Title: Brunette
Author: kbk
Claimer: Mine, bitch.

She runs her hand through her hair in frustration, and I can't help but think back to when it was my hand teasing those short strands of chocolate silk. I think back further, and I remember when it fell to her waist untrammelled, in the days before. I never touched it then. I was merely a friend and as such had no right. I touched it when it hung to her shoulders - an unfortunate accident having necessitated the trimming, I thought it necessary to reassure her of its continued beauty. But later, she cut it herself, to an almost boyish length. To disguise herself. She sat with the ragged locks scattered around her, braiding them intricately before she threw them all away. I took one without her seeing. I carry it still.

Now, here we sit in a dingy hotel room, waiting for our contact to show. The man claims he can get us out of here - but how are we to trust him to do that when he can't get himself here within three hours of the appointed time? This was our last chance, the last hope we had of freedom from this oppressive regime.

They will kill us, if they catch us.

I want to hold her against the oncoming darkness: but she twists away from me in her agitation. It's been a habit of hers for as long as I can remember. If something's bothering her, she deals with it herself: by becoming too restless to sit still for two minutes. In the past, she would simply sit with a book, a bouncing foot being the only echo of her inner turmoil. A nice long solitary walk in the evening would do wonders for her. And now the two of us are shut in this room together, and she has no space, and she won't pace because there's not enough room, and there are no books left for her to read. And I wish she would just sit and let me fold my arms around her, because I need to hold onto something real, but she's too jumpy to let me touch her, even.

Hair like tongues of... something around her head. It would be flame, if her hair was red - but it's brunette, and I can't think of anything brown that flames. Inconsequential thoughts are comforting, in a place like this: but the glare I receive for daring to smile a little is upsetting. I know she's tense - everybody is, these days - but does she have to take it out on me? A little of this must show in my expression, because she softens a little: then glares even more because I've cracked her carefully-constructed shell. I understand why she built up her defences, why she started the night after the war did, the night after we... I understand all that. I understand her. I just don't want it to be this way. I don't want her to be hiding all the hurt inside. I don't want her to feel so alone.

We are in danger, though, and if this is how she deals with it - if this is what will keep her alive - I will support it all the way.

It's hard to believe that a few articles in a newsletter at university could lead to summary execution, but they will. Would we have written them, had we known? I would have, for I believed in the content. She? I believe she would not, for her interest was in the technical challenge, the task of using her prose to influence the thoughts of the young people around us. She would have been a perfect employee of the new Ministry of Information. I like to think that she would have known it to be wrong, that she would have disagreed strongly enough with the regime they are creating to refuse their offer and perhaps...

Now there's a thought. An underground newspaper. The real news, leafleted in the busy parts of town - a sheet of paper slipped into an open briefcase or crumpled into a waiting hand. One side news, the other side articles - starting, of course, with the ones that could mean our heads if we are found. An idea that I will not share with her until we are a little safer. Of course... damn. We are attempting escape. Therefore the task of the newsletter will be left to others. We can use them, though - publish our articles in the major newspapers of the world under some sensationalist headline. "The articles that condemned this young beauty to death" - but of course, having escaped, it won't be as newsworthy as had we been killed. But then again, there in the flesh we can talk to people; or I can talk to people and she can stand there looking pretty and abashed and claiming her skill is rhetoric of the pen and not the voice.

He should be here by now. The chances are he's been captured and is right now being tortured to reveal our meeting place. We should get out of here immediately, wait for another chance - but we are the scapegoats, the sacrificial lambs, the favoured victims of the state. A hundred articles in a hundred newsletters, all with the same essential message - but our newsletter is the one that found its way into the hands of that bastard propaganda officer, our articles were the most impassioned and persuasive, our pieces of propaganda the only ones to rival his own. And our pictures are the ones on the posters.

And God help me if she doesn't look beautiful in them.

I hate that she feels she has to be strong all the time. I hate the way she is always on edge. I hate the knife that has taken up residence in the right of the high boots she now affects. I hate that we are dirty and hungry and fearful. I hate that this could ever have happened to us. I hate that we used each other. I hate that she flinches when I touch her. I hate myself. I hate her.

I hate this war.

I know that the world outside is not paying all that much attention - a relatively bloodless coup, an undesirable but not despotic military ruler, no reports of horrible death, no martyrs emerging from the chaos... No stories.

