Breaking the Silence
Author's Notes – This jumps around in time, so don't expect each section to follow on exactly from the one before. It's also slightly AU- all the people are essentially the same, but the events don't follow Tekken canon at all.
Also, there's a few Russian characters used. I think most computers will display them without any problem, but if not then you're not missing anything terribly interesting- the sections are just numbered. I've transliterated the couple of Russian words that are actually used in dialogue, so that will show without any problems.
1. Oдин
"You need better protection," her father says heavily, looking like a man that's aged ten years overnight.
Lili sits sideways on the hospital bed, sullen and silent. The hospital have kept her in overnight and she's tired of being woke up every hour by doctors asking about her ordeal, when she just wants to go home. There's a bruise on her cheek, a faint purple smudge like a thumbprint, and her arm strapped up in the sling they insisted on giving her, even though she only sprained her shoulder. She's had worse injuries in her ballet class or falling from her horse, and she can tell the small signs of pain hurt her father far more than it ever hurt her.
He sits down besides her, rubbing his temples wearily before he looks at her. His eyes are confused and faintly lost, looking at his daughter as though he doesn't quite know who she is. Lili meets those gentle, lost eyes and knows that he's watched the CCTV footage this morning, seen his little girl fighting off her kidnappers. He's seen his flesh and blood made weapon, watched her snap an arm, smash someone's face back to blood and cartilage, fracture a man's skull as she drove it into the pavement. She hopes for his sake that the footage was too blurred to make out her expression.
"I had no choice," she says, softly.
"No one blames you," he says, a stifled sound catching in his throat. He reaches half out as if to stroke her hair, like she was a little girl again, and pauses. "I'm proud that you can take care of yourself, Lili. But you'll never have to do it again, I promise."
But she wants to. Lili nods, and watches him go, doesn't tell him the truth because it would break his heart to know his daughter loves to fight. Let him believe that she had no other choice, that she half-killed a man out of desperation, that she didn't really know what she was doing at all. He turns back to look at her, his expression still puzzled, and softly shuts the room door behind him.
The gilded cage closes in a little further around her.
2. два
Her new bodyguard never talks.
He even makes her friends uneasy, and they're all so used to security that they notice them no more than the furniture. Lili has had bodyguards all her life too. She has fond memories of some of them, especially when she was younger and they would humour her by joining in her games or listening to her childish prattling. Perhaps they weren't all as friendly as she remembered, but it was lonely growing up in that echoing house, and at least a paid guard would never leave her alone.
He's a spetsnaz operative this time. Lili was expecting some massively built young soldier, cropped hair and blue eyes and Slavic good looks. Dragunov looks almost sickly, too pale with bluish lips and purple-stained eyes, as though the Siberian winter has set in so deep that it will never leave him. He's scarred, whiter scar tissue on white skin, and he looks so bloodless she imagines the fresh wound would have looked like a gash cut into packed snow.
Dragunov doesn't fit in here, in the balmy air of their summer mansion. She thinks he dislikes the heat, although she's never seen him wearing anything less than a full uniform, and he follows her out into the buttery warm sunlight whenever she tries to slip away.
"Did you know that in English, your name sounds remarkably like Sir Gay?" she snaps at him, as she turns half-way to the tennis courts and sees him following. Dragunov's expression still doesn't change. She'd wonder if he even spoke French, but she's tried telling him to go away in French, English and Russian, and he still will not answer.
3. три
Weeks pass without a word. It doesn't matter what she says. She's ordered Dragunov to go away, threatened to get him fired and insulted him, and he still won't respond. At first, she thought that perhaps it was meant to be professional. Lili dimly remembers her father taking her to see the Queen's Guard in London, and she doesn't think they were supposed to talk when they were on duty. Then she wonders if he doesn't speak French, but it's the same response to every language she tries. Then, she remembers the scars and wonders if it's some old injury, if someone damaged his vocal chords too badly to speak again. Lili stopped goading him about his silence after that. Besides, she could talk enough for both of them.
"Poshyol na khui!" she spits, tossing her shiny sheet of pale blonde hair over her shoulder and slamming the door in Dragunov's face before he attempts to follow her into the cool, shadowy library.
