The perfect Sunday morning activity; perving on hot Asian men.

Ignore that last comment readers.

Here finally is the seventh chapter for you, I apologise a million and one times that I haven't updated in so long but this chapter was excruciatingly hard to write, I will also apologise again that after so long without updating I've given you a short chapter, it's only three thousand words and my average lately has always been 6-8 thou.

I'm still having some trouble and all that when it comes to writing, the plot of this story I find is actually rather easy to figure out when I put my mind too it but alas, my other XIII story is not of such a texture. I probably won't be writing that one for a time (Excluding the next chapter which hallelujah is actually plotted out) so mostly I'll just be writing this story right now (My KH one has taken the back seat seeing as not so many people read it, which gives me the chance to take up more time in bettering the chapter contents, also on that note, please read my KH story)

Disclaimer: I do not own final fantasy, Square Enix does.

Agony

The golden rays of the setting sun wafted in through the spaces between the half closed blinds and settled themselves upon the floor to where they crawled up the wall to gilt off of a syringe filled with a translucent golden liquid held by a nameless girl no older than eighteen.

Tapping the side of the syringe twice with her pointer finger of her left hand, she hummed to herself, trying and failing to make her demeanour completely indifferent to the women on the bed. It was obvious that she didn't want to be here, but deep down she did feel a little worried, as little and small as the feeling was, it was nevertheless undeniably there when you looked into her eyes. She just hoped the women who lay before her half asleep wouldn't notice it.

Fat chance.

She was attuned to everything around her 24-7, even now when she was as tired as she was, one look up at her face and she'd see it, the chance of her missing it was one in a million.

Tapping the syringe one last time with her finger, the girl took a few steps closer to the bed, taking time to steel her mental state so that when she spoke it came out as if she was unaffected by the women's situation, even a mite bitchy, like it truly annoyed her to no end that she had been forced to come out here to help her.

Lowering the syringe, the light that had been reflecting on its surface fell from it and repositioned itself on the girls arm and the wall that lay behind her. Clearing the distance between her and the bed, the girl reached over and shook the women's shoulder to keep her from falling back asleep like she had been when she'd first came here.

"Fang" she said in a faked annoyed tone.

Fang, with her eyes still half closed, tilted her gaze upwards some in an effort to see the girl above her. The girl made sure to keep her head held higher than fang's limited gaze reached to prevent their eyes from meeting, she didn't want her to see the slight emotion in her eyes, she wanted Fang to think that she felt the same way her voice portrayed.

Bringing the syringe to a spot within Fang's view, she began muttering on in that same fake tone, sounding as if she was caught in reverie, but she was feigning that as well.

"You know Fang, when this happens you should really contact HQ, you should have had this enough times now to know that you can't kick it on your own. I'm not saying that sevarcasum helps you completely" she said with a gesture to the golden liquid contained with the syringe "not at all, but without it the chemical in your blood will keep on building up and you'll only get sicker and sicker and trust me if you let it come to that you're more likely to die than anything else"

"Perhaps that's what I want" Fang snapped out weakly, a response that made the girl in front of freeze for a second before she shook her head, her inner monologue scolded her for the reaction, telling herself that a death wish was something Fang had been holding close for a long time now. So why should it surprise her that if there was a chance of this illness killing her she'd take it. In fact she very well could have killed herself with it this time, had Nataliah not piped up about Fang being sick to the superiors.

But whether she sought death or not, the superiors would be furious if they lost an agent that a number of them considered their best, and would punish anyone brutally who failed to stop any suicide attempt she may make. So without much further hesitation, the girl reached down and took hold of Fang's right shoulder, which from her position of laying on her side was the only one visible to her and rubbed a thumb across it seeking out a particular spot. After some contemplation, she stuck the needle into Fang's upper arm and pushed down on the end of the syringe until all of liquid held within flowed out and into the women veins.

Sevarcasum, the golden liquid she'd inserted was a solution that was made by pulse with the intention of killing off chemical substances, like the one that existed in Fang's blood. When she had escaped from cocoon's clutches, she had been very sickly and her condition only worsened as time went on. It had taken awhile but eventually pulse had discovered a chemical in her blood stream, something that was narrowed down swiftly to be the cause of the illness.

After many test it still came as an unidentified substance to pulse, so it didn't take long to figure out how it'd gotten there. The chemical had obviously been a compound of cocoon creation, and either used as a device of torture, or for the even worse option of, and easily more deadly one when done by cocoon's hand.

Experimentation.

