He returned to his side of the cell, but that wasn’t good enough for Ruth. She noticed he had finished his ration-loaf, so she broke off half of hers to give to him. It was a bit of a challenge with her burned hand, while also keeping the open berry from tipping over, but she eventually managed. She took it over to him, sitting at a similar distance to the one he had left between them yesterday when they ate together. This time she wouldn’t go for his tail.
She smiled and held out the loaf. She knew he didn’t understand the smile, but he seemed to get that it wasn’t aggressive, so if she kept doing it he’d hopefully learn it was a good thing. Not that she could stop doing it, anyway. It was reflex. She didn’t have as much to smile about as she used to, but that didn’t mean she was going to give it up completely.
The alien looked at the loaf in her hand and growled. Ruth wiggled it about, trying to get him to understand that she meant for him to take it but he wouldn’t, so she put it down in front of him.
“It’s for you,” she said. No response. “Okay, well, I thought it was time we try to learn each other’s name, now we’re being friendly.” That longer speech got a reply, and she politely waited for him to finish even though it meant nothing to her. He punctuated the end of his complaint by pushing the loaf back to her.
Was he not hungry? Did he disdain her loaf? She’d given him the half she hadn’t been nibbling from, but apparently he still didn’t want it. Maybe he just didn’t want to take food from her. There might be more coming later after all. But this was about building bridges, not sustenance. She pushed the loaf back to him.
“Take the loaf. I see you don’t have any loaf left. I still have loaf. I’m sharing my loaf with you,” she insisted. She wanted to stop saying loaf, but she couldn’t. Maybe this was cabin fever.
He tucked his hands against his sides and pulled his knees up like he was building a fortress of his limbs and pulling the drawbridge up. He levelled a defiant stare at her. She sighed, and tore the half-a-loaf in half again. She planted the new quarter-loaf in front of him. “You’re going to eat the loaf,” she promised him.
She didn’t know if he was copying her or if it was something his people also did, but he sighed, and tore a small part off the piece in front of him and quickly ate it.
She smiled. “Good. Thank you. Now,” she lay her hand against her chest and began enunciating like she was teaching an infant. “I’m Ruth,” she said.
He clearly didn’t get it, or even what she was trying to do.
She began tapping her chest and pointing at herself. “Ruth... Ru-uth...”
If his species didn’t have individual names he was going to think she was crazy. She watched him for any glimmer of recognition, and sighed. Okay. She began pointing at things around the room and naming them to give him the idea. There wasn’t much.
“Wall. Hole. Hatch. Ceiling. Floor... Loaf. Ru-uth.”
Nothing. She pointed at him. “Alien?”
He stiffened at that, apparently taking affront, and rattling of another string of growls. Ruth didn’t know if would even be able to pronounce his name when she heard it if that’s what his language sounded like.
“Then tell me what your name is,” she said. Silence. She went back to tapping her chest. Honestly she had nothing else to do and unending hours in which to drill this into him. “Ruth...”
“...Gru...”
“Yes! I mean, no, but you’re responding and that’s great, we’re getting somewhere. Okay, Ruth...”
“Grute...”
“Ruth.” She was leaning forward, ridiculously exaggerating the movements of her lips and tongue and speaking at a fifth of the speed. She could only draw a single syllable word out for so long.
“Gruse.”
“There’s no G. Ruth.”
“Gruse?”
Okay, maybe every word in his language started with G. Maybe that was just something she’d have to live with. It might not have Th either by the sound of it. So, did she want to be Gruse or Grute?
“Gruthhhhhh.” She put her tongue between her teeth and hissed at him like a snake. He looked a little alarmed, but he copied her.
“Gruthhhhh?”
“Yes! Gruth! Practice, but... Gruth.” Finally.
She pointed at him, looking enquiring. He tapped his chest and grunted.
She blinked.
“Gron.”
“What?”
“Gron.”
