"Uhm…" The woman groaned as light pried through the cracks of her shoddy blinds, then rolled toward the side of the bed and reached for the source of warmth that had disappeared sometime in the morning.
She cracked an eye open and shut it just as fast when confronted with the harsh, blinding glare, which in itself was odd, since the smog hanging over Gotham had long seen to it that what little light that managed to fight its way through the lower atmosphere always reached the ground tinted a sickly green.
Thighs stacked on top of each other, she propped herself up onto one hand and called for the self-proclaimed 'Super Demon' she'd spent the last four nights wrapped around. "Rowan?" Her overgrown fly-traps answered in his stead, rustling loudly before they offered her a plate of runny omelettes, complete with slices of toast she was probably supposed to dip in the egg.
A yawn forced its way out as she stretched, her elbows and shoulders and the knots in her back popping one after another. Then she set about shoveling the food into a stomach her constitution kept eternally empty. For all that the Green gave and all the ways it served her, it also demanded its due in appetite and sugar. Not that she was going to look a gift horse in the mouth, since it meant she would stay thin and athletic without ever having to count her calories.
With breakfast settled, she hurried to the bathroom.
She brushed her teeth, scrubbed the dried cum off her thighs and stomach, and lathered her hair in bubbly shampoo.
By the time she finished, an hour had passed, which could have probably been two, or three if Rowan was around, but her brutish lover was unfortunately out on another of his runs for… Suitable subjects.
And by 'suitable' he meant the worst of the worst, the ones society wouldn't shed a tear over should they perish. Pamela, for her part, didn't see the point. What did it matter to her if it were petty thieves or death row inmates strapped to the operating tables?
But the vigilante had insisted, and Rowan could be very… Convincing when he wanted to be. Lucky for her, she could be just as convincing pulling the other way, and where he kept trying to coax some good out of her, she spent her nights working to bring out the worst in him… Could anyone blame her?
He was way hotter evil, and he even had the look for it!
Not that he needed much help playing fast and loose with 'the Codes' with the city up in flame.
He'd even admitted as much when he hauled in the first batch of test subjects and stood witness while every single one died screaming. It was practically a game for them by now, which was not so different from Selina's cat-and-mouse with the Bat. And so far? She was winning. Ivy caught her reflection in the mirror, skin all but glowing, and grinned.
And so began another day for Poison Ivy. Another day of work, another mind-numbing day on her own, save for a fellow scientist who seemed to be running late and was every bit as dry as the cure they were working on.
"AAAARGH!"
She didn't let herself dwell on Selina often, or Harley, who came a distant second, but mornings like this one made it hard not to. The company would have helped. A shame, then, that one had reportedly gone off the deep end, if Rowan was to be trusted on the matter, and the other had thrown herself headlong at the very lunatic responsible for the mess they had found themselves in the middle of.
Pamela hoped, with what little softness she had left to spare, that the both of them were faring better than the rest of Gotham.
She flicked her dripping red hair back over a shoulder and shrugged into the white coat she'd salvaged from her old wardrobe, while her victim screamed himself hoarse the whole time. Between her and Victor, the worst of the violence had been wrung out of him, yet the hallucinations were proving hardier than either of them had given it credit. Pamela crossed to the head of the table, drew another vial, sank a syringe into its stopper, and emotionlessly met the man's petrified stare.
And what was it he saw, she wondered, that put such fear in him? Any other man might have thanked his stars to wake where he was, given that Pamela had put on nothing but her underwear and a lab coat that hung… Loosely over it.
Oh, well, his loss.
"Shhh…" Ivy hushed, drawing nearer while he fought the vines for all the good it did him. He'd torn the tendon between his chest and bicep doing exactly this only the night before, yet here he was, back at it again, clearly having learned absolutely nothing. "You're going to feel right as rain…" Or flatline. There's seldom a tidy in-between. Not with Poison Ivy, at least. And certainly never with Gotham.
