A nice situation she had landed herself in…sitting here…in the dark. Some foreign instinct told her to stay here. Where the light couldn't get her. Where it couldn't burn her up and turn her to dust and ashes. There was a simple logic to this. Dark, good. Light, bad. But no matter how simple this logic was it didn't make her any more willing to follow it. She wanted out of this shadowy prison. Away from the fears, the instinct, and the blood.

Not her blood of course.

The woman's blood.

She couldn't remember her name. She remembered that Shinra had held her captive at some point to keep Cloud and his friends in check. She remembered reading the woman's file as being the wife of a man who had died in Wutai during the Western Invasion. She remembered thinking at some point, "What a sweet lady…I feel sorry for her."

…She also remembered standing over her dead body, her lips cracked and pale, her mouth dry and her breath ragged. She remembered kneeling down, bending over her prone body, draining the blood that was left from her corpse.

Now she was huddled in a corner, her knees hugged to her chest, staring at the very same corpse, a feeling akin to horror writhing in her chest like a creature ready to burst straight through her rib cage.

SHE hadn't killed the woman. She hadn't done anything to the woman…the poor woman…the stupid woman. What was the old hag doing? Letting strangers into the house? A stranger like her? An assassin? A mercenary? A stranger like HIM! A maniac! A murderer! It was that kind of compassion that she never understood. If SHE received a panic stricken girl bleeding and with a pistol in her hand on HER doorstep, she would have either slammed the door shut or shot the heffer with her own damn gun.

But no…not this woman. She had to be a compassionate and caring person, a person innocent and oblivious to the danger…oblivious to the death that she was ushering into her home. The girl, huddled in the corner, with her arctic cold blue eyes, stared at the blood stained white carpet. Then at the corpse. Then at the various trinkets and things lining the walls in the room. Dolls, pictures, and figurines; these were the typical assets of an elderly woman living alone.

The room used to smell like lilacs and baby powder. She remembered that much. Now it smelled like blood and decay. But who was decaying? She? Or the corpse? Most likely both, because she was sure she was no longer living.

Thinking back she tried to recall the beginning of this horror that had become her reality. She tried to focus the blurry images of her memory, tried to pick out just where things went wrong and how she came to be here. How the woman came to suffer from a fate meant for her. How she lost her humanity, a fragile thing, to something much viler than anything she could have ever dreamed of…

A lifetime of moments draining down into one, the girl closed her eyes and thought back. Rewound to the most recent events of her life, where she found her identity. Her past. And the start of her future.

Elena, ex-Turk turned assassin/bounty hunter, started from the beginning that was then and continued on till the end that was present, thinking with uncharacteristically morbid tones, "And here is the start of my reckoning."

And she was absolutely right.