Chapter 1
She’s angry and she wants a fight.
She ends up drinking.
It’s a compromise that doesn’t end up with her hurting people. If she starts a fight someone’s going to get hurt.
She needs to blank her mind. Needs to silence the thoughts that rage around her head, images she wishes she could forget. Her bad decisions.
Her regrets.
She sees the little girl, sees the blood, sees her hand holding the gun. She hears the echo as it discharges, hears the hollow wet thunk as it tears through her young chest, hears as her body collapses down to the floor even as she reaches out trying to save her from the impact. The haunting smells are the worst. The visual and auditory memories she can work through, but the sudden whiff of iron, unexpected, the taste hitting the back of her throat knocks her mind back to panic, forces her to relive the memory. She can almost smell the blood, the retched tang of iron mixed with stale sweat, the smell of violence, unhappiness and death. It haunts her. Her mistake. Her failure. Her fear.
The staff doesn’t make her angry. It makes her afraid.
It makes her fear the monster she is inside. She’s capable of so much violence, of causing so much hurt. That she could kill a child in cold blood. An unarmed innocent. Only a monster could kill a child. She hates that her mind follows on repeat. She locked the monster away for a time, transferred to administration, caged the beast in the hope that it could never kill again.
But then she let it out.
For him.
She hoped that if anyone could control the monster she’d become it would be him. He promised no combat ops. Led her into releasing the monster one little step at a time whilst promising that it would never see combat, that she would not see combat. She thought maybe if she kept the monster leashed it would be enough.
It wasn’t enough.
She kept it contained initially, leashed placid and docile. She was thrown into a wall, knocked unconscious and lost her charge. Another girl she failed to protect.
She held it tightly leashed, let it attack just the one threat, protecting the girl she promised herself. That was all. She left her victim unconscious but alive. The girl protected. She threw up only once everything was safe, but what ifs playing throughout her head intermingled with images of another girl and the horror of her picking up her victims gun, turning the rifle on this girl, seeing the blood blossom slowly across her shirt, hearing the hollow wet thunk as the bullet slices through flesh and bone, smelling the acrid burning following discharge, tasting the iron in the back of her throat. She didn’t sleep that night.
She pushed past it. Reasoned and rational. She kept it leashed continued to protect them... to protect him.
The next op was worse. Senseless violence. Outnumbered and outgunned almost before she could think to react. The monster inside her took guns, overruled her decision to avoid all firearms. Her mind reasoned it necessary. She needed something to even the odds stacked against them when the military police advanced on their position. Two specialists against an army is wholly insufficient. She gave the monster teeth. The ability to hurt and kill so much more easily, to rend flesh apart, bathe in blood. Twelve rounds in each, twenty four victims.
He stops her.
She moves on. She won’t take up a gun again. She won’t give the monster teeth to kill so easily. She can balance this, she thinks. She can keep protecting him, keep the monster restrained, minimal violence to protect. She can justify that much. The monster leashed it can’t take a life. She can’t take a life.
Then he forces her hand. Forces her to let go the leash entirely. She takes up the staff.
And she enjoys it. The violence. The power. The ability to cause pain a hundred fold. She’d like to tell herself her reasons are good – she’s protecting her team from attack when she takes up the staff. She’s lying to herself and she knows it. She wants the power. She wants to fight. To strike out at others and conquer. To deal hurt to those who’d stand against her. She wants to hurt them. She enjoys the victory. She’s a monster.
She’s afraid that someday she’ll stop caring, that someday she’ll let it win.
That all she’ll be is the monster staring back from her eyes in the mirror.
And she won’t care.
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