To Embrace
Disclaimer: I don't own Arrow.
Chapter 7: Teeth
Chapter warning: This chapter is dark. Mentions of rape and explicit violence. This story is rated M for a reason beyond my bad language.
Sweat dripped from Thea's face as she raised her hands above her head and forced her lungs to expand. Her legs were on fire in the best kind of way and she was high on endorphins. She put one foot in front of the other as she began her cool down walk back to the manor. The wheezing breath of her running partner didn't make her pause or turn around.
"I hate you so much right now," Tommy choked out between gasps as he slowed his jog down to a walk. "It's not even seven o'clock. What the hell are you made of Queen?"
Thea laughed. "Stronger stuff than you Merlyn."
Tommy fell in step with her or rather limped. "I can't believe I agreed to this."
"You are doing great and didn't you tell me not a week ago how appreciative the ladies are of your bod?" she asked with more than a bit of sarcasm.
The self-proclaimed play boy shook his head and bit back a groan as muscles pulled. "Ok, one, I did not say bod, I don't say bod and two I thought I was doing great too and then you just blew that idea to smithereens when you lapped me twice today."
Thea chuckled again and lifted her long sleeved shirt to wipe the sweat off her face. One of the terrible things about getting sweaty was the acne that cropped up around her hairline.
"What's that?" Tommy asked his voice devoid of any previous humor.
His half-sibling's head came up to see what he was looking at and found she was the focus of his gaze, or more specifically her stomach. His blue green eyes were staring at a splotchy bruise that covered the bottom left half of her rib cage curtesy of a luck shot from Roy.
After meeting with him and stuffing her face with beef with broccoli and crab rangoon she listened to his problem. The guys that he was paying a debt off to, which he finished paying soon after he tired to steal from her, decided they were going to continue using his thieving skills for their benefit. She also got the feeling it was payback for the humiliation she caused that Roy witnessed. His face was only the tip of the ice burg and he was black and blue all over after refusing their 'offer'. So a completely embarrassed Roy asked her to help him by training him to fight. She said yes immediately and without much thought. It was after all her fault he was in this situation and she realized he could very well be seriously injured or killed by those assholes.
They met three times a week in an older boxing gym in the Glades. Thea payed the owner to keep the place cleared out for the time they were there. After two weeks Roy was making good progress. He was a natural fighter and the state of her ribs was proof of that. He had gotten a little too cocky after landing the kick though and Thea took great pleasure in showing him how far he had to go.
She dropped her shirt quickly and shrugged. "I'm taking racket sports this semester at school. My partner's backhand could use some work. I'm hoping she'll actually hit the ball soon instead of me."
Her brother didn't look completely convinced of her story but he dropped the subject. They parted at the manor, and Thea headed up the stairs to get ready for the day. She was reading the news on her phone and on her second cup of coffee when Park walked in with an unexpected guest.
"And this is the kitchen, feel free to come in here and grab yourself a cup of coffee in the morning. You might even catch a glimpse of a very rare sight. A teenager up before eight." Her driver and friend leaned against the counter and grinned at her.
She sent him an eye roll and glanced at John Diggle who raised an eyebrow at her. "Your usual?" she asked Park before moving to get the man his ridiculously sugary latte.
"Yes, please," he replied politely before dropping into the seat that she vacated and picked up her phone. "How was your run?"
A wicked grin spread across her face. "I think I nearly killed Tommy." Her driver huffed out a laugh and Diggle shifted on his feet. Thea could tell he was trying to figure out what kind of relationship she had with Park. "He was making this god awful wheezing noise. Can I get you something?" the brunette shot at Digg.
The dark skinned man's eyes widened a bit before he answered with a small smile. "Black coffee, if you have it."
"See, that is a real drink, not this milky nonsense," she teased while pouring the freshly brewed espresso into a mug of steamed milk she had prepared a few minutes before the pair walked into the kitchen.
"Like you don't drink them, oh yeah, Thea this is John Diggle, he was just hired on, Diggle this is Thea Queen. Whatever you've heard about her, it's probably not true."
"Unless of course it's that I am amazing and have a fashion sense to die for. That is true," she corrected, handing Digg his mug of coffee. "Have you heard of a little word called privacy?" Thea asked with a pointed look at her phone before giving Park his own hot beverage.
"I'm reading the news, staying informed," Park answered, taking his drink without looking up his face becoming serious. "The guy whose been raping women in the Glades struck again."
"What?" Thea demanded sharply, her mind instantly going to Sin.
"He didn't stop at rape either. This bastard killed the poor woman. They didn't release her name but she was only twenty-seven. He strangled her."
