Warning: pretty graphic descriptions of torture and psychotic detachment

Edward Pleasure had been promised one thing in exchange for his (ultimately futile) help in getting Alex to go back to MI6 for the duration of his adolescence: an audience with the man who murdered his daughter.

His fingertips buzzed, and his breath came in, and out, and in, and out. Too short and shallow. A whisper instead of a breath.

Edward was a slight, older man. He put his resolve into words on paper, into litanies of accusation and justice. His articles, his reports, were how he settled scores, how he held his own. His liquid courage was dark ink, sheafs of paper his strength, their stories his attacks and his defense. He was a writer and that was always enough for him.

He felt like a madman, now, waiting in the concrete hallways of this maximum-security prison. He felt like a demon at the gates of hell, waiting for them to open.

He felt like a killer about to be unleashed.

This man had stolen his little girl.

And now, his hatred was alive.

Frederick Hollis had been transported to a prison in France, towards the border of Italy – a multi-national lockdown facility for Europe's truly heinous criminals. The ones who would benefit society more by disappearing instead of being rehabilitated.

The prison wasn't dark or damp, like he'd expected – Edward didn't know why he'd expected something like an ancient jail, like catacombs. Perhaps it was the part of him that enjoyed fantasies, trying desperately to twist this experience into a climax in a story. In something other than his life. Instead, this prison was oppressively bright, fluorescent lights screaming overhead every three feet. Linoleum tiles and gleaming white walls refracted and reflected, making the hallways seem like tunnels to the afterlife. Like doorways to other worlds.

Perhaps they were. Edward never thought this would be his world.

But that was before.

Before, there had been Sabina, and Liz. Before, there had been softer light, brighter joy, and he had been a regular man with a regular family and life. A regular, if not combative, job, a salary, a pension, and a desire to send his precious only child to the best school he could afford. A desire to watch his daughter grow up.

He was going to walk her down the aisle. Hold her children.

Die knowing he'd given her the best life he could manage, surrounded by family.

Now, he knew he'd die alone, still grieving. He would never watch Sabina marry the love of her life, never hold her children, never send her off to uni with a smile somewhere between limitless pride and terror, sending his little girl into the unknown. He would never see her smile ever again.

A door creaked, and the guard, a French man with a lisp and dark eyes, beckoned him forward. "He's secure."

Edward's hatred leapt through his chest like something trapped in a pinball machine. It rattled and raved. There was no fear. No hesitance.

Those were reserved for men with things to lose.

Edward allowed himself to be led through the door and into a secure waiting area, where he was once again frisked for anything that could be a weapon. Anything too sharp, too heavy, too suspicious. His belt and shoelaces were confiscated. Even his watch. The only things they let him keep were his daughter's ring on a chain around his neck, and he thought it was more out of pity than anything.

Edward wasn't Alex. He didn't know sixty ways to kill with household items.

It didn't matter.

Finally, finally, finally, he was led through the door and into the room where the man waited.

Hollis. Even though he didn't deserve a name.

He was a tall man, Edward supposed detachedly, though the height was less impressive from where he sat cuffed to a table by his wrists and ankles. He was wearing a gray jumpsuit, stained under the arms (which seemed too utterly human a detail for this monster), and his skin had a waxy complexion. Too little sunlight, Edward mused. The man was missing his left eye. He had no eyepatch – just an empty, scarred hole, only a few months old. Still a raw, ugly thing.

It made Edward smile, for some reason. He felt grateful to Alex, though he been grappling with complicated feelings towards the boy for a long time.

"Do you know who I am?" Edward said, pulling out a chair and sitting across from Hollis, steepling his fingers in front of him.

Now, after the adrenaline rush of the last two weeks, planning this encounter and imaging all the ways it could go, drafting speeches, drafting murder plans, simply raging in his head and at the mirror in all the ways he wanted to, he felt remarkably, inexplicably calm.

The hatred burned all the brighter for it, no longer dampened by insanity or clumsy rage.

Edward had never felt this kind of raw anger in his life, and it sang in his bones like acid and bitter gasoline.

Hollis finally trained his one eye on Edward, scanning him up and down clinically. His face curled into a smirk. "No. You another shrink?"

In his calmness, Edward saw the bravado for what it was – the man's pallor, his dishevelment, his twitching fingers. This place was leeching life from him, one second at a time. It was gratifying, if not fully satisfying.

Edward unclasped the simple chain with Sabina's ring and placed it on the table between them, not letting go, but keeping it visible. He had no illusions that it would garner sympathy or regret from the thing in front of him, but he wanted him to see.

"You killed my daughter," Edward said.

The words were pulpy in his mouth, disjointed and wrong. They left his teeth aching and his tongue seared, the roof of his mouth raw and his throat swollen.

And then Hollis said something that lit a match.

The man smiled, eye narrowing, and shrugged almost bemusedly. "I've killed a lot of daughters. You'll have to be more specific."

One single match. No more than a tiny flame in those words.

It was all it took for the gasoline in Edward's bloodstream to fully, irrevocably, explosively ignite.

Edward wasn't like Alex – not too quick on his feet in the athletic department, not to adept at knowing which random items made for good weapons. He could throw a punch, but that was as far as fights went for him, because he certainly couldn't block one.

But this moment had been playing in his head over and over and over for so, so long. Months. Seconds and days and weeks and months, always present and pressing.

He'd done his fucking research.

He'd seen the guards lock the doors. He'd seen the camera light blink off. That had been part of the deal. He knew the one way glass would be absent of interference.

