Schrödinger's Cat
"Oh, what would S.P.R.X.-77 think of you, my dear?"
He's the bad guy; oh, Nova's tail curls as she thinks of what she just did.
She would confront him, the warrior told Antauri. She would go. A trial, they were told. Fifteen murders on the transportation ship, all a la Mandarin.
Nova would witness the execution.
She would watch Mandarin die.
A pity, all the hyperforce members thought at one point, that their former leader would not suffer in the nothingness of limbo, the agony of waiting.
Then, the electrocutions will commence, the jury rises. No shock there, pardon the pun.
Graveling static echoes in a sweltering, confined room, The prisoner will die.
Unanimous.
He sees her.
Unanimous.
Everything is set.
Unanimous.
Restrained, ready to be served on a platter of roasted monkey, Mandarin lifts his head, curls his lips in a charming—noit'snotnoit'snot—smirk, bears white canines—all the while holding Nova's reluctant gaze.
He remarks in a casual tone that the deaths were so thoughtlessly messy of him. The least he could've done was wipe the stains up, after all. Blood is so unflattering against dull brown. How selfish of him to only lap the blood from his fur.
And a guard slams the tip of his gun against Mandarin's muzzle. Strike one, strike two, and there's no way Mandarin, his weapons far away from this desolate location, can defend himself.
Not fair, not right.
A voice achingly familiar chastises, Of course, you stupid woman. Fairness is an idea, nothing more. You take what you want from the paws of life.
Hold yourself, pull your . . . .
Mandarin and Antauri are in her head, calling to her.
And Mandarin's down, but she's up. Then, everything and blazing and pulsing with infuriated energy.
Suddenly, she's by Mandarin's defenseless side. She rips at his bonds with her teeth, heat searing his hands, though he doesn't complain. He says nothing, really, though he now stands—albeit wobbling.
Before this instance of ferocity is over, there is blood on Nova's fists.
And everybody else is gone.
She stares at Mandarin with enticing eyes that say, "What have you made me do to myself for you?" Feeling upon feeling tumbling forward and tangling like impassioned limbs.
"Nova," he whispers. "I love you." Such weakness! But he realizes she is weak too.
She shakes her head as she retracts her fists and says nothing for a burning moment, chained by repulsion and doubt—mostly aimed at her actions.
Nova stares at him as if he is an unimpressive stranger and replies, with no inflections in her tone, "Get lost." The girl almost says "Mandarin," though she decides to refrain from acknowledging that this . . . this—he deserves a label. That he's something, somebody implanted in her mind—embedded in her like a lysogenic virus.
Hiding until the right moment. The right, crippling moment.
"Why?" he barks, but he doesn't even receive an indifferent stare.
As she ambles away, Mandarin realizes: She is a warrior. She runs—yet she fights. He miscalculated her strength, and not for the first time. The training, the cold—
As cold as her disposition toward Mandarin, while he surged with something he believed wasn't entirely viable alongside his biological manufacturing. A cloud in elucidated skies.
Just as he is blind, irrational, Nova doesn't realize, doesn't acknowledge a side of her—the beast.
The beast that refrains from insipid human-coddling; the beast Antauri believes is pulled by the reins of need. Nova doesn't realize, with Mandarin, she would be whole. Never would a cage need to be dropped, settled—the monster shackled and languishing, curled and posed to attack its prison.
And Nova runs, and Mandarin doesn't reach forward, tackle her, and rip her eyes out of her sockets, squeezing until she's dead, dead, dead, as dead as they all should be.
Because, after all, distance makes the heart grow fonder.