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daine

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I had no idea what she was doing.

She probably knew I was there, I had been following her for a little while now, watching as she seemed to test trees for some reason, and I hadn't made any real attempt to hide that I was there. I hadn't meant to follow her without saying a word, just watching as she worked, but once she started up with the trees, I found myself distracted trying to work out what she was doing.

I would have tested trees to see whether or not they would make good snares. I didn't think that was what she was doing. In a place like Darrow, snares weren't necessary, not for hunting, not for security either. There were better ways to do both those things and although I couldn't say for certain she would know that, I had to assume she would.

Someone who knew how to make snares would be smart enough to figure that out.

Eventually she was going to get annoyed with me, so I finally stepped closer, my hands in my pockets, and asked, "What are you doing?"

Hopefully she would answer me. But probably not before thinking I was Elio first, just like everyone else, even though we sounded nothing alike.

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Daine's fair certain she recognizes the boy from the party, but after a few minutes of him following her, she starts to wonder if it's really him. The one at the party -- his name had started with an E, she thinks -- hadn't struck her as especially shy. But this one's hanging back. Granted, she's got a small hatchet swinging from her belt, but she doesn't think she looks that scary.

Not that it's normal for folk in Darrow to wander through the woods and test branches for their springiness. She'd probably look mad to one of the locals.

Eventually, he wanders up and questions her, all casual. She has to bite back a grin at how belated the question is, and she takes a moment to brush some bark off of her palms and school her expression before she answers.

"I miss my longbow, so I thought I'd try my hand at making a new one. Except there's no yew trees in Darrow, which is what we'd've used back home." She'd know; she's done her own searching and asked the People, and come up empty on both counts. "I'm trying to find something else that might work."

Weapons were something I knew. I was still curious as to why she would need a longbow in Darrow, but my expression brightened when she explained what she was doing and I thought, if she wanted, I could probably help her look for a tree. I had never made a bow before, but I had shot one many times. It was one of the things I was most proud of stealing from the pirates, that bow and my long red coat, though neither were here anymore. Peter had destroyed my beautiful coat and Crow had stepped on my bow many years ago, breaking it in two.

"I miss my dagger," I said. "They took it from me at the hospital when I arrived and now the workers at the Children's Home won't give it back until I'm eighteen."

They said I didn't need it here. Maybe they were right, but it was still my property and I still wanted it back. Of course, if I'd had my dagger when I had fought those boys, chances were high one of them would have ended up getting stabbed and I knew Simon was right about the consequences of that. This wasn't Peter's Island.

"They just took it?" Daine scowls, thoroughly unimpressed. Maybe it shouldn't shock her -- folk in Darrow have funny ideas about how old you have to be before you're officially not a child anymore, and funnier ideas about how to keep children safe. That a dagger can be dangerous seems less important than the fact that it's his, and a thing from home. If she did have her bow, and someone had presumed to take it off her, she would've been fair furious.

Sometimes it feels a little like cowardice, the way she mostly manages to avoid settling in the way folk might expect and prefer someone her age to settle in: going to school, doing the same things other teenagers do. Then she's reminded of how silly what passes for 'normal' is here, and she's just grateful that Biffy and Lyall haven't ever pressed the issue.

That doesn't help with his dagger any, though. "I'm sorry," she says. "Though it's fair typical for this place, I s'pose." Daine considers asking him if he knows where it's being kept; she's fair certain she could retrieve it. But she doesn't want to get him in trouble at the Home, either, if he's to be stuck there any length of time. And introductions should probably come first.

"I'm Daine," she says, holding out a hand.

"Jamie," I answered, shaking her hand. Her skin was warm and like everyone else I met in this city, she was impossibly pretty. At least I didn't think I had any more room in my head for mixed up feelings at the moment and she had relaxed me a little with talk of weapons, which meant I probably wasn't going to stumble over my words and sound like a complete fool, as I so often did.

"I guess they think I just won't need it here," I said. "I suppose they're not completely wrong. I haven't had to gut a deer since arriving."

Or stab a pirate. Or kill a Many-Eyed. In fact, most of my time in Darrow was spent trying to settle into a normal life, the sort of thing I had so deeply craved, the thing I'd been running toward, Sal at my side. Given what had happened, that she'd died trying to get us all back to London, I thought it was important to give it all the best chance I could and besides worrying about school and my confusing feelings for my roommate and nearly every pretty girl I met, I thought I was doing a decent job of it.

Not the boy from the party, then. She wasn't able to match names to faces for everyone there, but she's fair certain 'Jamie' wasn't one of the names she overheard. Probably just as well, really; she found the whole thing bewildering and overwhelming enough that she isn't sure she made much of an impression worth leaving. "'S nice to meet you," she says.

Daine twists her lips in a conceding wince. Most folk in Darrow wouldn't know what to do with a dagger besides stab another two-legger with it, as if that's all a blade is good for. Still, it doesn't seem fair to take it, and if they don't trust him with it now, she's not sure how much difference a year or two is supposed to make.