"Best start praying,"
With any luck, this new concoction would finally do the trick, because though it'd only been three days, she was already sick to death of having to tend to these screaming, drooling idiots each morning.
"For your sake, and mine…"
"No…! Nooo!!! NOOOOO—"
.
.
.
"—NOOOOO! Get away from me!" Lawson screamed while Nick and Michael both bolted.
His heart slammed against his ribs and battered up to his throat as he and Michael made a break for the door that may as well have been miles off. If his mind had hoped to distract him from the literal Demons hot on their trail, then it sure had the strangest way of doing it, because what it chose to dredge up was a damn documentary, of all things. Some nature thing, narrated by a voice swollen with grandeur.
He hadn't even meant to watch it. The truth was that he'd been baked so far into the upholstery that night, sunk so deep into the couch, that finding the remote had loomed before him like a great quest beyond mortal reckoning. He hadn't cared for it, in all honesty. Most of it had drifted past him in a soft green blur of migrating herds, moving crowds and time-lapse glaciers.
But one thing had stuck with Nick, and that was the narrator's claim that every man and woman alive today belongs to a lineage of survivors who withstood plague, famine and war… That if your instincts ever screamed at you to fucking book it, you book it, no question asked, and you don't look back, because those were what had carried your bloodline across every disaster the world could throw at it.
And that the scream was the inheritance of thousands of ancestors who had run when it counted and thus lived to pass the fear along.
Every cell in him was screaming it now.
Run, you moron!
Run and don't look back!
Run and keep fucking running until the coast's clear!
But fear wasn't the only thing the bloodline had handed down, was it?
There was another urge riding alongside it; an urge that was just as old and every bit as powerful, and that which had driven the first of his ancestors to creep toward the hot, dancing energy no sane animal would approach, and to swallow the strange psychedelics that forced their primitive brains to grow new pathways.
When the gunshots lit up the room behind them and Lawson's screams became increasingly more frantic, what Nick felt, against every shred of sense, was curiosity. He'd heard the tales of the Imp, whose methods were every bit as violent as the Bat's, if not more so, and of the Shadows the Demon commanded with ease. And Nick was damn curious.
So he turned. He turned and found a pitch-black darkness that promised nothing beyond broken bones should a man venture past the safety of the light. Not that the light was going to spare Lawson from the black, crawling lump that itself seemed to repel light.
What caught his eye next were Lawson, the gun lighting up his terror-stricken face every moment or so, and the empty shells clattering uselessly while the croaking Demon crept ever closer.
Nick didn't dare watch a second longer, not now that the lump seemed to have noticed his gaze and turned its sight back on him.
So back to fleeing it was, but as the old adage went, 'curiosity kills the cat.'
That one brief glance was all it took to cost him his footing.
One moment he stood upright and the next he was down on all fours, scrambling to right himself, but by then Michael had run out ahead and shut the door in his face, probably figuring the more bodies he put between himself and the Shadow, the better his odds would be.
Now, Nick was no saint either and would've done the same in his shoes, but he owed it to himself to curse Mike to hell and back at least, which he did while wrestling with the oily knob he was beginning to wish he'd cleaned. Luckily the thing finally gave after a few seconds that had dragged on like an eternity. "Wai-Wait for me!" He screamed, watching Mike hurl himself into the driver's seat, but before the man could turn the key, a grappling hook latched onto his ankle and hauled him up the streetlamp, upon which the Imp perched.
Nick watched, fascinated, as the Demon's features dripped and smeared; its mouth widening from ear-to-ear, its six eyes leaving persistent glow in the air like ink trailing down a damp canvas. And then he made straight for the van, only to discover that Mike, the selfish bastard, had taken the key with him.
"He... Hehe!" He'd wanted to cry out in frustration, but the toxin would allow him nothing but giggles as he abandoned the van and the hideout. He could always start again! Find another empty house.
