Title: The Shapes of Water
Summary: Eudial, fire-wielder of the Witches 5, faces an unlikely opponent years after fleeing Tokyo
**Content Warning for those who are a little squeamish, or don't want to read about body pain/torture! None of this is that graphic, but it does ~~go there~~, so use your discretion. And review if you like!**
Inspiration: Sailor Mercury clearly manages the most powerful, deadly element. She deserves to be respected.
"How did you find me?" Eudial screamed it now, tearing against the frost that bound her to the metal chair. The pain peaked and she slouched back, flakes of her own freeze-dried skin grating her back and re-freezing to her. She was delirious. Exhausted. The torture had finally coaxed her temper to the surface but she stuffed it back down. She needed her temper within her, warming her, keeping her alive in this cold, concrete room. "How did you find me?" she asked again, a whisper.
There was no answer. Only the twinkling of the ice crystals as they grew over her ravaged skin, knitting lattices of cooled gore. She balled her fist, willing her blood to keep flowing to her hands. She needed her hands.
"Tell me!" Eudial spat the words at her captor's boots, misting them in blood. Good. Those boots were so stupid. Tragically sensible, Mimete would have called them. "Just fucking tell me."
Still, Sailor Mercury would not respond.
Eudial didn't know why she kept asking. The answer of how she was found did not matter. What mattered was that she had been found at all. It felt like something past unfair. It felt absurd.
Eudial had faked her own death three years ago, snuffing herself out in a fireball car crash at the edge of Tokyo, leaving just enough evidence unsinged to frame it as a murder. Finding a body to take her place in the twisted, molten car had been the easiest part. Harder was the flight across the world under a new name, then renting a car, then securing a condo in the outskirts of Tallahassee under an even newer name.
Harder than all that was staying hidden. She could not live as the Eudial of before. The Unburnable Witch, Mistress of dark flames and high society. That Eudial became a sacred fiction hidden behind a built, impenetrable plainness. She took a job as a dental hygienist. She purchased Groupons for massages. She collected coasters. She went on like this, carefully layering the details of this unremarkable existence one twig at a time, weaving a brittle wreath of kindling around her smoldering, true self. She burned low and red and angry, never feeding off any of it. She willed herself to burn lower. Slower. Slower yet, until she was just a dotted ring of neon, smoldering somewhere deep within herself, gnawing at the stumpy hope that one day this would end.
Three years passed.
And then she showed up. A girl in a plastic coat, standing in the rain as Eudial dashed from her office to her car one evening. Eudial hadn't even recognized her as a Sailor Scout until it was too late, and even then Eudial didn't recognize the danger of it all. She thought that if they ever came her for, they'd send their strongest water wielder: Neptune. Instead they'd sent their weakest.
It wasn't just absurd. It was funny. In the cold, concrete room, Eudial smiled. Warm blood carved down her chin. It was time to end this.
"You'll burn. All of you will burn. Master Pharaoh will return, and when he does there will be nothing but ash and ruin in this world. He will start with the weak, Sailor Mercury. He will start with you."
And now Eudial willed the violent heat of her heart to spread back through her veins, so hot that the jagged ice binding her went knobby with melt. The temperature of the room began to rise.
Sailor Mercury watched Eudial, new interest in her eyes. Fear would come in a minute, Eudial knew. Mercury, for all her smarts, had been stupid enough to seal the door. There were no windows. Things began to drip. The room became sauna-hot.
"It's a curious thing," Mercury said, "The relationship between you and I, between those born of fire and those born of water. We are always seen as in conflict. The comparison never resolves, as though it can't. As though we are equal."
Mercury stepped forward, kneeling in the blood at Eudial's feet. Eudial stiffened, but took courage from the sweat on Mercury's upper lip. Just a few more minutes and this girl would be a crackling, parched husk.
"It's a curious thing," Mercury said. "Your power. You have expert control over the radiation you give out. Perhaps you could bring this whole room up to a sweltering temperature in a blink. But you must not want to, because you haven't. And you haven't, probably because you know that heat alone is not enough to kill me. You, Eudial, need fire."
Eudial blanched.
Mercury leaned forward, her face shining with sweat. "It's a curious thing, the power of fire. To burn. To brighten. To breach the chemical constitution of even the hardest substances. It is unlike the power of water, which has no innate force. No shape. Just depth. Fire drives back the darkness; water deepens it."
All around them mist drifted in lazy, unraveling curls. The metal chair was hot against Eudial's frostbitten back now. Thick and pungent, the stench of blood and sweat buoyed upon swells of humidity as the room went steamy. Eudial had not accounted for the steam.
"But fire requires a spark, doesn't it? And so do you, Eudial. Am I right?
Eudial's heart was suddenly beating in the flesh between her eyes, fluttering and black-edged. She had raised the temperature without considering the ice. She could not lower it. She blinked through sweat as is dripped down her brow, her neck, settling into the creases of her elbows and pooling beneath her thighs. She was singularly aware of how vulnerable she had become—a quivering body—beneath a net of pent, tremulous droplets squeezed from her skin. The sweat that covered Eudial, like all water, belonged to Sailor Mercury now.
Mercury picked up Eudial's white fist, and uncurled it. Inside was a crushed book of matches Eudial had snutck out of her pocket, right before Mercury had disabled her. It was Eudial's spark, her only hope of summoning her fire magic. Mercury peeled apart the book like petals, soft and useless.
"When people fear me, if they even bother, they tend to fear my power over ice. My treacherous frigidity. But the true treachery of water is not its crystallized form. It is its shapeless neutrality. Its fluidity." Mercury said this like she recited the formula on a flashcard. Quick, without inflection. "Water is everywhere, is everything. It shapes itself passively, without intention, becoming the blood in your veins and the empty space of your brain. In this way, we all live in the caress of water's ambivalence. Ours is an existence borne of water's bored mercy." Sailor Mercury flicked the soggy matches into the drifting steam. "I don't bore so easily."
Mercury drifted over to Eudial, a bruise clarifying upon the thick, lovely steam. She placed her palms upon the tender flesh of Eudial's knees.
"To answer your question, I'll ask you my own question."
Where Mercury touched, Eudial's shining skin instantly frosted over in beads of pale, barbed frost. This cold was unlike the cold of before, unlike any pain Eudial knew. This cold was bone deep and burning. It was burning Eudial from the inside out.
"Where are the remaining witches?"