"It's still yours, though. And it's from home." The only thing she brought with her is the Badger's token, and she doesn't like to think of someone taking that from her. After a considering beat, she adds, "If you ever need it back, I might be able to help."

"If I steal it back and then try to use it, I think they might notice," I pointed out with a bit of a smile. It was something I had already considered, as I had no doubt I would be able to take it from them if I really put my mind to it. But was it worth the effort, I had wondered. Because if I had the dagger, I didn't want to have to try and hide it from them, I wanted to be able to use it when necessary, and it wasn't as though the Children's Home offered us any real privacy. For the most part I didn't mind it. It only meant I would have to wait.

And in the meantime, there wasn't a lot I could accomplish with my dagger that I couldn't accomplish with my bare hands. Not in Darrow, anyway.

"It's not the worst thing," I added. "Before I came here, a friend and I were trying to... to get back to a normal life, I suppose. That would have meant giving up weapons anyway. I'm not opposed to giving it a go."

"Depends on what you're using it for," she says with an answering grin, but it softens a moment later, conceding. It would be hard to hide from the other young folk, if not the staff, and Mithros knows how bad it might get if someone nearer his age tried to take it off him. She doesn't know that they'd succeed -- Jamie talks about weapons too easily to be anything but comfortable with them, and that speaks to experience -- but someone would doubtless get hurt in the trying.

"Weapons are a part of normal life in my realm," Daine says, hitching her shoulders in a little shrug. "That's why I want a longbow. I've another bow I bought here, a different sort, but..." she shakes her head and purses her lips, disapproving and scornful. "It's built so a baby could just about draw it. I'll lose my touch and end up embarrassing myself at this rate."

"Mine, too," I answered. "Well, sort of. They were a normal part of life where I'd been taken, but not where I'm come from."

It was hard to explain without getting into all the details Peter and his Island and sometimes I felt a little odd when I spoke of it. Sometimes I could see something shift in someone's expression when I tried to explain, as if they almost recognized what I was saying, but none of the people here had been on the Island, so I knew that couldn't possibly be the explanation. Still, it was as if something changed, and I didn't quite like it, but I also didn't know how to stop it short of not talking about Peter.

"Have you made many bows before?" I asked. "I've never made one. I've never even really used one. You wouldn't have to worry about embarrassing yourself next to me."

That's a bit perplexing, and Daine's brow furrows as she tries to imagine a realm in which such a thing would make sense. It seems to her that if you've got folk who use weapons and are prone to kidnapping anywhere near you, then you'd probably want to be familiar with how weapons work, yourself. Elsewise, you'd have no end of trouble.

But it also seems like a rude thing to press about. Just because he mentioned being taken doesn't mean he wants to talk about it in detail. So, aside from looking a bit bewildered, Daine doesn't respond to that bit. Instead, she resumes her stroll through the trees, trusting that Jamie will keep up as well as he has already.

"Not in ages," she says with a rueful smile. "Grandda showed me how, but I already had a good bow, so I've only made middling ones. I don't even have all the tools I need, yet -- but the wood has to dry for a while, anyhow, so I figured I'd just focus on that part, first."

There's a drumming of a woodpecker not too far off, accompanied by a pointed nudge in her mind, and Daine turns towards the sound with a soft 'huh,' as if an excellent point had just been made. "Let's try that, then," she says, giving Jamie a brief, conspiratorial smile as she heads in that direction.

I wasn't sure what it was about the woodpecker that made her turn in that direction, but I was happy enough to follow. There were obviously things she knew that I had no idea about and I wasn't too proud a boy to learn from others. I didn't think I would have survived the Island otherwise, because it was the entire group of us that kept the family together, even if Peter had never seen it that way.

It was fun to learn. Maybe by the end of this, I would know where to look for wood if I wanted to make myself a bow. Maybe she would even help me fashion one of my own some day.

"How come you don't live at the Children's Home?" I asked as we walked. She didn't seem to be that much older than I was and not older than some of the girls in the Home, but I supposed I couldn't be absolutely certain of that. I had come to understand a long time ago that sometimes people weren't quite what they seemed to be.

Daine would have winced at that question once, and the urge is still there. The 'why' of it all is a mystery to her, and not one she much cares to air. She doesn't know why the city gave her an apartment instead of sending her there, though she is grateful. She also doesn't know how to explain it without making it sound horribly unfair, because it is.

But she hasn't lived at Ocean View for some time, now. Really, the apartment needn't come up at all. "Because I live out here, in a farmhouse with some other folk. Biffy and Lyall are my guardians." It's the technical term more than the right one, but she doesn't want to put Jamie off by calling them 'Pack.'

"Though even that seems strange, often as not. Seventeen's a bit old to have folk treat you like a child. Like you need guarding." She wrinkles her nose, making no attempt to hide her feelings on that matter. Granted, folk her age in Darrow often act as if they might as well be children, but she suspects it's because no one expects better of them, not because they can't help themselves.

