Beauty & Cruelty

by Meredith Katz

  Cruelty knew when Talia came less by the pulsing tightness on her fingers or the sleepy groan and dazed toss of Talia's body's head and more by the way that constant voice finally strangled, choked into a whimper, a long silence, an exhaled "Oh…"

  The realization spurred her own movements on, hips grinding and catching, writhing fast against her. Orgasm twisted in her, a sharp almost jabbing pressure wrenched tight, leaving her shuddering and grasping at Talia's thighs with her own, before throbbing away into a strange quiet sadness, like some kind of anger had poured out of her and left only a hazy, floating wistfulness behind.

  She stilled her hips, drew several ragged breaths.

  "Cruelty?" Talia breathed.

  And suddenly, still straddling her, still shuddering through the aftermath, Cruelty needed to leave. She knew even as the urge hit her that it was absurd. At this point, there was no way to interpret any of it except as running away. And she was naked, and Talia was naked, and that was absurd already. She fought the urge, folding her hands into fists, looking down at Talia's sleeping form, at her own moisture-wrinkled fingers, at the place where the curls at her groin met the soft thickness of Talia's thigh.

  "Rue…?" Talia asked her again, softly.

  And for a moment she recognized it as her name. That was the feeling inside her right then, a strange, churning ruefulness, a sense of self not tied up in the sharp pinpricks of thorn and needle but in something softer like this, a body under hers that she had transformed in revenge but had wanted her regardless.

  "That's not my name, Beauty," she said, voice a little ragged.

  She dressed first, thought it might be best to give Talia the worry that she might leave her like this, on rumpled sheets and naked. To think about the possible embarrassment in case another Archetype came in to ask for orders regarding the humans in the castle. In case a human came in to meet the captor caring for them. Cruelty wasn't going to leave her like that, but it might be nice to make Talia think that she would.

  Talia didn't seem concerned, though; her image looked spent and satisfied, hair tangled, cheeks flushed, bright eyes gone hazy and sleepy—a strange mix, Cruelty thought; her image's eyes had always seemed so wakeful even while her body had slept. "Rue, are you leaving?"

  "I'm leaving," Rue agreed, and sat Talia's body up. Careful with that hand again, she pulled Talia's nightgown back on, first one arm, then another, tugged her head through and spread her hair out, lifted Talia's hips to tuck the nightgown under her properly. She felt like she was tucking Talia in for the night, an absurd thought. "I want to see what things are like in the human world with these disappearances."

  "You're running…"

  Talia had said it; then it was as obvious as Cruelty felt. She made a face as she smoothed Talia's nightgown down; there was a sticky spot on her thigh, and she fetched a washcloth, wiped that down, then tucked Talia's nightgown around her again, properly. "I'm working."

  "Come back to me," Talia said. Cruelty couldn't bear to look at her image, at Talia's self, to see that sated satisfaction again or, worse, whatever it had become. Instead, she looked at the pretty picture of Talia's sleeping body.

  Talia looked completely at rest, undisturbed. Cruelty didn't think it would be obvious to anyone what they had done, and ducked her head at her own uncertain feelings around that.

  "I won't make you any promises," she told Talia instead.

  "I wish you would."

  "We don't always get what we want," she said and left.

  As she headed out, as she walked downstairs and out the door, as she went back to her castle so she could step between space in the easier paths she had already made, she felt like people were looking at her. Had they been loud? She knew they hadn't been. Was she disheveled? She was sure she wasn't or, if there was any roughness in her hair, it wasn't unusual, not with the way she walked around outside these days. She was imagining it, she thought. Self-consciousness was a new feeling and not one she was sure she liked.

  She wanted to get away from this self for a moment, get away from the expectations of who she was as Cruelty, not when she wasn't sure any more who that was. It wasn't that going back to work was a bad thing, of course. 'Checking human reactions to the disappearances', exploring how their plan was working… It was a good excuse to tell anyone else who asked.