He took the unclasped chain and carefully picked it up, one end in each hand, and stood, rounding the table.

Being a journalist, Edward knew how to read body language. He knew the twitches and tells that people made when they knew more than they were letting on, when they didn't want to pursue a certain line of questioning, when they were ready to spill their fucking guts to anyone who would listen.

Hollis didn't like having Edward out of sight – that much was obvious. The man strained against his instinct to turn and keep Edward in his sights, trying to appear unflapped despite the situation.

"You gonna kill me, paper pusher?" Hollis asked. Edward wasn't overly surprised that Hollis knew his general profession – killers knew targets, and lots of targets shared traits and habits. Some journalists made for annoyances that led to untimely deaths – he'd almost been one, after all.

"Not right away," Edward responded after a moment. He wound the reinforced titanium chain once around each hand, and looped it over Hollis' head with so much more calm them he'd envisioned in this moment.

Every cell was alive with hatred. He thought he'd be taken in by the moment, honestly. That he'd be too angry to control himself, and he'd end it too quickly. But that wasn't the case.

He'd make it last. As long as he could. He'd make sure Fischer died in the most exquisite agony he could provide.

The MI6 man, Fischer, had given him clear instructions to not kill him, but Edward didn't care. Let him rot in prison. It would be no worse than this purgatory.

If he couldn't die knowing he'd given his daughter a good life, he could rot away knowing he'd avenged her, at the very, very least.

Fischer, if nothing else, held his promise. Edward and Fischer spent a very, very long time alone together. Edward watched Fischer's face redden and purple, his lips swell, his nose drip. He watched the veins in the man's one eye burst – red lightning strikes in milky white.

He listened to the man cough, wheeze, choke, and splutter. He didn't beg – Hollis was too proud, too used to pain, but it didn't really matter to Edward. It was obvious the man was in utter agony with every breath and every subsequent denial.

Edward had never considered himself capable of torture before this, but he was finding he was quite good at it.

This continued. He punctuated the strangulation with hits that only fed his fury, wrapping the chain with his daughter's ring around his knuckles and punching the bloated face again, and again, and again.

Watching the moment where Hollis' head finally hung in exhaustion was the closest thing to joy Edward had felt since Sabina died.

His daughter's ring was bloody, and perhaps that should have bothered him, but it didn't. He felt strangely disconnected from himself – like he was an actor on stage, performing someone else's life. Sticking to his role and saying his lines. It was easier that way.

"Do you know who I am?" He asked after an hour, sitting back down in the chair across from a flagging Hollis, covered in blood and snot. A pathetic, pathetic thing.

Hollis grinned, manic. Blood bubbled through his teeth. "Some brat's dad with one hell of a chip on his shoulder."

"Edward Pleasure," he corrected, flexing his aching hand. The soreness was grounding, but not nearly enough to pull him form whatever vindictive fugue had taken him hostage. "You killed my daughter. Sabina Pleasure." He breathed. "You shot her in the head."

Hollis stilled, and tilted his head. His voice was gravelly and stilted when he said, "So you know soldier boy, then? The Jaguar kid. The one who did this," Hollis said at once, pointing to the hole where his eye should have been. The wound was puffy, cherry red from the trauma and trapped blood. Purple lines zagged where some of those blood vessels had burst.

Edward didn't want to talk about Alex now. Didn't think he'd ever want to talk to or about him again, as unfair as that sounded. Whatever pretty platitudes he'd spat in the park were things he'd rehearsed that sounded good enough. Good enough to get him this audience.

"Yes. But he's not the one you killed."

"Almost was," Hollis said with a grin and through a cough. "He's dangerous, that one."

Edward could have said something along the lines of how ironic that was, coming from the monster before him, but he only hummed. His time was almost up. "I'm going to kill you."

Hollis didn't react outwardly, but Edward thought his fists clenched a little bit tighter. "You've tried…a few times now, old man." His breathing was labored. He looked pitifully weak.

"I'm sure you're not unfamiliar with torture," Edward said, rising again. He resumed his position behind Hollis. Immense, burning satisfaction hummed in his bloodstream at the way Hollis' shoulders stiffened. "But I don't have much time."

"They'll throw you in jail somewhere like this for killing me," he said, and his voice wobbled the slightest bit. It wasn't quite beginning, but it was becoming close to bargaining. To reasoning.

"You took away everything I had to live for, anyway," Edward said, looping the chain around Hollis' neck once more. Sabina's ring was nestled in the hollow of the man's throat, only disturbed at the deep swallow or apprehension. "It doesn't matter."

Edward tightened the noose, and Hollis went rigid.

Then, several things happened at once.

A key in the lock sent the first bright streak of panic into Edward's cold fury, at the thought that he'd be robbed of his chance to fucking finish it after so much time, and the chain loosened on instinct.

Then Hollis was no longer cuffed to the table.

In a blinding instant, Hollis had shucked his hand restraints, shoved his palm into Edward's nose at a nearly impossible angle, then pulled the bleeding, stunned man into a headlock. They were both off balance due to his feet still cuffed to the table, but it was enough of a position to pause the guard in his tracks.

The gun was trained on them in seconds, but a surprised sound of pain from Edward had the guard hesitating.

"I'll have to thank you for taking your time, Edward Pleasure," Hollis said derisively into the thick silence, smirking bloodily. It looked like someone had sawed a gash in his face. "You just became my ticket out of here."