Sir Edward Mitchell's Story

Light filters through a cracked eyelid, beneath the pale flesh a blue iris tracks backwards and forwards, following the flickering traces of unknowable shifts, odd shapes halfway between reality and nonexistance. Slowly, however, it seems to gain focus, the tracking slows and focuses upon the point of light high above. It takes an eternity for one slender arm to find its way beneath a bound ribcage and slowly, painstakingly, to leaver it upright.

The creature itself is pitiful, unrecognisable as anything more than a collection of bruises, burns and cuts. What fabric remains, what attempt at modesty, is rendered almost entirely superfluous by the simple fact that no human living could look at the sorry example of a human female and find anything remotely appetising about it.

They didn't care about that.

A skull ringing with pain is lowered gently back against the wall with a soft cry of pain, before the tension begins to ease out of the right shoulder. The left, wrapped haphazardly with indistinct rags, does little but hang bound towards the body. Days mean little here, beyond a sliver of light at the window, a moment's warmth. In the distance she can hear the footsteps of life passing by, but her first mistake had been an attempt to draw attention. That had been what cost her her collarbone, and she'd learnt. After all, there was no one coming for her. Not now.

So instead, the broken excuse for a young woman waits, and tries to find what comfort she can, and prays to gods that have long deserted her, that this half-rest would continue a little longer. There is only one chair in this dark room, and she'd rather break her own legs than sit upon it of her own volition... so it's the floor, and the tatters of clothing, that provides her some comfort.

The house, much like the neighbourhood it sat in was incongruous amongst the ochre fabric of the city. Built in a western style, it stood a full storey above the surrounding buildings, belonging more in some mid-western suburb than in Vien's dusty heat.

Sitting in neat rows, the houses followed a truncated intersection of tarmac which had been roughly patched into the dirt roads servicing the rest of the city. Dust pooled around patio tiles and drizzled like fine rain of roof slates, clogging gutters and fouling plumbing. Very few of them were inhabited, the residencies an object of curiosity more than anything else. Neglected, they had all fallen into disrepair, but none more so than the two houses at the end of the road.

The one on the right had become Edward's lair. The street children who regularly invaded the other domiciles to smoke narcotics and fumble amongst the collapsed ceiling beams avoided it with an instinctive fear of violence. They told stories of an old desert demon cast up by the west wind, a vengeful spirit hunting for the souls of the unwary.

The demon lived in the attic in a nest built from beams stripped from other parts of the house. An eerie from which he kept an unceasing vigil. Sometimes an errant flame illuminated his hunched shape, curled smoothly around a long-barrelled rifle, the yawning muzzle tracing a lazy pattern over the blacked out windows of the house across.

His hunt had been long and gruelling. It had claimed the lives of twenty policemen and numerous contacts and informants. Strand by strand he had pulled apart a complex web of intrigue, torturing and killing his way across the city. Several times he had been forced out into the desert beyond the walls by the arrival of them, unwilling to risk his fragile mind in battle.

She had been his driving force. The old Edward would never had been able to rationalize the brutality he had committed. The old Edward would have been driven insane by guilt, rendered down to some pacing insomniac taking half a dozen different pills just to feel normal again. The demon did not care. The demon wanted her back.

And now, for the first time in months, she was within reach.

It doesn't take long, and at the same time takes an eternity until there is the sound of a key in the lock. She forces her head to turn, ignoring the pain that etches it's way along her neck in protest. The dark slacks were easier to look at than the impassive faces, and she gets a good look as two sets of them march across the dirt-encrusted floor towards her.

The force with which they grab her arm destroys any hope she has of maintaining her silence, and she cries out in a high, bitter gasp of agony as they wrench the undamaged limb upwards, disturbing it's injured partner in the process. They tell her to move in an alien tongue, but it is a word she has heard so very often that her feet struggle to obey despite the barrier. They've met before. More times than she can keep separate within her mind. In the beginning she'd tried to fight them, and been battered and beaten for the trouble. Worse, she'd learnt that there was only one way up, one way out... and that she could not get to it. The destruction of that hope had been almost as painful as the physical beatings... but twice as effective. She hadn't tried to run again.

