"Like A Criminal" – Trigun Maximum Fanfiction – Chapter One of Sixteen
By Bennu (who, incidentally, is not Yasuhiro Nightow.)
This is also part of AnonymousTrigunOtaku's Alternate Het Pairing contest.
Dedicated with all my heart to Ann V.
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She remembered the first time she had thought that she might just have fallen in love with him.
Maybe it had been the soothing lyric of his voice as he explained, in perfectly honest terms, what he wanted to do to her, and how much it would hurt. Maybe it had been the gentle touch of his skin on hers, so cool and so warm at the same time. Maybe it had just been a dreamt delirium, a twist in her belly somewhere along the hazy path between saying yes and waking up with her hands considerately bound to keep her from scratching her eyes out in the agony that followed.
Or perhaps it had already happened before all that, and it had just taken her mind too long, as things usually go, to catch up to the sly workings of her heart. All she knew now was that when the pain subsided and he unwound the linen bandages around her face, he had smiled tenderly at her and told her how proud he was of her sacrifice, and she thought right then and there that that was it. She loved him.
It was a frightening and liberating thing, at first, for a girl who had grown up thinking as "love" as something that had made the pickled swine of her father tick. Love was the hateful thing that drove men and women into bottles to die. Love was the word you used when you wanted to touch and break your own children. Her father had certainly had a lot of love for her, and that was why she'd ended up punching six new holes in his body via Saint Winchester and running for it before she was even ten years old.
But that had been a comfortably long time ago, and she had made up her mind. What wounds she bore now were hers by choice. Love, she decided; Love and a charismatic man can make me do the strangest things, and I don't care.
She watched him glide through her life like the shadow of death on the face of evil men everywhere, and saw his rare serpentine smile in alternating shades of sunkissed skin and bright sharp teeth, and red. She wanted to taste that smile and erase the world. With half her vision painted in dark, blood-red blur and the other half intoxicated by the power of everything he could promise, it was no wonder she fell straight into the trap that would steal her life.
Love had stripped her of her innocence and made her a killer. It had seduced her into selling her soul and then took the killer within her and bred the executioner true. She had been eighteen years old when love convinced her to pop out her own right eye and stagger just a little more into the arms of the Devil.
In five years, she would be dead.