Fleeing for his life down the street, Nick glanced back once more to find Mike hanging upside down from the lamp, and the Demon gliding lazily behind him. He paled and ducked into an alleyway he knew would open into a maze of houses and pathways. Nick doubted it would be enough to shake off the Hellspawn hounding him, but it sure beat doing nothing at all…
Nick ran, and ran, and ran until his legs burned with a pain that was still but a fraction of the fear driving him forward, coming to a stop only when he saw the trashed, abandoned church his god-fearing dad used to bring him to every Sunday.
That was a long time ago, though.
It was a time before the freaks began to crawl out of the woodwork, a time when the old crime families, for all their sins, still tried to hold onto the old codes.
His arms instinctively raised on their own, reaching for the disheveled wooden door that he'd once hated with a passion, and that he now knew might be the only thing standing between him and the Demons, only for his legs to cramp up from the intense exertion when he was mere feet away.
'Work, work, work!' Nick screamed in his mind, while his mouth babbled on and on with incoherent nonsense as the Demon landed at the other end of the alleyway. When that too failed, he began to crawl, laughing and crying as the sound of boots crushing gravel echoed from behind him agonizingly slowly.
Nick was not a man of faith.
He'd never believed, despite his father's attempts to make him, but what else could he rely on now that his body and mind and guns had all failed him?
'I'll be good,' he swore as the crooked, decorative cross caught his eye.
'I'll change my ways,'
'I'll go to Church. I'll do charity, and I'll never sell drugs again!'
On and on Nick pleaded, until—against all odds—the cross began to glow faintly, only to vanish behind a pair of steel boots and wings of white. It seemed God had not given up on him just yet.
"Azrael." The Demon called out from behind him, prompting the avenging 'Angel' who had descended to clench his fists in disapproval.
"Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of the devil;
Ye cannot be partakers of the Lord's table and of the table of devils.
Are you trying to provoke the Lord's jealousy?
Are you stronger than He?"
The 'Angel' stepped over him, the 'wings' Nick only now realized were in truth a cape billowing in an unnatural wind. "What are you doing, Child?" There was a disappointment in his tone that almost reminded Nick of his father's whenever he landed himself in trouble.
"What?" Unsurprisingly, the Demon's offended scoff reminded him of the reply he'd always thrown back.
"Look at yourself! Have you lost all hope in salvation?!"
"Hope in sal—" The Imp repeated, scoffing again and pushing past the Demon just when Nick managed to touch the door. "You've gotta be fucking kidding me."
The Imp crossed the alley in no hurry at all, talons loose at his sides, six eyes fixed on the door Nick had finally dragged himself behind. He stepped up to where the light gave way to the dark of the threshold, and attempted to cross it.
Light erupted through the warped floorboards in jagged white seams.
The pews were long gone and the windows long shattered, but for all that the place had been gutted and left to rot, it'd been a church once, and the holy symbols, cracked and faded into wood no thief had thought worth stealing, remained.
It violently threw the Demon clear, hurling him from the threshold like batting a bug.
Nick threw the flimsy latch first, not that it was any noteworthy feat, given how old lock and rusted it was, then slammed the door shut and put his back to it.
Chest heaving against it, Nick groaned, sure that the Demon could not follow him in, so he stopped looking, and started listening.
The criminally insane were still people at the end of the day, and people, him included, were fucking busybodies.
The voices came through the rotten wood, but Nick's heart was slamming so hard the blood roared in his ears, causing half of what reached him to drown in his own pulses.
"If God cared," The Imp said, and Nick could practically envision the scowl from the tone of his voice alone, "He'd be here."
"Perhaps He already is… Perhaps it was He who sent the both of us, Crusader and Demon alike, to cull the madness in this city." The Angel responded.
Nick heard the Imp pick himself up, and shivered at the unhurried scrape of his boots on solid ground. "There He goes again, taking the credit. Now I know how doctors feel. Crack a chest open, bring a man back from the dead, and what does he do? Thanks God. Well, if God sent me, then He clearly has no problem with my methods."
"That is not—"
"I don't have time for this." The footsteps suddenly got closer, stopping just short of the door.
"Don't bother… He is under the Lord's protection now."
