Prelude: Prague

[x-roulette.livejournal.com]

The ceremony of innocence is drowned

(warning: potentially disturbing content)



Jennie Stavros had pictured her death a hundred different ways since she had taken up the leathers, especially when she was younger and green. What it would look like, what it would sound like, how it would feel. She had hoped that if she did have to die, at least it would be in a blaze of glory. Hair blowing heroically in the wind as she went down. That Jennie had been too naive to realize just how young she really was. That Jennie had never pictured how death actually would be, with her shit-scared and unwashed, exhaustion making her entire body rough and raw as sandpaper.

And she never expected death to smile at her first.

It was a marketplace in Prague, hundreds of tourists and locals, shoulder to shoulder. Voices buzzing in her ears. The world had gotten progressively redder as the day wore on, and she was already keyed up. Keep moving, stay on the road, as far and as fast she could go. Just a brief stop for some gas and some quick food, and she would be running again. Running until... she figured something else out. The bike she stashed someplace safe, full of sun and people. Her mind mapping out possible escape routes as she let the crowd carry her in, thinking she had safety in their numbers.

Foolish. Exhaustion's made you stupid. Rookie mistake, as John would say.

Poor John. Poor dead John.

In a way, she was glad when she spotted him across the market, in his leather jacket and dark hair, right and so very wrong. In all her running, of the terror of seeing him, at least now, he was there. He was real.

His eyes were hidden behind mirrored shades but she could feel them on her, burning a hole through her. Her heart briefly stopped when she saw him, and cold sweat broke out along her back. He had been watching her, waiting for her to see him. He smiled at her, slow and showing too many teeth. In one awful moment Jennie knew he had control of the situation, he had the upper hand.

Jennie set the oranges in her hand back down, eyes flicking across the marketplace in panic. She had tried to prepare herself for this, ran all the scenarios in her head as she'd been taught. But the reality of him chased all her careful plans out of her head and left her with a naked, animal terror. An instinct that screamed at her to run, run now. She held onto the table at the fruit seller's stand, trying to steady herself.

Think, she urged herself. Stop freaking out and think. Her mind couldn't turn up any other scenarios where she got out of this alive, but she could mitigate the damage. There were a lot of people in the market, and she knew he would not hesitate to break each and every one of them to get to her.

Leave, Jennie ordered. Leave and get out of here. Get to someplace secluded. Sometimes the difference between living and dying was simply having control of the terrain. She needed to have the higher ground. She forced herself to straighten her spine, to look Death in the eye, and with a jerk of her head, direct it to follow her. Then she spun on her heel and walked purposefully out of the marketplace. Away from the hundreds of people, through the cobbled streets and old alleyways of this medieval city.

The people on the sidewalks were too slow, the traffic too thick. Jennie tried to force herself to be calm, to not run, to not push down the clots of tourists ambling along at an excruciatingly slow pace. She weaved and dodged, offering a few muttered apologies as she was forced to use elbows.

Away. Get away. Run, Jennie, Run.

This part of town was older and more crumbly, steel rebar blanketed one of the buildings, supporting it for renovations. Empty of people today. Jennie read the lines that crawled along in a way only she could see and she nodded to herself. Red, thick and ugly, shot through with soft, muted white. A fighting chance at the very least.

It would do.

It was a nice, old house. The kind with grand staircases and high fireplaces. There was a large room near the back, it must have been a grand ballroom once. At least three stories with a high plaster ceiling, scaffolding showing they were in the process of restoring the cherubs painted into the center. A second story had a balcony that overlooked the center of the room. Plaster and tools lay about the edges, rubble and refuse scattered throughout. Jennie quickly climbed to the second story, positioning herself so she could get a layout of the whole of the room.

She heard him before she saw him, his slow footfalls echoed across the dusty floor.

"Jennie Jennie Jennie," Death sing-songed, followed by a high laugh. "Where did you go, my Jennie girl?"

Jennie didn't respond, she was watching the lines crawling along the scaffolding. Bury him and then make a break for it? No. No, that won't work. But perhaps... A red disk formed in her hand.

"Jeeeeeeeen," he sang out again, like he was calling out a naughty child. She waited for him to move into the center of the room. Then she flung the disk upwards, so it splashed against the steel and wood of the scaffolding, causing a chain reaction.

Rust bloomed along the metal, and wood cracked. The scaffolding swayed and the force of it caused it to snap and explode outward, sending bits of wood and metal flying at a frightening speed. One piece headed directly for the space in-between the man's eyes.

