"Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them."
- Georges Bataille

"I got in," she said sweetly, "by slipping past your defences. I managed this because I have a useful knack with shields. And I can do that because my name is Violet Parr."

Time crystallised around him right then, a solid shock of a moment that froze him in place as the puzzle came together with a click that snapped through him. He felt made of spun glass, surrounded by a thin clear candy-coating, dangerously balanced and precariously placed. The blind rage rose inside him like bubbling magma and finally exploded from his mouth in a roar that propelled him forwards.

Violet was ready for the vicious outburst and jumped backwards, forewarned by the look of pure hatred on his normally-unassuming features and the story of anger he had told her. Her body was faster than her mind and her training took over, forcing her frame into a crouching defensive stance whilst her conscious mind tripped over the possibilities. She'd known it would anger him but had thought it would have been the cold vitriol of an old enemy. Not this ferocious outburst, more akin with a deep psychological wound... like torture.

She ducked and weaved, staying beyond his grasp as he grabbed for her. His balance was off a little, though, and she had superiority of speed and skill. She slipped around him quickly, ducked as he turned, slid to the left and used his own momentum to throw him off-centre. Moving with a deftness and dexterity she'd trained long months to achieve, she wrenched his arm up behind his back and pinned the other. With her fingers on his nerve points to immobilise certain motor functions, she forced him to his knees as he snarled and tried to twist her off.

She pressed her lithe form against his broad back, keeping her fingers in contact with his body to keep him from throwing her off and using her senses as a monitoring system to predict sudden movements. She could feel his heavy breathing through her chest and the way his muscles jumped through the doubled fabric of his tee and shirt. There was something odd about this whole thing, a surreal quality that only struck her when she realised that they'd somehow managed to swap roles entirely.

While all this had been going on, some little office in the back of her mind had been going haywire. She liked to think of it as her logic centre, the place she looked to when faced with a particularly puzzling challenge – like the one that got her here. It had been poring over Syndrome's behaviours and making crucial connections and comparisons, drawing startling parallels between him and herself. There was something about his reaction that reminded her of herself... like some buried pain finally making its way to the fore with the introduction of the one stressor that was enough to break his mental control.

Manipulating his body via his nerve points (and without losing a sense of irony at that), she tipped his head back. When his throat was exposed and vulnerable, unwillingly submissive and under her temporary control, she leaned up until her mouth could reach his ear and spoke words she hadn't planned. Words that were utterly instinctual as though her subconscious was directly wired to her tongue by way of her vocal cords, bypassing her rational mind.

"Tell me about Mr. Incredible," she murmured.

He stilled instantly below her, an unexpected cessation of movement that made her freeze with him. Slowly, she moved her arms away, freeing his movement whilst remaining in close proximity.

Violet knew that he knew she'd figured him out. Figured everything out.

The moment was severed by a new type of light cracking into the room and the sound of the door moving back on its hinges.

It was Nikolaevsky.

He paused in the doorway as his eyes sharpened to the problem inherent in the scene in front of him.

His stance changed instantly, from easily passive into furiously aggressive. The man (all six feet and eight inches of him) had looked mild and relaxed, but now he glinted with new fury, an invisible darkness all about himself. There was light in the room but even more in the corridor, and Nikolaevsky was almost a silhouette of anger. The lines of his shoulders and the taper of his waist were harsh (especially under the thick, kevlar-plate armour), his legs were long and locked, and his hands were clenched tightly into fists. He was growling.

His eyes were focused on Violet and her aggressive stance towards his boss, and Violet threw herself to the side without thinking more.

Nikolaevsky missed her by centimetres.

Violet didn't allow herself to roll and lose momentum. Instead, she shifted her centre of balance and bounced as best she could, phasing out. She moved back fast, quietly, and tried to get her bearings.

Syndrome was glaring around himself, fists clenched and with a sheer snarl on his features mixing in with delayed shock. There was little colour in his face and his breathing was unsteady, as though dazed by an uppercut. For a moment he looked like two people: one, confused and shocked, hurting a little from something best forgotten and trying to shrink away. The other was infinitely more aggressive, angry, determined to lash out and to push back.

