Shadows of Angels, part 34, R

[Daughterof_Evil]

Just taking a break in the monotonous hiatus of this child of the night. What have you lovelies been doing while I was away? Homework? Housework? Head-banging?

This part includes mild sexual innuendo, mild medical gore, and mild swearing. Thank you all again for your wonmderful support...you have no idea what it means to me.
***
“ …in other news, German Intergang leader Hans Klirren has dominated an entire city block of Berlin for his stronghold, leading many authorities to believe he is either bracing for an attack or becoming insane…”

Tan skin, red kevlar, that mask. Running pale fingertips down his peaceful face. Fingers through his gelled, dark hair. He stirred in his sleep, and she sat back, afraid she had disturbed him, but went back to the stitches on his arm, admiring the gentle profile of his handsome face as he turned away from her.

“ Intergang colonies in Colombia continue to gain both suspicion and support from the international community. Many countries are still wary from the Bastille Day bombing in Paris, though the Colombian sect of Intergang is quick to point out it has nothing to do with the quarrel of American and European sublets…”

His thin chest heaving with an unconscious sigh was the last thing X remembered before rousing from sleep, the covers bundled around her torso. She found herself asleep on a large cushion atop a Persian rug in the middle of a bare wood floor. The walls were sepia-colored, hung with Pakistani tapestries. A fan had been ripped out of the ceiling, and its exposed cords were spewing from an empty socket.

She sat up and rubbed the back of her neck. She could only remember moving through the dark tourist channels of the Paris sewer system, listening to the slap of the water, watching their shadows bounce across the wet-gleaming brick walls. Saru crouched down next to her. He was in a pair of sweat pants, tabi socks, and a blue tank top.

“ Sweep where?” he asked.

She blinked at him. “ Huh?”

He pointed at her crumpled bed and attempted the English again. “ Sreeeep weru?”

The withdrawal hit her like a sledgehammer, hard and swift. She suddenly noticed the sweat soaking through her gauze-thin nightshirt, the prickles of cold along her skin, the blinding headache. The beef steroids were not helping her in the least, and every day the pain grew more punctual, the sickness more violent.

She darted up and out of the room, past a concerned Saru and an emotionless Hiramiaku, and threw up blood in the steel kitchen sink.
***
“ Just hold still, child,”

There was a man standing over her, shortish and grey, with a comb-over and a pair of surgical goggles perched on a beaked nose. She trembled with fear and cold and pain, and every time her body was wracked with agony, a shock went through her. She could feel the metallic taste in the back of her mouth, her skin crawling with microscopic minds, the tiny worlds built behind her eyeballs.

The doctor pulled a pair of tongs out of a bloody mess above her eyebrows. A bit of soft grey material sat between the halves, and he tossed it into a steel basin. He bit his lips, tinkered with a few wires running over her left eye.

“ Try to move it now,” he advised.

She did. A metal pinky finger quivered.

“ Good,” He was satisfied, and smiled.

“ The work isn’t going fast enough,” said a deep and smooth voice behind him.

“ You can’t rush art,” the doctor said, glaring at the man out of the corner of his eye. “ We’ll put her in the machine tomorrow, we should let her get her last night’s sleep,”

They receded into the dark. The light haloing her tortured body remained.

She felt herself hating.
***
A knock at the door. Helen listened, then muted the TV and left the kitchen. She paused at the front.

“ Who is it?”

“ It’s Bruce,”

The clatter as she unlatched the door. He was watching it all happen in his mind, like a tape he’d already seen. The red door flew open.

“ Mr. Wayne!” she cried, surprised. A sweatshirt, jeans, a tan Pakistani scarf holding her twists back in a perfect black arc behind her head. She was wearing blue socks.

“ Please, it’s Bruce,” he reminded her. He held out a bouquet of golden lilies wrapped in green tissue paper and secured with an orange silk bow. She took them, then, slightly embarrassed, invited him in.

The suite was small and just glimpsed the bay through the forest of investment buildings surrounding it. Green walls, carpet patterned with some faded baroque style, blue couches filled with foam. A kitchenette was set clumsily into the corner, and the other corner was the cordoned-off bedroom and bath.

Helen was talking. “…they just moved me here.”

“ So the case is going to take longer than normal?” he asked nonchalantly. She was moving around the kitchenette like a Nubian goddess.

