Chapter Eight
Kori crashed through the doorway to her home, crawling across the surprisingly clear hallway and entering the kitchen. On the top shelf was a first aid kit that she'd kept from her time with the Teen Titans.
It had everything she'd need to patch herself up, injections, antiseptics and the like. The only fault in her plan was that she couldn't actually reach the kit.
"Fuck." She muttered.
She decided to go for it anyway, regardless of her weakened state and placed her hand on the kitchen worktops above her – not letting go of her neck or the tourniquet – and pulled herself up. But it seemed she'd sustained another wound in her arm and it split open further with such use of her muscles.
"AH!" She screamed, falling back onto the floor and panting heavily. She put her finger to her ear and clicked the little button on the communicator, "Slade...Slade, help...me." She begged, pulling herself into a sitting position where her back was resting on the kitchen cupboards.
She got no answer, and as she panicked more blood spilled from her.
"Slade!" She yelled, her breathing ragged as she coughed up some more blood.
Again, she got no answer. Her body was slowing and she could feel herself getting heavy and limp the longer she stayed on the floor.
Robin stumbled into the Batcave where all of his friends were working; trying to figure out the girl they'd not been able to fight, or even corner.
"Robin, did you get her?" Cyborg asked over his shoulder.
"Erm..." Robin said, looking down at the blood on his hands.
"Robin?" Raven asked, turning around and seeing the blood. "Robin!" She called out, rushing over to him, "What did she do? I can heal–" He cut her off.
"I-I did it..." He murmured.
His voice was low and strained because of his swollen throat. He couldn't believe that he'd probably killed the girl, her body could only lose so much blood before she passed out, and then minutes before she bled to death.
"What? What did you do?" Beast Boy asked, helping him into a chair as Cyborg got some water.
"I threatened her, put a shuriken to her throat...I didn't think...she moved..." He trailed off and looked up to his friends, "I think I've killed her." He told them quietly, finally looking up into Raven's eyes. "I think I've killed her, and if I haven't then she's got one foot in his doorway..."
Kori sat on the floor, her chest heavy as she felt her body weakening further.
You can't give up! You're Koriand'r, Princess of Tamaran!
"Shamed...Princess..." She sighed to herself, closing her eyes slightly.
Don't spin that shit; you're owed revenge for what they did to you!
"They...didn't have a...choice." She argued, trying to make peace with herself before she died. Why die with unfinished business? She'd earned a rest.
You mean in the way you don't have a chance now? You can still get up and fight, it's just harder than sitting here and letting yourself die! Don't be lazy!
"I did not...choose this..." She snapped.
Yes you are! You're choosing to die now, there's still a chance! Be better than them!
It seemed that the war between her mind and her body was endless, and she knew that they could both match each other. So which one was she supposed to listen to? Which one was she supposed to be?
The way she saw it, she had two choices; stay on the floor, and die, her death only ever being discovered by Slade and possibly Batman – or she could get up, get her revenge but suffer immeasurable amounts of physical pain.
Be better than the Titans...
Eventually, she listened to her mind and got up – tearing her skin further – and dragging her limp body up so that she was leaning on the side of the kitchen worktops. Blood was smeared everywhere as she pushed herself and strained to reach the first aid kit. It took a long time to finally touch the box, and when she did, it fell onto the worktop and clattered to the floor.
"There's nothing on the news about anyone finding a body..." Cyborg said, looking through all the channels and all of the summoning calls for Batman. "Do people honestly call Batman because their pot-plants have been stolen?" He asked himself quietly.
"It can take days to find a body, Cy." Robin said, his catatonic and shell-shocked demeanor was supposedly under control as he went about normally. "Follow the trail of blood again." He ordered.
"Robin, it gets to that alley and then there's nothing left." He told him, "Raven and Beast Boy checked it out and there's no body."
"Maybe someone took her body..." Robin suggested.
"For what?" Cyborg asked, his face twisted in confusion.
"Necrophilia." Beast Boy called out.
"What?" Robin asked, not sure what that was.
"Oh, it's where people have sex with–" Raven slapped her hand over his mouth and tried to take the information back.
"–Other people...while burying a dead body...really respectfully..." She lied pathetically.
"Right..." Robin said, dragging the word out in disbelief.
"Look, Robin, we can't find her – she might not be dead." Cyborg said, "She could be in the hospital." He suggested.
