-by CK Russell
-Completed Dec 01
-Elektra © Marvel Comics 2001
-story © CK Russell
-do not distribute or reproduce without permission
~
Someone once told me that the hardest thing to do in life is to live in it. I'm inclined to believe that, after witnessing and experiencing countless tragedies... seeing the survivors stagger away and trying to forget... trying to erase them from history. Sadly, it doesn't always work.
~
John Malcom stepped into the Parisian cathedral with his heart in his throat, clutching a breifcase and a manilla folder to his chest. He had chosen the meeting place carefully, to be symbolic as a holy place and a haven, but that could not calm him... for tonight he was meeting Death herself.
"E-e-elektra?" he called out to the shadows. "A-are you here?" The shadows answered back with a breath. and a red clothed form.
What do you want." Death inquired coldly.
"I-I-I want you to kill this man!" Malcom stammered, holding out a photograph. Elektra took it from his trembling hand. A young man was smiling on it's surface, a young woman -his wife?- stood next to him, caught laughing.
"There must be a reason." Elektra looked at Malcom, who was about to give himself a heart attack. "Why are you buying this man's death warrant?" Malcom whimpered, and his arms shot out with a folder in hand. Elektra took it, and reviewed its contents. Minutes passed before death uttered three words in her soft voice.
"I'll do it." and then disappeared, leaving the quaking John Malcom, less the money he paid for blood and a manilla folder.
~
A ghost clothed in red entered a posh hotel suite through the balcony window, as in a cathedral across town an old man was weeping, for his son's death would finally be avenged.
"Peter Frederick" she murmured, laying a manilla folder on the suit's coffee table, caressing the photo of a happy couple that lay on top of it. "Your days are at an end."
~
"Peter!" Julia shouted to her husband, as she hauled her slender form from their in ground pool.
"Darling!" he countered "Did you miss me while I was away?" Julia smiled slyly, wrapping herself in a large white towel.
"What would you do if I said 'no'?"
"Why darling Julia, I would have to wage a war to win your heart back." He smiled, then kissed her as if it would be their last kiss.
"Charmer," she giggled, oblivious to the looks directed at her by the middle aged maids.
"Hurry up and get dressed, or cook will have our heads for letting dinner get cold."
"Till dinner, then," she said, tossing her damp blonde head. "Best that you don't be late." and she ran inside.
"Scandalous, absolutely scandalous!" Julia heard from around a corner as she reached the second floor of the mansion. It was Mary, one of the gossiping maids.
"Oh, I know," replied her gossip mate, Anna. "The mistress is only 20, the master's old enough to be her father!" An old argument, being rehashed again.
"I swear, if my mother were still serving this family, she wouldn't stand for it!"
"But she isn't, and the mistress is nice enough, even if she's just a child." Julia was stung. To be called a child -even if she was one by comparison- was like rubbing salt into an open wound. "She'll be a young widow for sure." A new wound in Julia was flayed open. Her mother was a young widow... Julia's father killed by a gang over a parking dispute when she was just a toddler. A lifestyle that Julia had been running away from for the better part of her life. There was no way that she would let a pair of old gossips imply that she was heading back to it.
"Good evening, ladies!" she boomed, turning the corner. "hear any good gossip lately?"
"N-no, ma'am," Mary stuttered. Julia grinned feraly.
"Good." Julia spun away, stalking off to her room, leaving the elder women to catch their breaths.
~
Peter watched his young wife bound away, continually amazed at her endless energy.
"The gods were smiling on me when I found that one," He went indoors to his study to unpack his business papers before dinner. he closed the study door behind him, then stopped, sensing something wrong.
"Who's there?" He spoke out. "Show yourself." A shadow shifted, and a woman's voice answered him.
"This sai," a glint of metal. "I have died at the end of it." The woman stepped into the waning light, looking between the prongs of her weapon. "Be grateful killer, it will end you far faster than it did I." Peter screamed for mercy, realizing what his fate would be. But there would be none, for mercy would only be wasted on a dead man.
~
Julia head her husband's screams, as she stepped out from a hot shower. Fear stabbed her, tangible as a knife as she threw a robe around herself and flew downstairs to Peter's study. The door swung inward when she pushed it, giving way to a bloodbath. What remained of Peter was gored. His blood stained the rugs, painting the hardwood floor beneath. Julia gave a strangled cry, falling to her knees in horror.
