Rings of Rhea - Part 1.3

His ability to sleep has always confused him. He can trek through the structure for long stretches of time without rest, but the moment he gets hurt or overexerts himself, he needs to rest at the soonest possible junction like a battery needing to recharge. With no means of telling time, he knows not for how long his rests last. Sometimes, however, he dreams.

Mostly, the dreams are of the structure— composed of filthy realism and invariably terrifying— while other times they are a blur of activity in places of color and cleanliness he has never seen. He never dwells on these visions, either due to his inability to remember them or lack of care. If there are indeed places like those seen in his dreams, he rages at being "born" here instead.

Craig feels his eyelids tug apart in response to the glaring brightness of the florescent lighting above. He groans at the oppressive luminescence and turns away from it to face the hole in the wall. For a moment, he cannot imagine someone being on the other side. After staring for several blinks, he crawls over to it. Looking past the ragged concrete edges and solid bars of metal, he views the adjacent room from every angle he can before his eyes finally fall upon the woman’s figure. She, too, rests on the floor, her breaths soft and quiet as her chest rises up and down, her head cradled atop a wadded up article of clothing. For the first time, Craig sees her face.

She was roughly his age, if he were to guess, with her hair cut down to a ragged shortness not dissimilar from his own. From his angle, he sees several long scars across the left side of her head. As if from the claws of a beast, they part the hair on her scalp with a series of lightning-bolt lines of uneven bare skin. One of the scars extends just above her left eye, very much erasing the eyebrow.

No stranger to scars, he finds particular interest in her clothing. Her top is a rather basic sleeveless shirt of neutral color tucked into her pants, which are long and frayed with a many-pocketed belt keeping them from falling off of her hips. Her legs sport solid metal armor plates that cover her shins and feet, something Craig would have been grateful for several times during his trip through the structure.

Off to the side, Craig sees a pair of ragged fingerless gloves in a pile one the floor, presumably discarded before they touched their hands together. Thinking of his own clothing, looted from a dust-old cadaver near the beginning of his travels, he wonders just where and how she procured such human-sized equipment in a world of machines.

As he begins to survey her room, his eyes fall upon her bag; an elongated and threadbare over-the-shoulder design. After some comparison, he estimates the length of the bag to be as long and wide as her legs if she stands with her feet together.

“Adele,” he whispers over to her, hoping to wake her gently. No response— not even a twitch—as she continues to sleep. The sudden fear that she might not be sleeping crawls into his mind. Despite the obvious evidence that she is alive and breathing, the integral fear of renewed solitude takes over his senses. “Hey, Adele!” he calls, more loudly than before.

She stirs, turning over and away from him. Upon seeing the other side of her face, he feels a dip in his stomach. Across the right side of her head is a long fiery burn scar. Her ear a shriveled-up flap of skin, that side of her head is all but barren of hair on the scalp. The very outer edge of her eye is sealed shut, making it look slightly smaller than the other eye. He wonders why he was unable to notice such terrible scarring earlier when they were very much face-to-face.

With a sigh, Craig pulls away from the hole, feeling he should not wake her until she is ready, and looks around his own room. It is mostly barren, save for the metallic door and a small slanting shelf in the corner. The corners of the ceiling reveal a series of pipes and cables, some of which lead into the light fixture above him while others lead absolutely nowhere or through a wall. He has long since given up wondering where so much electricity comes from to power the structure. From what little knowledge he has regarding electricity, he knows that a massive amount is needed to power the thousands of lights in the thousands of buildings within the city, to say nothing of the hundreds of mountainous facilities whose purposes he cannot fathom.

As he has done several times before, he sits with his back against a wall and listens to things. He knows not what he has always been listening for, but it became a habit every time he was not running for his life. A slight hum of the fluorescent light above him acts like a tiny needle of sound through his ears. Off in the distance, he feels the slight vibrations of machinery, most likely stationary ones without legs or claws, reverberating their mechanical functions throughout the buildings. The clinking of machinery fills his head, plus the faint hiss of what might be a leaky pipe.

Moving on, he eventually hears a sort of soft, slow, rhythmic sound. The harder he listens, the more comforting it becomes. His shoulders lose their tension, his jaw stops clenching, and he uncrosses his arms to place his hands on his knees.

“So that’s what another’s breath sounds like,” he mumbles to himself, opening his eyes and glancing back at the hole in the wall behind him.

As if on cue, he hears sounds of shuffling from the other side. Stretching his neck to look, he sees Adele sitting on her knees, rubbing her eyes. “Ich schlief?” she says with eyes half closed as she peers around the room with a yawn.

“Good morning,” Craig says with a smile, though he cannot remember ever experiencing anything called “morning.”