He watched it impassively, before he moved at the last second and caught it in his bare hands. Jennie felt her heart sink at how fast he was.

"Tricky, tricky," he said, tossing the rebar from hand to hand. "Tricky girl," he said. He looked up to the left, then to the right, almost lazily, before turning and throwing the rebar, embedding it in the wall not three feet from where Jennie was hiding. Jennie could only stare at it stupidly.

He meant to miss, you know Jennie heard John's voice in her head, as she had almost every day since she'd started running. She was aware of the fact that clinging to him the way she did was making her seem a bit mental, but it was what she had. He's fucking with you. He won't make this quick.

So what do I do, John? How do I get out of this one? she thought, her breathing too loud in her ears.

His voice came back, echoing from the past. You have a gift. She could hear his exasperation, because it always was so obvious to him. Use it. Without meaning to, Jennie smiled.

She crouched against the wall, scanning the room, trying to see if there was anything else she could use against him. Red and white shimmered around each probability, but nothing that could save her--- until, there. Near one of the windows. And-- she followed the lines, as they crawled around the figure in the center of the room. Dark, angry red, shot through with bright, glittery white. It was such a slim chance, and it involved her getting close to him, but it was her only option.

Taking a brief pause to curse at the universe for requiring her to fight hand-to-hand against an opponent that clearly outmatched her yet again, Jennie flexed her fingers and took a deep breath.

This was going to hurt.

The figure put his hands behind his head and began to whistle, waiting for her as she crouched low and slid below the bannister, dropping to the second floor noiselessly while his back was turned. She hid behind one of the pillars supporting the second level, heart hammering in her chest and trying to steady herself.

Okay, do this. Get out there and--

"Gotcha," he appeared from the other side of the pillar. He lashed out and Jennie jerked away, his fist embedding itself in the wall in a shower of plaster where her head had been moments before.

She backed away, leading him to the center of the room. He threw another few punches at her, which Jennie dodged, the last one she tried to block, but the force of it made her teeth rattle.

He was so strong and fast, and Jennie couldn't keep up with him for long. He finally landed a jab in her stomach and removed all of the air in her lungs. She didn't even have time to cry out. He wrenched her arm and she used the momentum to pull out of his grasp. She feinted low and then kicked high, catching him across the bridge of the nose, her boot should have shattered bone and indeed she felt something give.

But she wasn't naive.

She twisted away into a low crouch, watching him as he backed away, hands to his nose. His sunglasses lay shattered on the ground.

He hunched over in pain, moaning and-- when he noticed that Jennie wasn't buying it, straightened up and laughed, snapping his nose back into place with a faint crack and inhaling deeply.

He was faster at a lot of things, it seemed.

Death looked at Jennie, crouched low, poised to run or strike at a moment's notice, while his posture was relaxed, calm. He smiled at her, showing her what he had been hiding. Jennie felt bile rise up into her throat. His eyes... oh, his eyes. They were crawling with jagged black lines that exploded outward from his pupil, irises the color of old milk underneath. Ruined eyes. There was no soul behind those eyes. Just cruelty. The wrongness of them was like nails on a chalkboard to her brain. She wanted to launch herself at him, to claw and rake those eyes out of his face, to scream with rage. But she stayed where she was, her own eyes blazing with hate.

"Hullo, gorgeous," he said, smoothing back his hair with both hands and laughing.

Jennie said nothing, just waited for him.

He shook his head and tsked. "No fun today, eh?" he said, then he moved. Jennie barely dodged his first strike, but she couldn't dodge the second. The blow to her thigh made her leg go numb. She stumbled and he caught her, yanking her upright.

"Don't make this too easy, Jennie girl. You don't want to disappoint the person you love most in the world, do you?" he mocked.

"The person I love," Jennie gasped, "Is dead. You people killed him."

"Is that what you tell yourself?" he said. Then he laughed. The blow to the side of her face made her vision go gray at the edges. He pulled her head up by the hair with one hand, the other grasping her jaw. He leaned forward.

"If anyone is at fault here, it's you," he whispered in her ear. "You didn't come in time." Jennie couldn't repress the shudder that went through her body. He laughed and changed his grip to her arms.

"Did you like how we left him? Your precious John? Always thought he would make such lovely decoration. Knew it was a bit early for Christmas, but red's always in, yeah?"

Jennie spat in his face.

"Aw, pussycat's mad," he cooed, and went to wipe his face with his sleeve. Jennie's skin glowed white and she used that moment and the sweat on her arms to slither out of his grasp.