  But knowing that neither she nor Talia would buy it felt strange, and that feeling didn't fade as she stepped between worlds.

  Chapter Twelve

  It might have been running away, but she had expected a little more to run to.

  Her house was, in a word, trashed. The piles of books, already precarious, were scattered everywhere; pages were torn out through incidental damage, and mud was tracked all over the floors and over open pages. Bugs crawled, worms sticking out of an occasional clump of mud, centipedes skittering away from her approach. The door must have been left ajar for a while to be this full of wildlife, she thought, so perhaps she was lucky that it was just this. She sighed, crouching down, and picked up one paperback that had a chunk of the middle missing and its spine broken.

  Well, she thought, that was what she got for turning her house into a gate so haphazardly. She hadn't even got the place ready for visitors.

  Pretense at working on the plan completely pushed aside, she ducked down and began sorting things. Damaged books got placed more toward the main areas; the books that had managed to escape it were tucked away more firmly in corners. It was a bit late, perhaps, but it still felt uncomfortable to leave them out to be trampled on. She'd relied on these for many years, and could rely on them many years longer if she had to. They weren't something she could easily disregard.

  She slowly worked her way through the apartment clearing a path for any further travelers, heading eventually into the bedroom. Here there were more footprints, her bed in disarray. She pursed her lips, tugging the sheets up; as she leaned over to do so, she noticed the flashing light on her answering machine.

  Although she didn't expect it to be anything of import, she pressed the button half for something to listen to as she tidied. The first few messages were dull—hang-ups, a coworker asking for a shift to be covered, auto-dialer, and so on. Then:

  "Hey Rue! This is Mandy at Burger Village. Sorry, I know this is a little weird, but Rick hasn't shown up to any of his shifts lately and his family says he hasn't come home in a few days. So... we're all pretty worried, especially with the news the way it's been lately. We've got the police on it and all, but I'm just trying to contact people who'd been with our store recently just to keep an eye out. If you've seen him, drop us a line so we can add it to this file and hopefully track him down. Hope you're doing okay!"

  She pursed her lips, pausing with a book in her hand as she considered the call. The answering machine continued on to more hang-ups and dial tones.

  Suddenly suspicious, she began to search back through her house all over again. Silverfish scurried for cover, millipedes darted back into corners, ants returned to holes they'd found for themselves. Once bugs got into a place, getting them out was the hard part. She couldn't determine when they'd arrived, but her place had been kept carefully clean before this. The amount of them in there, and the speed with which they'd taken over, certainly had its implications.

  It would be a sort of fitting irony, she thought dryly.

  It was mostly the thought of Talia's reaction that kept her from popping back immediately to check. She said she'd research certain things, and if she rushed back without it, it would be—well, embarrassing, at the least. So without intending to get terribly in-depth, she pulled up news sites, bulletins, message boards.

  Naturally enough, no fairy tale abductions were being reported, although she did catch a few terms that had a slight supernatural air once or twice in some media outlets—"vanished into thin air", "spirited away", that sort of thing. That implication was to be expected when they hadn't returned anyone yet; people who vanished without a trace were a mystery. But the disapp
earances, albeit a small trickle compared to the population, had been noticed all over the world in the cities she'd left the gates in, and there was a trend in all kinds of news outlets for a growing sense of concern and accusations of some sort of world-wide crime organization.

  Perhaps she had her start at becoming an urban legend, if nothing else.

  There didn't seem more to do to look into it; the news was what it was, and nobody had come back home, so the story couldn't update. Cruelty tucked a last few books away, thought about mopping up, then sighed. More dirt would just be tracked in; there wasn't much point.

  She shifted back over to her castle.

  There were a number of places she could check for him—her own castle was a given, but there were other places to find refugees. Sixth's cabin, the camp outside the Beast's castle, perhaps somewhere wandering the wilderness. She decided to check Talia's castle first since it did seem to have the most people in a single confined space. And although she had to spend a little while pushing through the crowds and checking side hallways before she spotted the familiar figure, she did spot him.

