw to her mouth in shock. Tish wasn’t sure whether it was appropriate to embrace Suni at this point, and ancestors knew Suni needed it. But Suni was expressing an extreme discomfort about being around Tish, and possibly had for a while! Would it have been better to refrain, to give Suni space? Or maybe it was just Tish needing her own comfort she didn’t earn.

Suni would have to lead, to tell Tish upfront when she was comfortable having Tish touch or comfort her again—if at all. And Tish hated knowing that, however inadvertently, she’d fractured a friendship she might have taken for granted.

“That’s not your fault,” Tish said, unwilling to touch Suni if she didn’t want it, Tish simply leaned forward, paws on her own knees. “Maybe it was your mother’s fault for instilling in you a fear of speaking uncomfortable truths. But I swear to you… I had no such intentions.”

And now Tish was having a hard time looking at Suni directly. Her eyes reflexively focused on Suni’s paws that twisted here and there as they desperately searched for something to do.

“At the same time,” Tish finally admitted with a sigh, “I can’t blame you for feeling that way. I’m hot headed, everybody knows that. But that anger was never meant to intimidate you. But now I realize, it probably did.” Tish felt tears forming in her own eyes now. “Or I intimidated you with even more than just my anger.”

“Your power over this place,” Suni said. “You and Saquel were our leaders. It was just like my parents’ power over my life. It’s… it’s all the same thing, in the end. This crushing… cage. And I couldn’t move without risking…” Suni’s voice dipped even below a whisper. “I would have risked the little love I was getting from you. The love I needed.”

“Suni, I am so sorry,” Tish said. Risking looking presumptuous, Tish opened her paws up in a rather vague gesture. Suni, still looking down and sniffling, nodded. Tish pulled her seat forward and wrapped her arms around Suni in a tight embrace, which was relieving, though Suni still felt stiff. There was still more Tish needed to say.

“Suni… my love is not conditional. I am sorry you had to live with that version of me. If you ever see her coming again, just remind me of what you said here, and I will come running back to kick her away. I promise.”

“O-okay.” Suni, sighing and with tears running down her cheeks, pressed herself into Tish, doing her best to wrap her own arms around the big geroo’s frame. They sat there for a while, saying nothing more, just holding one another and feeling their heartbeats slow with one another, until the time on the computer’s clock finally rolled around to 0350.

“Are you okay?” Tish asked. And she didn’t like asking, but Suni’s needs were far more important than her own right now. “Do you need somewhere else to sleep tonight?”

Suni shook her head. “I just… really needed to tell you.”

“I don’t want you feeling uncomfortable around me.”

“No, it’s okay.” Suni pulled back and, wiping her eyes, smiled with her ears. “You’re fine. I was just having trouble putting my thoughts together. I might still have trouble for a night or two. But like I said… it’s not you.”

“Just… two-months-ago-me.”

“Yeah. And she’s not here anymore.”

Tish nodded. “Okay. You ready to go back?”

Suni excused herself for a glass of water from the tap and, after a quick visit to the latrine again, waded with Tish through the sleeping space, all the way back to their usual spot.

But this time, Suni pressed into the cavity under Tish’s chin, and buried herself inside. She yawned once, and slumping further into Tish’s chest, Suni fell asleep in Tish’s arms.

Kanti stirred, noticing the different position that Tish and Suni found themselves in. “Wh… something wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Tish told him and kissed his nose. “Go back to sleep. Don’t wake Rahua.”

“Oh, I know something’s wrong,” Kanti whispered with a yawn. “But then again… you’ve spent more time with Suni than you have with me at this point. You probably collected a few thousand more secrets together while I was away. Kinda makes me jealous.”

“It’s nothing to be jealous over,” Tish said. Her ears lowered and her eyes matched, looking down at Suni calmly sleeping. “Trust me.”

“I dunno,” Kanti said as he drifted back to sleep. “She seems to be in an awfully nice place right there. I mean… look at that smile on her ears.”