Chương 31: Work
Damien felt himself being shaken awake what felt like mere minutes after he'd fallen asleep. He'd been led to a tiny, dark room that was little better the cellar room where mother usually locked him during his transformations. There was not even a window there, so he couldn't see the moon at all. He could feel it, though, the way he always felt the moon, even on the nights he wasn't near his transformation.
"What's going on?" he asked blearily, sitting up slowly to see Grace, fully dressed, standing over his bed.
"It's time for work," Grace said. "You've been assigned laundry duty, and since I have experience there, I thought I would show you some of the routines."
Damien slowly sat up, and immediately noticed that he felt less vitality than he had the day before. Whatever that mate-bond connection had done for him, the effect didn't last very long. He hoped he'd be able to keep his energy up long enough to not be written off as a useless burden and kicked out… or worse. At least he had his amulet to keep the vampires away. "Laundry," he said, and frowned. "Wait, does that mean-" he paused, looking at Grace, who had a too-innocent look on her face. "Did you ask for me to be assigned there?"
"Maybe," Grace said, a hint of a proud smirk crossing her face. "Morgan agreed it would be a good placement, keeping you away from where the vampires usually go. And it's normally a daytime duty, because we have to hang the laundry in the sun, too. So you'll be out and about when most of the vampires are sleeping."
Damien had to admit, it was a good position. It didn't hurt that he would have easy access to Cain's shirts, too. So that way he'd be able to keep fresh scent near him more often, and hopefully that would keep away the worst of the mate-sickness. If it didn't… well, he'd deal with that when he had to, and not before. "What do you need me to do?" Damien asked, standing up and running a hand through his unruly hair.
"First, get dressed," Grace said, a bit too matter-of-factly for Damien's comfort. He wondered if she'd been taking lessons from Dezzy, to say such a thing with such a straight face. Or maybe she just wasn't as easily embarrassed as he was. "Then, come outside. I'll wait just in the hall."
With that, she excused herself from Damien's room.
Damien was also glad he had laundry duty, because it would hopefully give him a chance to launder his own clothes. He'd done his best on the road to keep things as clean as he could, but there was only so much one could do without regular access to wash water and soap. He scrounged up the cleanest clothes he could find in his bag, and threw together a little pile of clothes that needed washing to take with him. Then, he stepped out of the door and into the hall, where Grace was waiting for him, just as she'd promised.
"Ready?"
Damien nodded, and the two of them made their way to the laundry, where it turned out that Damien was the farthest thing from ready. The room was full of steam, because they used warm water to wash the clothes here. The soap was strong, too, and before long Damien found his hands growing raw from the repeated dunking in the water. He was growing steadily weaker, too, especially with no scent of his mate to lean on. He got scolded three times in the first twenty minutes for not scrubbing the clothes hard enough, before they sent him to work on shaking out and hanging the washed items. He did his best there, too, but after only an hour, he started to get dizzy. He thought he was hiding it well, until he lifted a bedsheet too high over his head and fell over backwards, unable to regain his footing fast enough to prevent the embarrassing spill. The bedsheet had to be re-washed, and the laundresses seemed to despair of him.
"We'll have you take over the delicates," one laundress finally decided. "They require a gentle touch."
This turned out to work fine for Damien. The soap was far more mild, and rather than scrub vigorously, Damien only needed to gently scrunch the lace and silks until they seemed clean enough. Then he spread them out gently on a wide, flat surface. The laundresses clicked their tongues a bit, and told him he was being too slow, but they didn't send him somewhere else, so he figured that at least he wasn't completely ruining the delicate items.
By the time the first meal of the day rolled around, Damien was ready to collapse. His breath was coming in thready gasps, and when Grace made her way over to him, she looked genuinely shocked.
"Damien!" she exclaimed. "What's wrong?"
Damien shrugged. "My, 'wasting disease' catching up to me again," he said, putting a particularly ironic emphasis on the words wasting disease.
