I forgot to say it last time, but I'd like to thank my beta Hazel006 for helping me, again. I hope you had a Merry Christmas, see you next year !


Rachel looked at her hands. They were small, with thin fingers, and a few red stains adorned her palms. For an instant, she wondered if she could get arrested by the police, if, even if she could manage to wash the blood off her hands, they could find residues on her hands, if they could analyze the DNA of the person — or of the persons — it belonged to.

They could charge her with murder while she had done absolutely nothing to deserve it.

She shook her head and tried not to think about it.

She had to pull herself together, to focus. She couldn't let herself get paralyzed by the morbid tribulations of her brain.

She stood up and held out her hand to help Quinn standing up. Her legs were shaking, and she stabilized herself by gripping the kitchen counter.

"Will you be alright ?"

"Don't worry," Quinn answered, breathing in deeply. "We have... we have to hurry. The quicker we'll get rid of the bodies, the quicker we can go away from this place."

The little brunette swallowed, but still she nodded to show she agreed. She didn't want to linger in this huge house which was housing lifeless bodies for more than one hour. She didn't even know how many corpses there were.

She preferred not to ask her.

After a minute, Quinn seemed to breathe more evenly. She put her hands on her face, which reopened the cut above her eye.

Rachel frowned. "Wait a minute, I'll be back."

"Where are you going ?" Quinn said. "Don't leave me alone."

Rachel smiled bitterly. The blonde had the voice of a little girl afraid of the dark.

"Don't worry, I'm coming back. I'm going to get something for you."

She came back, as promised, one minute later, with the first-aid kit she had brought in her bag. She disinfected the open wound on the blonde's forehead until the blood stopped running. The cut wasn't very deep; Quinn wouldn't keep any scar, except maybe one, invisible, amongst hundreds of other that she kept deep inside her.

While she was at it, Rachel cleaned the hands of the young woman, which were scarlet, knowing full well that it would serve no purpose at all; they still had to take care of the bodies, and she could only delay what was bound to happen.

Quinn must have felt her anxiety and her hesitation because she grasped her wrist and asked her if she was doing alright.

"It should be going fine," Rachel said. "I'm holding on."

"You know that you aren't obliged to help me," Quinn said. "I know that it's a lot to ask from you, but I don't want to force you into anything."

"You're not forcing me. I'm going to help you. I have to help you."

The blonde tried to dissuade her one last time, even though it was a wasted effort, she knew it. A dozen of minutes later, they had put the first-aid kit away and they were getting ready to face the horror.

Just in case, Quinn picked up her shotgun and held it in a tight grip against her hip.


When she was six, Quinn had witnessed the most dreadful scene of her life.

A summer night, two people slipped inside the house where she was living with her parents and her older sister. She couldn't remember much about the exact sequence of the events, which got bogged down and were gradually fading from her memory, but she could perfectly well remember the black masks they wore on their face, and the handguns they had pointed at her parents.

She remembered having screamed, then nothing.

Sometimes, she wondered if she had made up all of this, if it was only a machination of her mind.

But Quinn knew that she didn't imagine her awakening in a damp and dark cellar, and the two faces that were gazing at her stoically, silently. A man and a woman, pointing a revolver toward her.

She could recall the musty smell prevailing around her, panting for breath, and the woman's voice, commanding and cold, telling her when she got closer: "You're gonna do exactly what we tell you to do."

During days, or hours, or months, her ordeal lasted. However, less than six months after her abduction, people found her — she couldn't remember how exactly, but some people told her afterward that a man had been worried to see his neighbors disappearing and not coming back to their home after a few nights — and the young girl was put in an orphanage.

It was in this place that she met Rachel.

It was also to her, and only her, that she related what had happened to her, so she would not forget it, afraid to think that she could have made everything up, so she would not fall into madness.

Rachel was her cornerstone, the link still holding her onto the earth, allowing her to move forward in quest of justice and peace.

Even if, to reach this peace of mind, she had to come to vengeance and to murder.


Rachel was walking slowly in the hallway, with Quinn just behind her. She didn't know if she should look everywhere, explore every square centimeter with her gaze to make sure that there was no danger, or run away from this filthy view, this blood marbling the walls and the furniture, this color which was attacking her eyelids and was making her nauseous.

