Sam

When Mongrel said that he had fixed her some sleeping arrangements for the night, Sam hadn’t pictured that she would find herself standing in the dingy studio apartment of an off-duty hooker.

Serene was one of the girls she had met in the fight organizer’s tent. Dark-haired, full-breasted, and gorgeous, she had a dull, haunted look in her eyes that Sam did not find surprising for one of her profession.

Kicking off her shoes, Serene padded across the single room and plopped down on the floor by a low table, immediately beginning to tamper with a delicate, long-stemmed pipe. “You want some?” she called over her shoulder.

“No thanks, I’m good,” Sam said, cautiously approaching the table. “What is it?”

“Oh, it’s just opium. Have you never had it?”

“Um… no.”

“You come to the Frontier recently?”

“Yeah.”

“Right. Might as well hold off as long as you can, then.” Serene laughed hoarsely. “Don’t worry—you’ll take a liking to it eventually.”

I wonder if it’s too late to go sleep with the chimps in the stables, Sam mused, but took a seat regardless.

Her stomach turned as she watched the woman drip a small glob of thick opium residue onto her pipe and set to smoking it, then began nursing some dark liquor straight from the bottle as well.

“You drink, though, right?” Serene asked, and slid the stubby bottle across the tabletop.

Sam gently nudged it back. “Not so much, actually.”

The escort snorted out a laugh that never reached her eyes. “Aren’t you precious! What’s your name, babe?”

“Sam.”

“Sam.” Serene blew out a cloud of thin smoke, tasting the name. “All right, Sam. Why’s someone like you join that tournament, anyway?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Well, Laborers don’t usually fight in the pits, that’s all. Most of them end up joining the militia, and Brimstone doesn’t let his boys fight in the pits. Hardly lets them visit Darkside at all, the prude.”

“Oh. Is that right?”

“Yeah. I’ll give you a bit of friendly advice, since you seem really fresh to this. Your ‘manager’—or whatever he calls himself—ditch him as fast as you can and go see the captain about joining the militia. The pay’s better than what you could ever hope to make as a fighter, and you’re not as likely to die on the job, either.”

“Thank you. I’m happy where I am, though—I didn’t join the tournament to make money.”

Serene frowned deeply, pausing with the pipe halfway to her mouth. “You didn’t?”

“Yeah, I’m just doing it to level up a bit—I’ve got someone I’m looking to impress.”

“Not that geezer, surely?”

“God, no! There’s… a boy I like, I guess.”

Serene inhaled another breath of smoke until her cheeks were all puffed out, then exhaled two thin streams through her nostrils, her raised eyebrows making plain what she thought about what Sam had said. “All right, babe. You do you.”

Sam’s cheeks flushed. She didn’t appreciate a heroin addict prostitute judging her life choices, but bit back a snide reply in the interest of keeping the peace. She had to spend a whole night here, after all.

Serene slumped further and further as she continued to drink and smoke, eventually lying with her head propped up against the tabletop. “You ever… killed anybody before?” she asked after a while; she slurred her words, eyes half-lidded.

“No,” Sam replied warily. “Why would you ask me that?”

Serene laughed an incredulous, delirious laugh. “Oh, you’re hysterical. You’re going to join this tournament even though you’ve never killed a single person?”

“That’s what I said, isn’t it?”

“No offense, babe, but you are fucked. Jesus, I thought my future looked grim…” She puffed lazily at her pipe, then slowly tipped the stem toward Sam. “You sure you couldn’t use some of this?”

“I’m sure,” Sam said, a little more sharply than she had intended. “I don’t know why you’re making fun of me.”

“Making fun…? That’s not it. I feel genuinely bad for you.”

“Why?”

“You clearly got tricked into this. How are you supposed to kill someone for the first time in a tournament like this?”

“I’m not, though. It’s not like these matches are to the death or anything.”

“That’s what you think?”

“Yeah, I mean… that’s what Mongrel said.”

“In that case, your manager is either lying to you, or he’s a massive idiot. Sure, most matches use a non-lethal rule set—if the fighters were killing each other every match, the organizers would run through their experienced fighters way too fast.

“That’s why they save up their loads for big events like this. The tournament tomorrow? Those matches are to the death.”

“Oh.”

“You get it now?”

Sam slowly nodded. “I think so.”

“You should drop out. It’ll probably get you in trouble with Golden Boy and his people, but it’s better than getting your guts torn out in the pits.”

“Do I have to kill people? Is that in the rules?”

Serene frowned. “Well… no. I don’t think so. But everyone is going to be trying to kill you, and the crowd will be expecting it. Like I said, death matches don’t happen every day, so folk build up an appetite for it.”

“Oh, okay! If I don’t have to, then I’ll just not kill anybody.”

“Babe, no offense, but I think you might be the craziest bitch I’ve ever talked to, and I know some real weirdos.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“It wasn’t.”

Sam shrugged, grinning. “Meh.”