Will we be the first martyrs? I doubt it. If only because of the efficiency of the bastard, and the fact that he has already taken over all the real newspapers, he has already confined all the real journalists, and by his all-out hunt for us he has put the fear of God - the fear of himself - into every student writer in the country. So our story will not be told until the day our country is freed, if we are even remembered then. Perhaps a casual acquaintance will look at a group photo and say, "Oh, I remember those two. They got killed early on - big public hunt for them, supposed to be rebel leaders or rabble-rousers or something. Sad, I suppose. But I didn't really know them." What an epitaph for two such as us. For one such as her, with her sparkling wit and shining beauty and incandescent mind.

I am in love with her. I fell years ago without a thought. I just didn't realise until our world disappeared beneath our feet. And when I tried to tell her, she - typically - thought I was trying to distract her, or justify her loss of control, or... I don't know. She didn't believe me, though.

There's a stuttered knock at the door, two quick and light followed by three heavier, and she stalks across the room, knife pulled fluidly out of her boot and glinting in the light from the single bulb overhead. She opens the door a crack, one foot braced against the inside - wary, she is, in a way she never used to be, and it's entirely justified - then steps back and gestures the man inside.

She lets me do the talking. She always has. She would even send me up to the bar when we were out, so she didn't have to talk to any more people than necessary. And forget doing interviews for her articles - no, that was all me, once we became a joint by-line, and before that... well, as likely as not she just made it up.

"What took you so long, friend?" is my - devastatingly unoriginal - opening line.

He looks over at me, eyes shifting nervously between the two of us as he spins a story about guards in town, being too late to pick up a certain article from a certain contact and that threw off his whole schedule and he had to go right across town and wouldn't you know the buses had gone to night-running by then and he had to wait an hour... Complicated, but not terrifically so, and definitely possible, so I nod to her and we give him the benefit of the doubt.

She puts the knife away, and I'm almost sorry to see it go, despite how much I hate it. It's damn sexy. Every now and then I look at her, and just see this incredibly fit chick with that really dangerous edge... but then I remember it's her, and that she really ought not to be this kind of attractive. It's just wrong.

The man settles himself cheerfully in one of the chairs, pulling various bits and pieces out of the inside pockets of his jacket and, in the case of a couple of particularly interesting items, from down his trousers.

"Here we are, then," he said, waving his hands proudly at the display. "All you could ever want to get out of this godforsaken hellhole. Papers, made up as requested, of course, you can check them if you don't believe me, concealable weaponry - I assume you'll be wanting to check them, miss?" he glances over at her, and I want to tell him no, that she's an innocent, that I will do anything that needs to be done. I can't, of course. She picks them up - a few shaped pieces of wood, a metal tube, a pack of razor blades - and looks entirely fascinated. It makes me sick.

I turn away, and listen carefully to what the man is saying - a fair amount of inconsequential babble, some political news that we've already picked up on, and interspersed with all that, the information we need. Details for two of the three separate contacts we have to meet. I stop him and repeat the details, making sure I have them right and get them memorised: it wouldn't do to fuck up our one chance. If I do... even if we survived, we wouldn't have the cash to make another attempt. I hand over the balance of the money he wanted, repressing the flinch at how little I still have in pocket, and escort him to the door.

"Good luck, mate," he says, patting me on the shoulder. "You're gonna need it." He slides away down the stairs, utterly unremarkable, and I know that he's right.

The first set of fake IDs, combined with a planned distraction from our first contact (a boy, can't have been more than fourteen, and the last we saw of him he was being chased by a pair of guards) get us onto a train and out of the city, but on a route heading deeper into the heartlands. It makes sense, of course, because the most heavily guarded routes are those directly from the city to the border, but at the same time... It's like we're mass murderers, or something, the effort that's being put into finding us, and the first time I saw a poster with my name on it I wanted to throw up. We didn't do anything wrong. Nothing. And that bastard's made it a personal vendetta. I don't even want to know how much money is being spent on this. Money that could have gone to the hospitals, or...

I started saying that, once. Telling her how I felt about it. But she looked at me, and asked if that meant that I wanted to give up, if I thought we should sacrifice ourselves for the good of our fellow citizens. If I honestly thought that the money would do any good, instead of fattening our glorious leaders and hunting the next poor idiots who get on the bastard's bad side.

She always was more cynical than me. I never thought she'd be proved right.

We sit a few seats apart for most of the journey, and try to pretend we don't know each other. It's difficult, of course, and I can't help the way my eyes are drawn to her - but it's natural, isn't it, pretty girl, healthy young man; just please don't notice that the lust is outweighed by something more tender...

