Then

There's a poetry in it, Ketch thinks, twirling the blade in his fingers as it glints under the surgical lights. Demon doctor tied up on her own table, under her own scalpel. Seems a fitting way to gouge the thorn from the Men of Letters' side.

He reaches down to pull up Carter's bloodied shirt even higher, exposing more skin to carve at. It's already so scarred, and he has to admit he's a little taken aback by the sheer amount of white scar tissue criss-crossing her abdomen. Still. Won't stop him from adding more.

He picks a spot between her sixth and seventh ribs, right side, and sinks the scalpel into her liver. She screams, throat raw and bloody as he carves.

"I can make this all stop," he says, voice cold and calm above the shrieks. "Just tell us where Kelly Kline is and what your plans are for her child."

Carter's scream cuts off, strangled into a grunt, but then there's silence. She stares up at the warehouse ceiling, eyes unfocused, breathing heavy.

"No?" Ketch prompts, trailing the scalpel over more of her exposed skin. The blade finds her throat, probes the artery. No pulse. Of course there isn't, but now he's intrigued. "Very well, then." He slices, and she screams again, writhing making the cut worse as he pulls back a flap of skin. "I've read your file. I know all about you, doctor. There's no point trying to keep secrets. All you have to do is talk to us."

She continues to cry out, intermittent screams in between heavy breaths, almost sobs as her chest heaves. It gets louder, more pained as he drags the blade towards her clavicle. Her fists clench. "Fuck!" The word is raw. "Fuck fuck fuck." Ketch smiles, starting a curve down across her chest, and then, "Yes!"

He pauses. The blade lingers, confused.

"No, don't stop," she pants out, eyes screwed shut. "Right there. Keep going."

What?

This wasn't expected. Tentatively, he tries dragging the blade again and for a moment it seems that she's screaming in pain. Then she gets louder, and there's no mistaking it's laughter.

"You fucking idiot," she eventually snarls. "You have an entire fucking dossier on me, yet you missed the main fucking thing." Her eyes snap open. She fixes him with a glare, cold and menacing, and it takes him a heartbeat to realise he miscalculated. "I don't feel pain."

There's no chance for him to reassess, evaluate. She moves. The restraints snap clean as her hand comes up, shockingly powerful, and closes on his wrist to shove the scalpel away. He gasps at the tightness of her grip, instinctively trying to pull back, and then she's rising like a demented Frankenstein from the table.

"Radiation sickness did a number on my nervous system," she taunts, voice hard and oblivious to the wounds dripping blood. "You're gonna have to do better than that." His free hand grasps at the tray of instruments, searching for something he can use as a weapon, but she kicks it out of reach and twists his arm hard, leaving him with the choice of dropping to the floor or suffering a dislocated elbow. He goes down.

"You bitch," he snarls, voice flooded with hate-fueled anger. She hadn't just played him. She'd humiliated him too.

"Nah. I think you can be the bitch." He hears the crunch before his body catches up with his brain, and he screams.

She's crushed his wrist. Whatever superpowered alchemical formula she pumps herself with, it's turned her grip into a vice capable of shattering bones, and his hand immediately goes limp.

He's starting to realise there were a lot of mistakes in her file.

It's no mercy when she lets him go, the change in pressure suddenly triggering a fresh wave of shock, and he can barely breathe as he clutches his hand to his chest. Through the waves of pain turning his vision red, he tries to get to his feet again, make it to the gun he's left beside his jacket just a few meters away.

Behind him, there's a mechanical hum and the rattling of chains as Carter's found the controls for the warehouse loading gear he'd used to get the table here in the first place. Maybe this wasn't the best location after all.

He's practically made it to his weapon, hand closing on the handle of the pistol when he feels something heavy collide with his shins and he's knocked off his feet. A chain's wrapped around his ankles, tightening up to his knees as Carter manipulates the other end, then she hits the button for the pulley overhead to pull it taut.

The chain begins to drag him back roughly over the floor. Pain shoots through his body as he twists and tries to shoot, most of the shots going wide, then with a jolt he's pulled up and off the ground altogether. One bullet finds her hip, but all it gets is a look of irritation.

Carter stands with the control in her hand, waiting for him to be lifted upside down until his head is slightly below level with hers, then she shuts it off. She crosses to him with a scowl and wrenches the emptied gun from his hand. "Amateur," she spits, tossing it away, then reaches up to unfasten his belt.

