Chapter Text
Garlean.
She sits propped up on her infirmary cot, Macchia’s great blunt slobbery head in her lap, and the whispers follow her. Everyone knows who she is now. What she is. She’s surprised that they’ve even allowed her to recover this far, that she hasn’t been dragged from her cot and beaten the rest of the way to death in public as a warning. After what the Imperials have done to the Reach, she’s sure they’re thinking about it.
The bleached linen curtains around her rustle faintly in the breeze, but they can’t drown out the voices. Maybe it’s just her ribs that hurt. Maybe it’s her heart.
Rotten little sneak.
Probably a spy.
Should we alert high command?
Too late, ‘s already been done. They’ll be ‘round.
Good. Maybe it’ll free up the bed.
She pets Macchia’s ears and breathes softly, shallowly. Anything else is too painful. The bullet struck a rib and lodged there, cracking it, and even with it taped up she’s on strict orders not to do anything strenuous. As though they care. The worst part, she thinks hazily, is that she’d been making friends. Her fellow smiths in the crafters’ tent—Rolfe, K’sanjha, Terec—stopped by soon after she was injured, but even they’ve stopped visiting. They probably realized they have better friends. Friends who weren’t lying to them all this time.
Footsteps. Macchia lifts her head and whines. She holds very still.
A Roegadyn she doesn’t know comes around the curtain. His eyes are dark and serious, but there’s a warm light in them she instantly doesn’t trust. “Miss...Brewster, is it?”
She nods. They’ve been giving her drugs for the pain, and she’s not sure what she might have let slip.
He pulls up a folding chair that creaks under his weight, produces a notebook from some pocket of his armor, and leans back. Back, not forward. Giving her space. “My name is Brazen Brook. I have some questions for you, but before we start...”
Ah. Here it comes.
“I’d like to thank you.”
She chokes out, “What?!”
He blinks at her. “We have no less than six witnesses to you beating an Imperial centurion to death with the contents of a toolbox. We have six additional character witnesses demanding you be rewarded for your hard work arming the Resistance. What did you think was going to happen to you?”
She blinks at him, barely believing her own ears. “...Figured you were gonna finish th’ job th’ Imperials started? That’s what everyone says you lot do!” It’s never even treated as gossip or rumor back home, only ever unvarnished fact. Her people fight like voidsent because they know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Eorzeans will tear them to pieces if they fall into enemy hands alive.
But Brazen Brook is shaking his head firmly. “No. No, Miss Brewster. We don’t do that to our POWs, and even if we did, you’re not one of them. You’re one of us.”
One of us. One of us.
Tears well up in her eyes, and she lets them fall.