Honor Amongst the Damned
Chapter One
The sands of the Arena were hot against her gloves, and as Alister rolled to the side to avoid the sword stroke aimed for her head, she cursed whatever damnable whim of fate made her an acceptable fighter for the Olympus Coliseum. She had been a bounty hunter, gambler, and thief before her world was taken by the Heartless, and now, she was trapped in a cycle of death and violence for the amusement of the gods of Olympus.
If she had been religious in life, she would have lost her faith a thousand times over, with every tournament she fought. She dived to her left, the blade missing the tail of her long sleeveless coat by scant inches. No matter how hot the arena got, she never removed her coat. Getting to her feet, she waited for the Bandits to come at her again, before pulling out her guns and emptying the chambers into the oncoming horde. She heard the howls of the crowd, a deafening noise as the barrier was lowered, the sounds and screams of the audience assaulting her sensitive ears.
With her usual flourish, she holstered her guns and left the Arena, biting back the urge to give the deities the one fingered salute. She hated them all, especially Hercules, who thought it wonderful that his illustrious family was entertained by his chosen sport. Just because he chose it, doesn't mean the rest of us did Alister thought with a sneer. Oh how she hated this place.
In the cool stone hallways underneath the Coliseum proper, Alister received congratulations on her win and bullshitted with the other gladiators while the Arena was cleaned for the next tournament. There were a few new faces among them today, a blond with spiky hair and a gold-metal claw, who carried a sword larger than Alister, and a platinum haired man with a single blue-black wing, in a black uniform with a katana longer than Alister was tall,. According to rumor, the blond had killed the other man before their world was swallowed by the darkness, and the dead man's soul had, like Alister's, been trapped in the Coliseum.
After so many "pats" that her back was going numb, Alister found a seat on the empty end of a table in the cafeteria. As the fighter of the day, she got her pick of the menu, and, like always, she ordered lobster to the amusement of the gladiators and the annoyance of the cook. After debating the point and agreeing to settle for shrimp, which she actually preferred over lobster, Alister sat in silence, lost in thought and not even noticing that she was the only woman in the cafeteria.
She started cleaning her guns and was just reloading when one of the burly, loudmouthed gladiator small fry went flying past her to slam into the wall three feet behind her table. She raised her gaze to see the silver haired warrior grappling with another wannabe tough. Alister shook her head as another of the bullies hit the wall behind her.
"Ten points if ya land one in Alister's lap!" An older, retired gladiator flashed Alister a toothless grin. The silver hair apparently didn't hear him, and proceeded to duck a charge, grabbing the tough around the waist and slamming him into the floor. Alister hated to admit it, but she was rather impressed. Then she looked around and saw the other female gladiators had disappeared. Odd, very, very odd.
"Twenty if you can slam Alister like that!" A young fighter, whose advances Alister had repeatedly rejected. The silver hair was finished with the thugs, and none of them were moving. He straightened up and turned to look Alister over. She was once more bent over her guns, ignoring the challenges and trash the fighters were talking. After it became obvious the silver hair wasn't going to play their game, the crowd dispersed a little, and he walked over to Alister's table.
He picked up the unconscious goons, dumping them in a pile in the middle of the room. Alister watched the muscles under his long black coat ripple with his movements, and she frowned inwardly. I think you got a few too many grains of sand in your cranial crevices, Alister. He's a dead spirit, girl she thought to herself. But, then again, so are you
Alister smirked, a wry twist of the lips that Sephiroth alone noticed, since he made the same expression often. Her pale brown eyes held a sparkle that he had never seen among the dead before, like she was laughing at the living world for still being alive. She was the only other Dead he had seen since arriving in the Coliseum, and the only female. The other women had been granted their freedom by Zeus, but he had withheld that gift from Alister, for reasons unknown.
All the Dead had something that would mark them as nonhuman in a heartbeat. Sephiroth had his one wing, Cloud had his claw, and Alister had her own little oddities. When she had been alive, she had a long scar running down her cheek, that was now a tribal tattoo; she had seven piercings in each ear, now she only had two in each ear with a chain running between them; on her back, she had had a massive tattoo, a scene from an old legend on her world, now, that was a tattoo of a map. The map of the Coliseum.
If any of the other gladiators knew she had a map, in any way shape or form a map, they would kill her for it. The fondest wish of everyone in that dreadful place was to get out, and Alister had the key. But, seeing as it was on her back, she couldn't read it. And there was no one in the Coliseum that she trusted enough to let them see it, and so Alister was trapped.
Her other tattoos had survived intact, the flames running down her arms, the penal tattoos on the back of her right hand, the military tattoos on the back of the left. The only change was that they were entirely black now, not a hint of color on her skin at all. And the concept of tattooing was foreign to this world, so she hadn't met anyone who knew how to redo her flames to look like the vibrant green magical fire they had been when she was alive, and, perhaps fortunately, the writing on her hands was in a language no one else could read, so they didn't know how many years she'd spent in prison, or how many victories she'd won for her army as a general.
Slowly, and with eloquent deliberation, Alister left her table, and walked toward the exit of the hall, just as Philoctetes came in. He saw her, and with a rather malicious smirk called her over to his table, along with the spiky haired new guy and the one winged silver hair.
"Alister, meet Sephiroth and Cloud. As I'm sure you can tell, they're dead guys, like you're a dead girl. Certain members of our regular crowd are getting bored with watching you pound on monsters, so, we are going to play out a little...soap opera. Although, I was told to make it more of a porno than anything else." The grin was as plainly evil as the smirk had been implied malice. "Now, which one of you would be willing to play Alister's lover boy?"
