The Resurrection
CONTENT:
Rating: Teen
Flavor: Drama
Language: some
Violence: mentioned
Nudity: none
Sex: vaguely mentioned
Other: none
Author's Notes:
Herein begins the second half of "The Legend of Nanda Parbat," the five-hour writing streak brought on by PlotBunnyZilla. Enjoy!
I skipped the whole pomp and circumstance... I mean, everybody saw it on TV, right? (Well, or on the web like me.)
The Resurrection
==#==
"Please come back to me," Malcolm whispered.
The platform hit bottom; the rope went slack in his hands. The chanting echoed through the stone chamber, but the only prayer Malcolm heard was his own. Please forgive me. Come back, my love.
The water boiled, and some... thing clawed its way to the surface. The priestess and assassins moved back, but Malcolm remained frozen in place. The troglodyte climbed up to perch like an ape-frog on the edge of the well, wet matted hair dangling around its face. It homed in on Malcolm, and he could see its eyes were rolled up so far into its head, that the irises were mere crescents, like dark little demon grins. The creature's lips stretched in a toothy snarl. One part of his mind screamed at him to flee, while some other part tried to insist he was seeing Rebecca's face.
With a banshee roar, the creature sprang at him, throwing him to the floor so hard, he lost his breath. His face stung where her claws gouged his skin.
Then the assassins grabbed her off him. Three of them hauled her back even as she lunged for him, roaring. Ropes of spittle flew from her lips as she turned to her captors, snapping as if to bite them.
Then her back arched and she screamed as if stabbed. The priestess was behind her, there, what was that she held at the woman's neck?
The demon eyes finished their journey up into the skull, and the woman - Rebecca - slumped, limp in the assassins' grip.
"Take her to the recovery chamber," Ra's al Ghul ordered in a calm smooth tone.
Malcolm finished getting himself back on his feet as the assassins and priestess carried out that woman. He refused to believe that was his Rebecca. Ra's al Ghul glided to a stop and tipped his head to study the scratches on Malcolm's face. Malcolm barely registered them. "Wh-?" he started, angrily. "You-! That is not my wife! What have you done?"
Al Ghul raised a hand. "The psychosis will pass, in time."
"Psychosis? You didn't tell me anything about any psychosis!"
"Would it have mattered if I had?" Al Ghul arched a cocksure eyebrow, and Malcolm had to admit to himself that no, it wouldn't have. "It happens, sometimes. It will pass."
"It had better," Malcolm growled low.
If the powerful Assassin Lord felt insulted at being threatened by a soft and weak businessman, he didn't show it.
==#==
Three days were more than Malcolm could stand. He went to Rebecca's chambers, and conned the woman attending her to give them a few minutes alone. "She is still weak," the woman warned him in her lilting Islamic accent.
Rebecca lay in the luxuriantly-appointed bed, her hands folded above the coverlet, her eyes closed, her skin pale, and her hair brushed out around her head upon the pillow.
Malcolm could only stare, gazing at her beauty, his heart yearning for her, his fingers longing to touch the warm silken strands of her hair.
Then she opened her eyes. For a moment, they were blank, like stones, and Malcolm felt the chill of fear. "Who are you?"
Her lack of recognition cut him to the bone. "It's me," he offered lamely. "Don't... don't you remember?"
She struggled to sit up, looking around in confusion at her chamber, at her gown, as if she'd never seen any of it before. "Where am I?"
"You're safe," he quickly reassured her, unsure exactly what to tell her. "It's all right. Do you... remember what happened to you?" he asked with trepidation.
A little crease appeared between her brows as she thought. A little crease he had often kissed away whenever she grew concerned or worried about anything. He had promised to always protect her and keep her safe. He swallowed.
She shook her head.
He reached out a hand to reassure her, and she shrank from his touch. "What do you want?" Suspicion shadowed her eyes.
"Rebecca, it's me. It's Malcolm. Can you remember?"
The crease deepened. "Malcolm?" she said, tasting the shape of his name on her tongue. Her eyes unfocused.
He held his breath as her expression cleared.
"Malcolm...?" Her voice was soft, far away. Ice feathered up his spine as she began repeating his name, with the same inflections he had heard a hundred times on the recording of her last words. "Malcolm...? Malcolm...! Malcolm..." And then, the barest whisper. "He never came."
His eyes stung. "That's right," he confessed. "I failed you. I'm so sorry." He lowered himself to his knees at her bedside. "Can you ever forgive me? Please, Rebecca." She didn't look at him. "I'm sorry. But... I've brought you back. You're here now, love. I did what I could." He clasped his hands in prayer, in supplication. Tears wet his face; he needed so badly for her to forgive him, to tell him it was all right, like a child in terror of the dark.
She only turned, looked down on him - through him, for her eyes were unfocused, unseeing. As if she were still dead. And her voice, too, was dead. "You will die alone and abandoned."
The words echoed in his mind as he fled the chamber. The curse of a wronged spirit. Damnation from the dead.
==#==
Malcolm didn't know what to do. Surely, this wasn't the end of it. If he could only explain, if he could only show her how sorry he was... When she was better. When she was herself, then she could understand. Then she could forgive him.
In the meantime, he continued his training exercises, letting the physical exertion drain his thoughts and guilt away.
He was utterly unprepared to meet Rebecca walking from the training hall, with other apprentices, all in their white gi, led by young Nyssa. Malcolm stopped dead, his jaw hanging slack. "Rebecca?" No one had informed him that she'd recovered enough to be out of bed. Let alone training - training? There was a spot of blood on her cheek. He reached to brush it away, gently, to see if she was hurt.
"Don't touch me!" she snapped, slapping his hand away.