Ketch's heart is pounding, blood quickly rushing to his spinning head. "Well, I have to admit, well played," he pants between the waves of pain, though his composure is slipping quickly. "I really bought that little show of yours."

"Yeah, well. I've caused enough pain to know what it looks like."

She twists both his arms behind his back, good one and crushed alike, and secures them tightly with his own belt. He screams again, vision blacking out, and when it returns he can see the sadistic smile that's settled on her lips. He knows that smile. Seen it reflected back at him in the blade of a knife enough times.

"Let me tell you, it looks something like that," she says softly, then starts working at his shirt, unbuttoning it carefully before pulling the fabric back to expose his chest. "You reckon you're a hotshot, but I have decades of experience on you."

He watches her turn away, going to retrieve the scalpel from where he'd dropped it to the floor and wheeling the cart of instruments back over. She isn't lying. It had all been there in her file: kept alive for decades by her own experiments in alchemy, and most of them spent in the business of torture.

"You know, my father was a Cossack," she says, wiping her own blood from the scalpel on his shirt. "Fled to England after the revolution, but he taught me how to hunt. Small things like foxes and badgers usually, but we'd go a bit bigger whenever we visited America. Bears, deer...that sort of a thing. Taught me how to skin what I catch too, and I guess now I get to skin what I Ketch." Her lips twist, smiling at her own joke. "Let's see if posh boys like you really do bleed blue…" The tip of the scalpel comes to rest in the soft space below his ribcage, almost teasing, as she watches it move with the frantic thrusts of his abdominal aorta.

His jaw clenches. He's bested, and he knows it. And scared. "Alright," he hisses out, chest tight. "What do you want?"

It was a mistake to assume he could bargain the same way he'd offered her. She leers. "I want you to scream."

The blade skims down over his sternum, grazing enough to draw a trickle of blood, then she finds his left nipple. She teases at it, scalpel scraping until it hardens to a point, and he feels his stomach turn.

She only has one nipple. He's seen it: the twisted mass of scar tissue where the other one should be, and for a moment he wonders if she's going to carve him in her own image. Then the tip of the blade moves an inch or two towards his navel, digging in where his heart beats beneath the skin.

It lingers, the moment drawing out as he braces for the pain, and wonders if this is some technique to make him more afraid. Her expression is blank, save for the strange intensity of her stare fixated on that point on his chest.

His heart beats several more times, pain pricking his skin in time with his rapid pulse, then at length she sighs and turns away. Ketch blinks in confusion.

"When the master torturer of Hell came to recruit me, I told him to go fuck himself," she says as she retrieves the control for the pulley. "I'm not breaking my streak for you."

He's still bewildered as she lowers him to the floor again, landing in an awkward pile, and he can't help but flinch as she moves to help him untangle the chains. She doesn't look at him when she cuts the belt, and he lets out an involuntary whimper as he clutches his hand to his chest.

"What, gone soft?" he tries to taunt, but his voice trembles.

She fixes him with a blank stare, and even the unreadability of her expression is unnerving. "Let me take a look at your wrist," she eventually says. "I'm a doctor."

There's a wariness to his his stare as she reaches a hand out to him, his eyes flitting past her shoulder as he wonders if there's some weapon he can reach or something he can do, but in all honesty, he thinks he's wrecked.

Gently, she grasps his shoulder, drawing his arm away from his chest as she casts a clinical gaze over his wrist. He can't help the whimper that slips through his teeth. "Alright," she says firmly. "Get up."

He only half needs it when she puts her arms under his shoulders to pull him to his feet, but she's so unusually strong she seems to be taking most of his weight. She leads him back over to the exam table, the floor around it slick with blood, and a jerk of her head tells him to sit. He does in silence, watching her curiously while she crosses to the trailer to take out more boxes. They get placed down beside the crate of tools he's already laid on the fold-out table, then she goes to get the matching fold-out stool from the trailer.

She opens it and sets it down in front of him, giving him a final appraising glance before she returns to the boxes and begins to prep some equipment.

"The only local anaesthetic I brought was for an epidural, so it's morphine or nothing," Carter says as she crosses back to him and takes a seat, syringe in hand. "Arm."

He holds out the uninjured one to her and she pushes up his sleeve to inject straight into a vein. He watches her with a silent grimace, then she turns to his broken wrist.

"Alright, let's take a look." She lifts it gingerly, making him wince, and it earns a him a hard stare. "I won't lie, this is still gonna hurt like a bitch."