Her compliance doesn't earn her much, the stairs add dark bruises to multi-coloured shins as she is shoved up them by impatient hands. But it is nothing compared to the primal fear that shoots through her body as she enters the Room. The Chair is here, and she hears her breathing become ragged, as though it belonged to someone else, as she is dragged across the floor towards it. "No!" She tries to protest, but it only takes the lightest of taps against a fractured cheekbone to leave her gasping in pain. Her wrists and ankles are soon bound to the chair, and she's taunted by the gentle whispering of air against the back of her neck. A breeze through the open window, barely a breath, and yet more than she has felt in so very, very long...

"So." The voice drags her back from her brief escape, sending tremors of fear through her body. "Perhaps today you will comply."

"I don't know." Her dry lips crack, and already she can taste the raw flesh beneath as she utters the only words she has.

"A pity then." The figure steps from the table, walking towards her with a contraption she had yet to experience, one that made her cold with dread. "Perhaps you will change your mind. Yes?"

Another night of waiting. A night of watching blacked-out windows, and the faint shadows behind them while the desert wind plucked at loose roofing slates and the street children whispered on the periphery. But he could be patient. He'd trailed her for months to this house. What difference would a few days make?

He did not want to address the consequences of failure. He couldn't lose her again. So he would be patient.

Edward knew the layout of the house down to an almost minute level of detail. Through exploration of other houses on the incongruous street, he had determined that they were almost identical copies, with some additions like conservatories and cellars. He was confident that he could clear the house in minutes, striking with a speed and precision unmatched by any military operator on the planet.

His injuries had ceased to become an impediment, aside from the loss of his fingers. It was unlikely that he'd ever be able to shoot with the accuracy he'd once possessed. The lacquered cane was propped up against one of the attic's slanted beams, now both a vain affectation and a defence mechanism all in one.

A flare of light and a drifting plume of acrid smoke heralded the beginning of another nightly smoking session on the porch. Three guards, dressed almost identically huddled around a single lighter, puffing heartily on the local brand of cigarettes.

Edward's count of the guards within the house rested at seven, each one carrying a personal sidearm. He presumed there was a store of heavier ordinance somewhere inside, kept out of sight to avoid drawing attention to the dilapidated building.

Stretching out his shooting arm, Edward settled the rifle's crosshairs on each guard in turn, exhaling rhythmically in a pantomime of shooting.

The moment would come soon.

"But I don't!"

She can hear the panic in her own voice, she hates herself for it, but as a ring is strung onto each of her fingers on her right hand, chains dancing above each, she can feel her panic rising. They'd abandoned the more studied methods some time ago, her current captor taking a particular pleasure in testing out his newer designs...

She knew because he'd told her.

"Just say." He coaxes as he lines up the chains with almost delicate movements. He moves off behind her, and she feels her fingers twitch in movement as he does so. "Where are they?"

"Don't know!" She snaps, and the words are followed by a howl of pain as one of the chains is rapidly yanked backwards, pulling against her bound wrist until she hears the 'pop' that accompanies a dislocation. His movements are quick, however. Almost before she can catch her breath he is upon her, ramming the digit back into it's place with surgical precision before pushing his hand down upon hers, leaning forwards to put a greater pressure on the traumatised joint.

"Sweets, we can do this all night."

It had been weeks this way. Weeks that had worn away at her self control, at her ability to resist the urge to shriek, and so she does, loud and often. In the streets, children flee. No one speaks about what occurs here. No one wants to look. On the balcony the guard share a glance between them, and go right back to their smoke. "'S mutant freaks for yeh." One says to his companion, who nods, sagely.

He waited until dawn.

He waited until the scorching brilliance of Aberash's sun crept down the incongruous street, banishing the cloying gloom of the summer night. Porches and overhangs cast deeps wells of darkness against the radiance, turning Edward's decrepit hideout into a shifting warren of light and shadow.

By the time the sun was beginning to rise outside, Aislynn could no longer scream.

The bitter taste of blood had moved from the faintest tang, to being all that she could taste- it infected the very air she breathed, it wafted through her mouth and bloodied nose until it seemed like the entire world was doused in it. Her throat felt raw and ripped, leaving her wincing with each cough and unable to utter the same irate, brazen comments that had so infuriated her captor.

