a/n: because of an idea, and because i owe cherie a fic.

warning: not for the light of heart. includes a description of rape. i don't gloss over anything here.

{./valkyrie\.}

She is five when she realizes she is different from the other children.

Wherever she goes, she cannot help but notice the frightened looks, the disgust and the fury but most of all, the terror that permeates the crowds she passes through, a smell so rich and redolent she can practically scent it even with her then-undeveloped senses.

"Why are they looking?" she whimpers, burrowing deeper into her mother's coat.

Mother smiles, takes her aside, and says, "Because you are beautiful, daughter. Because you are beautiful."

Mother dies, suddenly and unexpectedly, on a cold autumn afternoon, shot down by men in black who storm into their apartment and gun her down relentlessly, firing rapid volleys of bullets at her body even after her mother falls and does not move. Blood sprays into the air and she screams, the howling, tortured cry of a wounded child.

Without warning, she feels a sudden rush enveloping her body, a thrumming wind that sheaths her limbs in a glorious vortex, her head tightens as though a crown of splinters is being forced upon it. Her skull is alive, writhing, and she presses her hands over her eyes, mouth moving soundlessly as it simply erupts from her every pore, radiating out from the small, curled shell of a girl that is she and sweeping in gliding, glistening arcs over the soldiers, a force out of her control. She tries to deafen her ears to their cries, to the sickly crunch and flaccid squelch of tearing skin and bones, and oh, it is everywhere. The walls, they are red, they drip carmine onto their once-familiar apartment carpets, now painted scarlet by her own hands. Moaning, she claws at her bright pink hair, rips tufts of it out by the handfuls, and leaves her scalp raw and bleeding.

Absently, she grazes her horns and jerks back, lip trembling, a burning flash passing through her and dissipating in seconds. Her eyes wander to the corpses.

She yells, shrieks, tries to deny the sight that is sprawled before her, that oozes between her splayed fingers amidst the glass and pottery shards the furniture overturned, mammoths toppled by her call, and tries to deny it with no success.

But mother has taught her well, has educated her for the worst-case scenario. She wipes away her bitter tears, stands up on shaky legs, and walks through the red sea. At her mother's side, she pauses, stoops, and kisses her frigid cheeks and clenches her eyes shut so it won't start again; her mother's eyes are horrible things, gazing into her with glassy vacuity written on the pupils, her hair still splattered with rust-red flecks.

That night, she packs her things and departs on a bus to nowhere, staring hollow-eyed at the seat in front of her, her hair dyed pitch-black and the nubs on her head covered by a woolen cap, freezing underneath her jackets and sweaters and gnawing on her tongue so she won't break down like she did before.

She's only ten.

It works out well for a grand total of ten days - hopping from city to city, stealing food and sleeping in bathroom stalls - before the men catch up to her. Heavily armored, bearing weapons of all shapes and sizes, they storm into the shopping mall where she's sleeping and surround her. She is just a little girl, shaking uncontrollably on the porcelain-white toilet seat, clutching her bags like they are lifelines to another world, and the men stare at her with that same look that everyone else looked at her with - that fear, that rage, it burns like suns in their dark eyes through tinted goggles and behind rifles and machine guns aimed at her head. She gulps, whimpers, tries to call on the power but fails.

"Because you are beautiful, daughter."

She doesn't feel beautiful right now, she feels terrified for her life, watching these men with their guns pointed, fingers around the triggers, and she can only sit and wait an eternity before another man pushes himself to the front of the line, holds up a hand for his soldiers to stall.

He is a big man in a fancy suit, a suit that makes her feel too self-conscious of her own disheveled, stinking appearance. His eyes are hawk-like but not entirely unfriendly, peering at her from a heavy face set on a bulky, muscled body that strains the limits of his Armani blazer and Burberry slacks. A golden watch wraps around one tanned wrist like a snake. He smiles at her.

"Clove?" he asks, and she nods, tentatively. "I'm Agent Hartholme, I'm from the government, but you may call me Brutus, yes?"

Brutus. It fits this man, with the mountaintop-shoulders and the glistening bald head, and she nods once more.

"Excellent. Do you know why we are here?"

She shakes her head, her hesitation visible as she guesses, blurts, "To kill me? Like I-"

She can't bear to finish the thought.

The man named Brutus waggles his finger 'no', instead explaining, "We are here, Clove, because there are issues. Compromising issues that could affect the security of her nation. They could jeopardize us, Clove, the American government. And so, measures must be put in place to deal with these issues so as to avoid the creation of a greater conflict."