Adele nearly jumps out of her skin, a practiced aggressive stance turning her towards the source of the noise with bent legs and readied fists. She releases a sigh of relief upon seeing that it was just Craig. With a raised eyebrow, she thinks about what he had just said. “’Gude morn-ing?’ Ah, tut was dieser Bedeutung?” She can do nothing but furrow her brow at his words, wracking her brain attempting to translate them with naught but intuition.

With a chuckle and a push against the floor, he stands up, grabbing his trusty pipe from the floor on the way up. He taps it against the wall several times to warn Adele away from it. With all the strength he can muster, he winds up and swings, working at wearing away the parts of the concrete that are already broken in order to chip away a bigger hole than before.

“Hier gehen wir wieder,” Adele says from the other side before Craig hears her going to work as well. Adrenaline swells within his chest, spreading out to his arms and legs like a shot of electricity. With his next swing he breaks off a chunk of the wall the size of his fist. Between swings, it falls away as if to make room for their dual rampage. From what he can tell from his side, Adele is having similar— if not more— success than he with whatever she is using to break down the barrier between them.

During this, Craig absently muses on the thought of love. He knows nothing of the woman, yet finds himself deeply attracted to the idea of being near her. Knowing himself more than most— as least, he suspects this to be so— he brushes it off as a need rather than a want. Without knowing the number of months or years he has traveled, he cannot count how many times he longed for the presence of another beside him, be it a lover or companion. For him, either one would have been a grand thing to have since long ago.

It was only after the hole got slightly larger that Craig realized that Adele is using the butt of a long metallic ballistic weapon to smash the wall into dust. At first, he considers asking her to use something else available, but recalls that she must have been using it to break through the wall when they first approached the unbreakable door.

The shining, reflective door stands like a beacon of stability, never shaking as they wage war upon the less-robust stone. Letting himself rest for a minute or so, he approaches the door and taps it with his pipe, his arm nearly limp as he does. A blast akin to a small explosion bursts from the point of contact, the pipe jolting backward. Craig pulls it close to inspect it as if it would about to fall apart. No damage is apparent along its length, though it was already a rusty and dirty improvised weapon.

He hears Adele call his name from the other side between strikes— her gloves on her hands this time— and angrily strike at her side of the barrier. Looking over at her, Craig walks back over to the opening. Upon closer inspection, the area of her destruction has exceeded that of his own. He furrows his brow, clutches his weapon with both hands, and strikes the cement with all he has. Deciding to make it a race, he ups his pace and crushes the dusty wall away with feverish frequency. Adele raises an eyebrow at this renewed vigor, but smiles nonetheless.

***

The pair stands perfectly still. Exhaustion enveloping them in hot breaths, both expect the other to go through, or speak, or act first. Craig feels his heart pounding inside his rib cage as if the organ were trying to escape. He swallows between breaths. As he is about to say something, Adele kneels down in front of the hole, a look of fright in her eyes. With one hand, she reaches out towards him. Craig, after a few false starts, kneels down as well and stretches out his hand. For the first time without walls to block them or bars to obstruct them, their hands touch, beginning with the fingertips, until their fingers slowly, almost bitterly, slip between each others' in a solid grip. Though he was unable to tell before, Adele’s gloved hands are much smaller than his own, and when he feels the callused stub of her missing finger, his heart sinks like a stone as he wonders just how much she has been through.

The two shuffle along the floor until their faces are inches apart, and beneath the ragged cracked wall and sharp broken pipes, both fall into the arms of the other in physical and mental enervation. The ocean of Craig’s mind, ravaged by storms his entire life, settles into a sea of gentleness and relief. For the first time, warmth overtakes Craig as he feels her body weight against his and his against hers. A weight neither sharp nor hard, rough nor broken. Tears once again begin to well up in his eyes as they squeeze each other ever tighter. As his breathing grows ragged, he hears a similar sort of sound from Adele.

Laughter?

“Wha—?” he pulls away as she continues her attempts to stifle her bellowing, only for chuckles to escape her smiling lips and tears to leak through her tightly shut eyes. “What’s there to laugh about?”

“Hahaha! Ich noch verstehe nicht!” Her words are barely recognizable to Craig, even for what is to him already gibberish. Seeing the tears in her eyes despite the volume of her laughter, Craig sees himself in her. She thought she would never meet a living human being in her entire life, but here sits Craig, right in front of her with just as many tears in his eyes as she. This must have been her first opportunity to partake in the act of laughter.

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A/N: Sorry for the long delay. I'll try to edit and update this quicker (the next 20k words are pretty much finished right now).

Again, I used an online text translator for the German, so please don't hold it against me for the terrible use of the language.

Thank you for reading, as always, and constructive criticism is much appreciated.