“ Probably,” She stopped and leaned against the doorway. The TV was still muted, and images of sloping Colombian forests were intersected with slips of farmland. Coca crops grown beside corn. Banana plantations. Small, half-naked sun-browned children climbing in papaya trees with machetes on their waists. Interrupted by an image of a shaved-head Venezuelan man in a white suit, speaking without words.

“ No work today?” she asked. “ It’s eleven thirty,”

He started. “ No, I just left early.”

“ What did you need?” she questioned.

“ Would you come out with me?” he asked gently, somewhat embarrassed.

She looked at the floor. “ Bruce, I would love to, but—“

“ You can’t date anyone involved with the case, I know,” he said, raising a hand to silence her.

She shook her head, smiling. “ But, just…look at me!” She gestured at the jeans, sweatshirt, bandana. “ I look awful!”

He gave her a slightly sad, pleading smile. “ You look lovely.”

Six hours later, the jewel blue of the Caribbean sea spread out around the crescent of white sand. The air was light, fragrant with the smell of broken palms, and the sun was a bright white disc in the sky.

Helen was stretched out on a beach chair, dressed in a white two-piece and a light blue sarong. Her twists were brought back with a tie, her brown skin glowing like mahogany, black-lensed sunglasses shielding closed eyes.

“ So this whole island is yours?” she asked quietly.

“ Mm-hm,”

“ Not a person on it,” He could hear the grin in her voice.

“ You bring girls here a lot?” she asked.

He smiled down at the sand. “ So you’ve found out my secret plan.”

“ You’re transparent, Bruce Wayne,”
***
The horizon was still dusky from the sun, and slowly, around her, palettes of white and green and yellow flickered on in the impetus of electricity. Entire buildings lit up from top to bottom in a skin of trembling light.

She popped open the double windows with a tiny pick that anyone else would have mistaken for a very elaborate ballpoint pen. As she slid silkily in, the curtains caught the wind and brushed her arms, testing her stealth skills. She pushed them away, annoyed, and continued on into the room.

The partial blackout of the hotel’s ample generators had proven useful, as the built-in alarm system was silent and absent. The room, reduced to a few shapely curves of grey, spelled itself out for her. Couch, kitchenette, television, bed sealed behind French doors to the side. Shimmying to some distant music playing in her head, she moved into the bedroom, barely disturbing the slightly cracked door.

There was nothing under the bed but a pair of socks that she had a feeling didn’t belong to Agent Arroway. Checking through the closet, where her carryall was stowed in impeccable neatness. There were steel cases in there beside it, stacked almost up to the ceiling. She pulled the one on the top down and put it on the bed, opening it.

It was solid with the prismatic glow of jewel-cased compact discs, all lined up in neat rows. They had complicated code-names, but a single flick of her mind deciphered the real things from the dummies. She wasn’t stupid, she scoffed as she brought down another case, this one containing the laptop.

Unsurprisingly, it was encoded with the type of meek and understated security that government facilities contained. She dismantled it accordingly, stripping away the system in a ridiculously simple action, then accessed each disc one by one. The third of the good ones had the things she needed. She shut down the computer, zipping the security measures back up as she left it. She removed something from her utility belt; it looked like a tuning fork modeled to resemble a tube of mascara. On the handle end, there was a tiny LED screen. She applied the disc to the forked end so that it clamped over the hole in the middle. The disc began to spin, faster and faster.

There was a rumble in the hall, shouted words. The maitre d. Her blue eyes widened down at the small device and the spinning disc, looking more and more like some tin foil UFO from a cheap 50s sci-fi movie.

The LED screen lit up blue with black letters. SCAN COMPLETE. She removed the disc and replaced it perfectly into the case it came from, then stacked it back in the closet. She checked her watch. Seven minutes, thirty-four seconds. Sweating, she shut the closet and sped past the French doors, out into the suite. She dove for the window and its lacy white curtains, pulling it shut behind her just as the lights in the room behind her blazed on.
***
It was evening when they got to New Providence Island, and Helen had had to admit to Bruce that she didn’t know he could fly a helicopter. Then paid him the ten bucks she owed him for the bet.