He speaks fast, this man Brutus, and he laces his speech with pseudo-scientific terms she still struggles to comprehend. Nodding frantically like she can understand what he's saying, she edges further back, her back bumping against the seat. Brutus holds out a hand again, a placating gesture.

"Calm down," he murmurs. "We don't intend to deal with you in that way." (She understands this) "But, Clove, you are part of our issue, and as such, we must... resolve you, as best we can, to maintain our level of national security and to protect our people, our countrymen. You understand me, Clove?"

I understand you killed my mother, she thinks, but she doesn't say it out loud.

"What do you say, Clove? Shall you come with us? We can give you food, shelter, a good education..." Brutus dangles the thought overhead. "Or, you could choose not to. In which case we shall still be forced to resolve you, only in a slightly less unpleasant manner." He grins again. She no longer finds warmth in it; his teeth are sharp, she realizes, like shark teeth.

She's backed into a corner, her hands desperately knotting and unknotting. The guns are still raised. She can't do it, can't feel what she felt in the living room, that rush. She feels like she will cry again.

Back off, she hisses at her tears. Back off, just back off!

Brutus is looking at her expectantly. The soldiers are ready to fire at a moment's notice. She is simply a girl, in this dingy bathroom sleeping with her head against grimy tiles, and she's not sure how much longer she can keep this up, anyway.

One more time, she tries to pull at it again before she surrenders.

"I'll go with you," she acquiesces, and Brutus bellows laughter and takes her by the hand, leading her and his army out past the befuddled (and anxious) patrons like a loving father and a young daughter, out for any number of mundane reasons.

His grip is crushing against her tiny fingers.

She soon discovers a painful truth: people are anything but loving.

Her mind understands the lines drawn between them, she and them. Her hair is still pink underneath the fading black ink, her horns even more noticeable against the gritty tangles, and when she brushes against them, aware or not, she feels an electric shock pass through her, and she realizes how precious her horns are.

Sometimes, they beat her, and sometimes, they drug her. Her life is an unhurried cycle of experiments and morphine, of electric jolts and cattle prods. Jokingly, the scientists call her a "bull", because of the way she looks, because of the horns that protrude from her skull. It hurts to hear them say it.

Her back is a patchwork of scars, she looks down at her legs and finds them riddled with burns. Sometimes, she spends nights staring dully at the walls of her prison cage, rolling around on the cold metal floor, her hair splashed onto the ground like a muddy splatter of gum. She pisses on the cell floor and shits there and they only clean it out once a month. She bleeds, too.

They make her run through their trials occasionally, forcing her to dredge up what she pulled, inexplicably, from her heart on that day in what seems like a hundred years ago, or perhaps a thousand. She stares vacantly at toys, stacks of papers, and bricks, and wills them to move.

It's easier after a while, she observes; the pull is not so hard, the push not so rigid. Bit by bit, she feels herself unwinding, feels herself coming apart at the seams. They must notice this as well, because they carefully monitor their experiments and keep her sedated enough to inhibit a large-scale assault but not so much as to inhibit her cognitive functions; not so much as to prevent their prize pet from putting on a show for their government officials to applaud at.

When they send her back, she dreams, mostly, of flitting colors and shapes, of mice and hamster wheels and laboratories. She has come to hate science for what it has come, to genetics for shaping her into whatever the hell she is now - a beast wallowing in her own filth, a mongrel bitch who shits and licks it up because there isn't any food besides nutritional supplements, soggy vegetables, pallid fruit, and dry, tough meat.

After a while, she starts dreaming of locks and mechanisms, technology and TV monitors.

She dreams of cutting them up, one by one.

It's not so bad now.

On the day of her release, it is a spectacle. The scientists, the guards are a carnival in themselves, clucking like chickens and running around with their heads removed.

First, she dreams of a rip in space, and she hears a man scream on the outside through the reinforced walls. A key floats up, a gunshot rings, she stops it with a thought and dismembers him in the space of a piano note.

Then, she proceeds to unlock herself from the shackles that have kept her bound for so long. A card swipes, the doors open for her, a fanfare of metallic screeching announcing the arrival of the queen.

"Subject A-1 has escaped detainment, subject A-1 has escaped detainment..."

The robot voice screeches and stops as she sends the push flying at it, shorting out its circuits.

The rest is child's play. She has honed herself for this, has given herself up entirely to the sway of the power. It envelops her, like an old friend, wrapping her in an intangible armor, the faintest flicker in the air indicating its presence. It waves. She waves back.

