Fic: Recognition

Title: Recognition
Author: linaerys
Rating: PG
Summary: Bruce walks up into the mountains.
Word Count: ~800

It is one of the only plants that grows at fifteen thousand feet and it clings hard among the lichens on the hillside. Bruce bends down and picks one, feeling the rough leaves between his fingers, and the waxy petals of the flower. The petals huddle in close to each other against the cold.

Bruce tucks the flower into a fold in his tunic, close to the warmth of his chest. He wears layers of wool and cotton and linen—at least the prison provided some clothing. Bruce remembers walking around Princeton in the winter, wearing his cashmere coat, his hiking boots. Here he needs more, and has less. Everyone needs more, and has less here than they did at Princeton. He ties every drawstring tighter against the cold, and adjusts the handfuls of dry grass he secreted between the layers so they won’t scratch as much. Raw skin is cold skin.

He wraps his hands in strips of wool torn from an old prison blanket. The wind blows fiercely here, but it will blow harder above. The prison was at altitude too, an oasis of greater cruelty on the great Chinese plateau, where even the air was part of the punishment, but Bruce is grateful for that now. It made him strong enough, perhaps, to endure this test. And perhaps the ones beyond this as well, Bruce thinks. His lungs burn with the cold and he begins to climb.

Bruce’s focus narrows to the rime-crusted path in front of him. His flimsy boots aren’t meant for this and they slide against the ice. He develops a rhythm, testing each step for a moment before trusting it with his full weight. He stops every hundred steps for a moment of rest. His lips have started to dry and crack from the wind, and his throat is parched, but he remembers some Boy Scout lesson, someone once told him that eating ice would lower his body temperature before it could slake his thirst, so he endures.

He thinks of what might await him above, of Ducard in his cell, with his urbane demeanor, his Saville Row suit—nothing but handmade for a man that tall and broad. A man who made the prison walls disappear. Bruce could have done that too, spoken his name like a spell and walked through those walls, but the cost would have been too great, and where else did he have to be?

Ducard looked strangely familiar to Bruce: not his face, nor height, nor fine-boned hands in impeccable leather gloves, but the way he moved, the softness of his voice. Bruce couldn’t place the recollection—Thailand maybe, some foreigner glimpsed in the custom clothing shops that lined the tourist districts. Bruce had avoided those areas, but sometimes his path took him there—for every tourist that wanted a suit, there was one who wanted pure Thai heroin, a girl, a boy, something.

The line was thin there between the criminals and the respectable, there as everywhere else—money lubricated the passage between worlds for men like Ducard, men like Bruce could have been. But no, Ducard had none of the furtive, nervousness the tourists had.

The fractured layers of ice in the cliff before Bruce look like the stacks of dried squid in the Chinese market in Bangkok. The criminal underworld thrived there—the kindly old man who sold cut up fish in the morning might be using those sharp knives to cut throats at night.

Bruce weaved his way down the tiny lanes in the market, stacked high with food and stereos. The path was less than two feet wide and still a motorcyclist puttered by, with bundles of chickens hanging from the handle bars. Bruce took the route he’d memorized: right, left, 2nd left, at the smelly fish make a right, and then look for the old lady with one jade earring.

Bruce was there to pass a message along and get an answer. Would they move tonight? Cut the supply lines of stolen goods and divert them? Bruce just had to appear in front of the proprietor of this fish stall, and his presence would be message enough.

A nod from the old woman gave him his answer. And out of the corner of his eye, he saw a quarter profile—hair like the pelt of a wolf, a head bowed, a mocking twist of lip. Bruce turned his head to get a better look and the man was gone.

The man—Ducard? Or not, but some predator of a higher order than Bruce, someone who could slip out of view like a scrap of silk.

Bruce counts out his next hundredth step, and then leans against the cliff wall on his right. He sees a door above, grim and severe against the charcoal sky, but it is still some evidence that he is not quite abandoned here, doomed to freeze to the mountainside.

Was it Ducard there in that market, was that his finely lined cheek? Or was that some other Westerner bobbing along through the tides of Asian faces in Bangkok, no more remarkable than Bruce himself?

A whorl of snow swirls on the path in front of him, graceful and playful, dancing in the wind, and Bruce starts walking again. The door ahead starts to disappear in the fading light, but Bruce feels a renewed strength spreading out from his chest. Ducard followed him, and looked for him as Bruce navigated his downward spiral through Asia. He watched Bruce fight, and judged him worthy, Bruce thinks, as the muscles in his legs burn and cry out for oxygen.

Beyond that door, he will not be alone.