That first Syndrome was gone within moments, leaving the pure rage behind to take its stead.

There was a loud slam as Nikolaevsky kicked the door shut in one vicious movement, trapping them all inside. The fury within him did not appear to abate.

Nikolaevsky lunged suddenly, toward her, and Violet moved away smoothly. It was a guess of a jump and easily predictable. She turned her attention to Syndrome and tried to clear her mind from the newly-building sensation of headache.

"Do you know what you're doing?" Syndrome demanded, glaring right at Nikolaevsky. The burly Russian mindlessly grunted an affirmative and stopped moving, staring at the ceiling.

Violet looked up and saw nothing. Wary, she moved a little further from him and used long, lithe movements to avoid making noise. Nikolaevsky was slowly unholstering the weapon hung cowboyishly from his hip without breaking his eerie stare from the ceiling.

Then, in one smooth and well-practised movement, he gripped the stock of the handgun in both hands and fired three rounds into the ceiling. At the same time, he cocked his head and shut his eyes, and as soon as the echoes had died away he turned to face her. There was a triumphant snarl plastered haphazardly on his face, as though he weren't really paying attention to it.

Violet crouched down as low as she could go and slid, but she wasn't fast enough. This unexpected echo-trick of Nikolaevsky's had put her off-balance, its originality and inventiveness startling her. He'd used the echoes to map out the room, to identify where the noise wasn't... where it was blocked by her solid body.

Nikolaevsky's hand closed abruptly about her shoulder and she moved toward him, using the man's own momentum as energy. She jumped then, pushed off his midriff with both feet and turned in the air to land neatly on two feet and a hand, the other thrown out for balance. Nikolaevsky didn't even need recovery time; he was up and throwing himself toward her location without pause, heavy build belying the speed and sharpness he was capable of. She was still invisible but her landing trajectory would have been easy enough to predict by someone with the right mental computational skills, so she used her kinetic energy to bounce away.

When his hands failed to grasp his wayward prisoner, Nikolaevsky abruptly stilled. He shut his eyes and cocked his head, and Violet realised he was using a similar technique to the one he had employed with the handgun. She froze instantly, trying not to make any noise.

It seemed to be working. He stayed totally immobile, a faint frown on his rugged features, his heavily-muscled body bent into an improbably graceful form.

Violet was struck then by the sheer raw sexuality of the man; it was unvarnished and powerful, emphasised by the white lighting of the room. It cast surreal shadows into the gaps of the heavily-plated grey armour, revealing once again the depth of his shoulders, the girth of muscle on his form, and the ridiculous height of the man who had (indirectly) caused her to ache and suffer. The light threw shade into the hollows of his skin, particularly at his throat, where its two framing tendons cast triangular wedges of shadows off to the side. There was something both ferociously animal and ferociously civilised about him, a quality that attracted her as a girl and appealed to her as a fighter.

"Boss?" said Nikolaevsky quietly. "Might need a little backup here."

Syndrome nodded, pushing his already-rolled sleeves higher up on his arms. He was staring intently into the middle distance, a blank look in his eyes and a calculating expression on his face. The combination was eerily frightening; it was that of a pure pragmatist, of a man who has had all personal involvement with a situation removed. It was a man trying to use the resources he had at his disposal to his best possible advantage.

Violet started to edge silently toward the door.

"You're trapped in an unfamiliar environment, with two hostile presences," said Syndrome suddenly into the silence, a thoughtful frown on his features marring the anger. He knew that his own advantage here was superiority of intellect, so he was going to use chain logic to figure it out. "You're injured and weakened, but you still have an aggressive capacity. You're also a good tactician and you know how to calculate the odds. Which means..."

His thoughts seemed to trail off at that point, but his eyes were moving back and forth as he pieced the logic together. She could see the solution being formed in his mind, like a wonderful piece of architecture being constructed section by section. There was something chilling about him like that, something robotic and not-quite-human, a little malicious. Violet narrowed her eyes and sped up her creep to the door, recognising the mode of thought. It was one that she herself used on a regular basis.