"That is the pain of living." Death clothed in red spoke, as she stood by the open window. She held a bloody sai to her face, looking between the prongs. "And the surest way to prove you are alive." Julia looked up from the corpse, expecting to meet her own end -almost hoping for it- but saw only red ribbons escaping into the setting sun.
~
Elektra meditated. Tonight she was in Italy, paid to watch a business man, and keep him away from secrets should it be necessary. But before that, she would deal with the being that had the gall to stalk her. So she sat, meditated, waiting for her hunter.
~
Julia had died that moment she saw those blood red ribbons, and was reborn as she laid her husband to rest in the earth. A new life, a new chance, and she dedicated it to one task.
It began with hand-to-hand martial arts, and gymnastics. She graduated into weapons training where she met and surpassed her teachers. She mastered the staff, escrima, then moved quickly into bladed weapons... knives, darts and short swords. Ranged weapons were her next conquest. Bow and arrow, crossbow, rifle, she took to each easily, as if the art of war was her first nature. In some small way it was. Anger powered her through each new task, revenge her only goal. She thought no further than to kill the assassin Elektra, who had stolen her paradise - her garden of Eden- away in just minutes.
Julia, who had christened herself Rage in those first years of training, waited on a rooftop, not far from where her prey was resting. Counting the minutes until she would strike...
~
Elektra felt her own death whispering in the breeze from an open window. Her hand reached out, touched a control and the spartan loft was inundated by a techno opera, sung in Latin. A caphecony that would hide any noise she made, but known so well to her that any move her opponent made in error would be their undoing.
An arrow let fly through that open window, and Elektra turned from it, as if it were merely an afterthought, effectively dodging it. She rose, as if she never sat and disappeared in to the music. A small form landed in her former resting place, katana drawn. Had Elektra not moved, she would have been cleaved in half.
"Elektra!" the form screamed, betraying it's gender. "I am Rage, I'm here to kill you!" Rage's only response was the music, and red ribbons fluttering in the breeze. Rage attacked the ribbons to find that they were tied to a pillar, not flesh.
Elektra had circled around as Rage bellowed at the rafters. She was now behind her hunter. She leaped, and used that momentum in a kick, sending Rage face forward into the pillar she had just attacked.
Rage fell to the floor. Stunned, both at the blood gushing from her nose, and at her stupidity that had let the assassin take her from behind. She waited for the finishing blow that didn't come. Rage raised her head looking over her shoulder to see her prey poised in the moonlight as if to say 'that's all you've got?'
Rage leapt from the floor in an instant, charging her prey. Elektra sidestepped easily, tripping her, then pinning her to the floor. She screamed a profanity at her captor, over the drowning music as Elektra removed the mask. A girl, twisted with contempt from something innocent, to a being driven by the hope of revenge stared back at her. Elektra rose, and walked away, turning off the music, then seated herself legs crossed, back to the intruder. Julia was stricken, so much that she couldn't speak.
"I do not kill children." Elektra said, sensing the question. "Even the ignorant ones."
"You killed my husband!" she screamed.
"Yes."
"...Why?"
"To pay for the lives he cut short, and the ones that had to keep on living." Elektra paused, as if sensing some greater truth. She looked back at the girl. "You don't know what he did to pay for all of your luxuries, did you?" Julia pierced Elektra with an icy glare, the only successful blow she would land on the other woman.
"Drugs? Smuggling? Gambling? What crime was so heinous that he had to pay for in blood?"
"All of it." Elektra lowered her gaze. "He used drugs to kidnap children, keep them under control. Selling them to harems and private buyers, here and around the globe, gambling with their lives and international laws." She looked up, expecting to see a shocked face, but met only with the same anger... the same rage that had been there already.
"But... why?" she demanded.
Elektra narrowed her eyes, returning Julia's burning stare with ice. "Because a father grieving for his dead son paid me to do so."
Julia's screams fell only on the ears of those paid to be deaf, for Elektra had already left.
~
I don't know what caused Julia Frederick to take her life that night... I don't think I'll ever know what went through her mind when she turned her katana on herself. Perhaps it was the realization that she couldn't continue... couldn't carry the burden of living... surviving. Maybe it was learning that lives can be bought and sold like meat, even her husband's, even hers.
Or maybe she just couldn't forget.
I can sympathise.
| Elektra and all related characters © Marvel Comics 2001. Site & Layout © CK Russell 2001. |