Grace looked concerned. "Maybe you should go take a nap," she suggested.
"I want to earn my keep," Damien insisted. "I'll be fine for another few hours."
Grace pressed her lips together, staring down at his plate with a worried look. "But you've barely touched your food, and you didn't even take much to start with," she said, her voice soft and tinged with clear worry.
"It's okay," Damien said. "I'm just not very hungry."
This did not appear to reassure Grace in the slightest, but she walked away after that. Damien thought he'd successfully given her the slip, until the young girl returned a moment later with one of the senior laundresses, who took one look at Damien's face, his plate, and loudly announced, "You've done enough for today, new boy. Go get some rest."
Damien shot Grace an irritated look, but she just stared back at him with sad, wide eyes. He couldn't stay mad at someone who looked like a kicked puppy. So, he took a few more bites of his food, feeling his stomach twist uncomfortably on the final bite. He pushed his plate aside, stood, wobbled dangerously, and then staggered back to his tiny little cell of a bedroom, kicking off his shoes, yanking his shirt off over his head, and falling into bed. He was just about to drop off when his eyes flew open. What had happened to the pile of laundry he brought with him?
He wanted to crawl back out of bed and go looking for his clothes, but his body betrayed him, and refused to move so much as an inch. Sighing, he decided it would have to wait a few hours, and allowed his eyes to slide shut again. He was asleep soon after.
* * *
The next day began even more disastrously than the previous, because Damien only had dirty clothes that had been rumpled by lying on the floor at his disposal. All his clothes that he'd taken to be laundered were still absent, and he had no real recollection of where he had even put his clothes once he'd gone to the laundry room.
Despite his embarrassment, Damien pulled the rumpled clothes on and staggered his way to the laundry room, only to realize the sun was well risen - it was so hard to judge the passage of time in a small, windowless room - and that everyone had likely been working for hours, as the morning meal was just being picked up and carried out by the kitchen workers.
He managed to slowly drag himself over to the delicate washing station, feeling his face heat with shame as he murmured, "Good morning, I'm… here to help with the washing."
The thralls who were hard at work looked up with uniform glowers, and Damien felt worse than a worm as he quailed before them. Then, he heard his name called.
"Oi! Damien!"
He turned, and saw the same laundress that had sent him to his room the day before. He thought her name might be Ellen, but he couldn't be certain. "Good morning," he greeted, a bit quiet and shamefully. "Sorry I'm late."
"Not at all, looks like you needed the recovery time," the full-figured laundress said brusquely. "How do you feel this morning? Better? Worse?"
Damien waited too long to answer, and the lively woman clapped a large hand on his shoulder. "That's all right," she said, and used one of her muscular arms to begin steering him back across the room to where the table had been cleared of breakfast, but for one lone plate sitting in the middle of the table. "Sit down, eat something."
Damien felt like he might catch fire if he grew any hotter with embarrassment. "I'm sorry," he apologized, doing as he was told and sitting down in front of the plate, laden far too heavily with foods he had no chance of finishing, not mate-sick as he was now. His stomach flip-flopped just looking at the food, and he worried that he might get in trouble for not finishing the food.
"Don't be sorry," the woman said, placing her hands on her hips and staring down at him. She raised her voice, adding, "No one expects any more than what you're able to give."
One glance over her shoulder at the disgusted stares being sent his way completely invalidated her statement, but Damien understood that she wasn't just saying it for his benefit, but so that everyone else in the room knew where she stood on the matter. He appreciated the gesture, even if he found it shameful that he couldn't do anything to repay her for her kindness. He couldn't even be a good worker.
He grabbed a spoon, scooping up a small bite of eggs. They seemed soft and mild, and would likely sit easy on his stomach. He was able to eat a few bites, and then a few more bites of bread, before the lurching of his guts told him that it was time to stop. He scooted the plate back, not quite sure what to do with it, and stood carefully. He left one hand resting on the table so that he could keep his balance, and glanced around. Before he could move, though, he saw Ellen making a beeling for him.