She held out her hand, grasped the blonde's between her fingers for a few instants to be sure of her presence.

With a tight feeling in her throat, Rachel asked her how many bodies there were in the house.

"Four," Quinn answered.

She could have said a hundred and Rachel would have had the same reaction. She repressed a shiver and kept moving.

The hallway seemed interminable. The few paintings and pictures hung on the walls hadn't been spared by the blood of the victims.

They arrived at the bottom of the stairs, where the corridor split in two. Quinn softly patted her shoulder and made her go left, where was the dining room.

The door was wide open. Rachel only needed to make a single step forward to understand what had happened in this room.

A man was sitting down on one of the chairs, his upper body slumped against the table. A gaping wound opened onto his skull, pouring for probably more than one hour his blood all around him. He hadn't had the time to do a single movement; the injury showed that he had been killed at point blank range. In cold blood. He hadn't seen it coming.

Rachel put her hand in front of her mouth. And this liquid which was still flowing, dripping gloomily on the floor...

She turned around. "Let's go check the others," she said with a hesitant voice.

Then Quinn led her to the first floor, into what seemed to be a teenager bedroom. Two bodies were lying inside, one in the middle of the bed, the other collapsed behind the door of the closet.

They looked young. It was Rachel's first thought that wasn't related to the violence of the murders. They must be around twenty years old, no more. They were only children when Quinn had been kidnapped, and without any doubt blind to what their parents had been up to and had made her endure. Did Quinn really need to kill them if they were innocent ? Rachel didn't dare ask the question — it was too soon to ask questions.

The two young women went downstairs, into the bathroom. Quinn opened the door, ready to welcome the fourth and last corpse, but didn't find anything — only bloody red on the once spotless tiling.

"Quinn ? Is everything alright ?"

Rachel's voice seemed far away, almost foreign because of the panic slowly filling her.

"She's not here anymore," she mumbled.

"What ?"

"The woman I killed. She's not here. Her body's not here."

At this moment, Rachel didn't believe her. The house was empty — if the three other bodies were the exception — and nobody could have run away. They would have heard something, they would have seen something. It was impossible that someone could have survived to the weapon that Quinn was holding tight against her body, this shotgun that had left a gaping hole in a man's skull and had made two more victims upstairs.

Given the amount of blood, there shouldn't be a lot left in the organism of this fourth person.

"Are you certain she was there ?" Rachel inquired, even though she knew perfectly well that the question was useless.

"I'm sure. I dragged her here to..."

The blonde didn't finish her sentence, staring at a bloodstain on the floor — one more, Rachel thought. She frowned.

"What is it ?"

But Quinn didn't answer, preoccupied with the floor, and the marks on the parquet and on the tiles, which showed that a body had been dragged into the room.

Then left the room.

Rachel pressed violently her hand on her mouth to stop herself from screaming.

Quinn made her sign to keep silence, to keep her calm, she prepared her gun, and carefully went out of the bathroom, ready to use her weapon once more. She kept her eyes on the tracks on the floor, looking up from time to time so she wouldn't be surprised by anything.

Rachel was following her closely, breathing loudly but trying by all means not to panic. She wouldn't be afraid of anything with Quinn by her side, she believed it with all her strength.

Time seemed to tick over. There was not a single sound in the house, which didn't reassure the two women.

The prints were leading to the front door, to their great confusion. Worried, the blonde pushed the door with the tip of her weapon, only to discover the virgin land, the two cars that were parked there, the vastness of the forest in the distance. The mist had lifted, but the sun wasn't visible yet because of the thick clouds covering the sky.

Still wanting to check that they hadn't missed something, Quinn went down on the stoop, took two steps forwards before freezing upon hearing a bloodcurdling cry.

A terrified cry.

It was Rachel's voice.

She turned around immediately, pointing her gun in front of her, and she saw two silhouettes struggling on the ground.

One of them was sticky with blood.

Different sensations went through her at once. Her hands, like her entire body, became paralyzed. She couldn't fire, for fear of hurting Rachel. She was feeling guilty, too, to not having checked that her victims were well and truly dead, especially this woman, the one by which all of this had begun in the first place.

Then the adrenaline worked, and Quinn found herself running to the house, hitting with all her strength the blood-drenched body of the woman who was gripping tightly Rachel with her arms.