She looks fine. Nonchalant. Bored, even, staring out of the window and watching the buildings grow more sparse, sipping at her awful coffee - I was too miserly to buy any, but the way her mouth twists after every sip tells me everything I need to know about the quality - scribbling something on the back of her ticket, keeping herself busy in the little ways that normal people do. The way she always used to. But she used to do other things, as well. Used to comment on the prose on display, criticising the effectiveness of various advertisements. Used to fiddle with her hair, weaving tiny braids throughout the length of it. Used to enjoy herself.

There's a rush onto the train at one station, and I realise that we're passing through this town as most people stop work - and I can't even begin to describe how incongruous that is, how disconnected it makes me feel, to see these people trailing out of a long day at the office or behind a counter of some kind, when she and I are in the first stages of life-or-death flight. I stand up to let a middle-aged woman with huge shopping bags take my seat - and I know it isn't normal and it'll just draw attention to me, but it's something I do - and wave off her thanks, stepping away as a few more people squeeze on. I don't consciously realise who I'm moving towards, but then I look down and right next to me is the familiar head of sleek brown hair, the drab white shirt that hides her curves and the loose grey trousers that hide her kick-ass boots. I can't help it. I reach out and brush my hand across the back of her neck. She flinches.

It hurts, oddly enough. It hurts in a way that nothing ever has before, not being hunted, not being dumped, not losing my father, not her ranting and screaming that it was my fault, not her refusing to believe me when I told her... Maybe one or two of those hurt more, but there's a twist in my gut that is truly new. She doesn't want me to touch her. She doesn't trust me to touch her. She doesn't trust me at all. Which makes me wonder why she's stuck with me through all this, when we would surely be much safer apart. I could never leave her, that much is a given, but she could have up and left at any time. It's not like she needs me to look after her. I only wish I could.

She doesn't look up at me, but her hand flicks out and taps my leg a few times, pulling me out of my introspection. It's a good thing, really, I've been known to get maudlin. She pulls a pen and a scrap of paper out of one of her pockets, and scribbles for a few moments, then tucks it into my hand. I wait, turn slightly away, shove my hand into my own pocket and bring it out again, as though I've been carrying the scrap around for days. "Public," it says, "hence avoidance. Also, never liked people touching back of neck." I knew that. I knew all of it. I know her.

I tuck the paper into my pocket and wait, reading each advert I can see before I dare to communicate again. I rest my hand on her arm for a moment, and glance down to see her looking up at me. I look away a split-second later, but I squeeze her arm gently, feel the tense muscle and the warmth of her skin under the material. I don't want to drop my hand.

We leave the train for our next appointment in a town I've never even heard of, but it turns out she had a girlfriend who came from here, and once came back with her for a week. So we wander through the streets, and she tells me about the way the other girl's family hated her, and kissing in a corner of the town graveyard, and having a screaming match in a particular cobbled side-street. The way she tells it makes it funny, and she chuckles along with me, but I know it must have hurt. She just won't let herself be vulnerable to it.

Of course, it turns out that our contact is the girl's mother, of all people, but all she says is, "I thought those posters looked familiar," and from then on talks only to me. All business, of course. The plan is that we hop another train, and trust that our second set of false papers hold up well enough to get us to a village a mile or so away from the border. There we meet our final contact at a specific time and place - the boy we met in the city gave us a description - and he'll guide us across the border. The woman stops, nods at me, and turns away.

Then she turns back. "It was just that she's my daughter," she says plaintively. Her hand reaches out, tentatively, but she's met with a blank gaze, and for all that I hate the expression and almost feel sorry for the woman... No. You have to earn forgiveness from this one.

I should know.

We watch the woman walk away, and stand there even after she turns the corner and leaves. I feel a pressure against my arm, and she's leaning against me almost imperceptibly. It's the first time she's reached out in... I don't know how long... and I certainly don't want to discourage it. I lean back, ever so slightly, and brush my lips against her hair: I don't know if she'll feel it, and I don't care, I just want. It isn't long before she straightens, pulling her jacket closer around her. She quirks a smile at me and tosses her head back towards the train station. We go.

It's an even longer journey on this train, and the way the seats are arranged means I can barely see her, just the occasional flash of an arm outside the edge of the seat, and I really have nothing whatsoever to do, so I end up dozing off for a while. And when I wake up, she isn't there. At first, I think that I'm just not seeing her, but I get worried and I move and the seat is empty. That gets me even more worried.

