Don't Fear the Reaper
Dangerous. Criminal. Psychopathic. Words used to describe the unimaginable, to give voice to fears of a monster that went unseen, killing in the dark, reaping souls for an unholy harvest.
That's what he was, what he had always been: a reaper of men. And now the prey that had captured him had done something more, and turned him into a monument to that sole goal. They gave him strength, speed, and the weapons and armor to fight a dozen men.
He used it, too. He attacked on wings of fire, and killed with his bare hands. Meat, muscle, and bone came apart under his grip. Someone screamed, fired a handgun. The slug bounced of his head. He turned and opened up, the scythe pistol blowing crimson chunks from the man's chest, kicking him back into the wall. Alarm klaxons wailed, drowning all but the loudest howls, the loudest gunfire, as he killed his way out of the facility.
The mental resocialization didn't take, or at least not well enough. He was still insane, they said, still too 'unstable' for 'conventional duty'. But other tests had come back with a different story, a story told in genes as well as ethics. He was perfect for another kind of service, the first of his kind.
"You will be a weapon," the doctor had told him when they laid him down on the table. Leather straps held, tight against his arms and chest and forehead while the injections were readied. "You will become a killer in the night, and you will strike from the dark skies like death itself."
He had liked those words, liked the poetry to it. He had made sure to eat the doctor's tongue first.
A group of guards poured into the hall, firing from the hip. They were uncoordinated and slow, and they died easily. He ran to them and broke their bodies and skulls with his fists and pistols. The jets on his back screamed as he killed, flame scorching the deck and clouding the hall with smoke. In the din, they saw nothing but the red of his eye slits as he carved into them, killing with abandon.
They died the same way everyone died, like the whores and pushers and criminals and people in the alleys of home. They died the same way the dog in the gutter died, eyes popping and eaten by rats; the way the old man died on the curb, brain leaking out the hole in his face; the way his mother died, turning blue and breathless and thrashing in a stranglehold. They all died the same way, with the same glazed, panicked look in their stupid eyes. Everyone was prey in the end.
He thought about that and sneered, pushing his boot through a fallen guard's ribcage. The man's eyes bulged as he died, heart bursting under the pressure.
This was no fight. They turned him into a weapon of death and gave him limp-wristed pissants to fight. These men were nothing, their deaths pathetic. He needed something real, something worth killing, something he could fight and strangle and kill one-on-one and not feel cheated out of it.
He moved on, ripping open a lift and jumping up the shaft, engines wailing. The prison was deeper than he expected, and he had to change shafts twice before blowing the roof off the tunnel. He crawled out of the facility and stood in the snow, looking out at the men in front of him. Twelve all told, all in power armor, all standing tall.
All pointing rifles in his direction.
He started forward, but stopped. Not Dominion. No, none were red, none were shooting. Dominion would have shot, but not these men. Not these men in blue and white and a dozen other colors.
"Put down the pistols, jackass, and we won't paste your shit all over the ice," said the one in the middle, a marine with a spike rifle.
"Don't tempt him," said a second, this one female, a medic. "You have no idea how much he means it."
The reaper did know how much he meant it, and believed it a great deal. He holstered the scythe pistols and stepped forward. He would be careful how he framed his words. The Dominion bitch-doctors thought he was insane, but he would hide that here, hide it from these rebels. They would think he was one of their own, and he would hide amongst them, and be able to kill when he wanted and get away with it under the guise of revolution and activism, and no one would think twice.
He thought all this up in an instant, and played the scenario out in his head before he spoke.
"They ran tests on me. I escaped," he said, doing his best to sound lost and helpless. "Can I join you?"
He addressed the first marine to talk, and it was that marine that replied. "I'll have to clear it with Raynor, but you're covered in gore and just came out of a Dominion prison, so I think you're in." He met the reaper halfway and shook his hand. "Name's Jim. Welcome to the Raiders."
"Nick," grinned the red reaper, taking a charge from his belt and fingering it active. "Where do we start?"
Note: Just a violent little origin I scribbled down: Jim and Nick from the Brain Series, meeting on Braxis. Don't know what, why, or where it came from, but there it is. The medic was Ayanami. Hope you liked it.