A/N: I was searching through my files for something and found this old thing. It's not my best work, but I feel fairly proud of it, considering the age I was when I wrote it. It was inspired partially by Janet Fitch's White Oleander, though you'd have to be some kind of schizophrenic to see the similarities. (i.e. she doesn't write sci-fi, and what she does write, she writes well. XD)

Gwydion

Take what’s left, she thought on that rainy night. Always the same. Take what others had left behind. As she rummaged through the dumpster, icy waters pouring over her exposed, scarred hands, burning them like an unrelenting flame, she tried hard to remember what she had left behind. She concentrated so much on it, in fact, that her scavenging became an absent-minded activity, and all her being was focused on evoking those sleeping, if not dead, memories.

A name…She pulled a sheet of cardboard from the trash, covered in stickers, ratty, yet sturdy enough for one night, at least. Her other one had been taken by another Wanderer; his eyes had held fury, lust, and hurt in them, so she’d let him have it with no fuss. A man with such a flurry of emotions inside, no matter how common such a man was, was to be avoided at all costs. Tucking the sheet under her right arm, she turned back to the dumpster, and the possibility of a name.

It had been a boy’s, or, rather, a man’s – a man from mythology. My parents were so strange, she recalled, tossing a dead rat onto the wet asphalt in disgust. Gwydion. Yes, Gwydion, that had been it. She didn’t know why she’d had the “w” in it – her parents had always told her not to pronounce it.

Shoving a broken porcelain bowl aside, she tore through another garbage bag, reached inside, and pulled out a hairbrush, covered in hay-like strands. She tucked it into her sleeve, storing it for later inspection. By that time, she should have understood that hygiene and appearances were the least of her worries. The alleyway was unsafe; anyone who saw her now, especially anyone with a sexual appetite, would find the modern-day equivalent of an attractive, accommodating housewife standing before them. She held shelter (the cardboard), extra blankets (her tattered jacket, shirt and pants), and a night’s entertainment (her) right there. And even if nobody saw her, she would still have to return to the bridge before she caught something. Pneumonia and other more sinister and silent fiends prowled the streets during such cold, wet nights, invisible to the unwary, terrifying to even the most prepared.

She couldn’t think of such things at the moment, though, or else she would panic, and would be unable to perform the task at hand. So she turned her mind back to the past. Broken eggs…Sunday breakfast. Nothing but that, and her name, seemed to remain in her head. What else is there to remember? she wondered, cursing when she cut her hand on the cracked porcelain that had once looked innocuous to her incautious eyes. Squeezing the cut, hoping to purge whatever blood happened to gather there, she set the cardboard on the ground, shoved her hand in her pocket—and then realized that the cardboard would be too soggy to use by the time she was done. So, she shrugged off her jacket and dropped it on the board, hoping at least to cover a part of it. A half was saved from the damp.

The rain pounding on her uncovered arms, she bent over the dumpster, protected her bleeding hand in a pocket of her jeans, and thought, This is how an impotent man must feel: claustrophobic, control as a distant cousin who never visits, and only power in waiting. Of course, though, she had more power than an impotent man, if only in childrearing; she held no illusions about that. As she stood there, water seeping through the delicate cloth of her shirt, chilling the skin on her back and her chest, the memory of her first time bore itself like a whale onto the surface of her thoughts. She’d been a fool, and wished now that the one thing she could hold onto was her purity; not her name, not a hairbrush—

The brush! Startled, she turned to look down at the jacket—and found that the brush had tumbled out of the sleeve when she’d dropped it to the ground. It was now coated in rainwater on the floor of the alleyway, possibly ruined.

Infinitely annoyed with herself, she picked up her jacket, threw it on, grabbed the cardboard from the ground, and slammed the dumpster’s top down in an infuriated few seconds. The trash held no more treasures for her, she was sure, and so turned from the dumpster.

And then the worst came. There stood at the entrance to the alley, three growling, repulsive, hungry men. Bulky creatures, side-by-side they blocked the only exit back onto the street; the one at the center attracted the most of her attention, perhaps simply because he was in the middle, a position that usually denoted power in such gangs of three, or maybe because he was the most vulgar, scratching his bulging, hairy stomach that hung out under his too-small shirt, staring at her with eyes that saw nothing but possibilities. The other two could have been clones of each other for all she cared, because the middle one terrified her most of all.

Purity is but a dream. Shocked, she wondered where it had come from, that voice. The three men appeared unchanged, had not heard the words that seemed unbearably loud to her. In fact, they had already slowly begun to advance, walking like ravenous dogs in a singular motion that directed them towards the pleasing warmth of her body. She must have looked exactly how they wanted her to look: Frightened, helpless…frozen to the spot. But she was no longer paying them any heed.