He grits his teeth. "I can handle it, I assure you."

"You sure?"

"Absolutely."

"Absolutely." She repeats it back to him with a sneer, mimicking his accent with an exaggerated "yu" on the third syllable. "Where the hell are you even from anyway? Poshton, Toffershire?"

"You're hardly one to lecture me on class," he retorts with a scowl. "You aren't exactly a plebeian yourself."

"I'm from Cornwall." She doesn't look up from his wrist, tenderly probing the break, and he has to mask a grimace of pain with a sarcastic smirk.

"Well, the West Country accent has changed since last I heard it. Or is that Cornwall, Crimea?"

She gives him a dirty look. "Looks like a comminuted fracture. Can't be sure without an x-ray. And my father was from Siberia, not Crimea."

She stands again, crosses to one of the equipment boxes still left in the trailer. "I can splint it for you, but you'll need a trip to the ER."

He nods, giving another hiss of pain through gritted teeth, though he thinks it's slowly fading. "Alright. Do it." He still doesn't know why she's suddenly turned so caring, but now hardly seems like the best time to question it.

Carter takes a seat opposite him again, laying the splints and bandages on her lap as she takes his hand and sets to work. It's not been the first thing on his mind, but looking at the cuts he inflicted on her neck, studying them now at close range they don't seem as deep as he remembered. Presumably, she heals. He doesn't know how fast.

Several minutes pass, Carter working in silence as Ketch suppresses every urge to hiss or gasp in pain. It gets easier, the longer time passes and the morphine works its way into his system. His eyes flit between her face and her hands.

"Does it work?" he asks at length, watching her bandage his wrist. She's surprisingly gentle, the morphine having dulled the pain considerably.

"Does what work?" she says without looking up, a slight pout on her lips.

"The surgery. The demon modifications. Does it satisfy the need to carve into something and watch it bleed?"

A beat. Then, "No."

She still isn't looking at him, eyes staring intently at his arm though she's just about done. It makes him nervous in a way he hadn't expected. He thinks he's only just now learning the meaning of the word "untouchable".

"I know you crave it," he remarks softly. "Nobody makes a career of torture the way you did if you don't enjoy it. If you don't need it."

"And you'd know all about that."

She's right. Of course she is. "I never would have shown you mercy," he confesses, but it fails to provoke any sort of reaction. He can't figure her out, and it both unsettles and infuriates him. "Why did you stop?" he finally asks. "After what I did to you? Even if you couldn't feel it, why not just give in and torture me? On principle."

That's when she looks up. Her stare is cool, almost condescending. "Because it isn't about you."

He's still considering that when she gets up, returning to her equipment box to take out a stethoscope before crossing back to him.

A confused frown crosses his face as he watches her put it on. "Why…?"

"Shhh." She cuts him short as she pushes back the fabric of his shirt and presses the end to his chest. He doesn't understand what she's doing: there's no damage to his heart. Then, as he studies her expression, it clicks.

"You miss it, don't you?"

That earns him eye contact, at least. "Sometimes."

He takes himself by surprise when he raises a hand to press over hers, keeping her from pulling away as she looks at him in confusion. "Does this help?" he asks, suddenly keenly aware of his own heartbeat. "Does this satisfy some need, to feel something else living and know you could hurt it if you wanted to?"

Another pause. He watches the muscles in her throat work as she swallows, and then there's a whispered, "Yes."

His heart beats harder. "Well, I'm afraid, doctor, you've just given away your weakness. You aren't going to kill me." A small smile of satisfaction forms on his lips, and even he's not sure if he's taunting her or not.

She returns the smile with a similarly ambiguous one of her own. "Yeah, well. Yours isn't the only beating heart in the world, so I wouldn't count on it."

There's a beat as they awkwardly hold each other's gaze, then Carter suddenly averts her eyes and takes off the stethoscope again. She folds it into one hand as she stands and heads back over to the equipment box, placing it back inside and then examining the inside of her wrist. He watches, curious, as she gives a disgruntled sigh.

She offers no explanation, and he doesn't ask for one as she takes another item out of the crate: a titanium briefcase which she sets down on the table and opens up so that he can see the tray containing several vials of black liquid inside. Then she goes back to the trailer once again, rummaging in several of the crates until she finally finds what she's looking for and pulls out an item encased in bubble wrap. When she brings it back over to the table and unwraps it, he's genuinely surprised to see it's a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka.