Her hand touched the handle of the door, and as she changed her grip to fit around it, Syndrome finished his sentence.

"... that your current objective is... escape."

Nikolaevsky and Syndrome moved as one and leapt toward the door. Violet gasped for the oxygen boost and twisted, Nikolaevsky's hands just missing her. Syndrome landed brutal fingers into the hollow of her collarbone and she curved away, moving awkwardly and rolling as best she could. The two men moved around to face her position, Nikolaevsky with the distinct physical advantage (a better fighter than Syndrome could ever hope to be) but they both knew where she was and closed in mercilessly as a team. Violet twisted backwards, buying ground at the expense of her mobility while staying low, hoping for an opening. There wasn't one. She only had one option.

Violet shot forward suddenly, feeling the familiar satisfying slide of smooth air over her skin with the superbly-controlled acceleration. Something fierce exploded inside her then – the joy of the fight – and she let it carry her.

She had never intended it to be an escape. As she dived between them they felt the brush of her form and grabbed on instinct, but all they got was handfuls of her shirt, looser on her thinned and pulled-taught frame. She landed on her hands and twisted her body around and over, forcing their grips down and closer. The action wrapped their fingers into the material, trapping them. Her shirt gave out under the strain and ripped but she barely noticed, following through on the flip, entangling their hands in the cloth so that they lost their hold on her and destroyed the little defensive wall they'd constructed. As the material of her shirt was torn away from her body it suddenly became visible, obscuring the men's hands, and they crashed to the floor. Their balances were destroyed by trying to compensate for the sudden movement and each other.

Violet was moving away then on her own momentum, stretched to burning point, when Nikolaevsky's hand shot out. He gripped her ankle by chance and pulled. She crashed to the floor without leverage and resorted to sheer force to break his grip. It didn't work. Nikolaevsky landed his other hand on her ankle and pulled again, forcing her under his heavy form as he struggled to pin her while using the weight and the depth of his shoulders to track her movements. Violet pulled her knees up and thrust outward with her feet, the impact hitting the man in the solar plexus. He grunted, expelling air. It gave her enough space to break his shaken hold and to roll out and away, to spiral upwards to her feet, to know she was still invisible and doing well.

It was what chess must have felt like with added speed and adrenaline, she thought crazily. The neat way the movements fell together, the deft way she could manipulate the two men... it was breathless and exiting, a raw energy that powered her.

Nikolaevsky had also rolled the movement with a low-slung grace, his arms multiplying his balance so he could use his own momentum to regain control. He leapt forwards again. His aim was a little off and he didn't quite hit her invisible form dead-on, a fact Violet used to change her stance. He struck her back and shoulder with his chest and she moved over suddenly, leaving him spinning toward the floor. He caught himself in a moment of superb balance-shifting and used that momentum to swing around again.

Syndrome, meanwhile, had been watching the odd, half-invisible struggle and had evidently been making plans of his own. When Violet straightened herself into her next attack brace he was already there, having watched Nikolaevsky's movements and making his own predictions. Angry hands that sought to hurt her closed blindly on her arms and shoulder. She swept a foot into his abdomen, hard, and used the rebound to twist backwards and away. She hit the wall with her back while surveying the scene with a practised predator's eye, and was ready for Nikolaevsky's punch and subsequent block when it came. She ducked deftly, allowed her predictable responding blow to be parried, slid around him with a hipshot fluidity well-practised and swept out his legs from under him.

But his fall was not as controlled as she thought it would be. He fell roughly and heavily, deliberately off-balance, and this allowed him a sweep of his arm. His hand smacked into the side of her hip, grasped a belt loop of her combats, and pulled.

