→ my heart's aflame, my body's strained but god i like it.

[lupa]

Who: GG Giordano and the Militia.
What: It turns out you can't bite a police state in the neck, but it won't stop her trying.
Where: Numerous places; most notably the woods to the South.
When: Across recent weeks. It centres around the Spatters raids and the aftermath, so slightly backdated.
Warnings: Police brutality, violence against children, violence in general, murder and horror, a lot of discussion of the psychological effects of living in a police state, distressing everything.

The Militia’s suits block their scents and render them interchangeable outlines in GG’s brain, like they’re holes in the world around them. It means she can track them as a group but not as individuals, which is hardly anything special; it’s what they want, to be perceived as one unified and faceless power, without division or weakness.

(She knows why that is attractive; she hates them all the more for it).

She keeps track of them in the back of her mind; she maps out the city around her with her eyes closed, tasting the air. And she gets used to factoring those whirls and streams of nothing-living smell into her plans; where she will walk, and what she will look like. She doesn’t try to isolate them- she thinks, maybe, that the ones who often walk through (white and pink-gold and the smell of tired horses in leather harnesses on the back of her tongue and sickly sweet taste everywhere like fairytales like expensive rot and like brick, dust, gardened gardens) Syriac Well and then onto (wet grass which smells silvery green and tastes a bit chilly but not cold, a picnic weather-taste along with the tang of dogs that drag owners, the smell of tiny white flowers) Dog Fenn are the same ones each time. They walk in their own footsteps. She can’t be sure, though, and it doesn’t matter. She walks where it’s safe to walk.


*

There’s something wrong in the Spatters; there always is. GG notes it down in Italian at the edge of something she wrote about how the Spire smells, then stares at the whole page and scribbles it out; shit, who does that? Is she fucking insane? Does she want to get black-bagged? She’s not sure she’d put it past herself.

(Always, this outside-herself, the close reading of her own life, the desire to be legible).

Instead of the facts, GG writes something in Italian that tries to be poetry but keeps lapsing back into prayer, and she covers three pages with it. She only stops when she realises she can’t think of a word in Italian which she has in French, a word she even has in English. It’s a vertiginous, cliff-edge moment, though after the empty space it comes to her quickly, grandmother-syllables that she mutters and then writes. Still, she suddenly has to stand up, push her hands through her hair, calm herself down; she’s not losing it, her language or mind, she reminds herself, that’s not going away, they can’t disappear a language from her. They can lock down the faith she keeps collapsing into away in embarrassing, surgical little rooms, and they can dictate where she walks, but she’s almost sure she can speak whatever language she wants to speak, even if the City translates, makes it one and the same, makes it unimportant.


*

“The fuck do you think you’re doing?” GG hisses in French; the Badside boy writing on the wall in Ragamoll understands her, because the City is of the opinion that they are all Baedalites, that what they were before, if anything, is unimportant. He and his rapt audience of two brothers (she smells) back away, suddenly stinking of fear.

She knows what it is; she can see that it’s in Ragamoll but she can feel it in French: fuck the Militia. “Oh, Crisse de- come back-”

They're running, and GG knows why. She has found them doing something horribly, horribly dangerous. It is only chalk; they probably intended to wipe it away. They do that here, the kids, dare each other to write this or that and then hurriedly brush it off, laughing and nervous, making a game of it to break the sacred rules that are in their bones by now (you do not smile at the Militiamen, you do not look at the Militiamen, you do not speak to the Militiamen unless you are spoken to, you do not know anything, you were not there when it happened).

GG picks up the chalk, then. She looks at the writing. She rubs it away with the sleeve of her jacket. She does not want to get him in trouble; she doesn’t know how they could possibly trace a child’s handwriting back to the child in question, but she feels like they could. She raises her hand.

What she writes is in Italian, not Ragamoll. It amounts to the same. She stares at it, feels a sick thrill of fear in the back of her throat, and wipes it into nothing. She pockets the chalk. She dusts off her jacket. She leaves.

*

There’s something wrong in the Spatters; there always is. GG stares at the words she knows she wrote days ago, which linger now beneath the hard scratch-out. She turns her face up; when did that start, things being wrong in the Spatters? When did it become a fact that there is always something wrong in the Spatters? Who said it first and who wrote it down, and when did it become so true that to try and change it would be to try and change the colour of the sky?

(There’s something wrong in the Spatters, she thinks treacherously- does that reassure us, knowing that the Spatters are far away, do we assume there’s only so much something wrong to go around, is it a relief that there will always be someone beneath us?)

*

She walks through (gilt and water, and it is raining so everything blurs and the streets are filthy with sweet scent, mud and orchids and black-gold-white and things that taste glittery and deep and sour and rich) West Gidd when she doesn’t need to and she stares straight forward and two Militia men in quiet, peace-keeping patrol move towards her and towards her and towards her and she doesn’t breathe anything in and they’ve passed her.