"Rebecca," he rasped. He turned to Nyssa. "What are you doing with her?"
"Ra's al Ghul ordered me to train her," the icy twelve-year-old informed him.
Malcolm closed his teeth on an angry retort. It wasn't her he needed to speak to. "Rebecca, come with me, please." He reached for his wife's hand. Suddenly, there was a knife in hers. Pain flashed as the blade sliced across his palm, and he cried out.
"Touch me again, and I will gut you like a pig!"
Malcolm gaped at her. Rebecca's voice had never, never been tinged with so much raw hatred and anger. That was not his kindhearted and gentle wife!
Her eyes went wild, and then the knife was plunging towards his heart. He stood stupefied; it could hardly hurt worse.
The blade was deflected just as the tip sliced his tunic. Nyssa turned her body to force it between Malcolm and Rebecca. The girl expertly twisted the weapon out of Rebecca's grip. "Enough. You may face him in the Provings."
Nyssa led Rebecca away. As she passed, Rebecca's eyes did not leave Malcolm. They burned with hatred.
==#==
"That is not my wife!" Malcolm shouted as he recklessly stormed in on the Assassin Lord's meal. "What have you done to her?"
Ra's al Ghul looked up from the pheasant he was dismembering. "I did as you have asked. I brought her back." Before Malcolm could retort, Al Ghul mildly admonished, "I do not allow raised voices in the dining hall."
Malcolm reined back his temper, suddenly aware of the shadow-garbed assassins in the room, guarding their master. "Why was I not informed she was up and about? Why are you training her to-to kill? She's not like that."
"Neither were you, when you first arrived."
Malcolm bit his tongue.
Ra's al Ghul set down the pheasant and washed his mouth with wine. "It seems she is better suited to fighting than you are. She can not sit idle within these walls, therefore, she trains."
"That was not the deal."
"Perhaps you'd like to alter the deal?"
Malcolm frowned at the man, wondering what he was getting at. The Assassin Lord sat relaxed at his meal, his shoulders squared, his face open... and yet something canny in his old, old eyes, something Malcolm didn't trust.
"In exchange for resurrecting your beloved, I asked for a life. A life spent in service to the League of Assassins." Al Ghul spread his hands. "If she does not suit you... leave her here, to train with us. You go back to your life. To your child."
Rage burned inside Malcolm. "You tricked me, you son of a-"
The sound of blades being drawn around the room stopped him. Ra's al Ghul waved the guards off with a careless gesture. But he stood, and his eyes were hard as steel as they bored into Malcolm. "You begged me to return this woman to life. You did not care what it would cost, you would even die for her - that's how far you were willing to go." He paced forward, withering Malcolm with his glare. "Did you expect such an ungodly act to come without consequences?"
"Y-you told me she would get better," Malcolm said, his head turned away from the killer before him. He quailed before the power of this man, but he forged on. "You said it was only temporary."
"Each person brought back by the Lazarus Pit is different. Perhaps she will return to her true self in time, or perhaps she will not."
Not if you keep teaching her to kill, Malcolm thought hotly. But he schooled his features. "I humbly request she be trained in your healing arts." Rebecca was a doctor, not a murderer.
"She will be trained as suits her nature."
Damn you! "I humbly request to train with her."
"Very well."
==#==
Malcolm didn't know what he hoped to gain with this arrangement, but at least he got to spend more time with Rebecca, to monitor her progress. Perhaps he felt he could temper her destructiveness if he was her sparring partner. Some trace of her love for him might keep her from hurting him too badly.
And if not, at least he deserved the pain he suffered at her hands.
One morning he met her in the corridor heading to the training hall. "Malcolm!" Her smile brightened her whole demeanor.
His heart soared out of his grasp before he could stop it. "Rebecca," he said, hardly daring to believe the woman he loved had returned to him. He didn't know what to say. "H-How are you feeling?"
"Good," she said with another smile. "Stronger."
"Have you... thought about going back to your old life?"
She pursed her lips. "I don't know. It doesn't seem... important."
"What about Tommy?"
"Who?"
Malcolm's heart fell to the stone and shattered like glass.
Her continued bloodlust sickened him. Especially when he could see glimpses of her true spirit, her former self. Yet she had forgotten who she was - everything about her former life. All she knew now was what the assassins were teaching her.
"Sometimes I have dreams," she confessed to him one morning. "That I'm someone else, living another life. Somewhere far away. Somewhere... normal."
Malcolm swallowed. "Are you... happy? In these dreams?"
She hadn't answered.
==#==
Their past was tantalizingly out of reach, locked away outside the walls of Nanda Parbat. Malcolm decided he shouldn't rely on her memories, so he began courting her again. That ended disastrously one night when she came on to him, aggressively. When he tried to escape, it escalated into violence. Then she tried to kill him.
For three days afterward, every time she saw him, she would fly into a rage and viciously attack him.
The trainers had to separate them. Malcolm knew his attempts to save the woman he loved were futile. But he didn't know what else to do.
On the evening of the fourth day, it suddenly became clear to him.
Rebecca greeted him in the corridor again, oblivious to her prior rage. She was smiling, almost giddy with happiness. Just like her 'before time' self, which Malcolm found harder and harder to picture. When he saw her that way again, his heart cowered in a corner, knowing this was going to hurt like hell.
"Tomorrow," she crowed. "They told me, tomorrow will be my Proving!" She beamed. "Will you come and watch?"
The Proving, in which the pledged assassin proved capable of killing another human being.
Malcolm's heart shuddered, but he put on a wide smile just for her. "Of course I will." He swallowed. "Tonight... will you join me tonight? After dinner, for a walk in the moonlight?"
Her eyes shone with what used to be love. "Yes. I would like that."
==X==