She's half-lifted onto bloodied feet, and as the guards on the balcony give a wave to indicate that all is quiet in the street below, she is half dragged, half carried to the balcony overlooking the street. As she walks she finds herself looking at rolled-up shirtsleeves, marked with blood... her blood.

"See?" She feels fingers in her hair, jerking her up to look towards the rising sun, along a deserted street. The sudden light hurts the one eye that can open, the other long swollen shut, but the grip stops her from turning away. "No one cares." She's hauled closer to the edge, pushed until shes almost on the lip... kept back, perhaps, due to her captor's unwillingness to let her drop to the ground below. "I could drop you, leave you in the gutter, and not one soul... not one... would stop me."

She's shaken, and she feels her limbs flap loosely, her hands battering at her sides. "I will kill you." The voice promises, and Aislynn almost smiles...

The half step she takes forwards is cut suddenly short, as her hair is used to yank her sharply back from the edge and send her firmly onto the floor. A patent leather shoe follows, colliding hard with ribs that grind and crunch under the abuse. "Get inside!" He snaps, and when she's slow, the kicks rain down again, until she can drag herself into the safety of her own, damned, torture room. Only then would he stop, straightening the stained sleeves as he looks down at her.

"Tell me where they are."

She spits blood at him, and grins defiantly at the sole of the shoe that comes quickly for her face, sending her reeling into the darkness.

The guard closest to her folded up like a shop mannequin. He died quietly as his heart burst like an over-ripe fruit, the high velocity round exploding out of his back with a helical spray, spattering both Aislynn and her captor with viscera.

A pair of large holes appeared in the house's wooden panelling, followed shortly by anguished screams as the guards on the second floor met an untimely end.

Silence fell across the incongruous street. Smoke gusted from the shattered attic, a glitter of brass marking the passage of the falling shell cases. On the house's ground floor, a frightened face could be partially seen through a grubby pane of glass, as the remaining guards hunted for their mysterious assailant.

He had already moved to the house across, through a hole knocked in the fragile walls, tufts of fiber-glass insulation clinging to his coat. With a grunt, he dropped through a ruined ceiling onto the detritus strewn ground floor, tucking himself into a neat paratroop roll.

Invisible in the shadows thrown by a crumpled air conditioner, he levelled his rifle.

Another two shots marked the demise of the guards on the ground floor, arterial spray spattering across the inside of the windows.

Aislynn comes around to a pounding, stabbing pain in her head, and grabs frantically for her hair as she finds herself being dragged backwards across the floor. As her eyes refocus she can make out the crimson blood on the windows, lit in a moment of horrifying beauty by the rising sun outside. She realises that the man dragging her is muttering, swearing, and as soon as she has her wits about her, she screams.

It tries to be a name, a prayer, a word, but between her ruined throat and the swelling around her mouth, it sounds simply like "WAAARRRR", the other syllables somehow lost in the process. The noise earns her a kick, and suddenly she is released, her forehead bouncing off the wooden floor beneath her, before Shirtsleeves hauls her back to her feet, pressing her body to his, her back against his front as his arm closes around her neck, putting her throat in the crook of his elbow.

"Stupid whore." She snarls at her. "Shut up." He continues his mad scuttle backwards, heading for the stairs, hauling her around in an attempt to use her as cover. How many of them were there? Why had they attacked with guns, and not with the other abilities he *knew* they had? He glances through the nearest window, and watches as blood patterns the glass of the opposite house.

He swore.

Moments later they are back on the balcony, and Aislynn can feel the cool weight of a gun muzzle pressed against her temple.

"STEP OUTSIDE!" The words are bellowed from right beside her ear, and she flinches reflexivly, and just as quickly regrets the motion as he jams the metal barrel at her again, harder. He needs her for cover, and the majority of his suited body is covered by her own lithe frame as he surveys the house across the road.

"STEP OUTSIDE, OR SHE DIES."

A cool exhalation to squash the squall of anger raging inside him. An imperceptible movement to steady the heavy rifle. A blink to clear the dust from his vision.

He saw the girl and the man behind her. His pinched face and greased hair. The rapidly spreading sweat patches under her arm, the drops of blood running into his eyes. A shard of glass crunched under his foot as he adjusted his body position, pulling the scope down towards Aislynn's knobbly knees, and the dark fabric of her captor's suit trousers.

