B.L.A the Mouse: Thanks as always for your kind words – I'm glad to hear that you enjoyed my footnote! More tormenting is to follow!

Chapter Ten

It was not the battle of wills that the Merovege found so pleasurable about her time with Beka. She doubted that any human being could have withstood this chemical assault; certainly she herself could not. She never for a moment feared that Beka would successfully resist her for long, and the fun of it was not the prospect of beating Beka in such an unfair fight. While she enjoyed wondering what it must feel like for Beka, it was not even the physical pain she was inducing that thrilled the Merovege every time she went to visit her guest.

No, it was those shining moments of clarity that delighted her, that lit up her soul like a burst of sunshine through roiling storm clouds. The Merovege had programmed the security in her cell to tighten every time her heart and respiration rates hovered within a certain range – between manic and tranquilized – because it was then that she was coming back to herself. The restraints automatically pulled closer, another shielded door slid down at the single entrance, and the slightest unusual motion from Beka would set off a top-priority alarm. Her physicians could not attend Beka at these times; only the Merovege could bypass the security via a complicated process. It was not practical to implement the measures round the clock, but she only worried about Beka slipping out of her grasp during these moments of clarity. And for most of those times, the Merovege watched Beka in blissful, but armed, contemplation.

Just three days after Beka's capture – neither the Merovege nor the Andromeda had even pretended to try to make the scheduled rendez-vous – the Merovege walked into Beka's cell to find her shrieking. The sound of Beka's screams raised a primal adrenaline rush for the Merovege, but she ignored the slightly queasy feeling in her stomach and the horrible hoarseness of Beka's voice that itched at her own throat. She was screaming about her current hallucination, something involving a glowing white man and a cage, but as the Merovege watched, the quality of her screams changed.

"You can stop this!" she shrieked. "You did this! That man, that cage... you put them there!" Tears started rolling down her cheeks, and her screams became sobs. "You did this to me, you hateful bitch. I can't escape them, I can't escape any of it. You're killing me. I can feel it, you're killing me. You're tearing me apart. Everything I see, all the pain, all the... everything, you're behind it!" Her face was turning purple as she thrashed. "Get me out of here! Get me out of here! You BITCH, get me out of here!"

When her words trailed off for a moment and she gave into her sobs, the Merovege spoke up. "I can help you feel better," she said quietly.

Beka's head shot up to regard her. Her eyes were wide with hope for a fraction of a second before she jerked her head from side to side. "No, no, no, not that. I can't ever... you're turning me into a monster, but I won't help you. I have to fight it. I have to fight you! I won't let you!"

That fraction of a second made the Merovege's day. "Oh Beka, can't you see that I've already won? You're addicted to my little cocktail, you know. Tell me, does it hurt more when you're high or more when you're coming down?"

Beka's eyes, which had gazed at her so fiercely a moment before, dropped, and the Merovege allowed herself a wide smile. "There," she cooed. "You see? It can't get any worse. Whether you ask for the bottle or I force it down your throat with a funnel, we both know it's the only time you'll be free of the pain and the hallucinations. Am I wrong, Beka? Can you tell me I'm wrong?"

The battle of the wills was pleasurable, but far sweeter was the agonized look in Beka's blue eyes when she dragged them reluctantly to meet the Merovege's gaze. "No," she wheezed. "I mean... I don't know. I don't know what you've done to me. But I have to fight it. As long as I fight it, there's hope."

A genuine burst of laughter bubbled from the Merovege's lips. "Hope, Beka?" She considered. "We might as well be honest with one another. Yes, Beka, today there is hope. Perhaps if your knight in shining armor were to swoop in at this very moment, recovery from your addiction would not kill you or destroy what few functioning neurons you have left. But what about tomorrow? Next week? Oh, I have no doubt that Captain Hunt will return for you, but how long do you think he will require to formulate a plan to infiltrate my defenses? Will there be hope then?"

She lowered her voice and leaned forward. "It's your turn to be honest, Captain Valentine. Do you truly think he'll want you when he finds you? You've been down this road before, and it nearly destroyed his ship. Could he ever trust a Flash addict again? Put yourself in his shoes. Could you trust you again?"

This time, Beka held her gaze. "He's not like that," she finally whispered. "He's better than me. He... he wouldn't have hurt you like I did."

The Merovege hissed as if she had touched a hot engine. "No, perhaps not," she snapped. "Tell me, do you truly believe that a man like that will keep giving chances to space trash like you? He may be a knight, Beka, but he's not a saint." She sensed that she was losing the thread of the discussion and so leaned back in her chair to watch Beka.

"He'll come for me," she murmured, still shivering uncontrollably. "He still loves me." She glanced up at the Merovege, perhaps for argument, but the Merovege just sat smiling at her. If conversation failed, she thought, she would try silence instead. People generally hated being watched in their most vulnerable moments, and being strapped to a chair while coming down from the effects of a hallucinogenic narcotic cocktail while raving about a rescue that might never come would qualify for most people as a very vulnerable moment.