"You drinking?" she asks as she lifts two tumblers from one of the cases she already has laid out, then crosses back over to him.

Genuinely, he finds this weird. "What's the occasion?"

"The occasion is that I could really use a drink. And you happen to be here." She holds out one of the tumblers, and he takes it in his good hand as she sits down and pours them each a couple of inches of vodka. He's still studying the cuts left behind on her neck. Blood is still steadily oozing out, though he thinks he can see the veins surrounding the wound as dark shadows beneath her skin.

Steadily, he sips at the drink. His eyes flit to the tray of vials atop the table. "You need a fresh dose of your formula, don't you?" He's far less confident in his guess than he makes it sound, but the sudden scowl on his face tells him he's right. "This is what happens to you when it wears off. You get weaker. Can't heal."

"Well deduced. You really are gonna have to tell me what's in this file you have on me."

"Enough. I know about your history with the Men of Letters and our alchemical experiments. Our attempts to develop the perfect formula for azoth are where you got your start."

She sips at the vodka and scoffs. "'Our attempts'. You make it sound like you were there. What are you, forty?"

"Forty-three."

"I'm pretty sure your people abandoned those experiments before you were even born." She gulps down the rest of the Stoli then pours herself more.

"I believe some efforts are still being made. In one laboratory...somewhere."

"And let me guess: you still haven't managed it?"

"And you have?"

She shrugs. "I've gotten close enough."

He can't help the slightly smug smile that forms on his lips, and hides it in the glass. "Yet you still need to keep replenishing the doses." If she'd succeeded in creating the perfect life-prolonging elixir, he knows that wouldn't be necessary.

Carter's eyes narrow. "Don't go thinking it's anything you did. It degrades on its own. Not exactly predictable either."

"Sounds inconvenient."

"You know, if I'd gotten to drink that coffee, this dose might have lasted a little longer." A scowl has settled on her face again.

Ketch has to admit, he's intrigued. "As opposed to alcohol, which has what effect, exactly?"

"I don't expect you to understand the biochemistry of it."

He stays silent long enough that he knows she won't be able to resist showing off. Eventually, Carter heaves a sigh, but she's going to answer. He understands more than she thinks.

"Alcohol makes the transition bearable," she replies. "Fresh doses can be a bitch while you wait to acclimatise."

One of his eyebrows creeps higher. This is all very interesting. "For someone who can't feel pain, one does have to wonder what on earth could make it so unpleasant?"

"I sincerely hope you never have to find out."

He seems to have annoyed her. Carter rises, puts the glass down, then crosses to where his gun is still lying on the floor and bends to pick it up. She tests the weight in her hand, cocking and uncocking the hammer a few times, appraising. "Glock 22. How incredibly boring," she says, crossing back to him and then jostling the weapon in her grip to offer him the handle. Almost imperceptibly, he thinks he sees her hand tremble.

Ketch looks up at her, suspicious. "You're just going to give it back to me?"

"Haven't we already established you can't hurt me?" Her neutral expression turns to a smirk. "Besides, it's not even like you can load it one handed."

He puffs himself up, indignant. "I most certainly can."

"That I'd like to see." The scorn in her tone grates on him. That's a challenge he'll rise to.

"Fetch me my ammo, then."

Her left eyebrow instantly rises, sceptical.

"Left jacket pocket, if you really want me to demonstrate."

Without a word, she crosses to the jacket and does as he suggested, tossing the magazine onto his lap as she strides back to him. Then she goes back to her vodka, peering at him expectantly over the top of the glass.

Ketch lifts the gun, struggles for a moment to eject the empty magazine left-handed, then balances the new one upright on the table beside him. In one swift movement, he slams the bottom of the gun down over it, smoothly loading it in without a hitch. Then, he turns the Glock upside down, grips the slide between his knees, and pushes forward to chamber a round. He finishes with a flourish as if to say, "Ta-da!"

Carter stares at him, looking impressed despite herself. "You want me to clap?"

"Oh no, pouting will do just fine," he says, amused.

Her response to that is, indeed, to pout. "Alright, James Bond," she says with a sigh. "Well, I've patched you up and given you back your stuff, so if we're all good now, time for you to get back to your people and out of my hair."

There's a pause as he wonders if she's serious. She can't possibly have thought it's that simple. "Is that what you think's going to happen?"

"That's exactly what's going to happen," she says firmly. "Tell me where you're headed, and I'll drive you. Then, I hope, I'll never have to see you again."