Violet went down suddenly, falling with the amplified speed that came from the well-levered movement. She hit the floor without grace and Nikolaevsky used her instinctive half-moment of winded shock to clamp down on her, gripping her forcefully and rolling to bring them both upright. He turned suddenly, holding her bare arms still in his robotically powerful grip, and slammed her back-first into the wall. She gave up her invisibility in that one brief movement as her breath shook in her body, and didn't even try to fight him. The side of his hip pinned her to the wall, allowing her no leverage as his hands moved rattlesnake-like to pin her hands now that he could see them.

There was a moment of pure stillness and then Nikolaevsky reared his head back some, angry puzzlement replacing the adrenaline-inspired rage. Violet's hair partially concealed her face, short as it was, but there was no mistaking the way her thin form shook.

She was laughing.

As soon as she noticed that Nikolaevsky had spotted her suppressed mirth, the laughter burst forth with full power. Her legs weakened and buckled at the knees, pain digging into her sides as she laughed so hard that she thought she'd pass out. There were gooey tears in her eyes mixing into the rising thud of her headache and the only thing now supporting her was the heavy proximity of the man pinning her.

Nikolaevsky threw a shocked glance to his boss, who returned the look with a steely flat expression that was his version of grim puzzlement. Violet let her head fall forward onto the Russian's chestplate, shoulders shaking, tears trying to force their way out. She couldn't stop laughing, her grip on the situation finally shaken loose. Here she was, black combats and halter, hideously be-scarred, and somehow that seemed completely ridiculous. The remains of her shirt, hopelessly abused and now finally useless, lay on the floor some way away. It occurred to Violet that it really should still be invisible, and she laughed all the harder.

Syndrome took several mean steps forward, reaching around Nikolaevsky's chest to grip Violet's chin. Her laughter tapered off then, her hysteria winding down, but the insane smile was still on her face and her headache didn't abate. In fact, it was beginning to evolve into a full-grown migraine, and she had no pills to help her this time.

Nothing to help her at all.

Syndrome looked down on her, frowning, puzzled, but not quite snarling. Violet felt the urge to explain to him the whole situation.

"All this time," she gasped, trying to control her breathing. "All this time and you never figured out who I was. I had you down from day one, and it took you this longto figure out I was his daughter, a-and..."

The laughter cranked up a notch and she saw with a distant dismay how close to collapsing from hysteria she was. She recognised the laughing for what it was: a coping mechanism.

Nikolaevsky, seemingly content that she was not going to make another aggressive move, cautiously let go of her and stepped back. Violet bent over slightly and braced her hands on her legs. All the better for clearing the mirth from your system, my dear, she thought.

"Boss?" Nikolaevsky rumbled, face puzzled and suspicious, with the expression of a man who is left out of the loop or hasn't gotten the in-joke. "Do you know her?"

"I do now."

Syndrome's voice was flat and inflectionless, as cold and dead as his eyes appeared to be. The sight of his reaction was so familiar as to shock Violet back to sobriety. His was the expression she had seen on her own face for the last four years. She straightened up, still backed against the wall, her own eyes flatly locked with his, humour falling away like faulty armour.

"Commander, go inform Tactical. There will be an Army presence with us soon. Her mission was reconnaissance, nothing more, but her partner had military connections. Go raise the defences. I have more questions to ask."

"Should I take them down with an EMP?"

"No. I want to see where this goes."

Nikolaevsky did nothing for a long moment. He looked back and forth between Violet and Syndrome uncertainly, like a child watching his parents arguing. Childlike as he was, he knew the danger that Violet posed his Boss and seemed reluctant to be dismissed so readily.

"Boss... she –"

"Go, Commander."

Nikolaevsky knew when he was pushing his luck. He turned wrathful eyes on Violet for a moment, warning without words what would happen later should anything... go awry. Violet returned his stare blankly.

Nikolaevsky turned his back with some reluctance, the frown on his face marking his better judgement. There was a dull bruise coming up on the lower side of his left cheek to evidence where Violet had landed a particularly heavy blow. His eyes dipped between the two he would be leaving in the room, once, twice. Conceding his boss' superiority, he opened the door but paused a moment before leaving completely.