Lili has always been good with languages
4. четыре
It's claustrophobic, and now she can't even relieve tension by street-fighting, not when Dragunov won't be shaken off. Lili does try to lose him, several times. It's normally easy enough for her to get rid of her bodyguards when she needs an hour or so of freedom, out of the mansion grounds by herself. She mostly stopped doing it when she realised it got them fired.
"Do you mind?" she snaps one day when she's out shopping, heading into the lingerie department and hoping to lose him there. Dragunov doesn't mind in the slightest, it appears, and he follows her, unconcerned. Lili fumes, but her plan isn't foiled just yet, because at least Dragunov doesn't follow her into the changing room.
In the changing rooms, there's a staff-only door leading to a stock room. Lili gives the staff her most disarming smile and slips past them. In the stock room, and she climbs up metal shelving to squeeze through a high window and swing herself onto the roof. A minute later, and she's worked her way down to a garage roof, and dropping a storey to land in a little delivery alley. She stands up, dusts off her palms and jogs out, less than two minutes since she left Dragunov.
He silently falls in line with her again, as she emerges back onto the street. Lili isn't even surprised.
5. пять
He follows her into the gym too. She informs him that he's a pervert, but truthfully, she doesn't think he'd care whether she was dancing around in a bikini or a boiler suit.
Outside, she plays tennis, aggressively slamming balls against the court walls until she's sick and dizzy and her vision begins to turn sticky and black. She gallops horses around the grounds until they're spattered with white foam, recklessly attempting any fence, but they're all useless painted poles that bounce harmlessly to the ground if she hits them. Inside, she practises gymnastics and ballet for hours, trying to work off some of the frustrated energy building up inside her. Her father calls by every now and then, and seems relieved that she's not practising martial arts any more. He doesn't know any better. He doesn't read the language of her movements, doesn't see that she can spell out a threat with a simple dance routine. It's beautiful, but there can be beauty in violence too.
Still, Lili gets bored with her routines.
"Don't you spar?" she asks Dragunov. He must have studied martial arts of some kind, CQC or whatever they teach in the military. She tries throwing a punch to see if he'd block her, but he remains impassive as her hand stops just shy of his jaw.
"Fine. Teach me to shoot," she says, whisking the gun from his belt before he can stop her. "Otherwise I might hurt myself if I find one of these lying around. You wouldn't be a very good bodyguard if you let that happen."
He teaches her, without words, so she has to learn everything by example. The gun isn't meant for a learner, and her shoulder throbs painfully every night from the aggressive recoil, kicking back like a living thing. She can hit the target more often than not, but she fires too quickly and pulls the trigger too sharply, skewing each shot. It's too detached for Lili, and she doesn't find any satisfaction in it. She leaves it to Dragunov, the slow hiss as he exhales like wind over Siberian plains, watching the world dispassionately through the sights, shooting between the steady beats of his heart.
6. шесть
He even follows her on a date.
She tried appealing to her father, slipping out of the mansion as quietly as she can, and when Dragunov is still following them, hurls a few colourful Russian insults at him. He doesn't seem to care any more than when she insults him in French or English, but she's found the language is quite satisfying to swear in. Her father is happy with her growing Russian vocabulary too. Along with Mandarin and Arabic, he says it'll be useful when she enters the business. Although of course, when you're a Rochefort, people always speak your language.
Lili is at least allowed to go into the restaurant by herself, while Dragunov waits by the door, unconcerned by the cool night air or the looks from the patrons inside. Her date is a nice boy, gentle and eager and desperate to please, but it's difficult to concentrate on the conversation when she's being watched by those unsettling, milky eyes. She gestures at him furiously to go away, and then finally picks up her chair and turns it around, moodily. Lili looks up, and Dragunov's eyes meet hers, in the antique mirror mounted above her date's head.
The boy suggests they go for a walk in the quiet city gardens nearby. Lili nods, and they step out of the restaurant, walking past Dragunov as though he isn't there. She goes to call the chauffeur to tell him where to meet them, and sighs, noticing she's left her phone behind.
"I'll be one minute," she tells the boy. He nods, understandingly, and she heads back into the restaurant.
The staff fall over themselves to help the Rochefort heiress, but her phone is nowhere to be found. When she gives up, uses the restaurant's phone that's immediately offered and comes back out, the boy is dead in an alley. Her legs go as weak as water underneath her for one moment, before Dragunov nudges the corpse over, and she sees the gun her date was wearing underneath his jacket. He politely returns her missing phone to her.
