At first, it was as if she became aware of the world through a long tunnel. Sounds and feelings slowly came to her first, as if from far away. What surprised her was that the first things she could recognize as coherent speech instead of random noise was a conversation between Madame Gao, and Daniel Rand.
"...somewhat foolhardy? You cannot know her mind, you cannot understand her motives, and she has been twisted and changed from what she was in life into being death's weapon. Surely you can see that she is a danger to those around her?" Madame Gao asked.
The world around her didn't feel quite as distant now. Why that was, Elektra didn't know or care at the moment. What was very clear was Gao's intent, and the feeling of something around her that warmed her skin, and felt like it was igniting a fire within her chest. Aches and pains on her shoulders, stomach, sides, and leg began to pulse in time with her heartbeat.
Daniel's reply caught her attention. "And your idea of a reasonable and convincing argument involves automatic weapons fire, right? The only thing I'll give you, Gao, is my advice: reconsider your life choices. Maybe shooting up someone's store just to get their attention isn't a friendly gesture."
Shooting up...? What on Earth had she missed while she was out? And why on Earth was Daniel, her self-avowed eternal enemy, speaking in her defense?
"Ah, the noble and idealistic advice of the young," Madame Gao replied, the condescension in her voice obvious to Elektra's ears. "Be reasonable, Daniel. You've put yourself in a position where you're being forced to defend one of your greatest enemies, when you don't have to. You have nothing to lose by giving her up - in fact, you'd be doing yourself and everyone you know a favor by taking such a dangerous weapon off the streets."
Elektra's jaw clenched, just as she felt a wave of heat wash over her like the crashing wave of an equatorial sea. It felt like it came from above her, and she noted that the world now felt much less far away and indistinct. Another pulse washed over her as she heard Daniel reply, making it feel like the fire within her veins was heating to become napalm.
"And your hands for such a weapon is safer?" Danny replied, the sarcasm heavy in his voice. Directly to her right, Elektra heard a woman gasp, as the same moment that it felt like her heart was pumping liquid fire into her veins.
"Come now, young one," Madame Gao replied, her voice carrying a heavy note of mocking disdain. "Can you even claim to know the great and storied history of the Black Sky? Do you know how it was formed, what its limits are, or more directly - how to properly kill it? With such things that you do not understand, Daniel, it would be foolish to proceed unless you know more about what it is you are dealing with. Wouldn't you say?"
Another wave of heat washed over her, and she felt her heart respond with a burst of pure fire that felt like it would burn her to cinders from the inside out. Her eyes snapped open, and she gasped for long-overdue air. The first thing she saw as her eyes opened and she sat up was Daniel's glowing right hand, directly above her and to the left. Daniel was standing next to her and a woman wearing surgical gloves was sitting next to her at her right. Elektra tensed as she sat up, but noted the extensive bandages around her arms, torso, and right leg.
The mystery of what Daniel was doing, or even if he was aware he was doing it, would have to come later - as would the woman next to her who looked vaguely familiar. Elektra pulled her legs toward her chest, and began to stand.
"Wait!" the woman yelped, the expression on her face a combination of indignation and fear. "You're still very badly wounded, and you need to rest. Lie down, I'll take care of you. Danny and Colleen will take care of that," she said, gesturing with her chin toward the front of the building, which appeared to be freshly-ruined.
Elektra looked at her a moment, seeing in less than a second that the woman's intentions were true - but she was not used to such sentiments being aimed her direction. "He won't be able to handle it alone," Elektra said simply, as she stood with slightly shaking legs to her feet.
The woman looked torn between irritation and concern. "Look, Luke should be back soon. Danny and Colleen are handling this. You look like you lost a fight with a grizzly bear - I can't in good conscience let you exert yourself right now. Just lie back down, okay?"
Elektra's eyes narrowed at her. "Thank you for your concern, but I am not weak."
The woman looked exasperated. "I didn't say you were, but I did say that you look like you got mauled by a bear," she said, before closing her eyes and shaking her head. "Fine, you won't listen to me. Let me check on you afterward, okay?"
Feeling her lips quirk into a small smile, Elektra gave her a single nod. "I can do that," she said, before looking back at the front of the building. Moving with slow, methodical strides, she walked toward the ruined entrance. A pity - she had rather liked it when it was whole. It had an old-world charm that was seldom found now.
Before she had walked even three steps, she saw Daniel next to her on her left, his hand still glowing, giving her a strange look. "I don't need assistance walking, you know," Elektra said to him with a sharp look.
"Obviously," Daniel said with a small smirk. "But you're not the only one with a problem with Madame Gao."
Glancing at him for a moment, Elektra simply shrugged. "Do as you will, then," she said, as she resumed walking toward the entrance.
Madame Gao must have heard or felt something, since while there was the heavy scent of freshly-fired gunpowder from many guns in the air, she hadn't spoken since Elektra had awoken. Well, Elektra thought as she hid a smile, no time like the present.