  Rick also spotted her and beelined—literally, a swarm trailing after him—toward her.

  "You're really here," he said. His tone was equally mixed between disbelief and rage. "You really came here."

  "I'm from here," she said, flatly. "You followed me to my house?"

  "You're some kind of monster," he said. He was speaking too loudly, and people were turning to face them. "You—what is this? Some kind of fairy tale curse?"

  "Yeah," she said. She kept her voice even, kept it low despite her desire to raise it to match. "That's what it is. Well done. Well identified."

  His face froze in a scoff. "You... cursed me. Like some stupid fucking story. As if I was the one causing the problem there? I'm a manager. I have to keep control of my employees, Rue!"

  She tilted her chin up. "I won't be disrespected," she said.

  "Disrespected," he said. His voice began to get louder. "Disrespected?! You've ruined my life because you couldn't suck it up like anyone else? So, you weren't able to pretend to be human well enough, and I'm the one who gets it?"

  "It's not my problem that other people would take the shit that you gave us," she said coolly, and started to turn.

  He grabbed her hair, yanked, spun her back around. "You take this curse off me right fucking now," he said to her, furious. "You know I don't deserve this, you know you're just completely irrational—"

  "Don't touch me."

  His hand let go of her hair, only to touch her cheek instead, full-palmed, a deliberate response to her order. Her skin crawled; he'd always been touchy with his employees, and suddenly his casual touches seemed, in her memory, more lingering than she'd acknowledged before. "Why not? You decided to do whatever you wanted with me, so I'll—"

  She had many possible things she could do in that moment. Magic was a very real option, some kind of attack spell, or at least binding. In retrospect, she'd think of a variety of ways she could have driven him off and awed the crowd around them at the same time, a variety of ways she could have given them a story to take home.

  But she punched him instead, knuckles driving hard into his cheek, knocking him back—not quite off his feet, but away. He let out a squawk of pain as his hand came up to his already reddening face.

  Knuckles smarting, she shook her hand out. Maybe it was for the better this way, she thought. Turning a spell on one of the refugees here could tip the balance. If anyone asked that was a good enough explanation, if not the true reason why she'd done it in the heat of the moment.

  "I told you not to touch me," she said, voice tight, and turned again to go.

  The crowd had gathered around them in a ring as if expecting a fight, and she shouldered through a little uncomfortably. Some were whispering uneasily; one girl patted her shoulder with a muttered, Yeah, show him, which earned a flashed smile she couldn't hide. But she was uneasy still when she made up the stairs to Talia's room.

  "Rue! You came back so quickly!" Talia exclaimed with delight, at the same time as Cruelty said,

  "So there's somebody we should kick out of the castle."

  Talia's mouth worked slightly, the excitement on her face fading into confusion. "What do you mean?" she protested. "We can't just kick someone out unless they've been hurting the other humans down there or—something like that. I mean, the situation's already tense."

  "Well, I hate him."

  "We can't kick someone out just because you don't like them!" Talia said. "You hate a lot of people! Look, sweet Rue—"

  "No, don't do that," Cruelty said. "We're not doing pet names. We're not in a relationship. Don't do that."

  Rather than hurt, the expression on Talia's face grew annoyed. "Cruelty, you'd have to give a better reason than that. Is he starting fights? Is he threatening the Archetypes downstairs or the other humans?"

  "Well…" Cruelty made a face. "No. Not yet. I mean, he threatened me, but…"

  "Why did he threaten you?"

  "What, if he has a good enough reason, it's acceptable?"

  Talia crossed her arms, relentless. Not at all enjoying the feeling of being pushed around like this, Cruelty let out a huff, blowing a lock of her hair out of her face.

  "When you came with me to the real world," Cruelty said, slowly, crossing her own arms in return, and glancing toward the window rather than looking directly at that stern expression, "you remember a guy who had a confrontation with me? An old boss of mine at work?"