The experiments that went on in the shadows of cocoon were a notorious subject among pulse agents; it would be an understatement to say that fear of them was a motivation that pushed them to not get captured by cocoon. She knew from word of mouth that when serving cocoon Fang had been a test subject of the cocoon scientists, but the experiments had never been anything major, always going along the line of cybertronics.

Cocoon agents never unless by their own submission, received experiments that went beyond the realm of humane, but there was nothing stopping cocoon from doing it to the prisoners they held captive beneath their feet in chambers that emanated hell itself.

Lifting the syringe away from Fang's vicinity, the girl put an end to her train of thought and backed off slightly before turning on her heel. Dropping the emptied syringe into a small bag of hers, she picked up everything she had initially brought with her, and walked to the door with the intention of leaving without a word.

But Fang stopped her short by saying "you know Nickola, but if you want to try and lie to me, you're going to need to practice more. Your eyes aren't the only things that give away your emotions"

Nickola flinched rather visibly at that, finding that she'd been caught out all too easily, but with her inner monologue soon scolded herself for the reaction once again she straightened up and endeavoured to walk the rest of the length to the door. She didn't bother to question what exact body action had given herself away, right now she wished for nothing more than to leave this room as fast as she possibly could.

Twisting the knob, she opened the door to permit her entrance into the hallway, stepped though, and then closed the door shut behind her with a final thud, the sound of a lock soon following as it clicked into place.

'Why was it that nowadays Fang scared her so much?' Her inner monologue questioned as she walked one foot in front of the other down the hallway and further away from the room she just left. She used to be close to Fang once, and at the time the women had been a very social person, but that had disappeared with the going of time.

But not so long ago, she used to be her friend.

Struggling to move her tired limbs into a more comfortable position, Fang rested one arm over her eyes; the steady flow of gradually reducing sunlight coming in from the window was bugging her, not all so much, but ample amount to be a bother of sorts. At least now she could wait it out until sunset did its job in blotting it out as it came and went, as lifting an arm to close the half open blinds would be too much of a task for her at current.

Fang felt like her body was suffering from exhaustion like that of what you'd get for traversing a desert. Like whatever meek strength she possessed in her sickly state had drained away a little by little until it was all but gone. She could barely open her eyes right now; and lifting a single limb was comparably like lifting more than a tonne of weight.

She could only hope that the sevarcasum would soon take effect to ease the sickliness that ate at her body, knowing that it'd be a time till all the symptoms disappeared. But while they would continue to plague her for the next couple of days or so, at least their disappearing was a definite, while the existence of the sickness and its cause, was something that could never be undone by any means known to Fang. The chemical in her circulatory system always seemed to cling on despite all efforts made to kill it off completely. A bigger dose of sevarcasum might have a chance with but since it was not made with the intention of use on humans, too big a dose could pose great harm to her body.

But that wasn't something she concerned herself with; in fact she couldn't care less. It didn't matter to her that she'd be made to live out her life with the chemical in her blood, if fact she welcomed it. She hated the sickness it brought along with it with a passion yes, but the all too real chance of it killing her once it engulfed enough of her blood cells was something she oh so enjoyed. She'd found out a long time ago that the strength to kill herself by her own hand was something that would always elude her, no matter how her life disintegrated into hellfire and how much her mind screamed for that eternal darkness death would bestow her.

So she tried time and time again to let this sickness kill her, something she could easily have achieved that this time, if not for Nataliah. It wasn't that she hated the girl. But Fang could see herself developing some sort of dislike for her over this.

In truth she wished she hadn't been where she was when the tendrils of what she felt right now had taken a hold of her, she wished with all her being she had been here in her apartment or at least not in a place so open to the world, as long as it had been in public, Fang knew that knowledge of it would always come back to Nataliah and Pulse.

Gradually and with much hassle, Fang slid the arm that was resting over her eyes away from her face ever so slightly. Thankfully, in the time she'd it had there the light coming in from the window had dimmed down some, so it didn't annoy her like it had before.

Her gaze finding its way to the window in question, and what little of the outside world was to be seen, Fang Watched as two solitary birds fly away from view before letting her tired eyes close, deliberately refraining from letting herself fall into slumber. She kept her mind stayed active behind closed lids, with one thought after the other choosing to make themselves provident.

Thinking over some that had previously transgressed her mind, a new one surfaced in its depths, and made itself known.

The girl who had been here previously; Nickola Madeline.

Nickola, who at current had lived nought but 19 years, and had been cornered into taking the path of becoming an agent for Pulse at the tender age of 10, was someone who till four years ago had held Fang very close.

It seemed like eons ago to her now, but they had once been friends, good friends too, like many other had been to Fang. Of course after her ordeal with Cocoon, that had stopped but for the twelve odd months that Fang had served under Pulse beforehand, she had many friends.