He glanced back one more time. His Boss and the girl were staring at each other with a familiar intensity so powerful it made his brain ache. There was a lot of negative emotion there, a lot of anger that went unsaid, and the Boss had lost that focused, puzzled look he'd so often worn around the girl. He'd figured out who she was, and that, at least, made her less of a threat.

He shut the door behind him.

--I--

Violet kept herself on the balance points of her feet, ready to move fast if she needed to. Syndrome was stood solidly on his feet, a stance that radiated anger and perhaps a lethal intention.

"Parr," he said, rolling the word around in his mouth slightly, jaw moving with a fluidity that defied his unnaturally still form. "Violet Parr." His lips twisted into what might have been a smile, containing absolutely no humour whatsoever. "My, don't you look different."

Everything about him had changed. Mere minutes ago he had been calm and warm, understanding despite his hurry for information. Now coldness radiated from him like snow chilling the air, touching him colourless. His lips were thinned and pale, his skin oddly bloodless. His eyes had a dry sheen – as though they had turned to ice in his skull. He had changed his stance, too; gone were the easy, loose motions and the freedom of movement. Instead, he held himself carefully and without passivity. He looked like some kind of predatory animal frozen in arctic wastes, deceptively dead but ready to strike, his body locked in close, aggressive without being obvious.

And there was anger and hatred, plenty of it; all frozen solid at temperatures well below zero and wielded like a weapon.

There was a dull ache in Violet's chest – it was the fallout from yesterday (if it had been yesterday) when she had been trying to dodge the traffic on memory lane. It clouded her thinking and her judgement, kept her emotions to the fore of her mind when they should have been at the back, and weakened her defences. She struggled past vainly, trying to see beyond the bitter grey-white clouds of exhaustion and the sharp pained tang of denied tears. Violet was in no condition to face Syndrome now; she'd expended all the physical and emotional energy she had left and was suffering for it. She had given everything she had in the last week and was running so close to empty that it made no difference. His cold, clear face was a warning to her that Syndrome was going to attack in some way although he made no move at all, allowing the silence between them to stretch out to painful levels. He watched her while holding himself still with an unnatural solidity.

There was little left she could do to support herself and her mind returned to old habits like a junkie to the familiar high grounds. She felt herself responding to him; she was closing herself off, tucking her emotions neatly away inside, and the cool calm feeling of absolute control returned to her like a well-worn overcoat. She schooled herself to the neutral impassivity that was her daily persona without effort; she was tired and she was worn out, but she could be as she had always been. It would not last but it would give her some of her old edge.

Even through the pain in her head, rising, following the strength of her disassociation from herself.

Syndrome looked to be... compressing everything inside him, perhaps, compressing it so hard that it solidified within him and had frozen his very flesh. Violet felt her own psyche mirror the reaction, feeling its effects right into the cores of her bones.

"Times have been hard," she sad at last in an emotionless voice, acknowledging Syndrome's question. His expression didn't change an inch. The hatred in his gaze intensified.

"Where will the army fly in from?" he asked softly, like the crush of fresh snow on a winter's day. Violet narrowed her eyes, suspicious, trying to work out what motivation he assumed on her part that would actually mean she answered truthfully.

"The south," she said, the lie coming to her lips easily and efficiently. Noril'sk was in the north-west. Again, Syndrome's expression stayed as still as he did.

"How soon?"

His voice was dangerous, sharp as an ice edge, and as treacherous.

"A week. It was not an aggressive mission."

Sheer guesswork on her part.

"Where will they target?"

Violet trained her mind on Zharov, and his knowledge of her situation. The hangar.

"The ventilation," she said, wondering where he was going with all this, and what information he hoped to garner.

He moved forward fast, closing the distance. She was prepared, but she was powerless to defend herself. Nikolaevsky had worn her down. Violet took one step back to gain ground and her back hit the wall. Syndrome towered over her in that instant, hands pistoning out to the wall on either side of her, trapping her. She could duck out and away but she didn't trust him not to do something... dangerous.

"You've lied to me, Parr," he whispered, voice as icy and inflectionless as a northern wind. It pried into her defences in the same way, trying to pick her apart. "That's three direct lies you've told me to my face."