Arms launch forward, a fusillade of pulsing force, and rip and tear and maim with sloppy precision but effective precision. The men howl and hiss as they attempt to flee; she shatters their weapons, breaks their bones before tearing out their hearts and eating them. She has become a cannibal.

Her friend Brutus calls over the intercom, "Stop this, Clove. You are making a mistake."

She doesn't even listen, only sends him a nonverbal 'fuck-you' with her middle finger, and closes her eyes and allow the cameras observing her in hallway 3-B to explode. Somewhere in his control room, she imagines Brutus cursing. Old perverted bastard, she hopes he burns in hell. He isn't her current concern, though; her main focus is getting out of here, and so she mows through ranks and ranks of soldiers, flays them alive, pushes them against the walls and grinds their faces into raw mincemeat with a wicked grin on her cracked lips. It's the first grin she's had in years, and oh, it feels wonderful.

Bullets rain down horizontally, vertically, diagonally in a metal cascade. She plucks them from the air, hovers them like silver coins, and sends them flying back with all one hundred of her arms, and the push is so much easier now that it's almost amusing. Her footsteps leave the sterile floors bloody, her hair is pink as it should be and her eyes, they are hard and cold and predatory, the eyes of a wolf. She snarls, sends them flying, makes them crumble with a look.

"Stop!" Brutus commands, but she brushes past him, leaves whispers of death on his tie as he watches from his cameras, watches as she slaughters his men one by one. Her neck swivels back and forth, raining hellfire.

The soldiers are horrified now, firing at will if only to slow her advance down. She captures their bullets in mid-air and decapitates the first pathetic soul to come charging at her, shooting an invisible rocket through his chest and watching his heart curve and arc down to land on a young man's stomach. His eyes dilate and his mouth opens and closes like a fish as he watches it sink to his crotch, and he gives a hysterical, laughing scream that sounds a bit like crying before fainting dead away. The others try to run, but she bisects them, trisects them, divides them into neat rows of four-by-four pieces.

The exit is so close now; she can see it, can almost taste fresh air and moonlight on her lips after so many days, months, years in isolation. There is a click behind her, and she turns and is surprised.

A man still lives. She has overlooked him, has overcalculated the trajectories of her 'vectors'. He raises a hand to cover a slash across his shoulder, and another points a handgun at her face. In the moments between, she observes several things: that he is beautiful like a Roman statue, that he is powerful in the lean, hard lines of musculature lining his body, that his eyes are like winter and that his hair like the sun and he gazes at her with a mesmerized reverence before his finger pulls the trigger and there is a flash and a bang and the pullet streaks forward, a grey blur heading straight for her; she is in its crosshairs, she can see it.

A push, a flimsy barrier constructed just in the nick of time, but it strikes her soundly in the skull and she is standing on the precipice of a gaping hole in the building's northern end so she tumbles off as it meets her flesh and falls into the waiting ocean below.

She is beautiful still.

Like Venus, she rises from the oceans, but she is limp and tattered in comparison to the languid grace of the Roman goddess of love, and she crawls weakly across pale sand, clawing at shells and plastic bottles and litter as she pulls herself, painfully, onto solid ground. Her head, oh her head hurts like hell, she is burning all over with fire like a thousand hot brands have been applied to her skin. Her hair, it hangs like seaweed across her eyes, her horns are drenched and corroded by saltwater and the last thing she sees before her vision fails her is a pair of sandals and khaki shorts.

Her eyelids flutter and she awakes to sunshine. An old woman tends to her wounds, smiling benignly at the surprise that must flicker across her face. She is dressed in a simple pair of white pajamas, her head bandaged but her mouth thick and her thoughts as sluggish as honey.

"Are you alright, dearie?" the woman asks. She nods. The woman says, "We found you on the beach, lying in the sand. You were-you were bleeding from your head." She says 'bleeding' like it is a cuss word, biting her lip. "My husband has called for help, and they-the medics- should be arriving whenever it suits them." A scowl appers, then fades into a friendly smile. "Does it hurt too badly? I've dressed it with alcohol to keep out infection."

She shakes her head, disliking the gumminess of her tongue. She needs water and tries to ask for it, but finds she cannot articulate words. Instead, all that comes out is a weak little 'mew'. She blinks.

How inappropriate. How odd.

The old woman chuckles and says, "Would you like water?"

She nods. The woman leaves and returns with a glass, which she holds out. "Have a couple of sips, darling. You must be parched."

The water is chilled, with ice cubes floating inside, and she crunches those even after the water itself is gone. The woman chuckles and fills it up once more. She drinks until she is full. She feels like she could drink the sea.

