by Katie Vack
"Don't push me, Sora. We've gone too far already. You've had your punishment. Don't make me do any more."
"My punishment? My punishment?" She laughed again, scorn dripping from her cracking voice. "You don't have any idea just what I've done. To myself, and to others, and what they've done to me. You don't even know the words to describe just how fucked up I am. Someone like you doesn't have the strength to give me my punishment." All remnants of expression fled her face, leaving it a cold and unyielding statue. "You're bleeding."
"What?"
"Fear and confusion, a little guilt, traces of anger and loathing. Your mental state is unstable; your body is carried by a stolen power. Both are fluctuating heavily."
"What are you saying?"
"I'm saying," her voice was mechanical, "that you're bleeding. And I'm The Bloody Rose." She dropped her glaive, pulling out a straight razor and lunging at him. He sidestepped, lashing out towards her arm, but she was moving even before he'd begun. The strike was a feint, and she slashed him instead across his biceps, cutting smoothly through the muscle and releasing a spray of blood.
He stumbled away from her, gasping at the deep wound. There was something wrong with her, something terribly wrong. She had always been fast, but never like this. Somewhere, somehow, she had changed. It was like fighting an entirely different person.
He kicked out towards her, shadows dancing across his leg as it whirled through the air, but she simply vaulted over it, almost taunting him. He spun on his heel, a whirlwind of energy as he lashed out with his other foot, but she simply wasn't there. She stood off to the side, blade flickering out and cutting a crevasse into his leg, chipping the bone.
He stumbled away, mind whirling. He was in trouble. He hadn't expected this, not from a silvan with no powers to speak of. He'd fought her before, hadn't he? What had changed since then?
She struck out towards his face, and yet when he tried to defend himself her real target was his hands. He attempted to make the most of it by draining her energy but she reacted again, unbelievable fast, opening a wound across his forearm and out of reach of his shadows. She shouldn't be able to. He was damn good at unarmed combat, and bolstered by her energy she shouldn't have stood a chance. And yet he couldn't land a hit.
He feinted out towards her face, giving ground as he prepared to direct his strike towards her solar plexus, but her hands were already moving to knock it aside- not even bothering to defend her head, going straight towards the real target before he'd even altered course. His eyes widened. He'd been wrong. She wasn't faster at all. She was moving before he did. Somehow, in some freakish way, she was predicting every single move he made.
He fell further back, catching his breath as she too backed off a little. She grinned, allowing her mask to break for a moment. "You get it now, don't you? The Bloody Rose. I can feel you. I can feel your thoughts, your emotions, your actions. I can feel your blood. And the more you bleed, the closer we become. Your body is mine, your blood is mine, and your life is mine. You misjudged me."
She stalked towards him again, and he backed up against a tree. "You're a monster. You're a goddamn monster."
The razor flickered out towards him, and she was laughing, laughing as she sliced him to pieces. He swung wildly towards her, instinct overcoming years of hard training, and the blade flicked out towards his wrist, severing the artery and splattering hot blood across her face. She licked the droplets off her lips, watching him as his knees sagged, only the tree holding him upright. "Teach me pain? My little finger knows more pain than your entire body. You're a pretender, nothing more, and you don't have a chance against the real thing."
Grayson clutched at his maimed wrist, struggling futilely to stem to flow of pulsing arterial blood. Dead in minutes. Dead. In minutes. He looked up at her. He'd known this was coming, known it ever since he'd first met her, and yet he couldn't bring himself to believe this was happening. The woman he'd fought with, the woman he'd joked with, had philosophised with, was going to kill him.
She reached down towards him, tenderly, delicately, and gently lifted his chin to make him look her in the eye. Even now there was nothing to read from her face. She was laughing, and yet her eyes were cold and unreadable. He meant nothing to her, nothing at all. To her, he was already dead.
He suddenly became aware of the cold edge against his neck, the sticky wetness of his own blood on the blade. Her voice assaulted him again. "You're a child, Grayson, a child trying to fit in with the grownups. You think you know pain, and yet you've never experienced it. You think you're a monster, and yet you're dancing with the real ones. You think you're messed up, and yet you don't even know what messed up is. You think you're strong enough to make it, but you fool nobody but yourself."
She straightened, leaving him there on his knees. "You told me that the world was a messed up place, and that life wasn't fair. You were right, but I know now they were borrowed words. You've never really had them hammered home." She shook her head. "As much as I hate you, I can't even say this is personal. But you know who I am, and so you have to die. You're too naive. You could have kept it to yourself, and you might have survived. But now it's too late. Goodnight, Grayson." She drew the blade across his throat, the sharp pain barely registering on top of everything else, and the blood began to flow.
Regrets and Intentions
When Grayson awoke, he was looking up at the sky. It was clear today, a pale blue with not a cloud in sight. The sun was a scorching ball of fire, and under normal circumstances he reckoned he'd have been burned to a crisp. But, for some reason, that appeared not to have happened. For some reason, at worst he was feeling a little too hot.
