Chapter Text
Sometimes in the Shades people disappear¹. It is simply the nature of such places, where alleyways weave twisting rat runs between squat terraces, murky sunlight poking at shadows like a child examining particularly gruesome roadkill. They are consumed by the cobbles, eaten up, reabsorbed — the city, ever a hungry beast, feasts — and that is that.
[¹And, inevitably, any property about their person at the time.]
But occasionally, very occasionally, it spits things back out; the leftover bones, as it were, that litter the gutter.
Joan considers the battered creature before her — an abomination unto Nuggan, she is sure, and many other gods besides — laid out as best as possible in the nest of thin blankets padding the floor. One knee juts out at an odd angle and a shoulder hangs too loose, but that's nothing compared to the empty space where its foot should lie.
Most unsettling is the absence of blood. Severed limbs tend to create mess, this Joan knows, but aside from a coating of dry brown flakes there is nothing at all, not a single drop. She sighs, watching the flutter of the creature's breath, a dunnock taking flight in the cage of its frail chest.
"Our Sam would've been about the same age," she tells the shadow in the corner of the room. A set of yellowed teeth glint in the candlelight as they are bared.
"You shouldn't 'ave brought it back 'ere, you're invitin' trouble." Thomas' breastplate is dull and scuffed and warps Joan's hazy reflection in the corner of her eye.
And she agrees, would wash her hands of it all, but the creature is young, seven years at most, and does have a bit of their son about the face. Joan was never one for rescuing injured birds as a kid², and knew better than to fetch them in the house anyhow, but all at once she wishes she could cradle the creature in her palms like a chick fallen from its guttering³. It's so small, a scratch of ink in the bundle of sheets, and pale as a whitewashed doorstep.
[²As with most residents of the poorer parts of Ankh Morpork, she'd have eaten it. Birds, which rarely came close to the Shades, were considered a paupers delicacy.]
[³Ankh Morpork birds have never heard of trees and wouldn't know what to do with one of they saw it.]
Joan wets a cloth and kneels on the floor beside the creature. The broad stone tiles, as always, leech heat through her skirts. As she sets to work, she hears the click of the door leaving its latch, smells cheap beer and the pervading scent of the River Ankh on the wind.
"I'll 'ave breakfast waitin' on the table for you when you get back," she says, without turning. Thomas only grunts in response, pulling the door shut tight behind him.
In its sleep the creature shifts, a frown tugging at its lips and wrinkling its brow. Carefully, Joan pops the shoulder back into its socket and straightens the knee with a brace made of cut kindling and fabric scraps. All the while the creature remains in oblivious sleep.
At last she mops crusted blood from its calf, finally seeing the wound in full. If she had had an education in geography, perhaps she would have compared it to sedimentary strata, a sandstone cliff with its layers of beiges and oranges and reds, but they'd needed the pennies for more important things than books and so she thinks instead of the scum lines rising up the wall behind the Broken Drum.
The flesh beneath her hands is malleable and sticky at its jagged edges, made of a substance that is at once both like clay and meat, wrapped around solid, chalky bones. She wonders if it's some kind of golem, some distant relative to those that work down by the docks. Don't they keep script in their heads?
Joan's hand wanders to the creature's shorn skull almost of its own accord, curious, but she withdraws hastily when she notices the glassy eyes blinking back at her. There's fear there, she thinks. Fear and awful resignation. Her hands fist around the blankets as she flashes it a soft smile.
"Hello," she tries. The creature blinks at her for a long moment, unanswering — long enough that she begins to worry, wringing the sheets between her hands. What was she thinking bringing it here? Joan is a practical woman, prides herself on the fact, so why, why, why?
But then, quietly, so quiet that she nearly misses it behind her fretting, the creature lets out a cracked "'llo."
"Are you hungry?" Joan asks, falling back on what she knows. "I've some stew on the boil⁴, should be about done."
[⁴Sonofabitch stew, like scubbo, can require a lot of boiling depending on what ingredients are chucked in there and how much you actually want to be able to taste them. The ingredients of Mrs. Vimes' stew are perhaps best left unmentioned, save that they were boilt to hell and back.]