The Demon merely chuckled at the Angel's claim, before calling out to him in a silky smooth voice.
"Nikolas Varga, right?"
Nick's blood froze in his veins. He had never given his full name to a soul, least of all a Demon, and yet the thing had it anyway. "That's right, buddy… I know you. I know what you did…
I know about the first time you stole from your classmates and got caught. And about the addict you beat to death for your initiation. I know about—"
It recited monotonously, laying crime beside crime, while Nick warred with the crushing guilt he'd spent years drowning and, God help him, the old, warm ember in his belly that was wearyingly often accompanied by a swelling rush of adrenaline at having held another's life in his two hands and decided it would end…
The Demon spared him not one of the itsy, nitty-gritty details, drawing what felt like immesne enjoyment from torturing Nikolas mentally. Yet through all of it, he told himself he could hold on. He could, because God had seen to it that his sins were cleansed, as his father used to preach.
And then It named his greatest sin, and all of a sudden Nick wasn't so sure anymore.
"I know about your dad too. He brought you here every Sunday, didn't he? The guy loved you to the very end, stupid as that was, to the point he helped you bury one of your bodies, but he couldn't stand it, could he? He couldn't stand to wake up knowing what he'd done for you, so he took his own life." It laughed cruelly. "Come to think of it, isn't the Almighty pretty judgy about this sort of thing? You took his life. You stole his ticket into Heaven.
God might look the other way.
Your dad might've even forgiven you.
But can you ever forgive yourself?"
It slammed a fist against the door, and what had felt like an impenetrable fortress a moment ago returned to what it had always been: A flimsy, rotted old door that couldn't have kept out a pack of teenagers. He opened his mouth, yet nothing came as his eyes met the Demon's through the fist-sized hole it had made, and found in those malicious depths the truth he'd spent his whole life running from.
"So that's a 'No,' then."
It reached for him, driving the air from his lungs and the consciousness from his mind, causing Nick to slump where he sat. The last thing he heard was the Angel's reproach, "This is the Demon in you speaking. A man is given to repentance, not despair. You leave him no door but the one that leads down."
And the Demon's judgment,
"He deserves to go nowhere if not down."
Nick hated that parts of him agreed with it.
—————
A/N: Got a question for those of you who've been around long enough to remember my earlier disasters.
I first started writing with DML (if you know, you know), but eventually grew so dissatisfied with it that I somehow managed to fumble the entire storyline. The fact that I started the damn thing with absolutely no direction whatsoever probably didn't help either. Who would've thought?
Then came Infinity, my brilliant attempt to regain whatever writing skills I'd apparently misplaced along the way. And I'll be honest, I barely knew what the fuck I was doing while writing that thing (again, if you know, you know. I ain't incriminating myself), so that went about as spectacularly as you'd expect.
And now, because apparently I haven't suffered enough, I've been getting mentally tortured by a character I've been cooking up for Fate, plus a fair amount of guilt and regret over how dirty I did all of them.
Obviously, I'm not about to start another story while I'm still writing Hellbred. Book 2 needs to be finished first, at the very least.
They do say third time's the charm, but considering how spectacularly the first two attempts went, I'm not exactly brimming with confidence here.
That said, I've been entertaining another idea.
What if I made my fanfictions into something of a Seven Deadly Sins collection? Hellbred, with Rowan as its protagonist, would represent Wrath, while this new character would embody Pride.
I'm thinking an arrogant, insufferable dickhead. The sort of shameless ragebaiter who could piss off an entire room just by opening his mouth, and would probably consider that an achievement worth celebrating.
Oh, and he wouldn't be a Reincarnator. I've gotten rather bored with reincarnation stories lately, especially with how often the whole premise gets used as a crutch.
Anyway, that's the idea. I'm still on the fence about whether I should give Fate another shot, considering my rather impressive track record of fucking it up.
So... What do you guys think? Third time's the charm?
Anyway, here's the page if you'd like to check my writing out: P 4 tr3on . C0m (slash) Regularrr