Looking back on her memories of those times, Fang felt like for that instant her mind split in two. One side seeing them through perverse eyes, the other watching on as its counterpart found disgust with how the memories played out. Halting her train of thought just for that second, Fang couldn't stop that part of her mind slipping in the musing 'did it really disgust her so much that she used to be like that?". But just like that the two halves melded back into one, and the two feeling created by each halve of disgust and shock at the previously mentioned feeling altered. With the shock evaporating into thin air and the disgust turning into pure hate.

Hate that the people who had once been her friends had gotten to live without the darks devils like the ones that inhabited to her mind, and that they'd never ever came close to experiencing terrors like the ones she had. So she found herself resenting their attempts to help her, and the efforts they made to comfort her about a subject they could never comprehend without knowing the pain of it themselves.

Oh how she had hated that, and to top it off, during it all they'd showed to her something they masked as sympathy, but Fang saw through that façade from the start. It was pity they felt. And pity as it was, was something she'd never had the ability to stomach, and it'd been that way for as long as Fang could remember. Had it been true sympathy they'd felt when they reached out a hand to help her, then maybe, just, maybe Fang would have flicked an eye at their attempts to reach her.

But she didn't see herself giving them as much as the time of day under even those circumstances, back then or today.

Because there was always that hate to take into account, the feeling that always sparked into an inferno whenever anyone tried to help her. Fang didn't know exactly why that was so, why she couldn't stand for people wanting to comfort her. It certainly wasn't pride that barred her taking it, because just wasn't the kind of person that who would deny someone the right to offer their help to her because she was too proud to accept it, thought she knew many men who were.

No, it was how she thought them naïve, to try and comprehend a subject that you can't know the full pain of unless you've felt it yourself, least of all to try and help her through the terrors that haunted her mind because of it.

They didn't know, they couldn't know. They had no idea what it was like to live your days stalked by memories of unspeakable horrors, and how it felt to be forced to deal with nightmare each night that did nothing but remind you about how you suffered.

Every night when her head hit the pillow she saw it, that accursed dark room that held within its confines no light and no hope. A place a that drained away her lust for life one drop at a time until the pain it bequeathed to her made her mind shatter into a million pieces and her whole being scream for a release.

To scream for death.

Life after it had never seemed like an option, she thought she was going to die there, slowly and agonisingly painfully, but a death it would be. So for herself to survive, let alone escape from there without dying in the process, was something she never made plans for, seeing as her escape had been something of a spur of a moment thing. Fang wasn't even sure why she had done it, perhaps it had been nothing more than not wanting for her death to be at cocoons hand, a want to end the torment, for however long she could.

Yet she still wanted to die, there was no stop to that desire. But she didn't die; she lived on and was made to live with the pain.

Why didn't she die?

She wanted to, more than anything else she wanted to die, and that was something that was if nothing, more emphasised today.

Her mind might have its ways of keeping the truth away from her view, with all its metal illnesses and disorders. But when it got down to it, Fang didn't want to live with her mind twisted as it was. Too engulfed with paranoia to see that the people around her were not out there to do nothing but hurt her, and that when they offered her help it was genuine, not faked, even if some of the feeling sparking it may have. Too enveloped with severe depression to see the light of the world, forever locking her up in darkness where there was nothing but sadness of no hope for the future, causing her to want for nothing else but the end. And so many others problems that warped her so that she was unrecognisable from the women she used to be. Unsocial, distrustful, sad and perpetually angry at everyone around her. The light that used to exist in her eyes long gone, replaced by the tell-tale eyes of a killer, the eyes of someone who was nothing but a sad excuse for a person.

And it was all because of her incarceration by Cocoon, where she experienced all the anguish that Cocoon could impart to her till it was too much to take. She was the broken person she was today because of that.

It was all because of those seven months spent in that torture chamber that could be summed up as nothing less than pain of the highest degree.

Nothing less than agony.

Agony is one of my all-time favourite ways to say pain.

Sorry again for the short chapter, it was originally going to be longer but then I realise that the thing I was going to put in it that would make it longer was both extremely hard to work into the chapter and fitted better in one of the upcoming chapter, if I remember right its fifteen or something around then.

Also just so you know, but I'm fixing up the first three chapters that were unedited, it might be a bit before I post the fixed up versions of them up here because I'm doing this with four other un-betaed chapters and I have and I told my beta she has no time limit with them but your free to go look at them when I'm done with them. Since this story has completely changed from how it originally was when I first started writing (I'm talking about fangs metal problems not the plotline) it might be a good idea to go back and look at the edited versions when I fix up the consistency of this story.