The Castling Quartet

enoch

Two days and twenty-one hours before

It'd taken Enoch a moment to figure out how to run in the damned thing.

They were running from the palace. In the rain. Enoch, Horace, and Emma, soaked to the bone and shivering. Emma's heels had long been abandoned, and she was clutching her dress up with one hand and her breasts in the other. Her hair was clumped together in dark brown strands, though Enoch bet that half of the colour was simply dirt. Horace was trying to hop over puddles in an effort to save his suit, but it was much too late if the mud stains were any indication.

Enoch fumbled with the skirt of his dress, hiking it up to his mid-thigh and struggling to blow the hair out of his eyes with both hands occupied. He thanked whoever created his miserable existence that he had on work boots, despite Horace having bitched and moaned about Enoch ruining the look of his perfectly tailored dress. (That was before Enoch had barked at him to not have even made one.)

He would've complained about how long they had left to run, but he was at the end of their little line and the wights were gunning after them, so he trusted Emma to find some sort of cave to hide out in.

He was starting to wheeze when Emma suddenly barreled down the edge of a ditch and into a small cove concealed by a thick layer of pine leaves. How she managed to spot the place, he didn't know but was happy anyway. He slid down after Horace, tripping halfway down and landing hard on his side; subsequently, hitting his head on what felt to be a large and pointy rock. Enoch suddenly wished for a very short and merciful death.

Horace flopped on top of him, probably to cover up the shimmery white of Enoch's dress with his own black suit. He spotted Emma furiously slapping mud onto her cream one.

"Damnit, Horace," she whispered, "why couldn't you have made me a pantsuit instead? A brown one, at that?"

Enoch felt Horace's body jerk suddenly, and he deduced Horace had snapped his head up to glare at her. "Well, I'm sorry that I made you a custom dress! I'll try to be more considerate next time, mademoiselle—"

Enoch regained his bearings and, despite the pulsing pain, raised his head to glare at the two of them. "Would you two shut your bloody mouths? Do you want us to get dragged back there?"

Emma scowled at him as she scooped up another handful of mud and threw it onto her chest. Horace pressed his mouth into a flat line—whether at Emma ruining his perfect craftsmanship or Enoch mouthing them off, he didn't know.

They remained like that for the next fifteen-some minutes, Enoch would've guessed, alert and panicked and shaking like leaves in the wind.

Enoch broke the silence with a cough and a mumble for Horace to get off.

Horace sighed and rolled off of Enoch. At that point, they hadn't heard footsteps for quite some time. He sighed and inhaled deeply, as if he'd been holding his breath the whole time.

He sat up and rubbed his eyes. "Fuck, that was horrible."

Enoch sat up as well, stretching his arms and blinking around their little hideout, which was basically a hole in the ground with some tree branches above them. There was dirt and rocks rubbing between his arms and the gloves so he wrangled them off, shoving them in his pocket so as to not lose them.

"I guess it could've been worse," he said.

Horace shot him a look. "I killed a man."

Enoch shrugged. "It's not as if you haven't been forced to do it before."