"Are you- would you like some food?"

Another nod. Her benefactor serves her defrosted pancakes drenched in maple syrup and topped with fresh-picked raspberries. Surprisingly, she can sit up and handle a knife and fork, albeit clumsily. Her movements are wild and erratic, and more than once she slops syrup over the edge and onto her blankets. This makes her angry.

"It's fine, it's fine," the lady reassures her. She tries to apologize, and the 'mew' pops out again. She clenches her teeth, sets her jaw, and pushes the plate away to indicate she is finished.

"I'll go get you something else, yes?" The old woman stands, gives her a reassuring pat. "You'll be okay, sweetheart. We'll look after you."

She can hear the woman fussing downstairs. She pulls herself into a standing position, swaying precariously. Then, she walks down, to the bottom floor, and out before the woman even sees her leave.

It is warm here. Too warm. There's something she needs to remember, but she's forgotten it.

They are calling her a national threat.

At a store, she buys more black dye. In the bathroom of a Seven-Eleven, she turns her roots dark again, masking the vivid hues that lie beneath with chemicals; it smells like smoke, it smells sharp and pungent. Good.

She gives an experimental flex, probes the air with her fingers, and cracks the mirror without using her hands. A dull pain thumps all over, but she can handle it; the crack widens.

Walking away, she observes the people around her, the bystanders. In this guise, she is nothing more than an ordinary girl to them, a passing stranger to be glanced at and then forgotten. She likes this; it makes her feel dangerous, deadly. She is as insignificant to these men and women as a passing breeze, as an ant scuttling through the concrete gaps. Car horns honk, a heavily made-up woman walks by in a leopard-print coat prattling on and on about some trivial subject, and a sweating businessman hurries to catch a bus.

This is her idea of peace. She glosses through some tabloids, watches a news report about herself, pays for a Fanta and disappears.

The boy again. She cannot stop thinking about him, cannot draw her eyes away from that line of red, from the crystal orbs that looked at her across that hallway littered with the dead. She tosses and turns in a hotel bed, mumbles something incoherent.

In the morning, she awakes with a supreme sense of disquiet. Here is not safe anymore. She will have to disappear again, and this time, she will do it the right way.

At the checkout lobby, her heart pauses.

He is here. Questioning the receptionist, hair gelled into perfect blonde spikes, a gun holstered, looking regal in his military uniform.

Shit.

Calculations whir and whizz in her brain, both hemispheres rapidly analyzing the situation from a hundred different perspectives. Her breathing hastens. She has to kill him, has to kill everyone, and eliminate witnesses. He has to die before he gives away her whereabouts. There is only one variable that will fit for x in this equation and it is ripping him to shreds, tearing this godboy down with her bare hands.

But damn, she can't find it in herself to do so. Her words fail her twice.

"Excuse me?"

And now he is standing in front of her, lips pursed, and she can observe the planes and angles of his marble-sculpture face; he is more breathtaking in front of her than several feet away, she thinks.

"Yes?"

"Miss-" He trails off, staring at her face, then flashing a license in her face. "I am Agent Ludwig. I work for the government."

"Which branch?"

"C.I.A.," he responds, a well-crafted, natural lie, and she swallows it and smiles as he continues, "There's been a breach of national security. A highly dangerous individual in federal prison has managed to escape and is currently believed to be on the run throughout the country. We've tracked her whereabouts here, and we're attempting to get a lock onto this person to that we'll be able to detain her again and bring her in for custody. Tell me," he drawls, holding out a slim book, "have you ever seen this woman before?"

It's filled with photographs of herself, taken from different angles, with different clothes, poses, hairstyles, etcetera etcetera. She almost laughs, this is so fucking ridiculous it's hilarious, the bad kind of funny that usually accompanies dirty jokes and such. She almost laughs at the photo collection.

"Never."

"Are you quite sure, ma'am?" He's scrutinizing her, brow furrowed. "There's a lot at stake-"

"Then we, the public, shall leave it to you and Congress to decide on a point of action," she finishes primly. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go."

Swiveling, she makes to run away, but he catches her by the arm. "Not so fast."

She jerks back, eyes narrowed to venomous slits, the power crackling all around her, and he recoils and skids across the floor, gaping.

"You-you're-" he splutters.

All hell breaks loose, a shockwave that ripples through space-time, and she can't control it, and she flees the wreckage with a bitter taste on her tongue.