He was alive. Probably. He wasn't certain of the fact, but he was pretty sure. By all accounts the afterlife, if one did in fact exist, was a place of peace and tranquillity, and while he was not in any pain, nor was he sitting on a cloud strumming at a harp. That, in fact, was another point to add to his list of reasons to avoid dying; extremely, mind destroyingly, boring. But at the same time, while he might not be dead, he wasn't sure how exactly he could be alive right now. He'd had not one but two major arteries split, and that was not the kind of thing that one survived without urgent medical care- and considering that the only help in range was the same person who inflicted the injuries, it seemed somehow doubtful.
Perhaps, then, he really was in some kind of limbo. He'd never been picky when it came to religion, preferring what he did during this life to what came after, but he knew there were a few groups who believed in a sort of halfway zone between the living and the dead. Then again, most of those seemed to be places of fire and torment, while a minority were empty, fog-shrouded plains; and he could see neither. Perhaps he was in a coma, then. All of this could simply be a dream, vivid enough to be believable. He could see the sky, feel the heat, taste and smell the grit and dirt, hear the intruding mechanical noises of engines and pistons.
His first thought was that that might be pretty cool. Supposedly, you could do whatever you wanted inside a dream, so long as you convinced yourself it was possible; and Grayson was very good at putting his mind in its place. He could be the God of this little land of his. Could change everything to exactly how he wanted it. But being a God had to be pretty boring, and besides, you couldn't kill a man from inside a dream. Even if this was what it was, and he actually wanted it to happen, he couldn't allow it.
And he'd seen death. Felt it, as much as he'd tried to erase the memory. This wasn't it. And fantasising might be entertaining, but it sure as hell wasn't in any way productive. He reached his left hand across to his right wrist, feeling for some kind of injury, and sure enough there was the gentle impression of healing scar tissue. He was, then, alive. Remarkable, but hardly a surprise. Not only was he alive, but someone had taken the time to heal him. Not perfectly, of course, but enough to... enough to...
Realisation flooded through his brain, and he groaned inwardly. That was where he was- they'd brought him all the way to Lu
minacht Primary, and he hadn't even had the opportunity to take a look at Earth passing through. That, more than anything else, was a massive disappointment.
Now he was here, somewhere in the middle of a blistering desert, and they were going to expect him to hijack a train tomorrow. Not that he felt like he wasn't up to it, but if they'd fixed him to this extent overnight they must have taken him to a lumin, and lumin healing could make even the worst injuries seem like nothing; even when they weren't. He might get halfway through the mission and suddenly start spurting blood everywhere.
All of a sudden, he wished he hadn't opted for quite such an exciting and dramatic method of hijacking. Using a motorbike to jump onto a maglev at five hundred miles an hour might sound impressive, but it was far from efficient. Perhaps he hadn't had known just how fast that really was, but he still should have known that driving a motor vehicle across the top of a train was a pretty dumb idea- it had been Thief's.
He was certain the group would have been able to come up with something better, if only he hadn't been so eager to break his neck; or, for that matter, every bone in his body. But now it was too late.
Not that his plan was completely unwarranted. With the current state of the universe, everybody who wished to do even half well as a warrior had to become a bit of a showman in the process. With billions just like you, and with your exact skill set, you needed something to make you stand out. And since the high-ups loved their drama, mercenary conflicts had become almost a theatre, in which winning a fight was second in importance to how you won it. Once you were a known quantity you could do what you wanted, but up until then you everything you did had to be unique, spectacular. If nothing else, it weeded out the weak.
It did, however, have some serious side effects, namely that most of Fracture's mercenaries and heroes were now slightly unhinged at best, raving lunatics at worst. It took a certain type of person to take up fighting and killing not only as a profession, but also an art- a certain kind of crazy. His group, with the control-freak, the delusional rockstar, and the psychopath proved a perfect example. He didn't really know Seth or Crayton well enough to place them on the spectrum yet, but he was confident it was only a matter of time.
It wasn't so much that there weren't any real professionals anymore, only that those who were tended to end up in military or enforcement positions rather than self-employment. If you wanted to be a professional you joined the Alliance, if you wanted excitement and adventure you went freelance. And since freelancers were now such an integral part of modern society the politicians could do nothing more than make it a legal grey area, no matter how much they might hate them. Grayson personally loved the new system, partly because it was a lot of fun and partly because he'd never known any different, but at times like this he did find himself questioning it. It wasn't, as Karolus would no doubt have put it, the most logical state of affairs.
He sat up, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes and taking a look around. He'd been put on a wheeled sled, and Thief was towing him along a few metres behind, bike slowed to practically a walking pace. That was what he'd been hearing, he realised, the sound of Sunrise purring contentedly in front and Crayton stomping along behind. At first he was affronted that they hadn't bothered to stop for him, but upon reflection it wasn't like they'd had much choice in the matter. They needed to get to the railway, and they'd had no idea when he might eventually wake.
Crayton's speakers boomed out behind him, mechanical as always and giving away none of their master's thoughts. "Karolus? The boy's awake."
