A bloody smile rips across her face, playing through mouth and crazed eyes raised toward her tormentor.
"You're afraid of me."
Every time these words have dropped from her lips, a different person has received them, but they are always true.
"You always have been... a little, at least. Of what I could do."
She receives a vicious kick to the ribs with a savage grunt of pain. She laughs wheezily as she breaks against the wall, and a fine red mist explodes from her lips.
"They're all gone, She's gone, and you're still afraid of me." She flings her words with accuracy, but they fail to explode on impact as hoped. "There's nothing I can tell you that you don't already know." She grins again, a broken jester kneeling before her captor queen. "So why are you still here?" Those words hit their mark.
So does the next blow to her face.
She works her jaw gingerly and winces horribly when the bones grind and groan .
"I know things about you," she spits through numbed lips. "But that's not what you're afraid of." She braces her hands against the smooth, featureless floor.
The shadow darting back and forth in front of her stills, hackles up, lying in wait.
"Now you're afraid because I'm the last proof that you're human." Another insolent look up through lowered lashes accompanies the whispered dare.
"Oh?" Even that single cold, flat word emerges reluctantly.
She laughs dizzily, her head lolling back. The unshaded overhead light washes her face into a featureless white reflection. "What did you think I meant, Sameen?"
The blow follows automatically, without a ghost of thought or expression on the face of its deliverer.
"Who is Sameen?" A harsh afterthought.
Root rolls her head forward, a roller coaster gone over the brink and free-falling fast. Blood, saliva, and at least one tooth find their way numbly down her front as she struggles to stand, to kneel, to do anything but die on the ground.
"Sorry. My mistake." She manages to balance her broken body into a lopsided 'S,' her head bowed for this sibilant insolence. Bones and muscle scream their protests as she raises her head again, a pilgrim washed in blood and a fluorescent holy light. "You look like someone I used to know." Tears flow intermittently from daring eyes, as they have since the first kick landed, but she laughs anyway.
A click levels at her head, so innocuous for something so grave. The small black hole at the end of the barrel looks tiny. She keeps laughing, huge gasps and sobs of it wracking her damaged frame.
"I'm not human."
Root stares at eyes that she is not quite able to make out in the black silhouette, stares as though she sees God in this unprompted assertion.
"Are you going to kill me?" Her question trips sweetly out of bloody, bowed lips.
"Yes."
Her eyes close reverently. Her beatific smile casts its own ghostly light, and for a moment, though her eyes are closed, the eyes of her murderer, who used to be her love, are clearly visible.
"Good."