She feels like she’s just run a marathon. She feels like she wants to run another.

*

They haven’t done anything to her, she tries to tell herself; she’s just unnerved because she can’t pin down who they are, what they want, what they’re doing. At night she thinks: I am so fucking scared of them. Oh God, I’m so scared. That’s what they’ve done to me, they’ve made me scared, they’ve done it without lifting a finger, without looking in my direction. Oh God, I want to leave. Oh God, at least I’m not in the Spatters.

*

There’s something wrong in the Spatters, and it’s spilling over. There are people moving, running, and in some gossip they bring the Spatters with them like Strangerism is a disease you can catch, and later, when she goes home disgusted by the people she overheard muttering and raising sanctimonious eyebrows in a House Ecumenical building, that is when GG can put into words the thought that has been outlined in her head for days now, like the holes in the world the Militiamen are except exactly opposite. That’s when GG knows that the Spatters is a slum, a real place, a horrible place, but it’s also the goblin in the city’s fairytale, the story to keep children well-behaved. The Spatters is a prison, the Spatters is a deterrent, the Spatters is a place you don’t go and a place you don’t leave.

She realises that if she doesn’t do something, if she doesn’t act now, then she won’t feel bad enough about it. She might lose some sleep, but not much. She will rationalise it, and say that other people probably helped, that there are all those shadowy people who must meet and plan and try to bring down the system, that it wouldn’t have done any good anyway. She’ll look herself in the eye in the mirror with perfect calm and she’ll carry on with her life. If she doesn’t do something now, she will be okay with not doing anything for the rest of her life.

She’s moving before she finishes thinking that, actually, and she doesn’t put it into words in her head; that comes after, when she has to analyse and label her own actions and decide what to call herself. Now, she just has to do. And she does. She’s four-legged, she’s sleek, she’s a grey streak in a shadowy city, and some late night people give the wolf that flows past them strange looks, but this is Baedal and there’s always something stranger to look at.

She follows the smell of nothing, the smoke on the wind.

It’s night and the southern woods are not as familiar as the forests to the north GG calls her territory, but she is more at home here than she could be in the million overlapping scents of the city. She feels herself in every line of her body and it’s beautiful; she feels the thrum of purpose in every muscle. She feels anger, wild and black and streamlined.

She is, she thinks, going to kill someone tonight. It’s been a while, but she knows this shape of herself. She can taste her own bloodlust, thick and eager. She shouldn’t love it. She does. There’s smoke, there’s fire, there’s screaming. GG can taste (they came from the Spatters, they tried to leave, they made a life for maybe ten days, they lost it forever) the whole story. There’s a woman who looks tired rather than sleeping, eyes staring sadly and emptily up at nothing. She’s not the only dead body. There are holes in the world everywhere.

One of them is twisting the arm of a child whose fur is falling out like GG remembers hers did, patchy and thin, when she was starving- again, she is moving before she finishes thinking, pouncing, forepaws slamming into the Militiaman and the child getting knocked to the side, rolling and whimpering, shaking wildly and GG wishes she could say it is going to be okay but she’s too busy trying to break the neck of the man beneath her. He is monstrously strong. That’s fine. She’s a monster.

She bites- that’s all she can do, now, bite, and she feels something crack and then reseal in the man beneath her. Her tongue and her nose know his suit has ripped before her mind does, because the air is thick with (blood heat thick beastial sweat) him and she has him, she knows him, she will never forget, and then she is thrown off him with a blast from something that tastes black in the air and streaks of scent are everywhere like rain on a window, everything is blurred, she is blurred, and she thinks she sees the child remember how to run but she doesn’t know because she’s running away. (Too. She hopes she can say that- she hopes she can say that she was running away too.)

*

She reflects that she hasn’t done much good.

She reflects that she is still scared, a bone deep aching cold fear that doesn’t ever go away, but that it's better now.

She reflects that she was selfish, that she went for herself and left for herself, that she was stupid and impulsive and that she should leave, run, move.

Right now, GG is hidden in a boarding house in Badside. She hasn’t been home in days. (She hasn’t been home in months). She knows that she’s not going to get away with this; it’s just a matter of seeing how long it will last, and seeing what she will do in the meantime. She has a scent now, and that’s all she needs. She can track him down and she can kill him, somehow. But the scent of him is more than that- it means one of the outlines in the world she can't place or process has been filled in, even briefly. It means the faceless masses of the Militia are huge and horrible but not invulnerable. It means so much. She tries to put that into words in her journals, but knows she's only damning herself further.

Things will get worse. She will move, she thinks, to somewhere secluded; she won't let them move through other people to take her.

She closes her eyes, and for a moment simply enjoys the freedom of not having much left to lose. She's glad she did it, she decides. Because they hurt children, because they frighten her, because they here is something wrong in the Spatters, and they want her to think that that is right.