Parts of New Providence, he explained, were in a constant state of celebration. Expatriates from Cuba, the Middle Americas, and Africa had started sprawling communities that fed off of tourist money. Entire blocks were squared away with strings of light bulbs, holding in foreign languages that spewed from the stuffed bars.

He directed her into one cantina in particular, one without a name other than a picture of a man standing in a whale’s mouth on a plank of artificially aged driftwood hanging over the door. Everything was neat, but chaotic. South American orquestra music spilled from aged speakers anchored in every corner. The floors were a mess of differently patterned red and yellow tiles, the walls plastered with dated travel posters from Spain, Argentina, Italy, Morocco, Portugal. Booths lining the edges of the bar were crammed with vacationers, but upon seeing Bruce and Helen, a tiny African girl with beads in her hair cleared a table for them in the quieter corner.

“ A friend of mine owns this place,” Bruce explained.

The minute he finished that seeming disclaimer, a woman across the room exploded from the bar. She was South American, it looked, with glossy dark hair brought back in a bun with a paper rose tucked behind her ear. Dressed in a ruffled white midriff top and a wrap skirt printed like the backdrop of a Tarzan movie, just leaves and flowers. Large brown eyes lined heavily with shadow, lips stained purple-black with paintstick.

“ Señor Wayne!” she exclaimed, moving over to them just as a sultry jungle animal might. The small African girl followed faithfully.

“ Kimali told me you were here,” she said, pulling Bruce from the booth in a single move. Helen stifled a laugh.

Bruce grinned, embarrassed. “ Helen Arroway, this is Consuela Alverez,”

“ Nice to meet you!” cried Consuela. Helen smiled politely.

“ Papa wants to thank you for the relief money you sent to our village in Guatemala,” Consuela told Bruce. Kimali took Bruce’s spot across from Helen. “ He’s just dying to see you again.”

Before he could protest, Consuela had pulled him out of range and towards the bar, behind a wall of stained red and yellow glass, and into the kitchen. It was empty.

Consuela became very serious. “ Did you need to bring the agent?” she asked, dropping her heavy South American accent for a milder Cuban one.

“ It was the only way I’d have reason for coming down here,” he said. “ Besides, I’ve got people perusing her files right now.”

She sighed. “ Very well. My people in Costa Rica are saying that massive amounts of the working class have begun inquiring about the Intergang colonies in Colombia.”

“ Yes?” Bruce wasn’t thinking about Consuela Alverez, but really about the woman named Consuela Guemaria, a former Cuban intelligence agent who went rogue after escaping the country in a shipping crate.

“ They are creating fodder for the revolution, Bruce! These colonies in Colombia are nothing but humanitarian fronts for drug lords. Many of these people are already on their payroll as it is.”

“ And what about Germany and France?”

“ The same. Intergang there is functioning under the guise of little-known importers, using these as a means of bringing in large amounts of weapons from the South American colonies.”

“ They’re planning a war,”

Consuela nodded. “ Mullen is going to make a move for Klirren’s power soon. He has Annaka Behm, the insider, to tell him the structure and weaknesses of German Intergang. He has Nevig Lockhardt’s offshore money to fund his campaign. He has the hacker Asmodeus to disrupt communications. We’re not even sure what this Weapon X is yet.”

“ And somewhere in there is Coquin,”

“ Who we have no idea who that could be. We don’t intend to find out. They’re a sleeper, and we’ll keep it that way till the last possible moment.”

“ Have you heard from La Touga?”

“ Brugnon?” Consuela looked flustered. She had joined leagues with Brugnon La Touga after her escape into exile, working for select clients with bigger budgets than the Cuban government. “ I thought you said he was in Gotham,”

“ He’s left.”

“ That stunt of yours couldn’t have helped.”

“ He didn’t know the real Heinrich was sedated and dropped in Ontario until after he gave me the information, so it doesn’t matter.”

“ Well, if we’re lucky we’ll see him again in a few months and not in a few years like last time. He’s already dropped off the map,” Consuela commented bitterly. Like most females Brugnon came into contact with, they had shared a brief intimate relationship that had hardened over into cold professional competition.

“ You’ve got to admit you’re a little glad to see him escape,” Bruce prodded.

“ As a co-worker, yes,” she concurred. “ As the ass in who he is a pain, not by a long shot.”

Bruce looked over his shoulder. “ I have to go. She’ll get suspicious.”

