A/N: Set during episode 973, 'Scarecrow Killer'.

Rated T for some (non-graphic) violent scenes. Absolutely not suitable for kids. Slight deviation from canon. MorallyGrey!Shreya.

Vengeance

Twelve years after Shreya had chosen to become a CID Officer, she comes face to face with the reason why. She swears on Kirti's grave that this is not going to end well for him.

Shreya wakes up in a strange, dark room, head pounding and neck stiff, more disoriented than she would like to admit, and in an indescribable rage. Immediately she realizes that her hands and legs are tied. She swears. The lone source of light in the room is the lamp hanging a little ways away from her, glaring in her eyes uncomfortably. She turns away from it and her eyes fall on a much larger figure similarly tied and seated on a chair. Daya sir. He is still unconscious; a burn mark on his neck indicates the use of a stun-gun. She sweeps her eyes around the rest of the room, making sure that her captor is nowhere around. Then she returns her gaze forwards, and tries to discern the approximate location of the door through the blinding glare of the light. The door is old, as is the whole house, and it is shut, probably also locked to keep the two of them contained. Hopefully it will make some noise when it is opened to warn her of her captor's arrival.

She tries moving her wrists, tied together and anchored to the back of the chair, and finds that there is, indeed, a little gap between them that she can exploit if she manages to turn her left wrist to the inside. She sets about her task slowly, eyes on the door, wriggling her wrist until it is in the position she wants it to be, and when it is there her wrists are raw because of the coarse rope. She then strains her fingers as she tries to reach her belt through the small gaps in the back of the chair, moving her body backwards until she is pressed uncomfortably against it, and finally she can reach her belt. She slides her fingers around blindly, looking for the incision she had made a long time ago. She reaches inside it once she finds it, fishing out a small blade with effort.

She opens it, nearly dropping it in the process, cursing as the blade nicks her finger. Carefully positioning it to cut through the rope binding her and praying to gods that it does not inadvertently cut her hand instead, she begins sawing through the thick ropes.

It was Inspector Vijay. It had to be. They were with him, and now they've ended up here. All these years everyone had thought it was Kaane. She had thought it was Kaane. How wrong they had all been. She thinks of her poor friend Kirti—she had been on her mind ever since she got the distress call from the man who had found Aditi's body—all the memories she had had with her. She thinks of Kirti's parents, who had died of a broken heart not long after their daughter's passing. For one particularly dark moment she thinks of how the scarecrow killer had made a mistake. It should've been her. At least Kriti would have lived. She stares at the floor for a long moment, snapping out of it when her vision becomes blurry, and pushes the blade into the ropes with enough force that it cuts into her hand. She does not flinch, nor does she wince. Calmly she re-guides the blade to the remaining layer of ropes and lets herself relive the saddest memory of her life. Kirti's funeral.

Shreya didn't have any siblings. She had never needed one. Kirti was her best friend, her childhood playmate. Closer than a sister, more precious than the blood that flowed in her own veins. She had known her since the day she was born. She had hoped to know her till the day she died. They had dreamt of a future filled with happiness and joy and success the way all teenage girls did. This man, this excuse for a human being, shattered that dream. If she is being honest with herself, a part of her had died with Kirti. The child part of her. The naive part of her. She had seen it go up in flames with her own two eyes. She had mourned two deaths. The death of her sister, and the death of her innocence. And to think the one thought—the only thought—that gave her any comfort, that at least Kirti's killer is being punished for his loathsome deeds, was false! Shreya takes in a deep breath, then another, and another, until the stinging in her eyes has subsided, and swallows. Now is not the time to drown in her emotions.

When she feels her binds are loose enough, she wriggles her hands out of them, rotating her wrists to rid them of the stiffness, and begins working on untying her legs. She returns the blade to her belt, gets up, and glances at her senior officer, wondering whether she should wake him up. It really shouldn't be a question, but it is, because Shreya, from the bottom of her heart, wants to do nothing more than strangle the foe with her bare hands, and Daya sir, with his great moral compass, would never allow her to do that. She sighs, looking at the other end of the dusty room, its two windows letting in the moonlight. Cautiously she makes her way over and peers outside, trying to discern their location. She is greeted with generic outsides of a bungalow that could've been anywhere. They were going to Mandoba. Heaven knows if they are still there.

She trudges back to the chairs silently. They don't have their guns. They don't have their phones. She doesn't think there is anything in the room that could be used as a weapon. She glances around disconsolately once again, and her eyes land on an empty-looking sack in the corner of the room, partially covering something that is shining dull-ly shining. She lifts the sack to find the tools aiding Vijay's crimes—a stun gun, vials of some drug, more rope, and, most importantly, the knife. She lifts it up with deliberate slowness, disgust growing inside her. She wonders if this was the same knife he had used all those years ago when … she stops, unable to finish the thought.

So now she has a weapon. She replaces the sack the way it had been before, and looks between the door and daya sir. Finally, she decides to untie him anyway. It would not do her well if he holds her rope-bound senior hostage to get away. She loosens the rope but lets it hang, in case Vijay decides to come check, nevermind the fact that she is both untied and conscious. She tries the door and finds it locked, as she had thought. She knows the windows don't open, because she had tried. She could break the glass to escape but what would be the point of escaping? Especially when Daya sir is unconscious still. It would probably alert Vijay too.