"You could have just told me," she tells him severely, as if she couldn't take out one kidnapper by herself.
A car screeches to a halt in front of them as they emerge from the alley. Three men jump out, faces obscured. Dragunov glances at Lili sideways, but he doesn't push her safely back into the restaurant.
She raises her hands as she drops into a fighting crouch. "Please don't tell my father."
7. семь
Lili's final day at her prestigious school and she takes to the stage, a thousand featureless faces swimming before her. Her speech is all prepared, all nonsense about opportunities and the future and choosing paths, as if she ever really had a choice. None of it ever really mattered. She left her school with straight A qualifications, but life would be the same whatever grades she received and whatever courses she took. Her name would get her into the same university; her degree would lead to the same life, and whether she's studying dusty rocks in Australia, reading literature in a Scottish castle or painting in Florence, it's still the same gilded cage around her as she plays at being an adult.
She goes to speak, her mouth a little dry, and it's not like her. It isn't like Lili to be nervous. She's always been confident, wrapped safely in money and prestige so that the real world could never touch her. The she looks down and sees the tiny red dot blink into life between her collar bones, and she knew this would happen one day.
She never finds out who it was, because she doesn't really care if it was the mafia or the yakuza or someone else pissed off at her father, doesn't matter because someone is always after her anyway and Lili stopped taking it personally a long time ago. She raises her hand slowly, words caught in her mouth, now she'll never even voice those lies about future opportunities before her own are cut down. There's nothing between her and the shadows of the stage, nothing except this flimsy lectern before her. Lili doesn't even feel so very frightened as she watches the dot inch down, just closes her eyes and waits for the end to come.
She hits the floor hard, useless notes scattered out before her like a flock of doves taking flight, the oceanic roar of hundreds of voices suddenly rising as the echoing gunshot dies down. For that second, before she's grabbed and forced unceremoniously behind the lectern as the world explodes into screaming chaos around her, she stares at her outstretched hand and the blonde wooden stage, spattered with blood that isn't hers.
Dragunov doesn't make a sound when he's shot.
8. восемь
A few hours after surgery, and Dragunov was already awake and presumably cognizant. It was difficult for Lili to tell, since he didn't have the decency to babble nonsense when coming around from anaesthesia, like any normal person would. His pale, shifting eyes followed her, as she crossed the room.
"Spaseba," she says, a little grudgingly. It was one of the first words she'd learned, but she'd never used it until now.
And because he won't tell anyone, she kisses him once on impulse, before she leaves. He doesn't pull away from her, but he doesn't return it either. She rubs the frozen spot on her lip as she leaves, and tastes nothing at all, the nothingness of frozen skies and snow packed so deep it had crystallised into ice.
9. девять
He was just one man, but he came out of nowhere, hit Lili like a bullet and sent her rolling to the ground before he went for Dragunov.
She's on her feet almost as soon as she hits the floor, half expecting to find a hypodermic needle lodged in the curve of her throat to leave her limp and unresisting. But she's unhurt and there's no drug beginning to fog her mind, and the man did nothing but throw her clear of the fight. Lili doesn't recognise him, a black man with bleached hair and an X carved into his face. He's bigger than Dragunov, just as skilled and a knife leaves a bluish blur as he pulls it from his belt, as though it's cut a slash through the very fabric of the summer day.
Lili's mind is very clear, the day very bright as she acts without thought. No words, just movement as language as she reaches for the holster she's been wearing for months now. The safety clicked off smoothly, shutting her eyes as she raised her arm, because that's the best way to find your natural stance. She frames the man in her pistol sights, just as though they're in the mansion grounds, shooting with a silencer so it won't startle her mother's Arabian horses. She exhales slowly, thinks of winds whistling over barren lands, and squeezes the trigger gently, the man's life held between her fingers. The kickback of the gun hits her like a fist. She never did learn to absorb the recoil.
"I never came for you," the man tells Lili, when she approaches him, painfully forcing the words up through torn lungs. He doesn't raise the knife in his hand, just keeps his dark, urgent eyes on her. "Watch out for-"
The bullet hits the X dead centre. Lili is beginning to think Dragunov might have a sense of humour after all.
