oom: back to the beginning
Jul. 22nd, 2020 10:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
abyssum_invocatGetting out of Sarajevo is stupidly easy for being in the middle of a siege. She has no papers, no money, no ties to the city; she doesn’t need any. She tears at the clothes the bar gave her, already shapeless and faded and ugly, until they’re worn and stretched and dirty enough to make the picture she presents more realistic. It takes scraping her arms and knees, smearing dirt and blood on her face and in her hair, biting her nails down and rubbing all manner of filth under them and into her eyes until they’re bloodshot.
She knows how to look pitiful and scared; she’s seen it enough on other faces to mimic it. She rides in the back of the UN truck, tucked small in the corner with big, wary eyes trained on the blue helmets’ sidearms. She lets them all think she’s scared of the weapons instead of gauging who would be the easiest to take it from.
That act lasts her until Zenica, where she scrounges around for a day or three, eating as many calorically-dense foods as she can get with handouts (which isn’t many) and steals from an unconscious man she’d gotten smashingly drunk enough cash to make it to Banja Luka and across the border. She mostly hitch-hikes, still grubby in her clothes now authentically travel-stained and worn-in, and occasionally lets a man proposition her into a shady bar or empty bathroom stall before she bashes her elbow into his skull and robs him blind. The sole one of them who actually managed to put a hand on her she left hogtied with his own pants, and several of his teeth scattered on the dingy tile floor. His money and his jewelry get her a fair distance: all the way to Austria.
It helps that with two broken or dislocated knees he couldn’t follow her if he wanted to.
It helps that she’s still good at inflicting that kind of damage.
It’s Graz where she runs out of money, but in a university town it’s easy to blend in with the way she looks, young and fresh-faced and finally clean. She finds someone who looks startlingly like her, and after four days takes her ID cards and cash, leaving her one bank card and calling the police two minutes before she walks out with half the contents of the woman’s closet and her car keys.
She leaves the car four blocks away before setting it on fire, but she breaks into another before she clears the woman’s accounts with little more than a flustered, watery smile and a few well-timed remarks about needing to get out of town. She keeps her body language small, her eyes keep tracking to the doors as if she’s afraid of being followed. It’s really remarkably easy when she stops to think about it.
She doesn’t do that often.
She pauses for a half a day she sees a sign on the road pointing to Innsbruck; she has very few memories of the place, and she’s quite certain by the rest of the country that it won’t be a thing like it was the last time she knows she was there. Remarkably, Austria seems to have rebuilt itself out of the Reich’s heavy shadow.
If only she could do the same.
She knows how to look pitiful and scared; she’s seen it enough on other faces to mimic it. She rides in the back of the UN truck, tucked small in the corner with big, wary eyes trained on the blue helmets’ sidearms. She lets them all think she’s scared of the weapons instead of gauging who would be the easiest to take it from.
That act lasts her until Zenica, where she scrounges around for a day or three, eating as many calorically-dense foods as she can get with handouts (which isn’t many) and steals from an unconscious man she’d gotten smashingly drunk enough cash to make it to Banja Luka and across the border. She mostly hitch-hikes, still grubby in her clothes now authentically travel-stained and worn-in, and occasionally lets a man proposition her into a shady bar or empty bathroom stall before she bashes her elbow into his skull and robs him blind. The sole one of them who actually managed to put a hand on her she left hogtied with his own pants, and several of his teeth scattered on the dingy tile floor. His money and his jewelry get her a fair distance: all the way to Austria.
It helps that with two broken or dislocated knees he couldn’t follow her if he wanted to.
It helps that she’s still good at inflicting that kind of damage.
It’s Graz where she runs out of money, but in a university town it’s easy to blend in with the way she looks, young and fresh-faced and finally clean. She finds someone who looks startlingly like her, and after four days takes her ID cards and cash, leaving her one bank card and calling the police two minutes before she walks out with half the contents of the woman’s closet and her car keys.
She leaves the car four blocks away before setting it on fire, but she breaks into another before she clears the woman’s accounts with little more than a flustered, watery smile and a few well-timed remarks about needing to get out of town. She keeps her body language small, her eyes keep tracking to the doors as if she’s afraid of being followed. It’s really remarkably easy when she stops to think about it.
She doesn’t do that often.
She pauses for a half a day she sees a sign on the road pointing to Innsbruck; she has very few memories of the place, and she’s quite certain by the rest of the country that it won’t be a thing like it was the last time she knows she was there. Remarkably, Austria seems to have rebuilt itself out of the Reich’s heavy shadow.
If only she could do the same.
