Notes: Written for the Fragments Of Sappho Challenge over at Shatterstorm Productions. My fragment was "but I am not someone who likes to wound | rather I have a quiet mind" - I'm not quite sure this encompasses my entire fragment, but it's what the muses handed me…
There are hints of bondage and bloodplay, but nothing onscreen, as it were - I'm throwing the warning out as a courtesy anyway, just to be safe.
Finally, many thanks to Tigerkid14 for the awesome beta work!
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There are monsters inside Division, and Nikita's beginning to fear that her time there has turned her into one of them.
She knows - she *knows* - that what she's doing to Alex is wrong. Alex is still more girl than woman - frighteningly malleable and eager to please, for all her anger and fierceness - and there's no way she could have any true idea of what she's agreed to do.
(Of course, only an actual Division agent could truly understand what it's like on the inside, but that's cold comfort to Nikita when the guilt sets in.)
It was so completely innocent at first. Desperate for anything at all to help her connect with Alex, Nikita had indulged her interest in spycraft, turning it into some sort of unorthodox rehab program with herself as an equally unorthodox sponsor-slash-sober companion.
Several months later, there's no denying that it's worked - Alex is clean now, and probably happier and healthier than she's been in years. The girl who once begged Nikita to let her die doesn't even really exist anymore, and they're both more grateful for it than they can say.
Unorthodox or not, though, Nikita is pretty sure that legitimate sober companions don't have sex with their barely-legal clients on a regular basis. It's both the least and the worst of her sins - she can't really decide which, and the point is kind of moot when she knows she'll never be able to tell Alex no.
It's not the only thing she can't bring herself to stop, though, and that's what really makes her feel like a monster. She should never have even humored Alex's notion of playing mole in the first place, and should certainly have stopped Alex cold the instant she realized that Alex was actually serious.
She can't - she's tried, time and time again. No matter how much she wants to pull back, and how much she knows she ought to, sending Alex in to be her eyes and ears is the only real shot she has at getting what she needs to take Division down - and that's a siren song she'll never be able to ignore.
So, instead, she leads them both further down the rabbit hole - the sex gets edgier, more aggressive, and Alex's training takes on an intensity and urgency it's never had before. She teaches Alex how to fight, how to shoot, how to hack, how to communicate unseen right under the noses of everyone around her - she teaches her very own recruit how to hunt and kill, though she's very careful never to put it to Alex, or even to herself, in just that way.
(The cold, hard truth is that they're both so far into Wonderland now that the only way out is to see their way through to the other side. Even if Alex did finally come to her senses and try to back out, Nikita isn't so sure she'd let her anymore.)
To be fair, she *is* training Alex properly, or as close to it as she can get with makeshift facilities and only herself to instruct. She may be too far gone to stop herself from using Alex as a pawn in her quest for revenge, but that doesn't mean she doesn't care about her. (She does, more than she has for anyone since Daniel, and that just makes it all so much worse.)
She makes sure that Alex understands - as much as she's able from the outside - what it means to be locked underground with a bunch of criminals who have nothing to lose. She makes sure Alex understands that not all of them will be homicidal psychopaths, and that letting herself feel sympathy for them is just as dangerous as ignoring them completely.
She teaches Alex about the monsters behind the monsters. She tells her about Percy the megalomaniac, who pulls all the strings - he probably won't even notice Alex's existence, but it's worth the extra effort to make sure of it. She also tells her about Michael, though she leaves out so much that the picture is probably completely skewed - Michael is the most likely to realize that something's not right, but even he has blind spots they can use against him.
This is where Nikita - in her own eyes, anyway - truly damns herself for good. The only way to disguise Nikita's hand in Alex's training is to make it look like no one had a hand in it at all, so she teaches Alex how to be just like her - they spend hours shaping Alex into what Nikita was when she herself was first recruited.
Nikita is convinced by this point that she's screwed Alex up even worse than her captors ever had - and she's not even done yet. There's one more denizen of Wonderland that Alex hasn't been told about - Division's own Queen of Hearts, who is almost guaranteed to zero in on Alex in exactly the same way she did Nikita.
Nikita wrestles with this final lesson - she's not quite the monster she fears she is - and postpones it until it can't be avoided any longer. Alex, coming home to find Nikita sitting cross-legged on the bed, looks at the scarves clutched in one of Nikita's hands, then to the knife in the other, without displaying even a hint of fear.
What shines in Alex's eyes is curiosity, and it breaks Nikita's heart even as she forces herself to continue. "There's someone else at Division, someone I haven't told you about yet - the most dangerous person there. Her name is Amanda…"