I Can't Sleep, So Here Are Drabbles

[masterofmidgets]

 

He is six the first time he does it.

 It is market day, and when they reach the town square he darts from his mother’s side to join the other small boys clustered around the fountain. Andras, whose father is the baker, raises a hand in greeting and –

 
--his vision goes sharp and jagged around the edges, like broken crystal, and the air shimmers as though he is peering through gauze but he barely notices, riveted by Andras’ jeering face. “Mad Madric!” he shouts, grinning as if he’d hit upon something clever. “Moldy musty mad Madric!” and shoves him, hard, sending him tumbling into the dirt, and laughs while he does it –

 
Madric pushes him into the fountain.

 His mother and Andras’ mother both come running at the shouting, and Madric protests that Andras started it calling him names while all the other boys swear Andras never said a thing. Neither of them believe him, and Andras’ mother glares at him and mutters darkly as his own mother drags him away. When he gets home his father thrashes him double, for fighting and then lying about it.

 By the time he understands that he is seeing things that haven’t happened yet, everyone in the village knows that Madric is a hot-tempered and spiteful child, lashes out at people for no reason, and none of the other boys’ parents will let them play with him.
 

All of the men in his barracks were runaways, in one way or another. It was what the army was for – boys who had too much idealism and adventure-lust to stay home behind the plow or not enough sense to follow a trade, refugees of broken hearts and family feuds and ugly unspoken pasts that woke them up gasping in the middle of the night, men who had chosen the uncertainty of a soldier’s life over the work camps or the noose.

 Everyone knew the army was where you went when you wanted to escape and didn’t have anywhere to go.

 Huddled around the dim glow of the fire, hands wrapped around battered tin cups of cheap beer or hot tea, they traded stories. Most of the time they were stories about old battles, old comrades; they tried to pretend they’d all been born soldiers, taking their first breaths in cadence, teethed on a helmet and used a sword as a rattle. But sometimes, before a battle they thought maybe they wouldn’t come back from, they talked about Before. Where they’d come from. Why they’d left.

 When it gets around to him and they ask what he was running away from, he hunches his shoulders and doesn’t meet anyone’s eyes.

 “Not running from,” he mumbles, and concentrates on polishing his sword until he can see a sliver of his reflection in the narrow blade.

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For purposes of clarification, Madric is the protagonist of a novel I'm hoping to write. He's a travelling fortune teller. The tarot readings he does are mostly bullshit, but he really can see the future. Also he's kind of a bitch. The unnamed character in the second drabble is Soldier Boy, who will have a name eventually, from the same story. He and Madric go on the run together after he saves Madric's life. Then they have sex.

Comments

[telyanofcelore.livejournal.com]

Hmm... I'm not entirely sure I understand the second drabble. He's not running from anything, but actually joined the army for the sake of joining the army? He's got some sort of plan in mind? He, too, has a sort of foretelling and knew that if he joined the army he'd find the love of his life in the form of a rather bitchy Seer?

[masterofmidgets.livejournal.com]

I'm not entirely sure either! I prodded him and asked what he was running away from and that was the only answer he would give. I don't think he's a seer...

[telyanofcelore.livejournal.com]

*giggles* It would be a bit much if he were...