Beka dropped her eyes again and started muttering to herself things that the Merovege could not hear. Most of the interesting part had come and gone, and now the Merovege had to dose Beka once more. She rose from her chair to collect the little vial and to press the controls that tilted Beka's seat backward and secured her head facing forward. Beka shook herself from her murmurs long enough to issue one more shrill cry before the Merovege pulled back her eyelids and dropped in the cocktail in a few swift movements.

This was her other favorite part. For half a second before the drug hit, Beka knew exactly what was coming. This close, the Merovege could read the emotions that flitted across her haggard, shadowed face – the horror, the rage, and the tiniest flicker of happiness that the high was coming back. She bared her teeth at the Merovege, but a moment later, the drug touched off the first of many chemical reactions in her brain, and she was lost to the world again.

-o-

The Flash traveled through her veins quicker than the other chemicals, and for an entire sweet, ecstatic, and horrifying minute, Beka reveled in the sharpness of her mind, the awareness of every nerve of her body, and the strength and speed of her limbs as she thrashed in her bindings. During this minute, she assessed her situation with a blinding clarity, and she was sure that with just five consecutive minutes of that feeling, she could have plotted an escape. She could feel the weaker points of the restraints and throw her desperate muscles against them, and she recalled every detail of her capture and the security that held her here as if seeing it played on a larger than life video screen.

It has to be now, she thought. When they think I'm insane. This minute. But it took too long for her to remember where she was, too many precious seconds while she let the joy of her moment of sanity wash over her, and by the time she was alert and planning, she had less than half her moment left. Thirty seconds, a clock in her head warned her.

No guards outside. Clothilde doesn't trust human security, not after Tyr. Twenty-five seconds. She thinks the computer can handle security better than any of her people. Restraints adjust to my vitals, tighten when I'm coming down, loosen when I'm very high and very low. They think I'm crazy that whole time, but I have my minute. My minute. Fifteen seconds. Need to disrupt the computer. Need what, need codes? Need tools? Need something, anything. From physicians, from Clothilde? She trusts herself to be secure, nobody else. Checks physicians. Checks herself? Three seconds. Damn. Saw some of her automated security when I broke in. Think, what do I –

And nothing. The hallucinogenic hit, and a moment later, the Nietzschean hormones caught up. The glowing man smirked at her from a corner of the room hung with shimmering white shadows. She screamed as he crossed the weirdly tilting room in great, eye-blurring strides. He was coming for her. He had come for her father, for the pilots she had known growing up, and now he was coming for her with his white cage.

His burning hand squeezed around her wrist. His white cage laughed at her with teeth that dripped her father's blood. The glowing man told her terrible things about her mother and her father, about Clothilde, about her, and about Dylan. The room melted like candle wax, and nightmarish visions danced in the corners of her eyes, but still the glowing man remained. The white cage laughed and gnashed her ankles.

Her world was pain. Her world was terror. Eternity, dripping with her father's heartsblood, stretched out before her as the laughing cage closed its jaws around her with agonizing slowness. She tried to run, but always the glowing man blocked her escape. He whispered. She screamed. Her heart burst out of her chest, but still her chest pounded and her throat seared. She was drowning in the blood that dripped from the cage.

Every drop raked like coals across her flesh.

His horrible, glowing eyes.

The cage laughed as she screamed.

Growing larger and larger were his eyes, his glowing, his...

Blue?

The glowing man slipped off to one side, grinning at her and wagging his finger. The room stabilized as two pinpoints of blue broke the cages of the bar, following by a golden cloud and...

Beka moaned. Clothilde had returned once again to gloat at Beka's pain, to flaunt her own free movement, to lure Beka deeper into the chemical darkness. She had been pushed this far, and she knew that if she took a step of her own free will, she would fall over the precipice. But every time Clothilde came to offer that shining bottle, that beckoning tranquility with a smell like rotting grain and gasoline, the drugs had eaten away a little more of her sanity. Sometimes she fancied that she could see glittering plumes of her sanity drift around her head, dissipating into a vent she felt but could not see. It reminded her of a sight that always made her stomach clench, even in holonovels – the telltale leak of oxygen from a spacebound vehicle.

The words were not penetrating just yet, but the gist of it was clear enough. Those blue eyes, so like and so unlike her mother's, danced as that unlabeled bottle wiggled at the edge of her vision. She shook her head, but she noticed that as her heart slowed and approached something like its normal resting rate, the glowing man grew smaller and smaller. The blood had disappeared from his white cage. That was the worst part; she guessed that if she did take the bottle, the glowing man and his laughing cage would disappear altogether. Maybe the hallucinogenic was impeded by the depressing effect of the alcohol. She would have given almost anything to know for sure.

"Oh, I promise you I know."

Beka's head jerked up of its own accord. She had not realized that she had spoken aloud. "You can't," she mumbled. Her tongue felt like a velvet-dipped brick. "Can't know. This is new, you told me."