They deploy their guard dogs after her-real ones, and figurative ones. The black-clad men are in pursuit, aided by vicious Rottweilers and hounds tethered to leashes. They bark and growl and froth at the mouth; if they weren't what they were, she'd have thought them to be rabid.

He is their Top Dog; he pants and noses the ground and tries to trace her by her smell, tries to tear her to bits with his teeth. Godboy that he is, he must demand sacrifice, and she is to be devoured atop this ziggurat of trash, this junkyard. Howls echo in the fog, in her ears, and she scans the surrounding area sharply, sensing for movement.

Gunfire. She throws up her shields and it ricochets, goes bouncing back to the offender, who then goes bouncing across several torn plastic bags oozing cans and bottles and broken plates, the gun in his hands slipping from his grasp. She picks it up and cradles it, clutching it like a precious thing. Her vectors dart through the yard, sifting piles of trash and launching jagged metal strips and heavy planks of wood into the dark; she is rewarded with yells and cries, signalling hits.

Three more gunshots. They pause inches away from her nose, she crushes them into fine dust and sends out shove in retalation. The fog lifts, and the two gunmen are exposed. Petrified, they attempt to turn back, but she shatters their knees and then they go down as quick as birds to cats. She runs and walks, lifts her chin high and sends out her flowing tendrils of energy, anchoring herself to the earth with these thousand roots of decay; the earth is now poisoned, the apple that they bite is toxic. She grins mirthlessly and swings her head around, sending a lethal blow with all the weight of an industrial-size Dumpster thrown at a tremendous speed careening into a stray soldier whose rifle has been cocked and which now shatters into fragments. The soldier becomes a pulpy soup inside his armor.

Their footsteps are fast approaching, those of the dogs. They are wiser than they seem, gifted with that supernatural animal intuition, and whimper and back away as she draws closer. Their masters handle them roughly, yelling for them to attack the target, dammit, and she swings her invisible hammers down and flattens them all. Phantom blades leap and dart nimbly through the sky, severing, lacerating; swaths of concealed piano wire that slice through their soft flesh as easily as a knife through warm butter.

She searches for the blonde godboy, but in vain. He is cunning, she realizes. He is waiting for her to slip up so that he can have his opening.

Fool.

Easily, her vectors detect him, a faint, shimmering shape in the coordinate graph of her brain, and she pushes the mist apart and reveals him nestled behind a rusted metal bin. He fires. She blocks and lifts him into the air, where he struggles feebly, muttering obscenities under his breath.

"I'm going to make you scream," she murmurs in a dreamy tone of voice, her voice having returned, a peculiar fuzzy quality overtaking her senses. "I'm going to make you beg, make you whimper like one of these mongrels that you've brought with you. I'm going to make you ask to die, that's what I'm going to do. When you look at me," she purrs, "know that I'm your death, and the death of all your consorts. I will burn them to the fucking ground until there aren't even ashes, do you hear me?"

"No, you won't," he chokes, even though she's tightening her vicegrip on his windpipes. He laughs harshly. "You won't, you're not the kind of person to do that. Not to me."

"You've seen what I did in your labs." She tilts her head to one side, tired and amused and fascinated by him, by the tenacity with which he defies her.

"You can-," he gargles, bloody spittle leaking from the corners of his red lips.

"Suck your dick?" she replies sweetly. "Mmm, I'm going to bite it off and let you bleed," she laughs, and hones an arm to a razor-sharp point, surgical in nature, and traces patterns on his skin. "You want me to suck your dick, I'll drain you of your blood."

The needle punctures, he inhales-

-her head is stabbed by a sudden sharp lance of pain, white-hot and searing and all-consuming; suddenly, she feels like her brain (both hemispheres) are being enveloped in folds of fire, like she is being split in two with a burning axe. Eyes blinking on and off rapidly like shutters, she reels back, feels a discordant wave of air gravitate towards her, picking up debris as it speeds up. A black bag bursts like a Roman candle, spewing trash high up in a filthy geyser.

Her eyes are seeing spots. She twists her neck from side to side, trying to work out the cramps and kinks, but he is on top of her now, breathing heavily, a steady trickle of blood leading from a gash in his forehead. He is sweaty and he smells as dirty as she feels, and she has miscalculated the angle of her strike. He should be dead. He should be lying in an ever-expanding pool of his own blood, and she should be done with him, this pretty godboy who contrasts too sharply with her and whom she cannot fit into the shoebox of her life.

But he's not; calculate, predict, formulate a hypothesis. Why can't she simply snap that lovely neck and be done with it?