I don't panic, of course. That would be noticeable. My panicking would alert everybody on the train and probably a few dozen people off it. I'm just worried. I head up the carriage, towards the toilet at the end, and I even duck inside. I stand and stare at myself in the mirror, trying to get myself to calm down and just breathe some because fear is not the look I'm supposed to be going for. I flush and rinse and leave, and walk back down to my seat, and then I see her.

Two rows behind mine, reading a paper that somebody must have left on a seat somewhere, and I almost slide to the floor from the release of tension. But I don't. I keep calm, I keep breathing, I sit down in my seat, and I feel the crinkle of paper beneath me. I wriggle around and pull it out, to see that it's half a page from a newspaper, with a message scribbled in the margin. "Sorry 'bout that," it says. "Didn't think you'd notice." As if I could miss anything to do with her. As if I'm not going to fold this up and put it in my pocket next to the other one, as if I'm not going to keep them as long as I'm able, as if I wouldn't recognise her handwriting at a hundred paces...

She doesn't get it, though. Doesn't understand the way I feel about her. Thinks it was some kind of misguided protection fantasy, or something. Perhaps I should have tried harder to convince her, perhaps I shouldn't have backed off, but... if she left...

I love her, and I can't stand the thought of never making love to her again, and when we're out of here I swear I will make sure she knows it. But for now, best we go on as we are. Just another day, and we'll be out. We'll be safe. And then she might be able to love me back.

Somehow I manage to fall asleep again, and the next thing I know is being woken by a truly vicious kick to my ankle. The train's slowing down, and I stand up as fast as I can. She's already down at the door, waiting behind two other people, and I wouldn't mind betting that nobody in the carriage noticed her warning despite its force, unless of course they heard me curse. I peer out of the window, just to check, and the signs drawing to a halt outside show the name of our destination. I stumble into the aisle as the train stops, and rush to follow the others out onto the platform. It's chilly, and tiny, and bare grey concrete, and there are maybe fifteen people all told, but there only appears to be one exit, so at least we can walk in the same direction without being noticed.

We walk for a little while, as a couple again - she even lets me hold her hand for a while, because a pair of young lovers might conceivably come to a small village and wander around. It's a nice place, actually, at least in the centre - a lot of old stone buildings, a lot of tubs of flowers sitting in front of them. We walk, and we find the meeting place, and we walk some more and we don't say a word. We're too close to fuck it up now by being overheard.

Eventually dusk rolls in, and we go back to the meeting place, a small square in front of a church. It looks a little sinister in the dark, and I take her hand again and pull her to lean against the far wall. He should be here by now.

We wait, and we lean close to each other and exchange sweet nothings and do not say anything about our worries. She's so scared, I can tell. It's the way her fingers twitch towards her knife every so often, the way she rubs her hand across the back of her neck and tugs at her hair, the way her eyes flick to every corner...

She stiffens, looking over my shoulder, and I don't turn to see what she's looking at. I squeeze her hand, and raise an eyebrow when she looks at me. She nods. I turn, and look, and there's a man walking towards us. He fits the description all right, and he barely nods at us before he's leading the way down one of the quaint little alleys.

We follow him. What else can we do?

Well, we can follow him into a cutesie little square and find ourselves surrounded by guards.

Obviously it was too much to hope that we could trust four people in the entire flaming country to do what they said and not sell us out. I mean, yes, the reward is a lot more than what we were paying. But nobody ever gets the whole reward, and there are enough people out there that aren't especially happy with the regime - and trust me, I should know, I've talked to a hell of a lot of them, except of course they couldn't or wouldn't bloody well help - and... I suppose I've always been an optimist.

So we get marched off to the police station, and transferred around various cells and transported back to the city and it's a constant round of questions and beatings, and the worst part of it is that I don't ever see her.

I see her at the trial, of course, looking worn and thin - not the gorgeous way she was before, but verging on the skeletal - and we spend ten hours a day for three days staring into each other's eyes. On the fourth day, we're found guilty, and sentenced to immediate execution.

They have to drag us out of the courtroom. I think I must be screaming, but she is fighting desperately, silently, face set and determined. Not that it helps.

I know, though, that I won't see her again. It's all right. She saw me, in those last days, and I saw her, and we know. We know.

So once I can't see her any more, I go quietly. I clench my fist inside my shirt, around two scraps of paper and a braided knot of brown hair.