A pause. She tried to copy what she was hearing as best she could. “Hm,” she grunted.
He gave her a look as if to say he didn’t think she was trying. “Gron.”
“Grr?”
“Gron.”
She did her best bark.
“...Grrron.”
She took a deep steadying breath, and channelled her inner gorilla. “Gron,” she grunted. His face brightened, even though she wasn’t sure what she had just said. She would have to practice too. He said something further, but it was just noise to her.
“Gruth,” he said, as if congratulating himself on bridging this language gap.
“Gron,” she agreed.
Chapter 10
The second day in the cell progressed identically to the first. More food was thrown in, the same as before. Ruth made sure to note the time. If it was the same time every day, that would provide some kind of structure to the day. She would know when it was safe to finish the last of what was left over from the day before. She would know when there were aliens on the floor above them. She didn’t know how it was she could never hear them, but if they were going to escape, it would be useful to know their schedule.
She tried to engage Gron in more conversation, or get him to play a game, or just anything, but while he didn’t mind now when she came to sit near him, he kept it clear that he didn’t want her too close, or to be touched by her. He would watch her and sometimes respond with words she didn’t know when she sat in front of him and rambled on about anything she could think of. She asked him questions about their situation, told him about her life, asked him about his planet. Told him jokes. It helped to speak, even if he couldn’t understand, and to his credit he never seemed to grow bored or annoyed by it. He watched her attentively as if he was actually listening.
On the third day, she saw the aliens who had abducted her for the first time. And it was not fun.
She was talking to Gron again, her voice getting hoarse and her topics thin from holding a one-sided conversation for so long, when suddenly Gron stiffened and glared at the hatch. She looked too, but she couldn’t see anything. He must be able to hear or smell things she couldn’t. It could only be one thing disturbing him. The other aliens must be up there, when he clearly didn’t want them to be. Ruth looked at her watch, it was coming up to the time they had dropped the food yesterday, but Gron hadn’t reacted this way when they brought food. Something was different, and she was going to hold true to her promise and trust him after the hatch incident.
A thin growl vibrated from him and he looked puffed up somehow. She wanted to ask him what it was, but she stopped herself, knowing he could neither understand her nor reply, so she decided silence was better and to let him listen.
Without looking at her, he gave her a shove to the side and pointed to the corner of the room. It was alright for him to touch her apparently. She went to where he pointed and he followed close behind, using his body to shut her into the corner. He hardly gave her the room she needed to stand, positioning himself between her and the rest of the cell. His tail hung between her legs and the fur down his spine tickled her nose. One of his hands was on her hip, as if keeping her in place, not that she could have gone anywhere. She tried not to move, as she considered just how much bigger than her he was. Her head barely reached his shoulder blades. She resisted the urge to trace the lines of muscle that flowed down his back.
She was scared. For him to be doing this, something bad must be about to happen. He’d been here longer than she had. He might know why they were here, why s
he had been taken. He might have already had to go through the experiments or gladiator fights already. But why was he protecting her like this, putting himself between her and danger? He’d probably noticed that she was a total weakling compared to him, but so what? That just made her a liability to him, a dead weight. If they were going to be made to fight to the death or something, if his survival was at stake, he shouldn’t be protecting her. He didn’t even like her, as far as she could tell! They were strangers, she meant nothing to him.
“Gron...” she whimpered. He spared a glance back at her and rumbled quietly, probably something reassuring, and she found that it did help a little.
She heard voices from upstairs. At least, she thought they were voices. She thought she could detect... emotions, on some level. They didn’t sound excited. The language itself though sounded like a set of keys in a mason jar falling down a flight of stairs. Gron’s fur stiffened even more, puffing up like a cat’s until it was almost standing on end. His tail thrashed against her legs, surprisingly strong, and she tried to shuffle back to give it more space.
