Chapter Text
She hurtles through the trees, heart hammering in her chest, lungs exploding, leg muscles burning with exertion. Her heart skips a beat as her foot catches a twisted root and she stumbles, landing hard on her front, winding herself. There is no time. She struggles to her feet and lurches on, ears straining to hear the worst. That she is caught. That it’s over and she is done for. She hears nothing, but relief would be too dangerous an emotion to indulge right now. Complacency has burned her before. She must keep going and never stop, never look back, never pause to catch a breath. A stitch claws at her side and she presses her palm firmly against it, urging herself on.
***
After an eternity of pushing herself to near collapse, she sees that the trees are thinning and she can hear… something. Voices. Up ahead. The weak morning sun has found a gap in the clouds and through the low-lying mist, she can see two men working in a field. She ducks down low, trying to control her breathing. She must not be found. What if they sent her back there? A sort of shutter slams down in her brain, instantly cordoning off that unhelpful train of thought. She flits stealthily through the forest’s edges, from cover to cover, watching. One of the men is very tall and lean, imposing in stature. The other is shorter, stouter and wildly unkempt - almost as bad as she must look right now. She hasn’t seen a mirror in… she doesn’t know.
The taller one seems to be exercising every ounce of patience he can muster as he tries to supervise whatever the smaller man is doing. She catches him in an unguarded moment as the wild man busies himself with something on the ground. He exhales a heavy, long-suffering sigh and runs a palm over his weary face. She feels something shift and loosen deep inside her, a dangerous and unexpected softening towards this man. She shies away from the feeling, hardened and raw all at once from her hard-earned and deep-seated mistrust of all other living things. The mistrust is all she knows, the only thing she can rely on, the only thing that has ever kept her safe.
Exhaustion overwhelms her, snapping at the heels of hopelessness and despair. What now? What was the point of all that running, all that desperation to survive? She is basically dead anyway.