Violet forced a grim smile to touch the corners of her lips and said nothing, tipping her face up to his defiantly. Dull-edged satisfaction bloomed inside her. What had he expected?

Then Syndrome smiled. It was slow and it was inhuman, cold as the taiga above, utterly ruthless, pitiless as the first arctic snows.

"Don't you understand, Parr?" he asked softly, voice still low, but now with a cruel edge of softness that betrayed his upper hand in the situation. His eyes locked onto hers, trying to force submission from her. "They cannot take me. Think back, Parr girl, just a little way. I showed you how my system operated. You figured it out yourself, in fact. Do you remember it?"

Violet's brain made the connections at the speed of pain, one hundred and seven meters a second. The huge screen she'd played about with, his numbers, his figures, his stocks, all inactive due to the time. She'd entertained the notion of disrupting them but there was a lock on the data, some kind of read-only encryption that meant there was to be no changes. The data, however, had been accurate. His influence, his power, his control, stretching out like sinuous fingers throughout the world. Every sector, though primarily technology and governments. Every area of the financial hemisphere.

She imagined him gone, then, imagined some clever little subroutine buried in his programming that would shut down his operations after a set period of time with no activity. She imagined the money being withdrawn from its homes, investments being removed and hidden away in secret accounts... financial backings for companies, corporations, countries, all gone... the money not in circulation, effects filtering down through system and reaching every single person on the planet.

"You've made yourself invaluable," she said suddenly into the darkness between them, a pressurised void of hatred and mis-spent anger. The raw, cutting expression on his face was momentarily shot through with angry surprise and he moved backwards in furious shock, giving Violet a little more breathing room. His arms dropped away from the wall and Violet felt the balance in the room shift. It wasn't even, but it had levelled out some.

Violet had figured out his plan before he had had chance to elaborate it. She could see it in his mind by closely observing the change in his features: what possessed his face for a moment was nothing so trivial as annoyance, but whatever the emotion it was certainly related. It was quickly dispersed by vicious intelligence and a calculating urgency all frozen into this statue of a man that stood a little way from her. It made him into a ticking machine, precise and puritanical, inhuman in his distance from her but possessed with an edge of malicious cruelty that only humanity could give.

Violet didn't break her gaze from Syndrome's icy eyes, seeing the tensed power in his shoulders and understanding the man's grip on the situation. He controlled her, right now, but she was on the verge of equalising that. She understood he had a bargaining chip – the world's financial security – and his next move would be to enlist her help in defending the base. She had no choice. In order to save the world she had to protect the man who had once tried to destroy it.

He was the Boss, and he had earned the title.

"You know what would happen," he said in a soft undertone, glee frozen into malicious delight.

Violet responded calmly with "You can't be taken away from it. There would be nothing left."

Syndrome dipped his head a little, not breaking eye contact. It threw his features into sharper relief, making him seem crueller and ever more corrupt. The smile edged outwards unpleasantly.

"You're not dependant on yourself, like you were before," continued Violet carefully, using a low tone. "You're not an individual. You're in everything and a part of everything and you're the skeleton of it all, whether the world knows it or not."

His smile widened just a little. "Harker was so right," he said, sounding malevolently pleased and just a little dependently righteous, secure in the karmic rightness of it all. "You were perfect. Intellectually, physically, and in terms of your powers... you would have made the experiment worthwhile."

There was an element of praise in his voice that Violet didn't miss. It was folded neatly in along with the smug self-justification, icy maliciousness and a level of unearthly hatred. She studied his features through the vague fugginess of her rising exhaustion and tried to ascertain what, exactly, he meant by that.

"Where will the army fly in from?" he asked, angry delight at what he knew would be a truthful answer staining the seemingly harmless query. Violet paused a long moment, watching Syndrome, feeling irresistibly pushed onto a single course of action. He was right.

He was so right.

To be continued.

Rose: Many thanks! There shall be cliffhangers aplenty in future chapters. Yeah, I'm bad for that. Glad you're still liking the story!