She would feel the bullet pass her. The heat of the metal against her leg, drawing a thin line of blood across her pale skin. The effect on the man behind was was infinitely more dramatic.

The heavy calibre round drilled through his knee cap, the soft lead bullet expanding to destroy the soft tissue behind the bone. It exited out the back of his leg with a wet crack, leaving the lower half of the limb hanging by a few pieces of shattered ivory.

She feels the pain, first of the blow to her temple, then across her knee...

It is not until the weight falls from the back of her that she realises something is different, now... She stares for a long moment at the man writhing, trying at once to keep his gun trained on her, and to protect his half-severed limb.

She doesn't remember moving, but Aislynn finds herself sat on his chest, her slight weight pressed through her knees into the ball of his shoulder joint. The gun is halfway across the room within, and her good hand is wrapped around his throat. She grips tighter, and a demonic strength flows in her veins as she resists his attempts to throw her, half crippled by her position, half by his own injury which is rapidly leaking his lifeblood over the floor.

"M g'na d'stroy you." She tells him, forcing some semblance of sense around her battered mouth and ripped vocal cords. "T'k your soul, ahn rip it..." She squeezes tighter, her fingers going white with effort. She doesn't care. She doesnt care if his reinforcements come pounding up the stairs, if the next bullet goes through her own soul.

She wants revenge, and she bares her teeth in a feral grimace as she leans her weight forwards.

A wiry figure ghosted from the ruined doorway, his coat discarded revealing his corded musculature hidden beneath a sweat-stained white shirt. A brown leather holster rig criss-crossed his torso, the brass cases of individual rounds catching the harsh sunlight.

The application of a heavy boot ripped the house's door from its hinges, the booming report of a large revolver echoing from within as he stormed inside.

Scant seconds later, he emerged onto the upper floor with an impeccable fluidity of motion, the pistol in his hand spitting the last of its load into the unprotected torso of the house's last remaining defender.

Silhouetted by the rising sun, he turned towards the hunched figure of the girl on the balcony, deftly stowing the pistol as he crossed the room.

By the time Edward had stormed his way to her, Aislynn has put all of her insubstantial weight on the man's throat, and is panting with exertion. The thrashings of the injured, bleeding man had become light taps, his eyes rolling back into his skull as the last of the oxygen is drawn from his blood. Still she remains, and waits... waits to feel some kind of release. Some kind of justification, some victory for what has come to pass.

It doesn't come, and after a moment the dark void of her rage begins to fill with panic and she shakes the limp head, dragging the throat up and down, battering the head against the floor. "No. No. No, no, no..." She cannot explain it, she cannot understand it, but suddenly Aislynn is filled with every ounce of fear that she had felt within that house, and at his hands. "Just die. Just DIE." The scream becomes a croak, and blood runs from her split lips.

She glances up to see a silhouette come at her from the darkness and reaches into the small holster at her torturer's belt. The tiny gun was barely worth mentioning, a snub-nosed, small calibre contraption, and her hand shakes as she aims it. "S'n't you." She gasps, trying to rally what strength of will she has left. "Used th' button. L'ft. One'f them." She takes a deep, laboured breath, paling as she registers the pain even from that motion. Her movements are sudden, and the head beneath her knees sprouts a new pair of holes, littering her flesh with blood and thicker, wetter things.

She looks quickly back to the figure in the shadows, shifting her own hand to her temple. "W'n't let 't h'pp'n 'gain."

“You want the easy way out?”

His voice was almost as hoarse as hers, a dry croak almost bereft of any emotion or compassion. A man who had given his all for a failed cause. The rigid strength supporting his frame evaporated, his shoulders sagging, the pistol slipping in his tired grip.

“Fine.”

The word rang out like a death knell, imbued with a sour mixture of regret and disappointment. “Thought you were stronger.” This flickered over his shoulder as he turned back to the stairs, the toe of his boot smearing the spray of viscera coating the wooden floorboards.

Some flicker of recognition shifts across her expression, and just for an instant, she blinks.

Perhaps it was the sound of regret in his voice, or the hunch of his shoulders- echoes of a man long dead. One who had died at Their hands, that was lost... she'd thought lost.

He'd never leave her here. No.

But he would have come to save her.