10. десять
Lili wakes up suddenly, some weeks after Dragunov killed the man with the X-shaped scar.
It's the middle of the night, and she doesn't know what awoke her, but the warm air thrums lightly with danger like it did the day she left her school. Lili crosses the room cat-like and silent, looking for shadows crossing the yellow bar of light underneath her door. No shadows, and no voices either. She slides a pocket mirror underneath the door, and sees nothing but the quiet empty hall, and that trick doesn't work as well as it does in movies. Dragunov isn't there, but she supposes he has to sleep sometime, even if he's always been waiting by her door every time she's left before.
Lili turns the door handle, and it slips bonelessly through her hands. Locked, and the mechanisms inside clicking together uselessly where something small and vital was snapped. She backs up, sprinting across pale imported carpets to hit the door running, but it's solid hardwood and it doesn't yield. Something small in her shoulder gives way with a crunch, her breath smashed from her as she hits the floor hard and rises groggily, a long carpet burn running up her arm and prickling heat beginning to spread where bruises will blossom black tomorrow.
Out onto her balcony, then. New money buys old houses, and the worn grey stone isn't too difficult to find holds in. Her room is two storeys above the concrete ground, but she climbs on without a backward glance, up into the warm breath of night air towards the dim electric glow of the top floor, ignoring the pain spreading up her side. If they didn't come for her, then they're here for her father.
Lili swings herself lightly over the balcony, and has to break the door to get in. She holds her breath at the brittle, sugar-scrunch of breaking glass, but the night doesn't split into sirens around her. Someone has already turned their security systems off.
Into the hall up here, and she sees the bodies and now Lili knows why Dragunov locked her in her room.
But she won't leave her father, and perhaps she won't leave Dragunov either. She picks her way towards her father's office, through the broken, bleeding security guards that she once knew, the young man with a hopeless crush on her, who always used to stammer an eager 'Good morning, Miss Lili!' whenever she passed by, the elderly man who has been with the Rocheforts for years. He used to teach Lili magic tricks when she was a child. She fixes her gaze on the door at the end of the corridor, above the carnage and the corpses that were loyal to the end, because there'll be plenty of time for screaming later.
Her father's office has been ransacked.
And this is how Rochefort Enterprises made their money, a thousand dirty secrets spilled out before her. Every computer screen displays a fresh new atrocity, every scattered folder spills out photographs that no one was ever meant to see. Lili stares at things that might have been men, once, at the Japanese teenager with horns and bloodied wings bursting out from a back that was never designed for flight.
And then she stumbles, weakly, as she sees her father in the middle of all that ruin, a neat black hole above his eye. Even sprawled in the middle of his guilt, his expression is mild and faintly puzzled, as though he isn't quite sure how he got there. Lili is moving towards him, unsteadily, the room turning tight and airless around her as she waits for the scream to come that will shatter her world into pieces, and that's when she hears the click of Dragunov's gun.
When she turns, slowly, it's pointing at her and there's nothing she can do, because this is real life. In real life, there is no mystical martial arts move that's unblockable from ten feet away, nothing faster than the brutal reality of a bullet. In real life, she won't throw herself to one side behind a desk, and maybe only get shot in the shoulder before she escapes through the window. In real life, her father isn't alive. He won't come up behind Dragunov, broken and bleeding, to save his daughter with the last of his strength.
In real life, when a spetsnaz operative has a gun pointed at your chest, you only die.
Neither of them move, but she knows he will, for the sake of whatever he came for. All these months working into the heart of the Rochefort home, for whatever her father had to die for. A microchip, a computer file, a handful of damning photographs, something she didn't even know existed until now, and it does not matter to him. It doesn't matter if she saved his life when she shot a man with an X-shaped scar. It doesn't matter if he's taken a bullet for her, if he locked her away before the blood began to spill, if he's spent months standing between Lili and all who would hurt her.
Dragunov watches her, whitish eyes the bleached colour of packed snow and milky skies and sleeping frozen lands, and Lili's never felt so cold.
"Speak to me," she finally says, softly, knowing there's no explanation other than an order. When he kills her, it will be no more personal than when he saved her life.
"Dasvidanya, Lili."
The gun clicks, and the silence breaks into a thousand shards around her.