"Damien! Finished already?" She glanced at the plate, and then shot a concerned look his way.
"Sorry," Damien apologized again. He felt like he needed to explain. "I ate as much as I could…"
"Never you mind," Ellen said quickly, and patted Damien gently on the back before steering him back across the room to where the delicates were still being washed and laid out to dry. "Do what you can, and take a break when you need," she said, and then glanced at the other three who were hunched over the laundry tub, scowling at Damien. "And you three," she added, "go easy on him. He has a wasting disease."
The expressions on two of the other thralls shifted in that moment, from frustration to looks of pity. At first, Damien didn't understand why, until one of them said, "Does that mean the vampires won't feed on you anymore?"
Damien blinked slowly. "Because I have a disease…?" he asked, slowly lowering himself onto one of the stools beside the laundry tub and picking up a lace doily, dunking it in the lukewarm water and gently scrunching it with his hands.
One of the two nodded. The other just continued to stare with wide eyes. The third hadn't stopped glowering angrily at Damien.
"Probably," Damien said. "I don't think most vampires like the taste of sickness."
"That's too bad," said one of the thralls, now appearing sympathetic to Damien's plight. "I don't know what I'd do if I had to give that up," he said softly, lifting a hand from the water to cradle the side of his neck, much in the way Damien thought he might cradle a mate-mark, if he ever got one. Not that he wanted one from a vampire, anyway. Though he supposed that was sort of how this thrall thought of the bite-mark that may linger on his skin.
"It's turned my whole world upside-down," Damien said, very truthfully, though not in the way the thralls likely imagined. "I don't know what to do with myself now that I've gotten sick."
"How do you know you're not contagious?" demanded the angry, scowling thrall. "You shouldn't be spending time with us if you might spread the wasting disease to others."
"It's… an inherited disease," Damien said quickly, trying not to be too obvious but still wanting to defend himself to an extent. "It's not the sort of thing that can be spread, except from parent to child."
"Does it have something to do with your weird supernatural ancestry?" the second thrall asked, still looking a bit confused. She was eyeing Damien's ears with curiosity. "What are you, anyway? Part demon?"
Damien didn't know what to say. "Not exactly," he said. "It's … ah… one of the life magic creatures."
"Like a giant?" the thrall frowned. "You don't look like a giant."
Giants weren't even life magic creatures. They were of the mountains and stone. Damien didn't bother correcting her, though. "Something more forest-y," he said. "On my father's side." And my mother's side, he didn't add. He wasn't exactly a great liar, but the thralls also didn't seem particularly perceptive, and Damien was too tired to feel properly ashamed of his lies, which seemed to make him better at telling them.
"I still think you shouldn't be so close," the angry thrall said, scooting even farther away from Damien, still glaring as he did so. "You can't know for sure that the disease is only inherited. If any of us get wasting disease, it'll be your fault."
If any of you get mate-sickness, it wouldn't be because of me, Damien thought irritably. I already have my mate, and I'm no happier about the situation than you are.
"Will you recover?" the first thrall, the most sympathetic of the lot, asked him.
"I don't know," Damien answered genuinely. "I really don't have the ability to get any better treatments for it, so mostly I just try to manage the symptoms." That was true, only in the most technical sense that he couldn't exactly get the vampire to give him a mating bite. But it was also true that he wasn't exactly trying to get the vampire to bite him, either, so his lack of treatment was almost entirely a self-inflicted problem. Still. He wasn't going to just tell these people that he was mate-sick for a vampire that a bunch of unknown thralls were wildly jealous over for some stupid reason. They already hated him for being sick. How much more angry would they be when they discovered the reason for his illness was because he'd imprinted on the vampire they all loved?