She felt Gao's presence as she got to the bottom step of the small stairwell in front of the entrance, and stepped on and around the unconscious bodies atop it to reach the street level. The four men were all lying in a heap - Daniel's work, she guessed.
Looking in front of her, she saw Madame Gao, standing perfectly still, her small cane balanced in front of her, held with both hands. She seemed to be examining Elektra with mild curiosity, but her lips were thinning as she continued.
Elektra decided to break the silence first, giving the older woman a questioning look. "Is there a reason you chose the dramatic option to speak with me, Gao?"
The smile had completely disappeared from Gao's face, and she seemed to regard Elektra with something approaching annoyance. "What have you done with the Black Sky?" she asked, with no trace of levity in her voice.
To this, Elektra tilted her head to the side slightly, and smiled at Gao. "After the Black Sky and I met face to face, we found we had several unresolvable differences of opinion. I wanted it to die, it disagreed - and it lost the argument."
"I cannot believe the impetuousness of children," Gao said, shaking her head slowly, her hands clenching her cane more tightly.
"That does sound vexing," Elektra said, nodding with false sympathy to her. "What impetuousness are you referring to from our fallen youth of today?"
"Do you have any comprehension of what you have done?" Gao asked her in a cold voice. "A being thousands of years old, with thousands of years of fighting and operational experience, with thousands of years of memories of facing every trick and trap known to most people, is now dead at your hands."
Elektra raised an eyebrow at Gao for this.
Gao held up a hand. "Do not attempt to give me any of your excuses. You, like a willful child, slew a being much older, and much wiser than you, and you did this out of childish rebellion."
She heard Daniel's scoff from her left, but didn't look. "So, your view is that I should have allowed a being such as that to kill me, and then die knowing it was going to pick out another unlucky child to be its host for a few short years?" Elektra asked, crossing her arms as she narrowed her eyes. She wanted to provoke Gao here into making the first mistake, so she added, "It sounds to me more that you didn't know it could die. I can say, with no small amount of personal and professional pride, that I am very, very good at killing. Your inability to properly account for that in your plans is not my problem."
Gao's first external reaction was to narrow her eyes at Elektra, and then her face softened into a smile. "And yet, that same foolhardy impetuousness brought you and the Iron Fist directly to me. Children always do the will of their elders, in the end."
Regarding her calmly, Elektra smiled. "Elders seldom are able to see from new perspectives, which is usually when the wisest of them gracefully retire."
Madame Gao's shoulders seemed to tense for a moment, a scowl appearing on her face as she raised one hand into the air, before letting it drop lightly back atop her other hand, resting on the top of her cane.
Dozens of men, all wearing handkerchiefs over their mouth and noses, seemed to swarm from all around to surround them.
"Go with them, or the woman in there dies," Madame Gao informed them with a smile.
This was followed a moment later by the sight of a man unwillingly flying out the front door, and onto the street, quickly followed by another. "I got Claire and Colleen," both Elektra and Daniel heard Luke say from inside. "Go handle things up there!"
Glancing to her left, Elektra found that Daniel was glancing at her at the same time. As if by unspoken agreement, both of them smirked slightly, and then attacked.
With the mass of people around them, striking an opponent wasn't difficult - not being struck by everyone around them was a bigger challenge. Daniel had evidently decided that they were too close, as his glowing right hand raised up, and then slammed back down to strike the street beneath their feet, causing the pavement to crack under the strike, and the street to shake. Men all around them were flung up into the air from the force, landing in ungainly heaps on the asphalt.
The fire within her chest felt like it was heating up further still, and it felt again as if liquid fire were running through her veins. This time however, everything around her began to slow down. To her perception, everyone appeared to be moving, shouting, and attacking with exaggerated slowness, as if everyone were trying to move through water. Though her own movements were slow as well to her perception, to Elektra, this meant that she didn't have to rush.
Though it was tempting to lose herself in the feelings of move and counter-move of a proper fight, Elektra nonetheless kept her head, attacking the periphery of the men on the right side, herding them away from the front of the building. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Daniel was doing something similar on the left side, making sure that the gathered men didn't get the chance to go around to the back of the building, and become a bother for Luke and Claire.
The pain in her limbs, chest, sides, and right leg began to fade as she got into the fight, striking to knock her opponents senseless. Most of them were armed with clubs, but broken wrists made it difficult to hold a weapon properly, and hard strikes to the sternum made breathing or even staying conscious much harder.
One of the men she'd kicked in the chest flew in Daniel's direction, and he gleefully shoved another man in his way, causing both to collapse into a heap of tangled limbs. Two rapid punches on his part ensured the two men stayed down, and he flashed a grin at Elektra.
Just as she was restraining the urge to sigh, a flying body coming from her left got her attention. Stopping it with a hard knee to the face, Elektra followed up with a hard punch to the solar plexus that ensured the man went down and stayed there. She glared to her left, and saw Daniel giving her another grin.