"Raven, call the hospital and give in her description – I want either her, or her body, found." Robin ordered.
"Forgive me, Robin." Raven said, not moving, "Why are you adamant on finding this criminal? You've done this before to Control Freak and not cared."
"Control Freak has his technology to help him, she was alone, just a small-time criminal that got too big for her boots...she can't take care of an injury like that." He told her, rubbing his chin, "I've never killed anyone, and if the first person I've killed is close enough to the most innocent criminal to date, well...how does that make me any different to Slade, or the Joker?"
"One...little...needle..." Kori muttered to herself as she bit the top off of the needle and looked at the sterilized end that was supposed to go in her arm.
Oh shit, can you put these in your leg? She asked herself, panicking when she could see that injecting her arm was nearly impossible in her current condition. I can't reach my arm and then hold it still while I'm breathing like this...
She decided to bite the bullet and jab it into her leg quickly, it was a limb and not all too different to her arms...not really, what difference would it make? So she figured it would be okay. When she'd pushed all of the liquid in, she took the needle out and applied a little ball of cotton wool onto it to soak up the blood.
"X'hal, I hate needles..." She huffed, feeling her heart pump like a jackhammer.
When her leg had stopped bleeding, she picked up another needle that was empty and bit the top off of it. Knowing that this test would be worse than the first, she angled to needle just right in the crease of her elbow and drove it in slowly.
"Fuck me." She muttered, feeling it pierce the vein and pause.
She pulled the plunger back and watched her blood fill the barrel. When she'd extracted enough, she pulled the needle out of her skin and replaced it with an intravenous drip to get some liquids into her body.
Testing her blood in the little machine, she found that her blood had spread itself thinly throughout her body and she was in danger of both dehydration and blood loss. She groaned when she had to open up another vein on the back of her hand to funnel in some blood.
"Ouch." She hissed, feeling the sharp pinch when the blood stretched her vein a little too much.
Her neck was healing well ever since she'd wiped it down with the antiseptic and used the little rod that Cyborg had invented that sealed wounds almost instantly – it just hurt a lot.
"You don't say." She muttered, running the little rod along her arm and feeling the tight pulling and twisting of her skin cells reattaching themselves from her shoulder to her elbow on her left arm.
At least they won't scar...
When she'd patched herself up enough to attempt to move, she gathered herself up along with a few needles and braced herself for the mad dash to the sofa. Her legs were weak and trembled as she took her first step, the dizziness didn't help her coordination as she fell into several boxes.
Eventually she made her way to the sofa and sat down, resting the leg she'd injected on the coffee table and wrapping up her arm to stop the slight bleeding.
"You're a stubborn little fellow..." She cooed to the gash that couldn't be completely healed by the rod. "You just want to be difficult, don't ya?" She chuckled to herself, thinking of the irony.
You play with sharp toys, they're gonna cut you.
"And I had the sharper toys..." She moped, picking up a needle filled with some essential sugars.
I really hate you, Robin. She cursed mentally. There was one thing Kori hated more than Batman, and the Teen Titans...injections, and having to inject herself, well, it wasn't exactly high on her 'to do' list.
In ten minutes she'd injected herself three times with different sugars, proteins and blood supplements to try and boost her healing rate. The intravenous drip and blood transfusion needles would keep popping out because she hadn't taped them up, but she figured that it would prove more fuss to get up and find some tape in her condition than just jab it back in.
"Robin, we called all the hospitals in Gotham – no one's seen her yet." Cyborg said, pulling up their reports. "But we still haven't found the body; maybe she's not alone..." He suggested.
"She's not alone...but when I pursued her, had her pinned to the floor and held a shuriken to her jugular...they decided to abandon her." Robin scoffed, "Yeah, it's only someone's life they're losing if they left her alone." He argued, getting up and facing them.
"These organizations are big, what's to say a life means anything to them other than inconvenience?" Raven asked, pulling her hood down, "They're not like us; it's all about personal gain."
Beast Boy stepped forwards, "Maybe they found her body, it could mean something to one of them." He sighed, putting his hand on Robin's back, "Only time will tell."
Robin was shocked at Beast Boy's wisdom and patients – he'd really grown up in the past few years. He was only nineteen compared with Robin's age of twenty, and yet, Beast Boy seemed to handle this situation better than he.