The creature bites its lip, mulling it over, before nodding cautiously. Joan rises, her movements slow and deliberate so as not to disturb the stillness. She can feel the creature's eyes on her as she dishes out two bowls of stew, scooping plenty of meat into the least chipped one, which she sets on the floor beside the blankets. Crossing her legs beneath her, she takes her place once more at the creature's side with her own dinner. The creature sits up with some effort, staring warily into the broth as though reading the future in amongst the barley.
"Go on," she encourages it, nodding to the stew. "Best have it 'fore it gets cold, whilst the heat'll keep off the flavour."
Tentatively, it scoops a spoonful of broth into its mouth and, wincing slightly, swallows it down. Then, as if a light has lit somewhere inside its head, the creature attacks the stew with fervour, barely stopping to chew.
Joan can't help it — she laughs. Trying and failing to smother the sound with a fist, she laughs and laughs until tear spring in her eyes. The creature stills, shooting her a look of alarm tinged with offence.
"Sorry, sorry, I don't mean— It's just—"
It's just you eat like my Sam did, she thinks, like a growing boy should, and your hair sticks up all over the place and your brow crinkles when you think and your eyes are just the same shade of dirty green. It's just that you're not a creature at all, are you?
"What are you?" Joan asks, shaking her head. "How'd you come to be in that alleyway?"
If she had not been passing, she wonders, what would have happened to the boy? Would he have continued to lay there, fresh meat for the lawless carrionites that litter the criminal underbelly of the city like maggots? How long would he have waited in the gutter filth, staring lifelessly up at blankets of brown-grey smog, untouched even by the hidden stars and never knowing light?
The boy regards her in that sluggish way of his, as though the questions require deep thought, as though she has asked some philosophical quandary on the nature of the universe and the meaning of life.
"They made me be. In th'ss world." The words are stilted, the sentences fragmented. Syllables slur together. "Bu' 'm broke. No use for me. Start again from sscratch."
Joan frowns. "You were built?" She thinks of the stump leg, of the strange substance that formed it. "But you bleed!" Bled out but didn't die.
Another long pause.
"People make blood," the boy says, eventually, "blood makess people."
Joan's not sure what to say to that, but she does wonder if blood is important to him in different ways than it is for humans, like grease on the axel of a cart. It would still work without, albeit rougher, and may grind and squeak something awful.
After her Sam's birth — a terrifying, gory affair — she had been weak as a kitten both in body and mind, and her words had drawled languid and confusedly. Similar to the boy's strange manner.
And she thinks of her Sam then, lost to her a year since, and of the stench of the alley she had found the boy in, and in her mind the memories splice, one overlaying another. A lump forms beneath her ribs, a heavy, scorching coal, a chunk of fury and loss — and, in the blistering white centre, a small, quiet, desperate hope — bound into a tight knot.
She tacks the stratiform memories to the wall of her mind with care and shaking fists.
"What's your name?" Joan asks, leaning closer, one hand tightening around her spoon. The boy just shrugs, picking at the blankets.
Stirring her stew Joan weighs it all up, balancing the checks and altering their budgets in her head like a skilled tailor⁵ might an ill-fitting suit. They might be tight getting by, the darts and tucks a touch too close for comfort, the hemline shorter — and Thomas will certainly disapprove — but she doesn't think the seams will tear.
[⁵Not a seamstress.]
Despite the practicality life has foisted upon her, despite how much she might wish to be nothing less than sensible, there is a flickering candle-flame in her that refuses to be quenched. A part of her that was once called Joanie, who had yet to grow into the baggy cloth of adulthood, twitches aside the drawn curtains, a silhouette behind the netting, and lets out all the light.
Despite it all, Joan can't help but dream.
"If you'd like, perhaps I could call you 'Sam'?" Maybe it's wrong of her, maybe she's grasping at the hands of ghosts, but she thinks they can do this. Besides, he looks enough like her son that people might just believe it.
Perhaps the boy understands this gift, this hand-me-down name, for the pain it bares. He smiles softly and a touch awed, as though gazing reverently upon a precious family heirloom.
Then Sam nods.