Consuela agreed and let him go with a wave of her hand. Three cooks appeared, almost automatically, and began preparing meals. Bruce left the kitchen as a bunch of beef hit the frying pan with a hiss and a cloud of steam. She had never asked what the playboy Bruce Wayne was doing inquiring about international terrorists, and for that he respected her.

Kimali and Helen were at the table talking, the former swinging her legs under the table.

“ Sorry about that,” Bruce apologized as Kimali darted away, into the kitchen, towards her mistress the guerilla-trained former assassin.

“ No problem,” Helen said. “ You’re a popular guy, that’s all.”

They must have talked after that, but what Bruce could remember spontaneously and by will at that moment would have no consequence later. He looked across the table into Helen’s deep, black eyes, and took her hands in his.

[The_NewCatwoman]

Homework and Housework yes, but head-banging? Nooooo




I really enjoyed this part, and found that Consuela must have some kind of idea of Bruce's... extra cirricular activities to know about he decoy doesn't she.




Also, I can't wait to see what happens to X, and who was that in Helen's apartment?



Also, I wanted to thank you on your own posts about what you said about the hotel pool swimming. I was going for something that could suck the gloom out of the rest of the story, as it wasn't very... happy.



Thanks so much, and eagerly awaiting the next post.

[Panther]

“ You can’t rush art,”
I'm sorry, all I could think of after reading that was Toy Story II and the crazy chess man. Great line. Was that a flashback? You have an interesting tendacy to mix dream sequences, flashbacks and the present together to make the reader wonder sometimes what's reality and what isn't. It took a second reading for the descriptions of what the docor was actaully /doing/ to hit me. If you ever come across a black and white silent film form the 20's called 'Metropolis' (not the same as the anime movie just come out, but some similar themes). I suggets you watch it. It's got the orginal mad scientist. And I know I've mentioned Kage Baker's books before, but this post really reminded me of how one character sadly considered herself 'a bad little machine'.

I loved X's thoughts on 'the boy in red'. So heartrenderingly sweet! I also like Saru's attempts at English. Better than my Japanses! :D What of 'the man in purple'? Might he make an appearence along the way?

/Very/ curiuous as to what Bruce is up to, but, if I may say so, this is my favorite part of the whole post:


“ You’re transparent, Bruce Wayne,”
oh the irony!!!
later,

[Sable Phoenix]

I entered the room, not hoping for much; the last couple times I had been here I had only found an old copy of the manuscript I was looking for, much-thumbed, slightly crumpled and dog-eared, and half-buried under a growing pile of new pages. But lo and behold, as I glanced over the pile today, right near the top, a new page with "Shadows of Angels, Part 34" across the front! I scrabbled into the pile and devoured it. Then, sated for the moment, I placed back on top of the pile for the next avid reader.

Why, oh WHY do you string us along so, DoE? I just cannot wait for each subsequent installment. The sub-plot between Bruce and Helen is becoming very intriguing. Write faster!

[witness]

After waiting for so long! This was another excellent chapter. I, too, want to know who was in Helen's apartment. One thing that's still bugging me is you ended the last chapter in that way and in this chapter there was absolutely NO mention of it!!! GRRR......way to string us along DoE! As always, I'm looking forward to reading the next chapter!

[Daughterof_Evil]

Catwoman: Thanks a bunch. I'm glad you enjoyed it. And no head-banging? What have you been doing all week? I'm still looking forward to more Perfect Dark...you left it in a tantalizing place.

Sable Phoenix: I'm very happy to see you back. It's been awhile since I was able to put together a new episode because my "editor" was checking to see if the references to her characters were all in order. And I'm just wiggling with joy over your lovely comments.

Panther: Yes, I took that quote from Toy Story II...it was just so appropriate. And yes, I have seen Metropolis (the Fritz Lang movie, not the Tezuka Osamu anime that came out that I'm still trying to get tickets to), I actually own it and am very fond of it. The Debussy they use for backround music was just elegant. And I'll get back to X and Saru...try Japanese, I know you can do it!!

witness: Now, you know that's just how I am. I like messing with people's brains. I just got through with reading more from your story and was angry with myself for having not gotten to it in so long. So I left you a message. Thanks for the nice things you said, and you won't have to wait all that long for another, I promise.