"Alright...you're right." Robin nodded, rubbing the back of his neck, "But what if I have killed her?" He asked with a wince.
The team around him were silent; they'd seen their leader of nearly seven years break down for a small mistake. Criminals weren't meant to attack back when you had them cornered, especially not the ones working alone. This meant that either this girl was valued by whoever she worked for, or she was too stupidly determined to prove herself to someone. From what they'd seen, either could be the right answer – and Beast Boy was right, only time would tell.
"Accidents happen, Robin, we've all killed before." Cyborg said, his tone was final as he turned to leave the room.
And it was true, they had all killed, all of the people in that room had killed at least one person. Did that still allow them to be heroes? They fought evil – villains of all kinds – when they ended lives...but can a death ever be justified? Do you have to stop someone's heart to kill them?
Only time would tell.
The needles are getting blunt. Kori thought to herself, feeling how much more the needles hurt compared with the times before. They weren't made for going through material as thick as her pants, but could she take them off in her current state? She'd have to try; otherwise she'd be in big trouble.
Hooking her fingers into the top of her pants, she pulled them down partway but felt how her muscles in her left arm protested and almost split her skin again.
"Fucking hell!" She called out, her eyes filling with water as she sniffed and tried to clear the pain from her arm.
Not sure how to proceed, she sat there while the agony cleared from her system. How was one supposed to inject herself with blunt needles? Soon enough they'd be too blunt to even break through the pants, let alone her skin as well.
Kori then spotted a block of wood on the coffee table, the one she used to bite down on when she had to straighten her leg after the accident. Reaching out, she grabbed it and placed it in her mouth, biting hard as she grabbed a good handful of her pants into her fist and used as much strength as she could spare to rip it.
The injections had made the skin tender and soft, as well as the skin fusing to the material where glass had cut her. All the actions together made her thankful for the gag as she fought a bloodcurdling scream at the pain.
When she'd finished, she wiped the blood and sweat from her forehead and spat the wood out, perfect indentations of her teeth in the surface.
Looking down at her leg, she pulled the remainder of the pant leg off and looked down at the puncture holes in the top of her thigh. There must have been about a hundred where she'd hit wrong and thirty where she'd gotten it in the right place – either second or third time.
"You have got to be kidding me." She hissed, looking down at her bag to see that there was no more little pots of treatment. "Empty." She muttered, throwing certain vials over the floor, "Nada." She huffed, "No, no, no, I can't survive on this..." She panicked, staggering over to the device that held all of her medical items.
The cooling system held several bags of blood, but they'd be no use without the vials of calcium, protein and vitamins, not to mention stabilisers that storage took out of the blood. She went through the bag and saw one little vial of stabiliser left, it would give her maybe four hours if she just lay still and got a regular amount of blood into her system.
"Not likely with this dodgy equipment..." She panicked, tears filling her eyes and her throat swelling up as she thought about the possibility of her dying.
She'd have two hours probably, just two hours more to live before her body went into cardiac arrest, and then Clerical error from the blood overload...then X'hal knows what would happen.
Limping back to the sofa with the vial in hand, she pushed the now very blunt needle into the top and pulled out the remnants into the barrel. Bracing herself for the injection, she pushed it into her lower thigh and watched it empty into her bloodstream.
"Clock's ticking, Kori." She said to herself, taking a deep breath as she strapped the bag of blood to her hip and did the same with her intravenous drip. "God, you look shit." She said to herself as she walked past a mirror.
Her hair was in disarray, hardly tied up anymore, she wasn't exactly the cleanest or most presentable criminal about the place – which was pretty disgusting.
Her pants with only one leg, her shirt torn and bloody from her fight with Robin. She didn't even know how long she'd been recovering – she just knew it had been quite a while. Slade hadn't contacted her; he probably guessed she was dead or close enough. Bastard.
As she began her limp-run towards the door, she grabbed the blaster she'd stolen the night she was injured, and slipped it into the side of her pants. Not sure how she was going to do it, she left her house and staggered down the road in search of a chemists or the hospital.
Alright, I – no word of a lie – have venephobia, it's an irrational fear of veins and arteries. Call me stupid but I nearly threw up explaining injections and the like.
Don't you think I deserve just a little review, a spare moment of your time to tell me how I did?
Jade.