Gron snarled viciously, apparently in reaction to the voices, and she wondered if he could understand them. She knew if she were them, she’d back off right now, if she’d heard that sound coming from a dark hole in the ground. He was trying to warn them off without leaving her. He wouldn’t be able to fight them like that though, if that was what he wanted to do. If he stayed with her, he would be a sitting duck. If he left her, she would be defenceless. She held back a whimper and desperately wanted to touch him, just to put her hand on his back or hold his waist, anchor herself somehow. Ask him not to leave her. She didn’t do either of those things, because no matter what she wanted, now was not the time to piss him off.
She heard more voices from upstairs. She couldn’t see anything except Gron’s broad back. Ruth heard the bolt on the hatch draw back and the clang of it being flipped up quickly, and then a series of thuds as a number of aliens presumably dropped into the cell.
Gron roared, shifting forward into half a crouch, still trying to shield her. She wondered if he was scared, and if he was, whether he was more scared for himself or for her. She didn’t think of herself as fragile, in fact she’d often considered herself to be pretty resilient, but she knew there was any number of things an alien species could do to her that would break her. They probably had things she couldn’t even conceive of. They wouldn’t give her the same basic respect they gave their own species, after all. If they kept her in a cell like this, they probably considered her an animal. They were clearly far more technologically advanced than humans if they had space-travel.
Then the fight broke out for real. She imagined one of them had gotten too close, because Gron was suddenly not caging her in anymore, but driving some kind of long black stick into the neck of someone on the floor. She could see their attackers now. They were much shorter than her, between three and four feet tall. Gron looked like Godzilla levelling Tokyo as he cut a swath through them, but they’d clearly come prepared. Ruth couldn’t see much of what they actually looked like, because they were all wearing what looked like improvised padded armour. They’d strapped fabrics that looked like a cross between roof insulation and a futon to their bodies, reinforced with odd bits of metal. They were all wearing helmets or faceguards, but what she could see of flashes of skin was green. They were all carrying the same long black sticks that were almost longer than they were tall, with a small prong on the end. They’d clearly come loaded for bear, but not with any official or mass-produced armour, which made her wonder. She didn’t think they could be military, or even a large company. It struck her that what they most resembled was pirates.
Gron was fighting and refusing to go down, but he’d already been stabbed several times with the sticks that left large red welts on him, which must be the source of the bruises she noticed before. He was being drawn further and further away from her, and her fear mounted. She didn’t know what they wanted, but she guessed they wanted to take at least one of them away from the cell. Ruth watched as Gron knocked one of them to the ground them seized another and bit down hard on his shoulder. The creature screamed like a frog choking over several loud pops as presumably every bone in his shoulder collapsed. She didn’t think Gron’s teeth could penetrate the padding, but the crushing force of his jaws must be incredible, and if those canines hooked in, he’d be unmoveable. One of the aliens jabbed him hard in the back with the stick, digging it in until he howled and released the alien he was holding to turn and retaliate.
Ruth looked at the one closest to her. Gron had stabbed it pretty efficiently in the neck, but it wasn’t dead. It looked like the stick hadn’t penetrated the skin, but it was clearly struggling. It hadn’t managed to get up yet but was rolling from side to side weakly. Maybe it had a crushed windpipe or a chipped spine or something. Could she leave the safety of her corner to grab the stick that was still lying next to it? It occurred to her that this could be their chance to escape, the hatch was still open. And could she still respect herself if she let Gron be stabbed and attacked while she stood in the corner? What if her actions made the difference between them being stuck here or going home?
With that in mind, she took her first tentative step out of the corner. She didn’t want to draw attention to herself, but once she was armed... Ruth approached the prone figure, which was making progress towards getting up. She crept up to it. The stick was on the other side, she would have to lean over it to pick it up, or go around. She saw the alien reach for it and lunged, snatching it off the floor and backing away in a hurry. The alien’s faceguard turned to her in surprise? Fear? She liked to think so.
“That’s right, bitch!” she challenged.