"Bastard," she growls, shoving at him weakly. He does not falter, her hands feel like they are pressing into a brick wall. He is sturdy like a house, she is wind that cannot blow him down. She pouts.

"You're hurt."

"So are you." Her vectors slither along the cround, moving quietly as she regains control of her shaken mental faculties. Arrows poised to strike, archers ready to fire. She will pierce his body in approximately twenty lethal spots, ten being permutations of the same are, and then he will bleed.

"What have they done you?" he wonders, running a gloved finger along the curve of her jawline, twisting the strands of her bubblegum hair between his hands. She lets him play because in a moment, he will be her broken doll, lying in pieces all over. Still, there is hesitation, a pause in which she wonders whether to pull the trigger.

How irrational. She has since lost the capacity to feel such things. Her captors, they told her to disregard emotion, to annihilate sympathy. He is no different from the hamsters, the puppies, the newborn lambs awaiting her, the wolf. A child in her ancient eyes, an infant relative to the age of the universe. Die, she hopes. Die.

They taught her to kill gods.

"It's none of your business."

"It's all of my business." He sucks in a shuddery breath, her arrows inch ever closer. "This- this isn't right."

"What isn't?" She grabs his hands, slides them up towards her breasts, looking at him with apathy. He gulps, turns red; not as perfect as she thought, not as cold. "Is this wrong, then? Do you want to fuck me, pretty boy?" She tilts her head, observes him with scientific curiosity, awaiting his next reaction. "Do you want to put your dick inside me?"

"You- no! No, fuck no, of course not, what the hell? No, I don't, I-" He splutters, veering off on numerous tangents, and she tries not to laugh on the inside. Her lips curve upwards in a formless smile, exposing white teeth. Wolf teeth.

"Am I beautiful enough for you?"

"You're very... you're- no, this is wrong, this is so wrong, and you- you need medical attention, you're going to die."

How amusing, she thinks. The vectors glide gently around his waist (she could plunge them into his stomach), over his head (rip it off), across his arms, his hands (snap them like twigs). All this, and she is still powerless. He is not quite as red now, his eyes are full of something she no longer recognizes.

A word comes to her mind. Sympathy.

"This- I know what they've done to you. I've seen it. The man, Agent Hartholme - Agent Hartholme is my father." He gulps, glances at her to see if she is furious. She is as calm as a lake without ripples, but inside, something wrenches this way and that.

She cannot understand him. He is cold, hot, he is a paradox. Her fingers itch to end him, end all this confusion.

She refrains.

"I know you've been through a lot - God, fuck, that's an understatement. But," and he is breathing harder now, "you don't have to keep doing this. You can escape from it if you wanted. You could leave." His words come out faster, jumbled. "I know I've got no right to be saying this, I've never done anything, and it burns me up, you know? You should leave while you can - well, you should still leave before the rest of them come." He looks sheepish. And then sad, brokenhearted, almost. "You should leave."

"You don't know what you're saying," she whispers.

"I know full well what I'm saying," he persists. "What they've done - what my father, what we have done - is inexcusable. You're beautiful, you know," he adds.

She cannot stand it any longer.

"Let me go, then," and pushes. He flies away, skidding to a halt with mud on his pants, grime lining the pale angles of his pretty face. The godboy looks a little smaller now. He stares at her, wide-eyed, as she dusts herself off and looks at the sky. It is beginning to rain.

"I was going to kill you," she says, "but you've turned out to be more boring than I thought.

"But thank you."

The raindrops begin their fall, and she turns away from him, sparing one last glance at him - sprawled in the mud, Lucifer with a kinder heart - and leaves, because if she looks again he will be gone and she will feel like crying for no reason.

"Run!" he shouts. She ignores him and touches the blood seeping through her shoulder. It's warm, but the rain washes it away, and as she keeps walking she feels a little less empty - she's bleeding it all out, bleeding it onto the highways as she pads through the storm and the rivulets of water run down her skin.

There are sirens, and then there is nothing.

"You've been causing us some trouble, Clove," says Brutus, hands neatly folded. She assesses him; slightly more stooped now, but still proud, head held high. He's wearing a Rolex.

Her eye twitches, a hiss passes through the air. Overhead, a light fixture shakes. The soldiers have their guns drawn.

"I don't think you want to play any more games with us," Brutus advises, drumming his fingers on the table. "You're going to bring out my bad side if you do. And," he says, grinning like a shark, "that is something I certainly would not want you to see."