In the tumult of the struggle, nobody really knew what to do. The woman was screaming like a possessed person, fighting with all she had despite her belly holed by a bullet from a shotgun and the blood blocking her face, blinding her bloodshot eyes.

Rachel ended up escaping from her grip and, horrified, saw that the woman had just brought a large kitchen knife out of one of her pockets. She stepped back instinctively until her foot tripped over something.

The shotgun.

She barely had the time to pick it up that a cry of pain rang out. Her wide open eyes stared at the woman's hand holding the handle of the knife, and the blade disappearing into Quinn's back.

Without thinking, crying out in rage and distress, Rachel raised the weapon and hit her with the butt.

A muffled sound resonated feebly in the room. The half-human shape had been propelled backward with the impact, two meters away from Quinn. Rachel didn't need more encouragement to raise the gun once more and to shoot, as many times as she could until she heard the clicking sound and that the last echoes of the bullets died.

Then she got closer to the disfigured body — she didn't think that a body could contain as much blood and suffer that many deformations — and, once again, she lifted the weapon to bring it down on what was left of the woman's face. She stroke, as many times as she was able to, with all her anger and her despair, the tears flowing down her cheeks, hearing her bones cracking as she hit, splashing this vermilion on the ground, again and again — until she felt an arm on her shoulder, barely forcing her to lower her gun.

"It's over, Rachel."

She instantly broke into sobs.

Filled with rage, she threw away the shotgun on the inert body lying at her feet. Quinn embraced her within her arms, whispering the same sentence in her ear.

"It's over."

Nodding silently against her shoulder, Rachel hugged her back.

She had promised herself that nobody would touch Quinn ever again, and she couldn't fail to keep her promise — not now, not ever.


The body had been abandoned in the doorway, after that the two women had checked once more that they were the only two living souls of the house.

Again, Rachel went out to get her first-aid kit and, her eyes still wet, she gazed at Quinn's torn sweatshirt, unveiling fresh cuts.

Keeping herself from crying in front of the blonde, she took her hand and led her upstairs, into one of the rooms which had been miraculously spared by the bloody carnage. She suddenly stopped on the threshold of the door, realizing that Quinn could feel uncomfortable in the habitation that had been the scene of horrific events.

"Does it bother you if we do it here ?" she said in a soft voice.

"No," Quinn answered. "It's going to be alright. We have nothing to be afraid of anymore."

The young woman took off her tattered clothes, then her t-shirt. On her back were sprawled two purple lines, one larger and more impressive than the other, gaping. Rachel bit her lip to prevent herself from crying. It was her fault if Quinn was in this state; she should have been more careful, she shouldn't have let herself get caught by surprise, she should have...

"Rachel, are you alright ? Do you want me to do it myself ?"

Coming back to her senses, the small dark-haired girl slowly shook her head, made Quinn sit down on the edge of the double bed while she was preparing her equipment.

She told herself bitterly that she had been right when she brought this many bandages.


Quinn was naked above her waist, holding her hair with a shaky hand while Rachel was busy sewing up the two marks made by a knife.

The blonde didn't make a single noise, gritting her teeth when the pain was becoming too strong, and Rachel wondered if it was what she had to do all her life; keeping quiet and putting up with the suffering in silence, unable to describe what she was feeling.

She was finished after one hour of conscientious work. Almost automatically, she softly slid her fingers on the sinuous threads that were holding together two pieces of flesh formerly reunited.

She was blaming herself for giving Quinn an umpteenth scar, visible and indelible.

Rachel laid a kiss in the hollow of her neck and her shoulder before telling her that she could put her clothes back on.

"I'm going to get clothes in my car, I'll be back," she assured the blonde so that she wouldn't worry.

The latter held her back anyway, putting her hand on her wrist and looking at her for a long time.

"Thanks for coming," she said after a beat. "And for... what you did for me."

Rachel smiled. "It's natural. I wasn't going to let you go."

For the first time of the day, Quinn smiled. She smiled a sad smile, almost nonexistent, but a smile nonetheless, turning Rachel's insides upside down. Perhaps that, finally, this day was the beginning of the end of her suffering.


Drape your arms around me and softly say,
Can we dance upon the tables again... ?

— Laura, Bat for Lashes.