Jennie ran, tripping and stumbling to a corner of the room stacked with the repairman's tools and supplies. She began throwing things at him in desperation. The hammers, the shovels, boxes of powdered chemicals, he laughed and batted each one aside. Jennie lunged and threw one final thing at him, and he blocked it with his forearm, getting splashed with its contents. The acrid smell of it burned the inside of Jennie's mouth and nostrils and she gagged.

He tsked and flicked his hands, dripping and leaving a small puddle on the concrete floor.

"You finished?" he asked. Jennie looked around herself, panic in her wide blue eyes. There was nothing left.

"My turn," he said.

Jennie closed her eyes and pushed out with her powers, a faint glow of white shimmered across her skin as she waited for the blow to hit. She was pulled forward and then thrown into the wall, bits of plaster showering her as she slid to the floor. Her powers saved her skull from being fractured but did not stop the pain. Briefly there was a flash of colored lights behind her eyelids-- Christmas lights, and a stab of sadness to go with the pain in her body.

She moaned and pulled herself up, only for another blow to take her across the face. She shook her head, ears ringing, and made to move but he held her down. She opened her eyes to see him staring at her, a bemused smirk playing across his lips.

"You know, I've always wondered what it would be like to literally break every bone in someone's body. It must get pretty meticulous, snapping each and every little bone by hand," he delicately seized Jennie's left hand in his right one, the other other applying pressure to her thigh, where he'd bashed it not a few moments earlier. The pain made Jennie's head swim. "--Not that I'm not going to give it a go, mind you. Just means I'm going to have to do other things in the meantime, make sure I'm still entertained," he wrenched her pinky and the tiny bone snapped under his fingers. Jennie cried out.

"Hey!" he smiled, and stroked her hair tenderly. "Shhh. It's okay, Jennie girl. It's okay. You had a good long run. Anything you'd like to say to me? Any last words, before you start screaming to me all the things I'm wanting to hear?" He grinned.

Jennie whispered something, whole body shaking.

"Eh, what's that?" He mockingly put his ear closer so he could hear.

She grabbed the back of his head and pulled his ear down to her mouth. "Is that paint stripper I smell?" she hissed through bloody lips.

He pulled back in surprise, titling his head. Jennie held up the lighter she'd lifted from his pocket when he'd leaned in close and smiled evily.

Something passed across his face, a feeling Jennie couldn't name. Surprise, mostly. Perhaps a little bit of fear... and later, in what her tired mind would argue had been a hallucination, she could have sworn she saw the briefest flicker of ...pride.

He'd expected a scared and broken girl, and never questioned it when Jennie had given it to him. He was strong and fast and it was almost impossible to hurt him for long, which made him overconfident. He had been played since the moment Jennie stepped out of the shadows.

Tactics 101 John had always said. Cockiness will always cost you.

And now it was going to hurt him terribly.

In the space it took him to blink and pull back red light pulsed from Jennie's hand and flames burst to life, following the stream he'd left. They ate at him quickly, up his jeans and onto his jacket, onto him. He was wreathed in fire, aided by Jennie's powers. She saw hands reach for his head, saw him sway, and then she saw no more of him because she was up and running. Every step should have been agony but adrenaline numbed her body and pushed her forward, away from the burning figure behind her.

Back into the streets, back into daylight, back into life, one painful step after the other. Around corners, slipping between people, not caring if she knocked them over this time. She wanted to live. She needed to live.

She owed it to her boys, and their families.

Somehow she found the bike. Somehow shaking fingers pulled on the jacket. It took her bloody fingers a few tries to latch onto the zipper, to pull it up and closed. She slipped the helmet on and kickstarted the bike, the engine roaring with another wave of adrenaline. Then she was weaving through the streets, dodging in and out of traffic, missing cars and buses by mere inches, running lights and jumping sidewalks.

Somehow, improbably, she reached the highway. And somehow, improbably, Prague fell behind her, giving way to open meadows and more life. And somehow she stayed upright, sobbing from relief and pain, for a good hour afterwards.

By time she reached the border that evening, she was lucky to get the female crossing guard. She removed her helmet to show the woman her papers, and the woman's eyes widened.

"~Where are you going?~" she asked, her eyes taking in the bruises covering Jennie's face.

"~Away,~" Jennie said, exhaustion and the adrenaline making her voice hitch.

Wordlessly the woman nodded and stamped Jennie's papers and handed them back to her.

Jennie acknowledged her with a nod of her own. Jennie made to put her helmet back on, but the woman stopped her with a hand on her arm.

"~He will not hurt you again,~" she said.

"~No,~" Jennie said. "~Not if I can help it.~"