Barn Dances & Second Chances [Kheft & then Open]

District Ten...

A town of broken hopes and dust...dust that gets everywhere, kicked up by booted feet of ranchers and the broad hooves of their work horses, it's like a plague as that fine dirt settles on everything fine and shiny, every hope and dream you have gettin' layered with the grime of a deadend life. It's as if the whole place has been rolling in the mud for so long that they've long given up on what it means to be clean and to smile.

Even today as I stand in the middle of the big tent they've erected for the closing event, the 'barn' dance, I watch as folks stomp there feet and swish their skirts and go jigging and boot slapping their way through the rough steps of a country line dance...and they can't even smile now.

Why am I back here where the dream ends?

It's been two years since I put this place behind me, and I didn't ever expect to return...not of my own will leastways. I've had plenty of sweating nightmares with Elias face looming over me, and I just know that he's tracked me down, ready to drag me back and break me further. Not that I had much left to break in those days. There was nothing left, nothing that I could clutch at and hide from him, nothing to call my own. He made sure of it. With the cruel ways he learned to break in a horse that held onto it's spirits, he'd crushed my own under one tread of those muddy boots...and I'd been left just as dirty and cracked as every other person in the damn town.

“"You have to go, Wren. You can't hide here, cowering in the woods forever. You want to be strong, then you have to claim it back from him." What could I ever claim from Elias?[ I was weak in front of him, terrified, damaged...but she'd been so insistant, and maybe somewhere deep I knew that I'd never be whole until I faced up to the man who'd taken me apart to the very foundation.

I'm not that same girl...I'm not.

But there was only one way to be sure, one way to forever blot his face out of my dreams. I was tired of the power he still managed to hold over me, so here I was.

The colorful skirts of Sunday best danced their falsely cheerful patterns around me, and alcohol scented the tent with its pretense at escape. I watched as a few couples stole away to make a disappearance into the night air, and I wished desperately that I could follow, shed the closeness of humanity's press around me. But the tent is where all the girls would convene to showcase their looks, hoping for an attraction to help transcend the dust, and pretty faces meant this is where Elias would be as well.

“Howdy there darlin’, why don’t you see how a real cowboy rides…?”

A crude grasp made itself familiar with my hip, dragging me a step backwards into the sturdy frame of a man that was intensely and despicably known.

In that one instant, I felt the dust rolling from his tongue, smearing from his fingers to dull my skin. I was falling back into the mud of my old life with nothing more than a rough hand to push my head down. My breath was a long, coarse gasp in a suddenly constricted throat, and the prey instinct to run and never stop running.

I turned and faced him, his reddened cheeks and eyes glazed with liquor and lust. A sudden wildfire streak of indignation hit. This man would not humiliate me again, not ever again. So I mustered ever shred of confidence that I had left, ever thread that had been repaired and rewoven since I crawled away from this godforsaken district, and I stabbed at Elias with a carefully sharpened smile.

"Hi honey, I'm home."

His words tainted the air, staining it dark and filling it with the heaviness that had broken me once, had beaten at my ears and naïve, foolish heart until I was bowed and wilted beneath his fingers. It was, after all, how Elias wanted me. He gloried in that ultimate control, in taking what was fresh and sweet and corrupting it, fermenting its flavor into something spoiled to the point of his own intoxication. Maybe I’d been the first, but I could swear on a stack of Bibles that I wasn’t the last. Men like Elias get a taste for something and they crave it ever after. I’d seen him reaching abroad even during my months with him, he’d begun soiling our bed with whores at first, and then other girls like me who had been blind enough to let him get his talons dug in.

He thought I was the same version of myself that had crawled away to lick her wounds and grieve—the Wren who stood meekly by while his mouth spewed vitriol like a web of pain meant to catch and bind me for his own pleasure.

I am not that little Wren anymore, that timid little bird, I’ve grown, Elias. I’ve got my own claws now.

“I didn’t come back for you.” But my words are drowned out in the torrent of evil he spouts, and despite my very best intentions, I listen. I let his words land and take root, creeping up like choke vines to wind around and begin seeking cracks in me to exploit.

Old, ugly, ruined…unwanted.

All those calling cards he used to lay on me, and I believed him. After all, my family never did come back when they must have discovered me gone all those years ago…they left me with him. And Lark?

You were baggage to her, weighing her down. Useless, Wren. He’d made her open her eyes, see what she’d been in denial of her whole life before. A piss poor trade for a horse.