Grayson decided not to raise the point of being referred to as "the boy". Under these circumstances, he was probably better off finding out what had happened after he had lost consciousness. He stretched, yawning, and stepped off the sled. There was no dizziness or nausea, another sign that he'd received his treatment from a lumin. Normally, he wouldn't have been able to walk a few minutes after regaining consciousness from extreme blood loss. A shame he hadn't been able to see the look on Frankenstein's face at the use of a lumin.
Looking around him, he was confronted by the most barren and immense landscape he had ever been confronted by. Stretching out to the horizon on all sides was a vast expanse of dead earth, cracked and broken and leeched of all moisture. It was an orange-red, like the sky over a setting sun, and there was nothing to break up the landscape but a few rocky outcrops, spaced far apart upon the wasteland. It was beautiful, in a bleak and imposing way, and Grayson felt his mouth dry up just looking at it. The sky itself seemed large enough to encompass the world.
He set off walking, falling in quickly with the rest of the group, and Karolus dropped back from the front to parallel him. The angel smiled a little wearily. "Ah, the little martyr."
Grayson mulled it over, puzzled. "How am I a martyr?"
"Well, I don't think just anyone would take that kind of beating for their partner. Honestly, I wouldn't have expected it of you. I guess I misjudged you."
"That kind of beating?"
"Multiple lacerations, a severed radial artery, and a very nearly a slit carotid in your neck. Gods know how lucky you are to be here now; it's not like Sora could have used a tourniquet on your throat." He paused momentarily, looking oddly at the lumin. "Don't tell me you're suffering from memory loss?"
Grayson snorted. "Hardly. I just wouldn't have described like that. Heat of the moment, you know?"
"In the heat of the moment you told about a dozen thugs that you'd take your partner's punishment for her, and then proceeded to fight every one of them off. Whichever way you look at it, that takes a lot of balls, and it could hardly be described as a selfish act."
Grayson gulped uncomfortably. Sora, for some reason, had not only failed to kill him but apparently allowed him to live and made him out to be a hero. He really had to talk to her about that, but then he could hardly do it right now. "Not my smartest move. I doubt I'll be repeating it."
"Perhaps, but because of that impulse decision your partner is now alive and well, rather than dead or comatose in the middle of some godforsaken forest. And I hope you'll never have to do anything like that again, but for what it's worth, I'm proud of you. I'm sad to say, I had you down as a self-serving type who'd save your own skin over others'."
Karolus was right, that was exactly who he was. He'd decided a week ago that he could not be friends or anything else to these people, but even without having made up his mind on that he wouldn't have done any different. At the end of the day your life had to come before those of others, and while he did admittedly enjoy a little fighting he wasn't going to get himself killed for amusement. If a mercenary died, a mercenary died. They didn't have someone on standby to take their place at the headsman's block. And when it came to selfishness, Grayson could take it to a whole new level.
"As I've said, I'm not that person. It was an impulse, nothing more."
Karolus shrugged. "Perhaps. But all we know for sure is that you took a beating for your partner. Ill timed, perhaps, but I'm not going to berate you for something that wasn't your fault." He clapped the boy on the shoulder, walking back to his place at the front of the group. "You don't like praise; I get that. But you won't get it often, so you might as well savour it while you can."
Grayson shook his head slowly. Sora had made him out to be a hero. Just what he needed. As if he didn't have enough to deal with with the obsessive angel, the prattling mutant, and the sadistic partner who couldn't make up her mind whether or not to kill him. Now everybody thought he was some kind of noble warrior, and of course they'd expect him to behave as one. Perfect. Just perfect.
He walked a little faster, catching up to Sunrise and slipping behind Thief onto the passenger's seat. He'd never really figured out why there was a passenger seat on what was clearly a one person vehicle. It was one of those things that was always important enough to pick up on, but never important enough to bother asking about. Maybe it was Thief's oh-so-subtle way of looking for a woman. That wouldn't have surprised him- judging by hi
s obsession with Grayson and Sora's imagined relationship, he was obsessed with romance, and just naive enough to think it might actually work.
"So," the mutant called back over his shoulder, "hell of a day. Or should I say hell of a date?"
Grayson scowled, his new hero status putting him in a bad mood. "You know, I swear you get stupider every day."
Thief grinned, adjusting his glasses theatrically. "The greatest wisdom in the world is often labelled as stupidity."
"Very clever."
"I thought so."
"Who did you nick it from?"
The boy laughed. "Some human philosopher back before the Alignment. Can't remember his name."
"Figures."
The boy laughed again, completely immune to the disparaging comments. Grayson wasn't really sure whether to admire his confidence or hate his arrogance. It was often difficult to separate the two. "So, then. Joking aside, it sounds like it went pretty well."
Grayson sighed. "How would you define well? The fact that I nearly died?"
"Nah, I mean the day in general. On your first date you managed to save your girlfriend's life, take a semi-metaphorical bullet for her, and then, like some kind of superman, carry her half-conscious body all the way back to the hospital before passing out in her arms. If you ask me, that's textbook. Far better than you had any right to expect on a first date."