They talked on, and Sam found out that Serene actually knew a fair bit about the fighting pits—not because she frequented them herself, but because many of her regulars were fighters looking to blow off steam, and apparently her pimp had deals with some of the organizers so that she would sometimes be lent out to winners as an extra reward for good performance.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

“I hope they don’t treat you badly,” Sam said after hearing that. Despite her initial dislike of the woman, she somehow felt anxious about her situation.

“Oh, they’re all sweethearts,” Serene said with a sarcastic snort. “There’s one who always brings me flowers and chocolate, and another who massages my feet after he’s done fucking me up the wall.”

“But your… pimp,” Serene insisted on using that term, “he doesn’t let them get physical with you, right?”

Serene snapped her fingers, and a shimmer alighted in the air around the woman. What looked almost like a shell of light rapidly unraveled and dissipated like peeling skin. Once it was gone, the woman she saw had welts and bruises all over her face, and the white of one eye was bright-red with blood pooled from a burst vessel.

“Jesus,” Sam murmured. “Is that real?”

“I usually keep an Illusion up to hide the worst of it,” Serene explained. “Most guys don’t find it very attractive. Then again, some of them go crazy for it.”

“That’s awful! Is there anything I can do?”

“Oh, don’t worry about it. I asked for this.”

“Maybe you tell yourself that because you’ve been treated this way for so long, but it’s never right for someone to—”

“I wasn’t being poetic,” Serene clarified, picking at a snapped fingernail. “I mean, I literally asked for this.”

“You… ask men to beat you?”

“Sometimes. I try to read the room. Like I said, most aren’t too into that kind of thing.”

“But why?”

“Why do people do anything? It feels good—that’s all there is to it.” Serene rolled her bloodshot eyes. “Oh, don’t look so offended. It’s not like you’re any less banged-up than I am.”

“Except I’ve been practicing to become a fighter, not a punching bag.”

Serene laughed melodically. “That was almost funny! You’re not quite as boring as I thought.”

Serene was surprisingly all right, once you got used to her. She made Sam some food at one point during the evening during a brief lull in her inebriation, and when it became abundantly clear that Sam wasn’t interested in drinking alcohol, she scrounged up some elderflower juice from the recesses of a cabinet as a substitute.

Sam decided to tuck in early so that she could get a good night’s sleep for the tournament tomorrow.

“I’d offer you the bed,” Serene said around her pipe, “but I’m assuming you’d be a bit afraid of the cooties on it.”

“Is there…?”

“Semen? I’d imagine so, babe. Probably only a gallon of dried-in sweat, though. I run pretty cold.”

“Yeah, I think I’ll pass. Thank you, though.”

The escort shrugged. “Suit yourself. It’s the couch for you, then. Sweet dreams.”

Sam settled in on the ratty, threadbare bit of furniture, while Serene appeared to have no plans of calling it quits even as the evening progressed. She smoked and drank, and drank and smoked, and when her candles went out she continued in the dark.

Sam was in the fuzzy halfway state between dreaming and wakefulness when she began to hear muffled sobs from the center of the room. It sounded pitiful—if Sam did not already know the source of the sound, she would have assumed it was coming from a small child.

Sam was not able to endure it for long before she had to stand up and go over to the woman.

Serene was still suckling uselessly at an empty bottle in the dark.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, almost inaudibly. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

“All right,” Sam said, and made to take the bottle away. “Let’s get you to bed.” When Serene clung to the thing, she yanked it away with a firmer tug and discarded it with a heavy clinking of glass somewhere behind her.

“I didn’t mean it.” The woman clung to the front of Sam’s undershirt, pulling on it so hard she feared the fabric might tear. “Mom, I’m so sorry. Please don’t be mad at me. Mom, please wake up. I didn’t mean it…”

Serene fought weakly when Sam went to pick her up, but her strength, even more than the baby bird squeals she was making, reminded her of a feeble infant. She princess-carried the escort half-blindly through the darkened apartment, the other woman’s head lolling. By the time Sam got her under the musty and cloyingly perfumed sheets, Serene was nearly unconscious, mumbling feverishly under her breath.

“Do you want some water?” Sam asked, crouched by the woman’s bedside.

She could not make out the incoherent response, but felt the bed shifting with what Sam took as Serene firmly shaking her head. She filled a scoop anyway from the kitchen basin anyway, and forced the other woman to drink it all.

“Are you mad at me?” Serene asked, smacking her lips noisily.

“No,” Sam said, and stroked the woman’s clammy forehead. “I’m not mad at all. Now, you should try to get some sleep.”

“Don’t leave!”

“I’ll stay for a little while if you promise to try and sleep.”

“I’ll try.”

“Good.”

Not twenty seconds later, the escort let her head droop over the side of the bed and vomited onto the floor. Sam fetched a bedpan as she was sick over and over again, retching until only little drops of empty bile pattered into the slopping mass of chunky semi-fluid in the open ceramic container.