Purity is but a dream. The same words. The men were getting closer. She couldn’t move. Let it go.

She awoke in the same alley, rain sliding down her body and into the drain next to a wall, mingling with blood as it went. She sat up, feeling the aches and sharp twinges that covered her body all over. The men lay silent beside her, no longer moving; they were still terrifying, but in a far different manner.

Fleeing the sight of the dead, she snatched up her coat (When did I drop it?) and ran from that alley, leaving the cardboard behind. She took to the streets, and ran as long as she could before the cold, the wind, the water, and her own exhaustion seemed to drag her down, and she had the strength to run no longer. In no time at all, a skyscraper rose before her, like one cruel finger pointing inexplicably upward. The bridge under which she usually slept was far from where she now stood, so she entered the lobby of the building, ignoring all common sense. Somehow, actually, common sense had been overridden, by what she felt was a higher authority within her—a stronger sense, one that informed her that the building was empty, and would most likely continue to be empty.

Though she could not understand that instant knowledge of unknown origin, she could see why no one would wish to sleep in such a building: It symbolized all that had once been, and all that had been lost; it was a terribly oblique, immoral, and irritating metaphor for the past, showing everyone what they had given up for such a dark future.

And yet she proceeded inside.

The skyscraper itself was cold, unsurprisingly, and yet it still gave protection against the raging weather outside. She shook her coat off and dropped it on what used to be a reception desk, rubbing her arms for warmth. Her hand was still bleeding, and, as she wandered her temporary home, she also looked for bandages. Paper from a printer had to do.

Sitting in a cubicle, she tended to her hand carefully, wondered if she would need stitches, and then remembered that she had no way of obtaining thread or a needle. She lay back on a desk, having gently moved the computer to the floor, and nursed the latest wound, refusing to think back to the alleyway. Instead, she thought more on her name.

Gwydion…Gwydion had been a magician. He’d…he’d made a maiden out of flowers. That was all she could remember. Gwydion had made someone a wife out of flowers.

“It’s maddening, isn’t it?” There was the voice again. Her eyes snapped open and she instinctively backed against the wall of the cubicle, her hand groping futilely beneath the desk in the hopes of a weapon. Yet…she could not see the owner of the voice. “That your name is all you own of what you used to be, I mean. But you don’t really own it, do you?”

“Who—” she began.

“I mean, it’s more like a window—you can see what you used to be,” it went on, “but you can never touch it.” For the first time, she realized that this time it was aloud, and a masculine voice at that.

She jumped off the desk, tired, afraid, but still curious, and began to slowly follow the trail of sound the voice left behind. It seemed to be moving. “Why did you kill those men?” she asked, before she knew what she was going to say, before she knew that the man was speaking to her, even before she knew that he had somehow been the one to kill her attackers, not her.

“A lesson,” he replied simply.

“What?” He was in the lounge, that much she could tell. She slowly approached the doorway that separated the first floor office space and the reception area, pressed up against the wall, and leaned closer to the doorway.

“‘Purity is but a dream,’” he repeated back to her. “Come out.” Startled at his immediate order, she emerged from the office, and found herself staring at a tall man, not handsome, but not ugly, with dark hair like hers, though cut short. He seemed normal, though entirely unlike every other man in the city, from what she could tell.

He continued his words from before, smiling down on her: “You may wish to be pure, to be Gwydion once again, bear flowers down on this world—but that’s gone, isn’t it? This city’s chance at beauty.” His smile bewitched her, almost enough to distract her from his words. It was not a kind smile; nor did it wish her harm. This contradiction was enough to mesmerize her, but she forced herself to focus on what emerged from his lips, not on what shapes they formed.

“So what are you—”

Cutting her off again, he answered curtly, “Death. I offer you death.”

No matter how much she wished it, she could not feel surprised. He continued to speak, perhaps to persuade her: “How long do you plan to survive here, in this world? You will meet a terrible end before help, if any is on its way, and I can almost guarantee that it is not, can reach you.” He made sense.

“You wish for your innocence back,” he went on, “something that can never be granted. I pity your existence; what was once capable of beauty, of love, is now…you.” That last word was spoken with what could have been disgust, regret, or a number of other things that confused her. “I can take you away from here; give you a painless death.”

He paused. “Do you accept?”

She, who had, in years past, been Gwydion, a woman who had dined with her family on holidays, had dropped eggs on the floor while trying in vain to bake, and who now collected trash in the hopes of sustaining herself in that ruin of a city, turned to a window, and stared at the pelting rain.

The devil awaited an answer.