The only reason she could possible see it playing out that way is, he imagines, any of stupidity, naivete, or arrogance, and Ketch doubts it's either of the former. "Dr Carter," he begins. "As grateful as I am for you tending to my arm and offering me a drink," - it really strikes him as bizarre that he's saying this - "And, indeed, not killing me, for reasons I genuinely do not understand, I still have my orders regarding you."

He isn't exactly sure what changes in her expression, but suddenly it's ice cold. "I've been nice to you, Ketch," she says, voice soft and dangerous. "Far, far nicer than you deserve. Don't do anything stupid."

Whatever comes next, he doubts it will be stupid. Erring on the side of reckless, perhaps, but her wounds have stopped healing. If anything, he thinks they're getting worse. This time, she'll go down easy.

"Again, I'm much obliged. But business is business, and orders are orders. If it's all the same to you," Ketch stands, drawing the gun and leveling it at Carter's head. The hammer draws back with a click. "I still can't allow you to deliver Lucifer's child."

She doesn't even put down the drink. Dark eyes glare coolly up at him, an amused eyebrow raised. "And you still think you're allowing me to do anything. No matter how much it's worn off, you know that can't kill me."

"No," he concedes, then jerks the gun just an inch sideways and squeezes the trigger. The shot whistles past her head, stirring her hair before colliding with the rack of vials she'd left atop the table. It goes flying, the bullet throwing it so that the contents spill and clatter to the floor. Glass shatters.

Carter's head whips round, eyes widening, and he fires again, two more shots to take out the vials still remaining in tact. Even with his left hand, he's a crack shot.

For a moment, there's silence, a black slick spreading across the floor as her formula seeps from the containers. She looks on, almost in disbelief, and then at last puts down the drink.

Carter stands and turns to face him, eyes dark. Threatening. "You're going to regret that."

He meets her gaze and smirks. "I think you'll regret it first."

There's a tense beat. He knows what she's about to do, and he's ready for it. One, two…

Carter lunges.

At the same time, Ketch throws himself back across the table, firing two shots before rolling across the surface and tucking his injured arm into his chest. He lands on the opposite side, quickly finding his balance, with the table now forming a barrier between them.

Carter glares, visibly winded as blood pours from the two fresh holes in her chest. The skin under her eyes has turned dark, sclera red and bloody as her gaze bores into him, making her look almost rabid. It takes her a moment to recover, and then she goes for him again.

He's scrambling back as she vaults the table, another shot going wide as she still somehow has the speed to tackle him even though he can see how rapidly she's losing blood, then he hits the floor. The shock jolts his injured arm, and he cries out, then the sound is abruptly cut off as her hands close around his throat.

It's not the same death grip that had earlier shattered his bone. It's still enough. Maybe the move had been stupid after all.

He's lost the gun, and for all his scrabbling, his fingers can't reach to clutch it again. Ketch's eyes roll into the top of his head. He struggles, arms batting at her feebly, though they may as well be flies buzzing around her head for all the effect they seem to have.

It's only the random flailing as his body begins to jerk and twitch that allows him to find it. His left hand lands on something on the floor, and his oxygen starved brain takes a moment to process what it is: not the gun. The remote for the loading pulley.

In desperation, he slams his finger onto the first button he can find. It takes everything he has to focus, but through the shadows creeping at the corners of his vision, he sees it. The hook on the end lowers into reach.

Ketch reaches out, grabs it, and swings the point at Carter's head.

It connects with a crunch, a burst of cold, slick blood spraying onto him as it slices up the skin by her ear. She rolls off of him with a grunt, dazed, then shakes her head as she scrambles back to her feet. It buys him seconds, but that's all he needs.

Ketch grasps the heavy hook in his hands, aims, then swings it again. This time, harder. The arc of the pendulum multiplies its momentum, perfectly on course as it closes the few metres, then catches her under the jaw. Carter's head snaps back, she falls, then the back of her skull collides with the hood of the Jeep parked just feet behind her.

Ketch lunges for the gun, readies for her to get back up. She doesn't.

The seconds drag out, Ketch breathing heavily as he casts a wary look over her motionless form crumpled by one of the tyres. She'd fooled him last time. He won't make the same mistake twice.

Clutching the gun tightly, Ketch takes a few cautious paces towards her and kneels down, making sure to keep the Glock pointed at her head. "Carter?" He nudges the muzzle against her temple. "Doctor?"

No response. Perhaps she really is out cold, then.

Looks like he wins.