  "The one you cursed?"

  "I—yes." This seemed unfair. "The one I cursed."

  Talia pursed her lips. "And he's the one who's here?"

  "I strongly suspect he followed me to my home," Cruelty said. "He already was hanging around my other workplace, right? Which means he wasn't particularly against the idea of tracking me down. So he had to have followed me back and then got sucked into the gate there. He confronted me already, but he's not letting it go. Doesn't that creep you out? What exactly did he plan to do if he caught me alone at home?"

  "Well," Talia said pointedly, "you cursed him. That's hard to let go of. I can attest to that."

  Talia was too innocent, Cruelty thought. Anyone with actual experience would understand the implicit danger. "Unlike you, he deserved it."

  That hung in the air for a few seconds, both of them almost examining it and trying to figure out how the other one would react to its sudden presence.

  Then Talia sighed. "Look, if he does do anything more, I'll have people deal with him. But honestly, if you go around antagonizing people, you need to expect them to be antagonized."

  "It's not that I don't expect them to be antagonized," Cruelty said. "I just don't know what he's going to do. He's unpredictable, so having him right here is dangerous."

  "Mm," Talia said, strained. "I just... look, the situation's fragile. We can't toss him out of this world by himself without raising the fact that we could let them all out. We're lying to them, Cruelty, and that's not something we can let be known. But in a little while, we'll move all of them out and solve the problem. It'll get him out of your way and help us keep a high-level turnover. We do need to keep exposing new people to this environment without vastly overwhelming us. I don't think we want to keep them here much longer anyway, just long enough to give them a real taste of what it's like here. So let's play it quiet for now, and endure it. When we roll them out, he'll roll out with them. All right?"

  "Fine," Cruelty muttered.

  It was a tolerable compromise. And, more to the point, Talia was right. Right now, they couldn't afford to let the unease here become something dangerous; the situation was volatile. Deliberately so, but there weren't enough Archetypes to do much if it erupted. Waiting was the best bet; getting ready to throw them back out. A few would still stay, any who were claimed by part of a story here. But everyone else would end up back where they belonged with this experience to carry forward.

  "I should check on Martin
," Cruelty muttered, reminded.

  "Ah? Why?" Talia asked, voice suddenly a little uncertain.

  "Well, those who are actively under some kind of contract won't get tossed out," Cruelty said. "They're a source for helping us here or tipping the balance with new arrivals by passing news on. I got him into this, and it'd be good to have my finger on the pulse of that, anyway."

  "I was hoping," Talia said, "that you'd stick here around a while."

  Cruelty slowly looked between Talia's image—bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked and hopeful, lips a little pursed—and her body, laid out as Cruelty had left her, arranged so nobody would suspect what they'd been up to. Though, to Cruelty's eye, she thought she could still tell where her hair was a little more tangled, could see the small patches where her throat was a little more reddened.

  Suddenly, it was stifling again.

  "Sorry, Princess," Cruelty said. "Business, you know. You play politics, I play politics, it's what we're doing here."

  "Ah," Talia said, with smiling disappointment.

  *~*~*

  She went to see Martin, dodging the crowds, climbing the fence, entering as she had before. He was surprised at first, then laughed a bit darkly and said, "You know, I'd almost think you were getting fond of me."

  "I'm not fond of anyone," Cruelty said, tone light.

  "Funny, but I don't believe that," he said thoughtfully. "I could be wrong, but you don't strike me that way. Pretty sure you get attached, anyway."

  He had made her tea again. She cupped her hands around the steaming cup and watched her distorted reflection, hooked her ankles together with her feet tucked under the chair. "Maybe," she admitted finally, more to the tea than to him. "It's strange, though, to think I might like someone."

  Martin was silent a long moment—no wonder, she thought. He was probably unsure if this was aimed at him, or unsure why she'd reveal so much of herself. And then he laughed again, a quiet, resigned sound, and said, "Is it your 'beauty'?"