"Guess they couldn't make the evidence stick," Digg commented with disgust. Both Thea and Park looked up at him. "Some of my side gigs have off-duty cops on the payroll. They talk. They had a guy in custody a month or two back they liked for these."
Thea looked down at the cold cup of coffee in her hands. "Did they mention his name?" Digg's dark eyes focused on her. "My best friend lives in the Glades," she told him, hoping her appeal for information would be seen as just being concerned. Which she was of course but she also wanted to put all her training to use and stop this monster.
Diggle hesitated before nodding. "Don't know his first name, but his last name is Casper. I did hear that he's a veterinarian of all things."
"Not the friendly ghost?" Park asked. He received two glares and winced. "Sorry, not a joking matter." The ex-marine stood. "Come on kid. We should get you to school so you can be whatever you want to be, make your dreams come true, and all that special snowflake nonsense." Thea snorted and grabbed her back pack. "Digg's going to join us since he's going to fill in for me once my leave starts."
The brunette, not-teenager nodded at him in acknowledgement. "Speaking of special snowflakes, how is Hye-jin?"
"Still angry that I got her pregnant during her residency," he told her with a dramatic sigh, but the wide smile on his face gave away how happy he was. "She's doing real good though. The baby is apparently the size of a cabbage."
Thea's nose wrinkled. "What is with them comparing the baby's size to food?" She kept up pleasant small talk all the way to school while she found out all about Dr. Arnold Casper on her phone. During her lunch hour she called the animal hospital he worked at and learned his hours for the week from a chatty receptionist named Jeanette.
The next day she faked sick and no one questioned her because the new Thea didn't blow off school. She rode her brother's bike into town and easily broke into the apartment through the window off the fire escape. His apartment was the kind of obsessive neat that made her skin crawl. After photographing everything with her phone she tore the place apart.
Behind a false panel in his closet she found what she was looking for. She spread the mementos out in front of her and sat down hard. There were bracelets, necklaces, rings, and her stomach twisted at the earrings that still had flesh attached. She counted them and when she came up with a number not even she can believe she did it again. Thirty-four pieces of jewelry sat in front of her. She looked down at her watch. It was half past two in the afternoon and she needed to start cleaning up but part of her didn't want to.
She wanted him to come home to his home torn apart with the evidence of his crimes strewn across the floor. She wanted him to panic, wanted to watch him tear his hair out as he tried to understand what happened, wonder who was in his home and knew his secret. Then she wanted to watch him squirm as he waited for the cops to bust in his door.
Finally, when he realized no one was going to show up and he just started to think he was safe she would slip into his apartment silently. She would let him at least see her form, hear her voice before she began. She would make sure he knew she was a woman. Then she would hurt him in every way she could think of and was feasible with what she had to work with.
She let the fantasy play out in her head and felt the gnawing hunger that wasn't her own seep into her mind. Grabbing onto whatever logic and reason she had left she cleaned up his apartment. She waited on a nearby roof that had a view with a pair of field glasses till he returned that night and watched to make sure he didn't suspect anything.
The following day she called in sick again and shadowed Casper for the whole day. Though she couldn't exactly continue to trail him for the rest of the week, whenever she wasn't in school or sleeping she was in his vicinity. Sin was cold after she brushed her off for the nth time. Tommy showed up one day after school to ask why she was avoiding him. Her mother tried to corner her but failed. She blew Roy off and canceled on Felicity. Worst was Park's suspicious and worried gaze when she would make a rare appearance.
She was torn between her need to keep up her life as a teenager and her thirst for justice. Justice. It would be not in the name of justice that she would make him bleed. It would be in the name of the fear, and the pain, and the ruined lives of thirty-four women.
Thea was in her eleventh day of surveillance when she finally noticed the blonde woman who looked so much like Felicity for a heart stopping moment Thea thought it was Felicity. And then she remembered her from several other places Casper had been. He was stalking her. She was his next victim. The urge to end this was strong. It would be so terribly easy. There would be no witnesses. She would find a time when he was alone. She would cover his mouth with something so he couldn't cry out and look him right in the eye so he knew she was going to kill him. If she did it at his home she would have time, time to make him wish she would just get it over with.
A honking horn drew Thea from her dark musings and she sunk her teeth into her lip sharply to distract herself. Her hand reached into her pocket and this time what she was looking for was there. A string of smooth beads met her searching fingers and she rubbed her thumb over their surface, counting the bumps till she felt like she had regained some control.
On the thirteenth day she knew he was going to make his move on the blonde woman. She sat on a different rooftop from before as she watched him ready himself. She already had on black jacket that made her look bulkier than she was. She pulled up the hood as he stepped out onto the street. After making her way swiftly to his window and filling her small pack with what she needed the once again vigilante caught up to the target and followed him through the darkness of night. Her mind was empty of everything but keeping him in sight.