So she comes up with a plan. It is a reckless plan. She wants Vijay to die. Painfully. At her hands. But she also knows that it is more important that she and Daya live than for Vijay to die. He will get his punishment, by the law if not by her. She goes back to her chair, puts the rope around her feet and hands again to make it seem as though she were tied. Then she begins moving her chair around, making it screech painfully, hoping that the sound is enough to make the demented man come to the room. The sound wakes Daya sir before it brings Vijay in. He opens his eyes with bewilderment, looks around the room rapidly till he sees the rope, sees her, and stops. Shreya tries to assure him that it's okay, that there is a plan, but before she can so much as call out his name, the door squeaks heavily and opens with a bang, slamming against the wall.

"Vijay," Daya hisses out as the man comes in, costume in place, and for a moment, just for a moment, Shreya freezes, her mind taking her back to that moment so long ago, when she had first seen this dreadful sight. But she snaps out of it soon enough, watching Vijay pull out another stun gun from his jacket and approach her. She glares at him icily, making sure her breathing is low and even and weapon in hand and ready, even as Daya tries to lure Vijay towards himself in mad panic. Shreya wonders if he realizes his hands are, in truth, untied.

"Shreya," Vijay drawls, grinning, her name feeling disgustingly dirty on his tongue. She scowls, and he repeats her name again, and again, and again, leaning closer and closer towards her and bringing his stun gun closer to her skin. He is testing her patience. He is not getting out of the building alive. Never has she felt such loathing for someone before.

"Hey!" Daya screams when Vijay is leaning down to her eye-level, staring at her unwavering glare, "leave Shreya alone! Come talk to me, you scum!"

Vijay leans away from her, laughing maniacally. "Daya," he says, purposely baby-talking, "I know, you want me attention. But Shreya and I go way back." He turns towards her. "Remember, Shreya?" he asks, tracing her face with a gloved hand, making her want to sab it right then and there, plan be damned. But she perseveres, gripping the knife tighter. "I remember everything," she says, practically spitting fire.

Vijay laughs again. "I should've chosen you. You would've been so much more fun to kill …" he puts the tip of his stun gun against her neck again, "but that's okay. Better late than never, am I right?"

Daya screams again before Shreya can respond, moving about in his chair to pull Vijay towards himself, doing everything possible to take him away from her. She appreciates it, she really does. She tries telling him about the ropes as inconspicuously as possible while Vijay's back is towards her, before she notices his hands already untied, just held in place behind the chair. He gives her a look that has some meaning, though she does not know what he is thinking. He trusts her and he trusts her plan, probably because he has no choice, but what would he expect? How would he react? She doesn't know, and now is not the moment to care.

"It hurts you so much when I threaten her, doesn't it?" she hears Vijay say, and he is turned away from her completely. She shrugs off the rope, getting up as quietly as anyone possibly can, inching towards him with the knife in hand.

She is two feet away from him and he is still leaning over Daya. Daya looks over Vijay's shoulder at her, looks at the knife held aloft in her hand, looks at her firm nod, and breathes out. Vijay has ethyl sandyle and a stun gun, but they have the element of surprise. Daya swiftly brings his hands forward to knock Vijay over, sending the stun gun and the drugs flying to the floor, making him fall almost right on top of Shreya. He struggles to overpower her and get away, but Shreya is stronger than she looks. Besides, she is fueled both by rage and adrenaline. She grabs his neck immediately, knife at his throat as if that was the only place where it was meant to be, and presses it to his skin so that his breathing becomes shallow. He finally stops struggling when the knife begins digging into his skin. She removes the revolver he was carrying on his person, tucking it into her own belt.

Daya grabs him by his collar, wrestling Vijay's scarecrow mask off with effort. Not-Vijay lowers his face, in an effort to hide it or perhaps to simply annoy them, and Daya's grip nearly slackens when he sees the Scarecrow Killer's real face. It is not Vijay.

"Sameer?" Daya utters, and Sameer laughs, prompting Shreya to press the knife harder into his neck, bewildered as she is. It makes a small incision. Their astonishment sheds within a moment.

"You filthy dog," Daya growls, picking him up by his collar once again and nearly throwing him into the chair, as if he were a rag doll.

Still, Sameer laughs. "You can't stop me," he says in a sing-song voice. Twelve years, no one was able to stop me. You won't succeed either."

She has seen Daya angry before. She has never seen him in such a rage. She has never felt such rage herself. Daya sends Sameer clattering throughout the room, breaking a chair in the process, until he lands, ultimately, in the corner of the room, unconscious.

Shreya stares at him unblinkingly, still in a rage, hands balled to her sides, and she doesn't realize until Daya puts a hand on her shoulder that she is shaking. He steps in front of her, blocking her vision, and asks, concerned,

"are you okay?"

Shreya finally drops her glare and lets go of the knife she had been clutching for dear life, the part of her palm close to its edge fashioning a single big cut. She hadn't even realized until now that she has a cut.

"We should tie that up," Daya says as he grabs his handkerchief from his back pocket, and it is purely because of the adrenaline that Shreya is able to jerk Daya forward, purely because of adrenaline that she is able to shove him behind her, purely because of the adrenaline that she remembers the revolver tucked into her belt, and purely because of adrenaline that she is able to shoot Sameer straight in the chest. It is almost as though everything is happening in slow motion. Sameer falls with his canister of ethyl sandyle, this time for the last time, eyes unseeing and blood rushing from his chest.

There is deafening silence for what feels like a lifetime. Shreya is holding her breath though she does not know why. She is still shaking, whether due to adrenaline or anger or something else. Her hands are still holding the gun aloft, as if she were scared Sameer would come back to life and she would have to save them both from him once again. Finally she hears Daya move behind her, sees him come in her line of sight, check Sameer's pulse and breath, and look at her with tired eyes.

"He's dead," he says, nodding at her gun. She finally lowers it.

"He deserved it," Daya states as he looks her calmly in the eye, a finality in his voice.

Shreya nods. "He did."