In less than a week, I'll be dead. In some way, I'm dead already.
There is a thin line that divides us all from stability and complete human destruction. Pushed to your limit, beyond your control, and the fate of the world itself as your brain understands still held on the edge of the rope with no means of going back, and every step harder to balance, easier to fall.
Jacqui found herself awake at in the frail hours of night, no sleep, no ability to. Tossed and turned, a stale body on the canvas of time, she couldn't rest. Her mind urged her feet like itself to wander and before she could pull away from the thrall of discontent and fear, she found herself at the entrance of the cobalt mines where Shang Tsung waited for her.
He was dressed in simple black clothes, the air that night was hot and the mines cooled to a mid 70 for him to enjoy the moonlit bath of warmth and temptation as this young woman forced herself to accept him.
He spurred from the chair carved of Edenia's finest wood, likely stolen from the palace, and greeted her with that signature smug grin she wished she could kick right off his face. It wasn't that he was arrogant, of course he was, but it was that she knew he knew she couldn't resist.
Every step since that night she spoke with him, Jacqui began to lose a piece of herself. Every moment was a fire beneath her that shed away the little flakes of flesh that made her who she was before and now the effigy that stood before the sorcerer was almost ready to burn away completely.
"I don't want to die." She echoed the fear of losing herself, but yet somehow she knew that little girl inside was already dead. Shang Tsung could already see that inside her soul, because like he had half of Liu Kang's, when Jax was torn from her, so was part of her soul. "I need to know that me and my father can survive this."
"You want certainty." Shang Tsung boiled it down to its simplest form.
"I've dropped into drug dens, gang fights, freak shows in other worlds and never once gave a damn about if I got out of it alive because I always just thought I would." She added, "now it feels like all that luck has caught up with me, y'know? My number's up, and I can't trade it with my dad, I can't trade with anyone to survive."
"Oh, but you can." He smiled, "it's what I've been doing for centuries, my dear Jacqui."
She grit her teeth and stood firm against that kind of prod from him. She folded her arms and glared back.
"I ain't taking that sexist crap from you."
"You will take whatever I say, or I will not help you and your fate will be up to chance." Shang Tsung stalked toward the young woman. He had her in his grasp, but not yet in the palm of his hand. Could he teach her what he knew? Sure, but like Shao Kahn had with him?
"How did you do it?" She ignored his cross words.
"Do what?" Shang Tsung pried her, he wanted her to say all the quiet parts out loud. Only then would he answer.
"How do you kill someone and live with it?"
"I should ask you the same thing. Is it not a requirement in your country to be a murderer and get away with it?"
She huffed and stood firm. How dare he call her out. The medals, the time and the struggles she put into this job, to her country. Was he wrong though? Was she livid because he was right?
She bypassed the thought, "you live with the people you killed, I mean. All of those souls all up in you with nowhere to go."
Shang Tsung nodded in reflection and smiled. He could see the cracked mirror she desperately swung away from her face, and then turned it back around on her.
"You're right, my beautiful Jacqui. Unlike you, and Sonya, and everyone else in the force in your country, I can't just read the Bible, take some pills, or pretend the lives I've taken don't follow me everywhere I go, because they're the reason I still breathe."
"Now, you're stepping over some damn lines, I came to ask some questions, not get grilled on my life choices."
"Our lives change by the speed of the choices we make." He continued, "to answer your question though, I revel in it. I am what you call a serial killer, Jacqui. It's in my mind to kill, and it's in my blood to survive."
"We execute people like you."
"You also put badges and guns in their possessions." Shang Tsung turned away from here, "if you want to learn from me, you can't hide from yourself. I stopped fearing the man in the mirror long ago, and the only way forward is to accept who you are." With a glance he cut her, "you won't survive otherwise."
She paused. This ugly moment hung like a noose around her neck. The rope was in her hands, but she feared which direction to move it. This man had found his true self and he refused to hide it. She felt as though she never discovered who she really was because her father was gone her entire life and all she could do to fill that emptiness was force herself into the same service as he. By having put herself in his position, she thought it would bring her closer to him, and that when she'd go home at night, or even the bunk at base, that somehow she could look in the mirror and accept the empty stare of the hollow soul that looked back at her.
"You're not a serial killer, Jacqui." Shang Tsung turned back to her, his smile wiped clean from his face and he almost looked fatherly toward her. "You want out, and I respect that, but what you're asking, especially from me, there is coming back from."
The noose tightened around her neck and her hands sweat down the rope. What he just told her sank in. She realized what he meant was that if she accepted his help and burdened herself with the certainty of survival, then she'd never escape the hollow world she had carved out for herself. She'd never find her true self, maybe not even her father.
Unlike in the bed, she couldn't move. Her body was still and her mind raced. Take the offer and destroy the hope of restoring what semblance of humanity and sense of self she desperately raced toward behind that mirror, or face the very real possibility of death and everything she had done to this point had been for nothing but someone else's destiny.
Perhaps it was the lack of sleep, or the comfort in the emptiness of her world. Jacqui stepped back, wider and wider steps until she finally ran from the cave and from Shang Tsung. She had seen the ugly truth of who she was, who she could be if apathy set in and she was not prepared to embrace such a monster.
Her biggest fear, besides the thought of losing herself, was if she took his offer, could her father accept what stood before him, or would he reject what he could no longer recognize.
Crushed by the weight of herself, she chose to chase the possibly impossible future of being whole again on her own terms.