Disclaimer: Manticore, transgenics, X5s all belong to someone else. The character is mine however. Ohh that's a first.
Author's Note: Hmm, something dark. How keen, maybe I'm depressed. I took a break from Secret cuz though I'm liking it, I'm suffering writer's block. What can I say? It's not my usual on fanfics. I usually reserve dark for my own stuff, but if Dark Angel isn't made for just a little darkness I'm not too sure what is.
Review, it's only polite.
She Remembered
Her lips split in a macabre mask of a smile as she watched him pace the room. Her hands held above her head with shiny handcuffs, that bit at her flesh and cut off her circulation, connected securely to the ceiling by a chain, just as shiny, but she still smiled. Blonde hair the color of moonlight hung around her in a water fall, and her eyes danced despite the bruises coloring her cheeks purple and blue, mottled with red blood that she still didn't quite know where it had come from. She blinked when he turned around her smile still in place, his hand lashed out and she found out quickly enough that it contained a gun, the metal butt connecting with her jaw a flash of pain making her vision go white. Had she been anyone else she would have heard a crack, but she wasn't, so all it did was make her smile wider. It unnerved him and she loved it.
She wanted to laugh, but it would ruin the silence that hung thick in the air. The silence that her fidgety little captor was trying so hard to break. Torture wasn't new to her; she was a soldier and had spent the full twenty-three years of her life in a military facility, Manticore. She had been made and designed and if he thought this was torture he should meet the men she had been trained to kill, the men who had trained her. She turned unwavering eyes, the color of forest leaves, on him, bedroom eyes she had been told, full of promises that she had also been trained to fulfill. She blew a kiss at him with full bee-stung lips, and stretched against her chains seductively. She was perfect, even with the knife cuts running over her exposed muscular stomach, and she knew very well the effect she had on him.
He had followed her for days, and she had known but ignored it, having grown complacent and secure in the knowledge that Manticore was gone and she was finally free. Laughter threatened to boil over again as she watched her companion pace the room. He was waiting for his employer to come and take her off his hands; he was not equipped to handle an X5 if she chose to get feisty. He had watched her, tracked her, but he had not been the one to bring her in that had been someone else that she had not been able to see.
She remembered her days as a child, if she could ever have been called such a thing, and remembered what true torture had been. Lying on a cold metal bed, hands and legs strapped down as they cut off a finger to see if spider DNA could let her regenerate limbs. She remembered the word mutt muttered over her in a light voice followed by a laugh. It had been a long time before she realized what that word had meant. Wolf DNA intertwined with Cat and shark wasn't unusual; spider DNA, however, had not been attempted before, and she had all of them.
She hung there and remembered when she had been older, being sent out on her special missions. Her ability to regrow severed limbs made her priceless and ideal. She remembered being strapped to another bed; this one softer as a man ran a knife down her breast, leaving long lazy lines of welling red. She remembered later standing with broken legs and snapping his neck once she had the information she had come for, the information Manticore had sent her to retrieve. She was ordered to play as a toy and terminate. She had hated the feel of sweaty palms splayed against her skin, the feel of pain where she instinctively knew pleasure was supposed to be, but she was a soldier. Not all of it had been bad, she reflected. They had taught her to dance once, and the feel of skirts swirling around her ankle as she spun in the predatory dance of the Tango had almost been enough to make up for the actual mission they had sent her on.
The man pacing infront of her was the employee of one of those men, a contact she had not been allowed to kill though she had wanted to. He cursed her now, knowing it had been her that had given him over to men that played with his life and rearranged it to further their needs and not his own. He wanted revenge and she smiled at the man again waiting for it to come.
He muttered under his breathe, thankful when he heard the door opening behind him. She had heard the footsteps in the hall and had already had her eyes watching the door handle. "Hello, doll," came the thick broken voice of a man who had had his windpipe crushed just enough to rearrange his vocal cords, "miss me?" She batted her thick eyelashes at him, admiring her own handiwork even as he advanced on her.
"She's not right, boss." It was a squeak from her companion and she smiled at him again, and he shrank away from her.
"I never said she was, did I?" He ran a finger down her cheek, possessively. "Never thought you'd see me again, did you?" She batted her eyelashes again; "you never were much of a talker." She shrugs as best she can and watches as he runs his hand over her stomach, feeling the torn skin her hips reverently. She knows how much he likes knowing when a girl's in pain and resists the urge to roll her eyes at him.
She remembers how a nurse once told her that she pitied her; she remembers also the look on the nurse's face when she asked what pity was. Her eyes had closed slowly, full black eyelashes descending in a wave to cover forest green irises as she had contemplated the words that had flown from the other woman's lips. One eyebrow had risen and she had turned on the woman with cold severity, and had told her exactly why her pity did her no good.
He was talking again, and the memories that clouded her eyes did nothing for her now. "I blame myself mostly, you see, for trusting you." She snorted, and he punched her, the ring on his middle finger slicing open her lip. "I blame you more, however." He finished his chest heaving as he watched her with brown eyes the color of mud. And they too sparked memories she wished desperately to leave behind.
Those dull brown eyes burning into hers as the stench of rotting meat assaulted her nose, and she found herself wishing more that he would brush his teeth than that he would stop pulling the ropes tighter around her wrists. The silk cord around her throat didn't choke her but it was biting into her, soaking up the meager drops of blood that seeped out of skin the color of sugar cookies. A knife had already left red welts across her thighs and he grunted softly as he dug his fingers into the cuts.
Her eyelids were heavy as she watched him come closer step by step and she had to keep her face towards the ground to hide the smile. "You're going to pay." He ground out, his voice painful to hear to anyone but her. To her the pain that danced there was beautiful. "You're going to die," she said, her voice velvety and quiet but it seemed to fill the room with raw power. When he was close enough she let her eyes meet his, and watched as realization dawned.
When her legs swung up to fold around his throat he didn't have enough time to even squeak. She looked at his companion with cold eyes and smiled again, "Uncuff me, or watch him die." He hesitated and she squeezed her thighs and savored the sound of an unhappy groan, he didn't hesitate again. When 'boss' was deposited on the floor clutching at his throat he ran to him to help him up, and he never even felt it when his neck was snapped in her two delicate hands, with fingers that she had not been born with.
It was with slow deliberation that she pulled his knife from its sheath and turned on 'boss.' A kick snapped his head back, and she was straddling him on the ground the tip of her knife tickling his cheek before he had time to recover. She trailed the shiny silver edge across her jaw idly, "I remember you," she whispered her lips close to his ear. "I bet you wish I didn't."
She remembered broken fingers and bleeding hands and bruised skin, but most of all she remembers that he doesn't like to feel pain; just give it. She bit her lip and batted dark green eyes at him, bedroom eyes. She felt her lips pull as she looked down at him, her knife leaving bloody welts across his chest. She exorcised demons across his flesh and remembered the feel of his throat in her hands just before and operative had pulled her off of him. She remembered how she had sat in solitaire smiling with the feel of his fragile skin under her strong hands.
When she had entered her small apartment two days later, the scent of blood still hanging around her, she had smiled and let heavy lids drop over forest green eyes, remembering quite clearly the feel of a skirt swishing around her legs. She was going to take a shower, and then she was going to go dancing.