I want to strike at him, because he’s managed in moments to gouge chunks out of the walls I spent two years building up. I’m standing in front of him, and it’s like I never left, I feel the chains clinking on my wrists again, and my gaze seek out his boots where they were trained to focus. Smoke fills my vision, stinging at my nostrils and punishing my eyes until I squeeze them shut to block it out. Why in damnation did I come back here?

“Because it takes exceptional strength to look at what you fear most and look away again; a coward will keep his eyes closed, and a wretch will never tear them away.”

That was why. I came to look at Elias…and look away.

Somewhere I found the strength to keep the tears locked away, and enough control to stop my hands from striking his face and never letting up until that smug triumph was lost in the bruises I wanted to inflict.

“As I recall, I did the leaving, Elias, not you.” Every word I managed to press past the parched expanse of my throat was an achievement, one that made the next that much easier. “If I were you, I’d keep my voice down, don’t want the whole District knowing you’re married, much less that she ran away from you.” My porcelain smile stayed intact, glued to my lips with beads of desperation. He was just drunk enough that maybe he wouldn’t see how he still swayed me, still terrified the shit out of me. “I’m a trained healer now, and I’ve taken work and a room in town.”

I looked into Elias’ face as it approached, and his venom-laden breath stank of whiskey and bitter living. I could see the hard living written clear in the scars and pockmarks of his face, I knew each one with an ugly intimacy. From the burn on his jaw where an ornery horse had kicked the branding rod back at him and set him to cussing for hours, even after I’d bathed the angry red, spot and smeared salve across it. I’d wanted so badly in those days to make him want me there, to see me as a good thing, though our union was unlooked for. I hadn’t yet realized how deep his crookedness had travelled, how far I’d have to fall before I stopped needing to please this man.

My eyes didn’t shrink from the contact, and I felt my smile solidify into something real, a burst of amusement breaking through the end of his threats to ring with soft tones in my quiet chuckle.

“Oh no? And what more can you do, husband? Send someone else to do your dirty work and soil their hands for you? Well it wouldn’t be the first time, and we both know that. No, you’ve done your worst, and a knife across the throat or a gun to the head…those are just niceties between us.”

His threats were empty when I looked at them, because it was all done before. I’d been broken once, and I’d seen his tricks, the fact that he thought to intimidate me with nothing but the same was a bluff. Elias Poers was scared of little old Wren. And that knowledge was the sweetest taste on my tongue. Power. Something I’d never had before, and he’d just put the weapon in my hand.

“So you send all the king’s messengers…just make sure to warn them that I’m armed and with nothing left to lose. Which is something I can’t say for you. This empire you built, I own it in half. Remember that.”

I couldn't drag my eyes away from his face, it was as if any moment that I looked away was an opportunity for him to break through the shaky walls I was building up and bracing in place. He was strong, and I was brittle, hardened but prone to shatter. I wish I was bulletproof, wearing my invulnerability like a suit of armor, because I was so weary of hurting...so very tired.

A new voice rose to join the stuttering conversation between us, but I didn't hazard a glance, I knew Elias' type already, and I dreaded seeing what poor girl he'd duped into replacing me. Her words were flippant, petty and irritable as though she had some reason to be jealous. When had Elias ever been a 'catch'? But then, when you are poor and hopeless, wallowing in the dust, then even a miserable, twisted boy like Elias is something more than what you got. So I looked at her, burdened by morbid curiosity.

Dear god, she's just a child...

I had been young when my folks married me off like so much cattle for trade to the ranch owner from District Ten, but this girl could be no older than my younger sister the last I saw her. She glared back at my assessment with nose wrinkled judgementally, but I couldn't dredge up an ounce of resentment. If she'd been growing up with Elias for an influence, I was surprised she wasn't worse off than she appeared. I ached for this girl that I'd never before laid eyes on, and I wanted to rip her away from his side and somehow shield her from what I knew he was capable of. His words were proof of every concern as he slid his way down the slope of perversion.

"I'm Wren, Elias' wife." The words lept from from my tongue and I couldn't snatch them back, but maybe it was better, I knew it would enfuriate him to hear me attached to his name so publically. I never had the opportunity to find out what his response, or hers for that matter, might be. A lanky youth I'd never seen before tried to edge his way around the small cluster we made near the bar, and the next thing I knew he was tumbling into me, and his drink flew like a cascade glittering drops to splash directly in Elias' face and slid down to soak into his shirt front.