Now what though? She checked on Gron, and was dismayed to see him on one knee now, his movements noticeably slower and wilder. The creatures were all screeching to each other and it was clear that almost all of them were injured in some way. One of them was dragging his fallen comrade back toward the hatch.
What should she do? Should she help, or would that just make it worse? Would she get in the way? Distract him? Ruth saw that while the others were circling Gron, landing more and more hits, one of them had split from the pack and was making its way towards her.
“Oh no you don’t, buddy,” she said, gripping her stick tighter. Her burnt hand twinged but tough shit. She didn’t have time for that now. She levelled the stick at the alien. It was a funny angle for her, but she definitely had the size advantage. The alien held out his own stick, pronged end first. Shit, why hadn’t she taken fencing lessons?
A seemingly endless stream of possible strategies flooded into her mind, all good as far as she could tell, but she knew she had no training at all and nothing to base her decisions on, and seconds to act. Words like parry and block and jiu-jitsu came to her, unhelpfully, as she tried to read the alien’s body language to predict what it would do. Not easy, given that it was a heavily-padded alien. This whole situation struck her as incredibly unfair. She was quite smart if she was given time to prepare. She’d always tested well in school.
The alien made a few testing stabs at her and she scooted back, but she didn’t have a lot of room to work in. She heard a noise from Gron which didn’t sound good, but she couldn’t afford to look. She would rescue him after dealing with this thing.
She lunged her stick forward, knocking her opponent’s aside, but she didn’t have the range to land the hit on its body, and it danced back from her. She saw in her peripheral vision another shape separate from the group. She couldn’t take her eyes off the one in front of her but she knew the other one must be coming. Shit, shit, shit... Her fight-or-flight instinct was going crazy. She dodged forward suddenly, heading for the group in the middle, her only thought to charge through the little aliens, knocking them down like bowling pins and kicking a few in the face as she went. If she got to Gron, they could fight back to back. She wouldn’t be alone.
She barely it made it three step
s before a sharp, seizing, biting pain hit her in the side, sending her sprawling. She cried out in shock and pain, but she didn’t let go of her stick. She knew she was down now. She could see at least four of the other ones holding Gron down by keeping the prongs of their sticks embedded in his body while he panted and snarled when he could. He saw her with desperate eyes, and tried to make a renewed effort, but the little demons around him started kicking him and one of them climbed up to stand on his back and keep him down. He wanted to save her but they were just outnumbered. She hoped he understood she didn’t blame him.
She was stabbed another couple of times, and each time was worse than the last. She grunted and twisted on the floor, her body seizing but still trying to escape the prongs. It felt as if every muscle in her body had tensed to its limit. She couldn’t move. Her nerves were misfiring and wouldn’t carry her brain’s commands. She was helpless as her attackers set on her with tiny hands, and she felt the cool sharp edge of blades slide along her skin, making tears come to her eyes in fear. She heard tearing fabric. Oh God. What were they doing? Were they going to rape her? Right in front of Gron? Why would they do that? Why risk the fight just for that?
Quickly her clothes were cut and torn off her. She tried to fight them, pushing weakly at them, but they shook her off with ease. When she was totally naked, they scampered away and leapt out through the hatch in one bound. The others watched until they were out then bolted after them, clearly not keen to remain long after their job was done.
For a minute they both just struggled on the floor. Gron rumbled something weakly but she couldn’t look at him. She was too busy trying to curl up into a ball, cover herself somehow. Their abductors had even taken the scraps of her clothing away. She heard Gron call her name, but she ignored him. She was recovering faster than he was, since she’d only been hit with the prongs three times, and he’d probably been hit thirty. It was impressive that he was still conscious. As soon as could, she half-crawled, half-dragged herself away from him to huddle in the far corner. He called her again but she just wrapped her arms around herself and shivered, trying to process what had just happened.
Ruth's Bonded (Ruth & Gron Book 1) Page 5