"And what I've already seen is supposed to be good?" she whispers. "You fucking son of cunt-faced bi-"

She sees stars as one guard beats her on the head with the butt of his skin; blood leaks from a cut, she can feel it. She glares at Brutus with renewed hatred, but he only shakes his head in disapproval.

"You must understand, girl, that this is a game, and there are rules to follow, of course." He holds up two fingers. "You can either cooperate, be a good girl, or you can rebel, act like a naughty child, and face the consequences."

She hates his patronizing voice, hates him, hates every fiber of the being that is Brutus. He is the Devil. Briefly, she considers taking out this whole room, splattering them against the walls, but there are too many guns pointed at her head. Lasers, real heat-seeking lasers that she might not be able to deflect in time. Cameras. Brutus himself.

"I understand you've been in contact with my son." Now he is interested. "Did you say anything to him?"

"So what if I did?"

Another thwack. "The rules, Clove." He is impatient. "Remember the rules."

The Rules. They are Brutus' personal code, a set of guidelines to follow because he fancies himself a teacher and she his student. Fucker.

"I may have spoken to him about something. Anything, really." She waves a hand dismissively. "He wanted to fuck me."

Brutus leers. "Oh, I doubt that. And please do away with these thinly-veiled attempts at provocation, because they won't work with me. Besides, no son of mine would dare," he stretches the word out in a sort of drawl, "copulate with a whore like yourself."

"Because you want me all to yourself? Do you want my lips on your-"

Thwack. Goddamn, it hurts even more now.

"Nymphomaniac bitch," Brutus remarks pleasantly, like it is something you might read on a grocery list. "You say anything like that again, try any sort of slander, and perhaps I might take you up on that offer. If not, maybe I'll even let them touch those horns of yours."

A shudder of revulsion passes through her for this man who is not a man; a beast, no different from the dogs he keeps. With a tremendous effort of will, she holds herself back.

Dear God, she wants to kill him, to tear him into little glass shards. If only, if only.

"Now, I believe I have a proposition for you that you'll be quite interested in taking up." He claps his hands for emphasis. "We've had a bit of delay in capturing you and returning you to our custody, and of course you must be exhausted from the ordeal you've experienced. The real world isn't as nice as you made it out to be, is it?"

She remains silent and refuses to speak. He grins.

"Not in the mood to talk? I think you'll agree that I'm right, then. Has it been hard to get food? Have you had to sleep on the streets because no one will take a whore in? A bull?"

She growls, bares her teeth. He laughs.

"You'll soon discover that I can be generous if I want, when I want. But my generosity is contingent on your behavior, understand? Be a good girl, do your homework, and you might have the pleasure of a few perks. Some money, perhaps, a nice car, whatever you want." His scalp shines under the lights, his face twisted into a savage sneer. "Disobey my authority, assault your guards, and consequences will follow. And they won't be as lenient as you've been accustomed to, let me tell you that."

He licks his lips. She feels ill, like she'll throw up.

"Do we have an understanding, an agreement?"

She nods fervently, and he releases her, and she's back in her old room again.

The first thing she does is throw up in the toilet.

The godboy haunts her at night and haunts her during the day. She puzzles over the shape of his lips, the lines of his body, how someone can look so sharp and be so dull at the same time. He is her conundrum.

Once, she imagines his hands on her body, imagines his lips upon hers. But then, she wakes up and realizes it must be a dream, a hallucination, because she is alone in her cell and she is clutching the sheets for dear life and no, she does not smell his cologne on her skin and no, the cameras are not pointed away, and no, her heart is not thumping at a million miles an hour.

The secret exchanges. The sideways glances. Lips parted, touches that burn and a passion that rages.

She learns to hide herself so thoroughly and completely that no eyes might look upon them. She learns to kill a man with precision, to induce aneurysms and hemorrhages with a thought. She learns how to crush hearts.

But still, she doesn't know what to make of him, doesn't understand why she cannot get herself in order when he is around. She thought she left it all behind ages ago, in that living room of the dead with blood on her hands, staining them red for the very first time.

Some things are best thought of as impossible, she notes.

They have labels for her kind. Diclonii, they mock. Freak. Bull. Animal.

She is an animal to be driven around, a rat to run through their mazes. A prostitute to blow them and make them cum if they desire.

But he lies next to her on her narrow cot and says he loves her. He wears his heart on a sleeve. Her godboy, he is so riddled with flaws, so full of cracks and openings that a single prod and he might collapse. When their hips grind, when that delicious friction overtakes them both, he whimpers, keens, sobs and she traces the scars on his chest, across his stomach, all over his back. She smooths out the tight coils of muscle, runs her hands through his flaxen hair like he is a precious thing. She has had few precious things in her short life; she wants to keep him, wants him to understand. She wants herself to understand.