It wasn't worth the hassle. Rather than continue the conversation, Damien wobbled to his feet and carried the little doily over to the drying tables before returning to the washtub, where the conversation had already turned to more neutral topics, and Damien could turn his attention more fully onto the task of washing the pile of lace beside his stool.
* * *
When Damien was preparing to leave (which was around the midday meal, as he'd almost fallen headfirst into his soup because he'd been nodding off and on for about an hour at that point), he was pulled aside by Ellen, who pressed a small pile of freshly washed and cleaned clothes into his arms. "I saw you bring these in yesterday," she said, "but you never asked about them. You left them over there," she pointed to a corner near where the regular laundry was being vigorously scrubbed. "So I took the liberty of having them washed and dried."
Damien thought he might cry at the thought of finally having clean clothes to wear. Now he just needed to figure out where to take a real bath, because using a strip of fabric and the little wash basin in his room was just not a suitable substitute. "Thank you," he said feelingly.
"You're welcome. Next time," Ellen pointed across the room to a line of wicker baskets, "just toss them in there, and then retrieve them from the pile," she pointed to a small mountain of clothes near the long clotheslines. "By the end of the day."
Damien nodded. "Thank you," he said again. "I'll be sure to do that."
Ellen nodded, and turned to leave, but Damien thought he might try his luck once, and said, "Um!"
This prompted Ellen to turn back around. "Yes?"
"Do you know where the thralls… bathe?" Damien asked.
Ellen smiled. "Why don't I show you? You'll sleep better after a nice bath, and I deserve a break," she winked at him as she said this, though Damien wasn't sure if it was because she was lying, or because she was making a joke and thought Damien was in on it even though he was the farthest thing from it.
Ellen led him down the hall to an area not too far from the laundry. He supposed it was because both of them used warm water, and so both needed to be close to the kitchens. There were a few separate basins, and some standing racks where one could scrub down. There was also a small hearth where one could warm up and dry off without catching cold.
"Towels are there," Ellen pointed to the wall, "Unless you have your own."
Damien did have his own towel, in the pile that Ellen had handed him. But he didn't want to get it wet just yet. "That's wonderful," he said.
"If you have any special treatments that you like to use," Ellen paused then, and frowned slightly. "Though I suppose since you're not on the feeding list, you'll not be likely to want that, will you?"
Damien shook his head. "No, I'm not exactly appealing to vampires at the moment," he said, which was true, if only because of the amulet he wore around his neck.
"That's all right, lad," Ellen said, patting Damien on the shoulder once more. "I'm sure things will look up shortly."
Damien hoped that would be the case, though he knew that he and Ellen had vastly different ideas of what sort of situation might be an improvement on his current one.
"I'll leave you here to get washed up," Ellen said, lifting her hand from his shoulder. "My break is almost over."
"Thank you again," Damien said quietly.
"I take care of my own," Ellen said firmly. "You're one of mine, now."
Even though Damien had sworn to himself that he would hate all the thralls in the vampires' fortress, he found that he couldn't bring himself to hate her, not even when she used such possessive language. It felt nice. It felt familiar. Like the way Dezzy and Mother had always staked their claim on him. It felt like maybe he could forge a new family for himself here, even if it wouldn't be the pack he always dreamed of. But maybe he could live with that.
For a time, anyway.
Sighing, Damien found a dry corner to stow his clean laundry, and grabbed one of the spare towels. It was freshly washed and dried, and smelled like the soap from the harsh scrubbing side of the laundry room. That made sense, because towels weren't exactly fine linens. He could see a pile of wet towels in a basket near the door, and surmised that was where he should put his used towel. He wondered if the towels were collected once a day, or more than once. Maybe he'd ask Ellen.
In the meantime, he was ready to get clean, to finally wash all the grime and dirt of the road off himself, and then go to his room and sleep in clean clothes. It sounded heavenly.
…so long as he didn't accidentally fall asleep in the bath.
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