Rolling her eyes, she twisted the arm of a man who was until this moment armed with a knife, punched his shoulder to dislocate his arm, and then kicked him hard in the chest to send him flying. Suddenly appearing out of nowhere, Daniel slammed his fist down on the man's chest to deaden his forward momentum, and send him straight to the asphalt. Daniel grinned at her again, and gave her a thumbs-up.
No longer restraining the urge to sigh, Elektra took out her excess annoyance about over-exuberant avatars of Kun Lun viciously out on the men still remaining, though she couldn't help but notice with a dark sense of enjoyment that the ones remaining didn't seem anywhere near as eager to attack she or Daniel.
Well - that simply meant that she wouldn't have to wait, she thought as she kicked the legs out from under a man, and punched him in the side of the jaw to knock him unconscious. Daniel was attacking the small group of men remaining from the other side, and between the two of them, all the twelve remaining men were down in seconds, the few still conscious groaning in pain.
Looking around, Elektra saw that Madame Gao must have made her exit after the men attacked, and sighed with annoyance.
"Yeah, she pulled that on me, too," she heard Daniel grumble from her left. Turning to look, she saw that he also had an irritated look on his face, though he brightened after a moment. "Hey," he said to her, to which Elektra raised her eyebrows in silent question. "That was pretty awesome back there," he said with a grin. "have you teamed up with people like that before?"
She decided to let him have a moment of hope before stabbing it, and leaving it to bleed out in the street. "Yes, actually," she said, as she turned and began to walk toward the entrance of the building. "Usually, it was Matthew."
As she thought, it seemed to throw a bucket of cold water over his good mood. "Oh. Well, we did alright, right?"
At this, Elektra paused, and looked at him over her shoulder. "I've had worse help in the past," she said as she continued her slow walk back down the stairs, around the still-unconscious bodies, and back into the building. Colleen, she saw, was breathing a sigh of relief, and sheathing her blade. Luke had his arms around Claire and his back to the entrance, and he relaxed as he saw she and Danny come back.
Claire was out of Luke's arms and looking over Elektra critically in less than a second, it seemed to her. "Yeah, you bled into some of your bandages," Claire said sourly. "Sit," she said, pointing to a chair.
Although she couldn't truly say why, Elektra sat down on the indicated chair, and let Claire go to work. To the woman's credit, she did so with a will - even her stitching was neat and precise.
"The weapons of Kun Lun and the Hand, working together against a common foe - the last remaining Finger of the Hand," Daniel was saying, looking annoyingly smug as he looked at her. "That was meant to happen, I think. Like, the way a long and bloody chapter finally ends, and a new one begins, right?"
Elektra sighed, closed her eyes, and massaged the bridge of her nose. "You're insufferable," she informed him flatly.
"I don't hear you saying I'm wrong," Daniel retorted with a grin. "Besides - fighting alongside you was a lot more fun than fighting against you."
"Perhaps for you," Elektra said with a smirk as Claire began carefully suturing the wound on her right shoulder. "They weren't much of a challenge for either of us, and Gao knew it. They were a distraction, nothing more."
"So, she'd throw a bunch of people in front of her just to be a distraction?" Daniel asked, shaking his head. "Yeah, that doesn't surprise me about her at all."
"Prior experience?" Elektra asked Daniel with a raised eyebrow.
His grimace and nod was answer enough, but he elaborated. "Yeah. She tried to recruit me. Much more than once."
Letting her eyes close as she felt Claire beginning to suture the wound on her right thigh, Elektra sighed. "What this suggests is that she's going to keep using the same book of tactics, and that she has no intention of deviating from it," she said, before opening her eyes, and looking at Daniel, Luke, and Colleen meaningfully. "This means that until Gao is dead or has a dramatic change of heart, I am going to be a danger to anyone around me. I..."
"Don't even start that bullshit," Claire interrupted her, looking up into Elektra's eyes with an angry glare. "I've heard that line from Matt more times than I can count. All this means is that you need allies to get this done," she said, her glare changing into a look of challenge. "Unless your plan is to do this alone?"
Giving Claire a flat look, Elektra shook her head. Of course, her intention was to do exactly that, but... she may have a point. "What allies would I ask? The only ones I know of who possibly could still see me as their enemy," she said more softly.
"You mean, like me and Danny?" Colleen asked, drawing Elektra's gaze to her. "Or Luke? The ones who did so already without being asked?"
Feeling chagrined, Elektra nonetheless pressed on her point. "I couldn't ask you - any of you - to help me in this. Not after what I've already done."
"Well, you're not asking," Luke said, folding his massive arms over his chest, and giving her a smile. "We're offering, there's a difference."
"You don't trust me, and you have no reason to," Elektra retorted. "What possible reason could you have?"
Colleen walked to stand directly in front of her, looking directly into Elektra's eyes. "Honor," she said with quiet force, before shrugging. "That, and I'm a romantic at heart, and I want to see you and Matt have a chance at a happily-ever-after," she added with a smile, her eyes twinkling.
Elektra sighed, and massaged the bridge of her nose. "Somehow, I knew there was an ulterior motive," she said with a glare at Colleen, but the corners of her lips lifting into a smile gave her away.