Alister couldn't conceal her shock, and then her annoyance as the two warriors looked her over. Her hand was a black gloved blur as it shot across the table and grabbed Phil by the throat.
"You vile little fuck. How much are Zeus and Hades paying you for this little show?" She tightened her grip on his throat, lifting him out of his seat with one hand and no effort. Before she could crush his windpipe completely, Hercules had grabbed her by the arm and threw her into a nearby wall. The brick cracked around her impact zone, and after a few agonizing moments, Alister fell to the floor with a dull thud. She got to her knees, shaking her head a few times to clear the spots in her vision, then ducked and rolled as Herc came at her, his face filled with rage.
"How dare you attack Phil, you bitch!" He kicked out at her head, but Alister was on her feet and dodging expertly. He swung a punch and Alister leaned back so far that the watching gladiators thought she'd have to fall over, then she snapped back up in that second when Herc was wide open and hit him with her hardest right directly over the heart, since that was as high as she could reach. He gasped and fell to his knees, his face meeting Alister's knee on the way down, her fingers tightening in his hair as she stepped back and then slammed his head into the floor. As Hercules' head bounced back up from the force of the impact, Alister crouched and swung a circular kick that brought him up off the floor and right into Phil as he ran over to help. The pair flew into a wall near the entrance to the cafeteria, whooshing right past Zeus himself. The gladiators all gasped and fell to their knees, humbled by the power he had over their pathetic mortal lives.
"Alister, you shall play the role asked of you, or you shall suffer in this place for the rest of your death!" The god's thundering voice made pebbles from the ceiling rain down, but Alister didn't flinch. She was dead, he had no power over her, and his threats were utterly empty. Behind him, Hades slipped out of the darkness, his gaze lingering on Alister's well endowed chest.
"Fuck off you old lecher." She spun on her heel and walked out, past Cloud and Sephiroth, and the two men surprisingly followed her out of the cafeteria. Alister stomped off to her rooms, ignoring the newbies following her. Once she reached her door though, she turned around and waited for them to catch up. The younger, spiky haired one spoke.. Cloud, she thought absently.
"Alister, we were wondering, as the only Dead we've seen here... Is there any way out?" Alister smiled, an expression that was three parts naughty and no parts nice.
"Of course. The easiest way out is in a body bag, but seeing as we're already dead, that doesn't exactly help. If I knew that, kid, I would have been out of here years ago." He seemed insulted by the 'kid' but anyone younger than Alister was fair game. He didn't seem to believe her either.
"But, we /are/ dead, so why keep us around instead of more living fighters?" Alister smiled again, deciding to humor him.
"I don't know about you boys, but I can heal myself, I don't necessarily need food, I can't die in the arena, and, I'm stronger than a thousand normal fighters." Cloud seemed a little taken aback by her matter of fact tone, but Sephiroth smiled at her gently.
"Death is so much more fun than life, isn't it?" Cloud glared at him in disgust and stomped away, and Alister wondered what his problem was.
"He hasn't accepted it yet?"
"More like his dearly beloved is enjoying the fruits of death because of me, and he has no idea whether she made to this reality or not." Sephiroth's deep voice betrayed no emotion of his own, and Alister was impressed. He had incredible control of his voice... and everything else, too. He hadn't used an ounce of unnecessary force when pounding the goons. "I just wanted to express how impressed I am with the way you fight. It would be an honor to someday face you in the arena, and a pain, I'm sure, afterwards."
Alister laughed at the humorous twinkle in his eye. He was dangerous, this Sephiroth.
"Oh, I would never want to see you as my opponent in the arena. Your charm would kill me before I could attack once." He smiled a little and reached out to brush a tendril of Alister's long black hair out of her eyes. Bowing, he raised her now ungloved hand to his lips and laid a perfectly chaste kiss there. Alister was too astonished to do anything but stare. He had touched her, and he hadn't died... Alister blinked a few times, the saw a soft chuckle slip out of his smile.
"You're rather charming yourself, Alister." His smile faded and he glanced back down the hallway to the cafeteria. "I would also like to take this opportunity to warn you. I heard Phil talking to Zeus, who said that if you refused his little private show, he would send Aphrodite and Eros to work on the gladiators so that one way or another he would get you nude."
"Well, that isn't hard to believe. Zeus and Hades have both been desperate to get me in their beds since I got here. But, since I'm Dead, they can't touch me, lest they die themselves. Sending a bunch of horny goons after me would mean a lot of bodies and my clothes still on me." Sephiroth was surprised by her calmness, and her confidence.
"Well, Cloud and I are dead already, and though I think you're attractive, I have no desire to hunt you down and rape you for sport." It appeared that this hadn't occurred to Alister yet, and she swore under her breath.
"Well, for what it's worth, you have my gratitude." Alister looked at Sephiroth closely, wondering how much she could trust him. "How... How badly do you want out of here?"
Sephiroth smirked much the way she herself did.
"More than I thought I would. But, then again, I'm dead, so I have nowhere to go back to." Sephiroth turned to go, flashing a knowing grin back at Alister. "But if you come up with something, I wouldn't mind escaping this hellhole and making a new world... if you were with me."
For all the munny in the worlds, Alister didn't know why her heart was pounding and she was blushing like a virgin schoolgirl.