Disclaimer – Not even close to being mine.
A/N – Written as part of the Ten Minute Challenge. Keyword: complicated.
Feedback – Pleeeeeeeeeease give me some.
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Semblance
© Scribbler, December 2004
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He's backed into a corner and she's advancing. There was no game of cat and mouse. There was no foreplay, no last roll of the dice. She was not here and then she was. There was a window and now there is an empty frame. He is living and soon he will not be.
It's all the same, really. A fluid motion through from life to death. All arbitrary. No pattern.
He's covering his head like that will help. He stinks of fear. There's no other smell like it – no deeper part of the spectrum, apart from death. She notices, catalogues, but doesn't savour it. She finds no pleasure in this. It is simply necessary.
There's a gun lying in the other corner. The barrel has been sheared off. It's a clean break, the edges smooth and sharp, like the smell of oil and smoke in the air.
His fingernails are bitten low, the cuticles red raw. They look gnawed – a nervous habit. He was frightened before she got here – waiting for someone to strike against him and his grungy little bolthole. The gun told her that much, and the thick chains on the heavy door.
No matter. She doesn't care about justification and accountability. His fear was different before, aimed in a different direction, but only because he didn't know her. Now she has his fear. She will be the last to have it. She is his fear.
She is a nightmare.
She is a killer.
She is as insubstantial as the depth of a shadow.
She is a ten year old girl.
She is nothing.
"Wh-what are you?" he asks between his fingers. Not who, but what. He's staring at her claws.
Training demands she finish and leave. But she does something she's never done before.
She falters.
She looks at her claws, sees her face reflected in them. And his face.
They have the same skin shade.
But she is hunter and he is prey.
There is no other distinction, no other hierarchy. You live or you don't. You survive or you die trying. You follow orders.
He is not special.
His fear is infused with the scent of fresh urine.
What is she?
She tells his corpse.
"I'm complicated."
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FINIS.
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