Her Doll
Disclaimer: I do not own the game (Borderlands) or the characters
"If thou openest not the gate to let me enter,
I will break the door, I will wrench the lock,
I will smash the door-posts, I will force the doors.
I will bring up the dead to eat the living.
And the dead will outnumber the living."
- Ishtar
The sound of the crowd buzzed in her head like the monotonous hum of memories, never entirely defeated by the deceptive mercy of alcohol. There were over a thousand voices, each of which, in a forced unity of heated decibels, was pregnant with sour pretence. She took it in with the pungent flavor of cigarette smoke that curled out of her mouth, mimicking the frivolous attempts of cooling ashes trying to keep faith in the notion of a phoenix from the pit of their charred beings: pretty with a saffron glow, but no longer a blaze fit for fantasy. She pressed the noise tightly between her lips in a smile stitched across her face with each thread, covered in the velvet of lipstick, flashing a different name: Slut, Cheat, Lunatic, Babe, Bitch, Mother, Moxxi. No one saw these stitches except for her, and she could see them all over her face when she stared for hours into the mirror before desperately smothering on pounds of makeup. She wanted the powder to render her skin the shade of tranquility that only the sky knew. She wanted the rouge to bring back a blush that could only adorn the face of a virgin. Ha! virgin...
The crowed suddenly grew louder and Moxxi was torn away from her almost subconscious reverie. Their enthusiasm made her smirk. She knew what they felt – each one of those losers. They weren't euphoric. They were dependent. Like her. They needed this coliseum and every one of these fights, to keep their blood hot while their minds stayed numb to their own personal realities, and their larger shared reality – Pandora and life in Pandora, if one were to use the word 'life' liberally.
She leaned forward to observe the day's massacre. A part of her told her to say something and keep the voyeurs engaged, thus allowing them their morphine. Four rather notorious vault hunters were out numbered by a group of other degenerates whose names had already slipped her mind. She could care less, they'd be dead soon. It was the four vault hunters that she was almost genuinely interested in. They always got themselves an easy victory - less glorious to them who must have seen it all.
As the fight continued, the big guy - Stone? No, it was Brick, she recalled – was in the penalty box heaving with impatience and yelling at his teammates. She had looked at him often, hoping with the remnants of her heart that he would somehow appeal to her and make her feel something:warmth on her cheeks, fast escaping breath and long forgotten embers at the meeting of her thighs. But nothing. She stayed cold. She remembered being a ten year old: right after escaping her mother's howling and her father's drunken rage, she'd slip away with a wad of cash stacked in a corner inside the fridge, and buy all the chocolate she could afford from the pharmacy down the street. She'd enjoy just the first one or maybe two, sitting on the pavement in tears, but after she forced herself all of them, she'd find the roof of her mouth uncomfortably ablaze with too much sucrose and wake the next morning with blisters on her tongue to go with the fresh bruises on her body.
She watched the burly man yell at his comrade, the ex soldier Roland. He gestured and yelled back. Obscenities no doubt. He was stressed and didn't need instructions from the big guy. Moxxi cocked her head and twirled a brown lock around a painted finger, watching him dodge bullets. he seemed like a normal, sensible male...but so had her neighbor Mr. Waller, when he had invited her into his house to giver her a 'present' on the eve of her thirteenth birthday. She recalled seeing her reflection in his hallway mirror from where she had stood in his doorway, boxed in its wooden frame like a skinny little doll...so, so ignorant! When she managed to get herself home later that night, she was turned out. Never got the chance to wash herself clean until the motel incident...but that was another story. Moxxi bit her lip and curbed the images, folding them away into a darker room deep inside her chamber of ashes.
Sensible men, reckless men, good men, bad men. But never nearly as black and white. They were all grey. Dark, dark, dark grey. Watching the soldier irritated her, not because she felt anything for him, but because she felt nothing at all. Just like with brick. Just another bite of chocolate...an insignificant piece of candy that tasted good for a second, only to be regretted forever. Also, the older one got the less they enjoyed them - an infuriating fact.