"I love you," he says, an awkward proposal in a room that still reeks of shit and piss and blood and semen, and she turns over and lets his lips ghost over the shell of her ear, her eyelids, her nose, with a sorrowful tenderness, a raw flame flickering all over him. He is made of cigarette burns and a bit of gold, he is a Golden Calf not yet hardened, still dripping molten metal, still pliable. Or, perhaps he was frozen from the start and she has contributed to his gradual decay.

Look now, her veins sing. Look now, see what you have wrought, inhuman girl, bastard child.

He paws at her, he begs for her to deliver him release. In his eyes, she is the angel of Death come to take him away.

She only wishes she were.

Her door slides open with a thunderous sound. Light splashes across her face, she opens her eyes groggily.

"Get up, slut."

Rough hands drag her away; she loses two nails clawing at the ground.

And then comes the pain.

How long she has lain here, she cannot tell. An eternity is in her head, a vast, bottomless abyss that stretches from the highest heavens to the depths of her personal hell. Her whole body is consumed with black and blue, sheets of broken skin that sheath her in this dress of bruises. Her right eye is swollen shut, her lips gummed up with blood.

Her horns, most of all, are throbbing dully. They are not broken, but she probes her scalp and finds sticky warmth and an incredible ache that makes her respond by jerking her hand back and shivering uncontrollably. God, she is so cold, so damn cold.

Kyrie, she prays. Lord, have mercy on me.

There is no answer. She had not expected one, but still, she held out a small glimmer of hope, and now that is dashed. She cries.

Her doors are opened again. Footsteps, harsh, on the floor. A man's voice. A Rolex smeared with carmine stains.

"Bitch," he whispers. "You fucking bitch. You fucking, damn bitch."

She croaks out, "He wanted it, so I gave it to him."

"Did you, now?" A sharp slap that sends her reeling, makes her sees planets and constellations where there are none. Brutus' voice is right beside her ear.

"You whore," he breathes. "You slut, you cunt, you fucking bitch. You're a mongrel. You're a piece of shit."

Kyrie, she calls out again. Please.

"If you wanted it so bad-"

The sound of a zipper.

"-you would have gotten it, you dumb bitch. Dumb bitch."

The action is predictable. She cries out as he pentrates her; it is a humiliation, a horror, a nightmare and an agony like nothing she has ever felt before. He violates her, spills his seed into her and leaves her lying in a curled heap next to the spilled sheets, frigid and bereft of any heat and so utterly alone that the walls are pressing down on her and the darkness is the unexplored regions of space and she wants to scream with each painful thrust, but he forces her mouth shut.

"Bitch."

He punctuates every movement with that word, drilling it into her head. He wants her to know that she is an animal, she is nothing more than a dog.

"Bitch."

Again, the pain. Knives across her skin, glass in her mouth. Scream; nothing comes out.

"Bitch."

Scream.

She drifts back to the world of the living, woken by the screeching of gears.

She's the only one here.

Her breath is labored, her entire body as cold as the arctic. She cannot move a single muscle. Everywhere, there is blood. Her tongue is sour, her eyelids are closed and will not open.

The one thing that stands out the most is anger, hot and dangerous, pulsating in every inch of her heart, flowing through her veins.

The second is misery.

The third is sorrow.

Her world opens in a flash, a storybook splayed underneath her fingertips. She can sense, she can feel, she can see.

"Run."

His voice.

Gunfire. Shots. Herself as a child again.

"You are beautiful."

Her vectors swarm around her, lifting her into the air. A spiderweb of power flows from her mind, flows from every rotting wound and latches onto the metal; her prison is a grid, she can plot coordinates and punch through them, and then it will all topple. The world is a simple thing, run on mathematics and precision.

"Beautiful."

The doors rip open, then fly forward, twisted into indecipherable scraps of gray. Power swirls, a hurricane of thrashing limbs and bones and steel, around her head, and she is at its eye. She is the center, she is the apex of this storm. She is death incarnate.

They scatter at her footfalls like ants; she runs them over like the insects they are. She is no dog, no half-breed bitch. She is strong, she is a killer.

Raw and bruised and bloody, takes an uncertain step forward, trips, makes a noise of irritation and is caught and pushed back into place. Her veins sing with a pulsing light, she is lost in this ecstasy, bathed in these rains, dancing underneath waterfalls, making the world burn as she goes.

She takes another step.

Then another.

And then she is running.