When he entered the blonde's apartment building she was gracefully landing on the woman's balcony. She stayed low and kept to the shadows. The simple black domino mask she picked up from a halloween store was put into place from where it hung around her neck. It killed her to wait and let this woman experience terror, but cold logic overruled her compassion. She needed the woman to be attacked as terrible as that was. She needed her to be a victim. But she would not let it go on for long.
She heard him knock on the door and charm his way into the apartment. The sound of a struggle and the woman's muffled scream was enough to make her blood freeze and her mind seethe. The glass of the balcony door exploded under the force of one booted foot. A throwing knife destroyed the only light in the room and drenched the room in darkness. She caught a glimpse of Casper's startled face as he let the woman go in surprise before she was on him. The woman who was not Felicity but looked enough like her to make Thea see red scrambled for the door while. Her foot snapped out to shatter a kneecap and some corner of her mind acknowledged she was on the clock. But the violent ideas that were forming at a rapid pace in her head wouldn't take long.
Casper was already on the floor sobbing, struggling to get away from her. That was not going to happen. Several pops and the monster's tortured scream marked the breaking of a number of his fingers and hand bones. The heel of her boot dug in and twisted a bit more. His hand would never be the same.
The demon in her blood sang with pleasure and euphoria made her mind cloudy. She wasn't done, not by a long shot. The beast in her had only gotten a taste and it was a glutton. It was time to feed. She left him where he was, crumpled, whimpering and begging as she walked the short distance to the kitchen and found a knife that would be perfectly serviceable.
"Please, please. You don't, you don't have to this!"
He was right. She didn't have to. But she wanted to. The knife found a new home in his good knee. She drove it down so far it stuck into the wood below. His cries mingled with the distant wail of sirens. Thea glanced up at the door as she caught the sound of footsteps in the hallway.
"Help, help! Please, he's gonna kill me!"
Thea moved swiftly to the door and slammed it shut in time to see a man peeking out of an apartment across the way. She spun the deadbolt and turned around to see Casper dragging his broken and bloody body to an upright sitting position, knife that used to be in his knee now in hand. She raised an eyebrow at the unexpected showing of endurance.
"They're coming, if you just go I won't tell them about you I swear!" The brunette who was a bit of a monster herself wanted to point out that if she killed him he definitely couldn't talk.
The sirens were louder and she knew she didn't have much longer. Sanity clawed at the writhing mass of bloodlust that obscured her morals and better judgement. Thea avoided his clumsy attempts to cut her and took the knife from his hand after twisting his wrist till it broke. Grabbing a handful of his hair she bounced his head off the corner of the side table.
Though the air was free of his noise his unconscious state did not bring the moment of absolute peace she knew she would experience if she took his life. But she'd spent too long resisting that short bliss to give in now. She unbuckled the pack that felt much heavier than it was and set it gently beside Casper.
Thea heard the first responders explode onto the floor and calmly exited the apartment through the same way she entered and climbed to the roof. She traversed the rooftops at a rapid pace till her breath came harsh and she could no longer remain standing on her shaking legs.
She sat against the ledge of a building and took in a another shuttering breath. The burning haze of anger that came from her unquenched thirst was beginning to clear and her teeth found her bottom lip with enough force to sting as she tore at her bloody gloves. Her bare fingers found the string of beads.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight.
One.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight.
Two.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight.
And on it continued until the she could actually feel the cool night air on her face. Her head tipped back and the hood fell down. There were no stars or moon out, nothing lit the sky but the lights of Starling City. Inwardly Thea acknowledged that she couldn't repeat this. Not at least until she was out of high school. She couldn't keep up the appearance she needed to and hunt criminals.
She also couldn't let it go this far again. Hurting Casper, torturing him crossed a line that Thea thought she knew not to. The fantasies were something she knew she couldn't stop. They were a part of the bloodlust that she accepted as being out of her control. Acting on those fantasies was another matter. That woman looked like Felicity and it became personal.
She sat on the roof for another hour before coming slowly to her feet. Her body felt stiff and her stomach rolled when she noticed the dark stains of blood on her gloves. Hazel eyes closed and Thea shut out the lingering anger, newly forming guilt and the voice of her disappointed brother.
She put one foot in front of the other and started home.
A/N: So that was my take on Thea's bloodlust. It's different from the shows. I know I said I wouldn't be updating again so soon, but this chapter was done and I couldn't resist just getting it up so I could stop editing it over and over.
Thanks again reviewers and I hope to hear what you think of this chapter.
A big thank you to highlander348 for being my sounding board for ideas and reminding me that vigilantes should wear masks.