Could that echo be enough? Enough to hold on to, to ignore the hatred and resentment she'd seen after they'd left the hospital? Even before the discharge had been signed?

The small, broken, childlike part of Aislynn's soul whimpered from deep within the box she'd wrapped around it, and it's enough to bring the gun down, just slightly, to lift her voice just enough to cover drift across the bloodsplattered floorboards between them.

"'Dward?" It hurts to force her lips around the consonants, and she winces. She doesn't ask if it's him, because he doesn't think he'd understand the question. Did he even know how different he was now? How far away he'd gone?

"Hurts."

Some flicker of recognition shifts across her expression, and just for an instant, she blinks.

Perhaps it was the sound of regret in his voice, or the hunch of his shoulders- echoes of a man long dead. One who had died at Their hands, that was lost... she'd thought lost.

He'd never leave her here. No.

But he would have come to save her.

Could that echo be enough? Enough to hold on to, to ignore the hatred and resentment she'd seen after they'd left the hospital? Even before the discharge had been signed?

The small, broken, childlike part of Aislynn's soul whimpered from deep within the box she'd wrapped around it, and it's enough to bring the gun down, just slightly, to lift her voice just enough to cover drift across the bloodsplattered floorboards between them.

"'Dward?" It hurts to force her lips around the consonants, and she winces. She doesn't ask if it's him, because he doesn't think he'd understand the question. Did he even know how different he was now? How far away he'd gone?

"Hurts."

“Didn't stop me.”

Edward paused momentarily at the head of the stairs to turn and look back across the room at the crumpled figure on the balcony.

“I could have given up in the snow.” Once, he might have dashed across the decaying room to her, to console her, as if his mere presence could make her better. The man who stood at the stair head was a radically different person. This man had no time for compassion or sentiment.

He scraped his boot against the top step, glancing back at her. “I didn't fight my way across this whole fucking city for you to give up now. Get up.”

"Liar."

She hears the word out of her mouth before she can stop it, and she is just too bone weary, too broken, too lost, to try and retract it. She looks down at the slack, lifeless face between her knees, and forces herself to stand. The myriad of thin slices that tracked across the balls and heels of her feet like the web of maddened, sadistic spider sent eletric strands of pain up her spine, forcing tears into her eyes.

She glances to him them. "'Dward died there." She takes a step, ignoring the bloodied footprints she tracks behind her. "J'st d'nt have th' decency t' 'dmit 't."

Old hurt flowers in her chest as brilliantly as it had the first day he'd given her that look, or when she'd handled him the button back, believed that he'd used it. It goes some way to overlaying the list of physical hurts, and she limps her way towards the stairs with a slow, wavering pace.

“And I'm stronger because of it.”

The man at the stair head was unfettered by petty things like morality or sentiment. A machine might have displayed more care for the tortured figure in front of him. His eyes radiated a glacial coldness, his mouth set in a grim line.

“You would have died here without me.”

The blood on this man's hands would never come off. To reach this point, he had committed atrocities that would make a sadistic killer squirm. He had sunk to the lowest depths of humanity, and taken a liking to what he found.

"Might still."

Her hand finally finds the beginning of the banister rail, forcing her to twist awkwardly at the waist to lay her uninjured hand on it, nonetheless she feels better with some of the weight lifted from her abused feet.

Still she doesnt move though, and instead regards him from close quarters, her gaze as flat as his is cold. Mentally she shunts away what remains of her innocence, her battered and bruised soul, locking it back in the protective box that had allowed her to survive all that has come against her.

"Why come, 'Dward. Clear yeh d'nt care." Despite her best efforts, the words hurt, and her mouth twists into an unhappy line until she can force some form of neutrality onto her features again. She takes another breath, and winces again as it sets ribs to grinding. "Why come?"

Part of her cowers from the answer, she doesnt want to know, she doesnt want to hear his response. Part of her wants him to leave, just to walk out of the door and out of her life... at least then she would know. But then, she doesn't. The practical portion of her brain screams that she'd die here without his help getting out, even as her heart screams that those few, faint echoes of the Edward she'd known were enough to hold on for. So she leans more weight on the banister, propping the damaged arm on it as well as she regards him, as though they weren't surrounded by the numerous corpses of her captors, his victims.