Her girlish laugh hurt Beka's head. "Captain Valentine, you wound me. I would never deceive you! Yes, this cocktail is new, and you'll be interested to know that it was tailored to a Valentine... just not you."

Her brain rushed and puttered like a broken watch, but a memory surfaced just then. Rafe. Clothilde had tortured and drugged Rafe. With this? Yes... no, the rest of the memory eluded her. It seemed likely. "Rafe. You put him through this. That's why he..." She shook her head. "Did he even know what he was doing?"

Clothilde shrugged. "You know, I cannot decide if it would please me more if he did know and despised himself for it or if he was lost in a nightmarish world of my creation." She tapped her lips, then smiled. "I'll leave it up to you. I will tell you this, Beka: your brother did not last long. Perhaps he did not cherish your aversion to chemical psycho-alteration, but his alacrity in choosing the bottle amazed even me. Another hour, another day, another week – what do you think it matters to me? I can wait, Beka. I have waited a very long time."

The hallucinogenic lingered in the corners of her mind enough to sketch her a timeline, hovering just above Clothilde's head, that showed Beka just how long she had waited. Her stomach heaved and she lurched so hard that the delicate skin of her wrists and ankles tore against the restraints. Yes, Clothilde could wait. She could re-shape her entire persona, her life's goals, even her identity but cherish this deadly vendetta in the darkest depths of her heart.

So it came down to this. Clothilde's hovering timeline versus Dylan and his glorious warship. "No," she rasped, "I have to wait for him. I'll be here when he comes. Me, not... that."

Clothilde cocked her head and watched Beka for a silent moment. Then she picked up the bottle of clear liquid and unscrewed the lid. That rotting grain gasoline smell flooded the room and made Beka's eyes water. The glowing man shrunk into a dot in the corner of her vision, and the laughing cage vanished in the blink of her eye. It was working. Just the smell of the stuff had banished the glowing man. She let out a sigh of relief, and a moment later wished fervently that she had not.

"I know it's childish of me," Clothilde cooed, "but I told you so. Answer me this, Beka. If Captain Hunt comes for you, do you want your visions haunting you? Would you recognize him if he did come, or would you bite his hand when he tried to touch you?" She waved the bottle under Beka's nose, and her voice dropped to a whisper. "You could live with a dependency. Could you live if you hurt him like that?"

Tears leaked from Beka's eyes. Damn her. Damn the bitch to the fieriest, or the iciest, or whatever agony and horrors awaited monsters like her. She was right. The mockery, the temptation she could handle because she had fought against these things all her life, but the plain and simple truth... that was what had brought her to Dylan in the first place, the truth of his vision. Now Clothilde was presenting another vision, and Beka could not deny what she said. A life with an addiction, or two, or three, or a life blasted by betrayal? She knew what Dylan would say, that she needed to hold onto herself, but for the first time, she did not know what that meant.

She thought about Tyr, about their kiss, and her battered heart made her decision. "Yes," she breathed. She had betrayed Dylan once already, and no matter what hell she might put her own body through, she could not do that again. Clothilde was right; when he rescued her, it would probably be during one of her paranoid hallucinations, and it tore at her soul to think that that of what she might do to him if she were freed of her bonds. "Yes."

-o-

The battle of the wills had been highly enjoyable, the Merovege decided. Yes, that would be a pleasure to remember time and again, to savor in the palace of her memory. Those shining tears tracking down that dirty, smudged face. That slump to her shoulders that the Merovege had never seen, not even during Beka's uneasy slumber. That spark of coherence in her eyes, followed by a profound dimness. Yes, it had been sweet, but what followed was even sweeter.

True, the alcohol did give Beka some temporary relief from the pains of her hallucinations and the hypersensitivity of her nerves induced by the Nietzschean hormones and the Flash. But the eager tilt of her head, the shame and terrible knowledge in her eyes when the Merovege came into her cell now, clinking the bottle with her fingernails, thrilled her like nothing she had ever experienced. For as long as she lived, Beka would remember the ringing sound of her fingernail on glass, and her blood would quicken at the thought of the relief that would soon follow. And when she had drunk herself into queasy tranquility, the sickness that racked her body upon awakening could only be cleared by another kind of cocktail. It was a surprisingly useful effect of the Nietzschean hormone; it fought back the tide of the worst hangover even as it cleared the way for the hallucinogenic.

Beka's words remained as venomous as ever, but the Merovege saw the joyful anticipation, smothered ruthlessly in half a second, that animated Beka's bound limbs when the door admitted her. They both knew that Beka was ruined, that a single word had sent her flying into a downward spiraling chasm from which she could never emerge. The Merovege was fairly sure that Captain Hunt would arrive with his great ship before long, but her task was complete. Now all she had to do was to relish the fruits of her labor, to cement her enemy's addictions, and to dream of the happiness that Beka would never know again. That terrible clarity in Beka's eyes would diminish but never die, no matter how desperately she would search in a vial of hormone and a bottle of alcohol. And search she would.