“Better?” Sam asked, and wiped the woman’s mouth with the bottom hem of her shirt.

Serene did not reply.

Sam began to think that she had finally fallen asleep when suddenly, the other woman murmured: “Are you still there?”

“I’m still here,” Sam confirmed, and shoved the bedpan back under the bed.

“I don’t feel well.”

“I can tell.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. You’re all right.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“You didn’t hurt me.”

“I did, and I’m so sorry. Now there’s blood everywhere.”

Sam wasn’t sure what Serene was remembering, but she kept stroking her chin and her hair regardless. “Shush now,” she said, putting on a soft, patient voice. “Do you want me to tell you a story? Will that help you sleep?”

“Yes,” Serene said after a little while. “Please do that.”

Sam searched her mind for something to talk about. When she thought back on her memories, she found many of them foggy and indistinct. She could no longer remember how many wrestling competitions she had won at school. Had it been three? Four? She barely remembered her father’s face—in the few memories she retained of him, he always looked angry or disappointed.

“I used to be a bit of a troublemaker back in the day,” Sam began, settling on a memory without really thinking about it. “A long time ago, in my old life. I guess you could say I was a bully.

“I used to worry that I was worse than everybody else, so I acted like I was better than everybody instead. Well, there was still one really weird kid who never talked to anyone, and we got paired up once for this geography paper. No, wait, it was a science paper.

“Somehow, he knew I wasn’t any good at science, even though I’d never spoken to the guy before, and I’d made sure not even my friends knew about that in the first place. Anyway, he offered to do all the work on the paper for both of us, and that made me really mad, so I broke his nose off the side of a desk.

“I never really got in trouble with the school for that kind of thing, because my dad would always get me out of it. He had this way of getting people to do what he told them to, and for whatever reason he thought fighting other people was good for me. The only time I ever saw him proud of me was when I won a fight, so I kept doing it.

“The kids I beat up used to be afraid of me—I guess most of the students probably were. But for whatever reason, this one nerdy kid wasn’t. He stared up at me from the floor with his bloody nose and his scuffed elbows, completely dead behind the eyes.

“I hated that. I felt like he was making fun of me or something. Or like he thought he was better than me. So I kept picking on that kid, trying to get a rise out of him, get him to cry, maybe. Something. But it was like he didn’t care at all. I’d beat him up, or do something nasty to him, and it was like he forgot I existed the moment he turned around.

“I hated that boy so much. I hated how superior he acted. I hated how it seemed like he could see right through me, to the insecure little girl who just wanted to impress her dad. I wanted to hurt him. Hell, I wanted to kill him—or that was what I thought at the time, anyway.

“I don’t even know when that changed, exactly. From wanting him to recognize I was better than him, to wanting him to recognize me at all. I started craving his attention until it felt like it was the only thing I thought about.

“Of course, I didn’t want him to know that, and I was terrified of what he would do if he found out—if he knew how weak I was. So, for a while I kept on being mean to him even when I didn’t want to at all, just because I was scared to do anything differently.

“In the end, he saw right through me—I know he did. But he didn’t say anything—he waited for me to get there on my own. Which I did, I guess, eventually. Kind of hilariously, it was only when I saw other people picking on him that I decided it was unacceptable. Like I said, he was kind of a weirdo, and since he never stood up for himself, people started picking on him over all kinds of stuff. I probably had a big hand in that, giving people ideas by doing what I did.

“I decided to do what I did best, and started kicking the shit out of anyone who threw that boy so much as a bad look. Which, in hindsight, probably wasn’t much better than what I’d been doing up to that point anyway, but I guess overcompensating is better than not changing at all.

“At least it started me down some kind of positive path. I think I’ve become a better person since those days, and it took finding someone I really wanted to protect to make that happen.

“Eventually the two of us started hanging out. We were kind of an odd fit, him being the book worm that he was, and me being like, a jock squared. But it worked out somehow, I guess, and soon enough we did everything together. He’d come to all my matches, and I’d play his stupid video games with him.

“I love him a lot. His name is Will, by the way. Did I tell you that?”

It was only when she stopped talking that Sam could make out Serene’s soft snoring. With a sheepish chuckle, she rounded the bed and laid down on the unoccupied side, trying not to think about why parts of the bedsheet felt a bit stiff. She didn’t want to go back to the couch in case the other woman started vomiting in her sleep.

Even though she had survived five years without him, now two days—one and a half, really—was enough to make her feel like she was about to explode with pent-up feelings.

I miss you, man.

She wished she could go see him. He was somewhere out there in the city, after all—it couldn’t be that far away from where she was now—but Mongrel had said that it was probably best not to bother him while he was working, and no matter how empty her arms felt without having him there to squeeze like a giant stress ball, she intended to stick to that. She didn’t want to ruin things for him with that lord fellow, after all.

Sam didn’t get much sleep that night.