The three cut through their opponents like knives through a mess of sticky red butter. The sight of the color, her favorite shade, and its intensity, lit her up with an increasingly familiar delight and she giggled to herself - bitterly. Blood did to her what the sight of bare skin did to others. She tightened up in a much-solicited part of her body in an act of defiance against her own psyche. She grinned, clenching her teeth. Her own blood, the first precious drops, had been spilt years ago on the kitchen floor of a that mad man, Mr. Waller. And not from any wound either. The abundance of the ruby liquid now brightened her eyes - they all deserved to bleed, but would it ever be enough for Moxxi?
They were doing well with only the creepy sniper slightly injured. "There's nothing you can't handle, is there Roland?" She cried, still high from the sight of blood. Apparently she was wrong and he ended up in the penalty box, right after. The crowd came alive as the odds were stacked against them.
Moxxi scanned the ground for the other two, lost amongst their opponents. Twelve to two. Ten to two. Eight to two. Then she spotted them. The girl Lilith, darted towards the fallen sniper. She was fast, "like a rabid cat." Moxxi mumbled to herself. Her grin faded and she turned to look at the crowd. Of all the cheers and whistles it was safe to say that the 'whistles' were brought in by Lilith.
"Look at little Lilith go!" She announced. "...beating all the boys up..." She sniggered to herself. The pink haired bitch had the swagger of a nympho-egomaniac. Her body was so...perky. She must have thought the world of herself. The audacity!
Moxxi reached for the back of her neck to wipe away the sweat and the feel of her skin made her sink into someplace so far away, it was close within her. She became conscious of herself, of her body. It had taken enough pleasure in the company of men, many men, who sought in her just that – pleasure. The same body gave her two children and nourished them, and at the end of it all it was there, tired and un-caressed and definitely not what it used to be. Then there was that Lilith. Moxxi dug her nails into her neck wiping off the perspiration, leaving ripe and stinging scratches. Perfect, now she was scarred.
Lilith brought down three more thugs, then turned to aid the sniper. The blood of her opponents was trickling down her chest now. Moxxi bit her lip. How it must have felt - a body in first bloom with so much to be enjoyed. At her age, Moxxi was pregnant for the second time. But oh, did she ever want to feel it! her skin looked like her own, back then and she wanted a taste of her former short-lived glory. One, just one taste of what she'd never see in a mirror again. She wanted it. She wanted it from Lilith.
This little nymph must have had it all, Moxxi thought. She scrutinized the younger woman's body and was ready to lash out with all the sarcasm she could muster and humiliate the pink vixen. "That sweet ass isn't helping you now is it?" She said. But the sight of it, firm and shapely, took the sting out of her words. "mmmm" she purred at the brawl. At her.
More bullets and more screams until finally the sniper managed to bring down the last one and it was over. Moxxi announced the obvious, and then frowned at what she saw next as Lilith smiled at the sniper, and he watched her walk on ahead of him and one thing was certain: he wasn't staring at her feet. In a flash Moxxi recalled every promiscuous moment of her life, except : she was now picturing Lilith going through it all - Lilith on the pavement in tears, Lilith screaming between Mr Waller and his kitchen floor, Lilith running down the street on a rainy night, Lilith crying in labor on the floor of a dingy clinic with a dirty tiled floor under moth-summoning flickering florescent tubes. Her screams echoed in her head and she felt a pang of fear - it was all happening to her again, all through Lilith. Immediately she darted down towards the blissfully oblivious Siren.
"No" Moxxi screamed to herself pulling her hair as she went, "not again...Not this time!"
My friend wanted me to write a Moxxi x Lilith story and since I've never written anything like this before, i decided to give it a shot. so...here it is! ch 2 will be up soon.
ps: i haven't played the game yet, so if anything is out of place, forgive me.