Speakeasy 169 – On the Outside

He had already been living on the run when she met him on an old town where Order was slightly more relaxed than in other places. But she despised Them all the same. Everybody did in every place that wasn’t Free. And everyone had a different idea of what free was. No one ever knew, they had never been told. The Free did not contact the enslaved; in fact these people didn’t even have a name to categorise them. Not even people. For others, they were: Them. Those out there we rarely heard about. The imperfections of our perfect world, hidden in the shadows, doing all the dirty work, or left Outside to die, or become enslaved by the Order. That was all there was: Outside and Inside. There were no windows, just an unreachable barrier that separated the two. They were worlds apart. The Unnamed, as they called themselves, had chosen this wisely as not only their caste was unmentionable, but most of them had no name, as they had been thrown out at an early age because of an imperfection: A missing limb or a malformed one, a misplaced organ, heart condition, cancer, mismatched eyes. Anything that was below their standards. Unsurprisingly, after a while the Outside was not so sparsely populated anymore.

Walker had come to her town with another, older boy but he had been found. Dreamer’s Walker had escaped and found her accidentally by hiding in the same place she did when the world got too real. Of course at ten years old she wasn’t fully aware of the reason, she just instinctively left when the invisible weight on her skinny shoulders was top heavy. He was Walker because he travelled; the boy with him was also Walker. They didn’t have names so they gave each other names. She was Dreamer. The names they had categorized people. A smart No-name would stay that way, or at least not give away their names too easily, but children are unaware of such silly things as they would see them, so they exchanged names and two days later Dreamer ran away with Walker.

Dreamer then became one of the few with more than one name. They travelled together from village to village, not lovers but instinctively kin and by the time they were 15 they got caught up in some trouble. By that time they were a little less knowledgeable about the world but it could be argued that they were not less foolish for they were at the age when the young mind thinks idealistically and everything is possible.

Our Dreamer and Walker understood more of the world they lived in and its workings, and they would stir unrest in the villages they went to, they would rouse anger in the villages they stopped at, and they would incite the people to rebellion in the villages they left.

Eventually they were reported in one such village and found before they could leave. Dreamer got caught and Walker ran away. She loved Walker dearly as a brother, they had travelled alone together for five years and knew nothing or no one better than each other. She never got to tell him how much she loved him. The next day at the stocks in front of everyone she said nothing but thought it so loud that she convinced herself he had heard it. She died with no regrets and Walker never knew. He could only guess and hope she felt that way because it was the way he felt for her.

Though they were the same age, he had always acted the older brother, protecting her. But it still hadn’t been enough. And he hated himself for that.

And Walker walked alone while Dreamer dreamed above. A lone wolf crying out to the moon. Wolverine. And suddenly, he had a new name.

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The owner of this blog, B00kworm, is currently somewhere in England, with no wifi and a weak phone signal. It took her three tries to send this to me, one hour for me to type it all up, and god knows how long for her to write 600 words ON HER FREGGIN PHONE! Just barely making it on to the speakeasy Grid. GG bookworm!