by JuicyPuffin

Created on: February 25, 2009

Varietals: Tell me something.

xxx

She can feel her skin drying, her throat already coated with dust, sand collecting in pools from the wrinkles in her clothes and falling like baby birds to the ground, shaking and lurching with the wind. Unsteady, the picture of first flights, and a thought appears from the recesses of her mind. There is trouble focusing, and (if she's like this, how is Karime feeling)

because she knows there is little difference between her and the others, between those here and gone. It's something she's learned, in this place. Something they've all learned, but, this is one thing of humanity she has yet to grasp, perhaps. Perhaps. And it's an effect of miracles, the way this one is still alive and moving when no one else is left.

The android sighs and her head lolls to the other girl, who rests against a large section of concrete still standing relatively intact. Despite the bombings that have been frequent in this country for so many years, they have found sections of rubble large enough to protect them from view, choking in the dust and decay. Back against shadows, limbs splayed against the grit of earth, her companion is careless with youth: fragile, quiet, staring into the sky and dreaming of somewhere far away, a place with candy-sugar blades of grass and blue, blue skies. Her fingers testing the feel of themselves with a delicate sort of uncertainty. And, like sea glass, worn and faded and used and reused until it is so rare that a even glimpse of it is enough, as if it's something to be kept safe and locked away with key and chain, a daguerreotype of far-off days.

Still - when she smiles it is a filmy memory of history: all smooth, tan skin and hair the colour of ink, and Mara knows with certainty that this girl, at least, will not die.

But at the moment, they need water. She has been saving all of her rations for her comrade, and even though her artificial body can last far longer than those it is based on, it is still quite uncomfortable to experience the dulling of senses, the tinge of monochrome that creeps into her vision. The slight distortion of hearing, sentences which drown in layers and layers of ocean waves against a quiet shore, of textbook learning, of blurry swallows on horizons far, far away.

Otherwise, they have been fine there has been a lull in fighting for days, the enemy soldiers as exhausted as their own, and so they wait. Outlast, outlast. The girl has faith in backup, faith in something she knows herself will never

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