Winifred 'Fred' Burkle [Angel] (ex_screwdest167) wrote in _intotheabyss_, @ 2012-01-27 14:45:00 |
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Entry tags: | angel, winifred burkle |
[There's No Place Like Home]
There was only one sun in the sky above her. It was low, ready to dip behind the highest buildings, but it was still a long way from the binary star system that had made up her sky for the last five years.
That wasn’t right, because the only place that had a singular sun was the other place, and Fred had spent so long in her cave that she couldn’t be sure if that other place had ever been real. (Although, if it wasn’t real, why did she remember that its sun was a main sequence star, generating energy from nuclear fission of hydrogen into helium at a core density of about 150 g/cm³?)
The floor felt strange beneath her bare feet. It took Fred a moment or two to tear her eyes away from the sky and look down at it, realising with a jolt that it wasn’t leaf litter or grass or bare rock but real manmade concrete.
Manmade. Synthetic. Made by humans instead of occurring naturally. They hadn’t liked that word, back in Pylea. Cows weren’t supposed to be clever enough to make things.
Cows weren’t supposed to talk either, but there were human voices all around her now, fighting to be heard over the noises of the city and the hum of the … of the traffic! She’d almost forgotten about traffic. Cars and buses and bikes and the internal combustion engine. Had LA always been so loud, in the before time? In the time when she’d been allowed to be Fred and hadn’t realised what it really meant to be afraid? Some of the people were talking to her, confused and even a little frightened, demanding to know where she’d come from and why she’d appeared out of nowhere. They probably wouldn’t have understood the equations, but they still asked. They were always curious, cows. Humans, that is. Not cows. She wasn’t a cow, but her own curiosity had got her into a lot of trouble.
Ragged and filthy, Winifed Burkle made her way down the street. It was easier to remember that she was Winifred Burkle now that she was standing under the same sky she’d been born beneath, so she clung to the name as if it was a talisman. They taken so much away from her, but they hadn’t taken that. She was crazy and, despite being back in her own world at last, she was still sort of lost, but she was still Fred.
Please don’t let this be a dream. She’d dreamed it so many times before – a rescue, an escape, the right equations pulling her out of the nightmare – but it had never felt this real before. She could smell petrol and pollution and the nearby hot dog stand and the perfume of the woman who stepped hastily away from her as she walked past the bus stop. It was the hot dog stand that interested her the most. She’d been away from people for so long – except for other slaves, and they weren’t much for talking – that she wasn’t sure what to do with them. She knew hot dogs, though. Almost as good as tacos and impossible to make out of tree roots, no matter what you ground up to make relish.
Unthinkingly – no, not unthinkingly, thinking of math and hot dogs instead of things like paying for things – she stepped a bit closer. The man wasn’t looking at her. She was good at not being noticed, even dressed in rags in the middle of LA. (Back in Pylea, being good at not being noticed was the same as being good at staying alive.) He didn’t spot her until she snatched up the hot dog, wolfing it down with the hunger of someone who never knew when her next meal was going to come, or if it would even arrive at all. It was good. The best thing she’d ever tasted. It was so good that she almost wanted to cry from the taste of it. That was real, too, more real than any of her dreams.
“Hey! You gonna pay for that?”
She’d been noticed. Her free hand flew to the false collar around her throat, but he wasn’t a demon and he wasn’t going to check to see who she belonged to. He was still angry though, demanding money she didn’t have, and Fred didn’t know what to do, apart from run. His voice – getting louder and angrier and too like the voice of her first owner, the first demon she’d met in Pylea – followed her, and, for a horrible moment, she wasn’t sure she could outrun it. But then she turned a corner, and another and another, and found a quiet alley to hide in. Quiet and dark and safer than the street, even if it didn’t have any hot dogs or internal combustion engines.
Fred slid down between a couple of trash cans, feeling cold metal against her arms and cold brickwork against her back, hugging her knees to her chest. It wasn’t a cave but it was probably the closest she’d be able to find here. Maybe she’d look for tacos tomorrow. She could still remember tacos, mostly. Not what they’d tasted like, but that they’d been nice.