"Yeah, I-" I started, then paused, trying to decide how much I wanted to tell her. Daine seemed nice and I liked making new friends, but I also knew my story sounded a bit odd. People had looked at me as if I were strange when I told them where I'd come from and I didn't always enjoy that very much.

Still, I wasn't going to make proper friends by being dishonest. If I'd learned anything from Peter, I had certainly learned that.

"Where I'm from, there were no grown ups," I told her. "And it sounded so wonderful at first, but as time went on, it became less and less fun. I thought I wanted to be young forever and to never have any grown ups tell me what to do, but after awhile, I realized it wasn't such a terrible thing. I don't mind it now. They're just trying to do right by us."

And I missed being a proper kid. A proper young boy.

Edited 2018-08-24 20:22 (UTC)

She frowns, bewildered -- not because his story strikes any familiar chords with her, but because it's hard to reconcile what he's saying now with what he said before. Either he was taken from a place with no grown-ups -- and if that's true, how did he get there in the first place? -- or he was taken to a place with no grown-ups -- and if that's true, that'd mean he was kidnapped by another child, or group of children, which is hard to imagine and doesn't make much sense.

"So... did you start off in a place with no grown-ups? Or was it a bunch of children who took you away?" She just assumes it was a group, and that one child didn't haul him off.

"It was just one," I answered and I hated this part of the story, because it reminded me all over again that my mother was dead. That Peter had killed her, someone who had loved me very much, and then tried to act as if I would be taken away to jail for the crime. I had believed him at the time, but of course I had, because Peter was my friend and I had been very young.

"Peter could be very persuasive," I told her. "I went with him willingly."

And I had stayed with him willingly for a very long time. It had taken many, many years before I even started to realize what he was and all the ways in which he was so very cruel. Bit by bit, I had grown up as I had grown more disenchanted with his behaviour, until I found myself as I was now.

"Mithros," she breathes, at a loss. Plenty of questions spring to mind. Persuasive or not, why go with this boy, Peter, in the first place? Was life at home so terrible?

It might very well have been, which makes her hesitate to ask.

She's not sure how much Jamie really wants to share. And either way, it seems a little unfair, to have him just heap painful details of his own past in her lap while she just sits there and takes them.

"I left home when I was thirteen," she offers after a few moments' thought. "Bandits hit our farm while I was away. Everything was just... gone. Nothing to stay for." She hesitates for a beat. "I s'pose I wouldn't have been hard to persuade, either. Though I didn't feel much like a child anymore, after all that."

"Bandits," I echoed. "Like pirates?"

There were some things I only knew about very vaguely, because I spent so much time on the Island and wasn't introduced to the same things other people were, but I thought bandits and pirates might very well be similar things. Which meant I probably shouldn't tell Daine I had been thinking about becoming a pirate near the end of my time with Peter.

I knew I was supposed to hate them, but I had been so blind to all the cruelties of Peter Pan and I'd begun to wonder if maybe he was the real villain. If perhaps the pirates were only our enemies because we had attacked them first.

Daine hums in affirmation. "Near enough. Except pirates only travel by sea in my realm. Snowsdale was up in the mountains, so it was bandits we had to worry about."

And that's about all that can be said about it without going into some truly nasty details. She doesn't much care for telling anyone about how she'd run mad with the Pack, least of all folk she's just met. Just because he knows what pirates are doesn't mean he'll understand the vengeance she took.

"Seems so cruel," I said. "For them to just attack like that. Without provocation."

Like we did all the time. Because it was fun for Peter to see us raid the pirate's camp. For him to burn it all to the ground. We had become monsters under his guidance and looking back now, I often couldn't believe what we had done. Why had I thought it was so much fun at the time? Was it because I wanted so badly to see Peter smile?

I hated myself for that. I had to be better than that now. I had to try harder and not simply follow someone because I wanted them to be happy with me. I had to think for myself.

It is cruel, but a sort of two-legger cruelty she's so well acquainted with that all she can do is shrug. "Some folk find it easier to take things than work for them. It happens here, too, I expect; it's just that folk are more careful about it, and they don't run in gangs so much." Or if they do, they seem more concerned with holding their own territory than sweeping through someone else's.

Really, the nearest Darrow has ever gotten to the sort of lawlessness she'd see back home was the Purge. And there's been no sign that they're doing that again.

Peter had never worked for anything. He always just took. I supposed I was guilty of that, too, of taking things from the pirates instead of working for them, but I'm not sure where we would have worked on the Island. I supposed Peter had taken that possibility from us, too.

I had worked for our food at least. I had grown vegetables and hunted rabbits and gone fishing when I could. I was still terribly conflicted about the idea of becoming a pirate, but Peter had been no better.

"At least here it's possible to work," I said. "Where I came from, there wasn't anything like there is here."

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