[Daughterof_Evil]

Thanks for the nice things you all said. I'm excited now that I know you haven't forgotten about me or my bevy of misfits.

The following part contains song lyrics from the anime The Utena Movie, another story about angels, demons, revolution...and older brothers. The song is called Fiancee ni Naritai or, translated, I Want to be Your Fiancee, and is sung by Mitsuhiro Oikawa, who plays the voice of the villain of the movie itself. It was Romanized on the site Bara no Unmei (http://www.ming-ling.net/utena) by Ming Ling, who I give much credit to. Proceeding the chorus is a rough translation from the actual movie itself. Also, the Shiori Massage parlor is named after a character from the movie who has some *ahem* questionable virtues.

Also, the characters Memoria and Praevidare Khasekemwy are not mine but belong to my best friend Tonbo Rosso, the creator of Hiramiaku and Saru.

This part includes some major sexual innuendo (of both the hetero- and homosexual type), and a little blood. A note as well on the Japanese: in Japan, onii-sama means "older brother", but can also be used to refer to someone slightly older than you who you are very close to or admire. Depending on age, this type of relationship can go from onii-sama all the way to oji-sama, or "uncle".
***
Saru had hauled her into the bathroom and put her in the tub, running the water very warm. He left, came back with a basin of cold water and a rag. He soaked the rag in the ice water and tied in around her forehead.

" Hi-Hi-Hiramiaku-sempai," X murmured, voice shaking. " I ha-have some...to tell...her..."

" She is gone," Saru said. He knelt on the floor. Tiny little green ceramic tiles. The ceiling was stained with flowering splotches of tan. The shower curtain had cartoonish-looking fish on it.

X turned on her side. Her pajamas were soaked through, sticking to her, floating around her like a layer of skin that had separated from her body. Saru put a large, comforting hand on her forehead, on her cheek, checking her temperature. The jade bead around her neck sank to the bottom of the tub.

X began to whisper, her words just barely trembling along the surface of the water. The cell phone was ringing in the other room. Saru got up and left to answer it.

X continued to talk to herself, not even in real words, but noises, like a code used among animals. Her body went limp. Her head slipped under the water. There, everything was jewel-like, cool and blue, and she kept talking. Voices came and went in her ear. One stayed, repeated, gentle and soothing.

" If it's any consolation, Hollye, you're nothing like him..."
***
The red neon tubing on the front was molded into the shape of a rose, one petal continually flying away in its simple animation. The sign read SHIORI MASSAGE. He had been across the street once before, breaking up a group of cocaine dealers hunkered down in a fifth floor flat. This place had never caught his attention, because there were at least three hundred others in the city exactly like it.

The windows were screened with red lace curtains, and the bright sign in the upper right hand corner still read OPEN despite it being eleven thirty at night. He rode a jump line to a second story window, making short work of the baroque-looking burglar bars with a tiny plasma torch.

He got tangled in more red lace curtains trying to get in the window. The entire room was lined with aromatherapy candles, all sizes and colors, some lit, others not. There was a massage bed in the corner, posters of exotic locales plastered on the walls. Robin sat on the floor and cut the rest of the red lace off his boot with a utility knife.

He heard the crack of a primer behind him. " Get up slowly," said a feminine British voice.

He got to his feet, hands up in the air, and turned. She was very pale, with eyes so light they were white. And silverish hair, cut short around her head and fluffed up like down with gel. Wearing a black vinyl vest with a ruffled white lace blouse, black knickers, black sheer stockings and little pilgrim shoes with buckles on them.

She was carrying a huge, chromed shotgun, aimed directly at his face. No older than he was. She circled him, nudging him towards the door, out into the hall, down the stairs and into a parlor done all in maroon velvet. There were a few Manets on the walls, real ones, not reproductions, and the more he thought about it, the more he remembered them missing from some museum in France.

The girl made him sit in a chair in the corner that had doilies on the arms.

" Praevidare!" she called. A thump. Then, " What?"

" A caller, dear brother," she answered.

Someone came thudding down the stairs from the front in a rapid fashion; they were obviously in the basement. A boy appeared, pale, with black hair cut in a chili-bowl style feathered just over his ears. White eyes. Dressed in a white brocade vest and a black laced-over dress shirt ruffled at the cuffs and collar, white knickers, black silk stockings, patent leather shoes. He was slight, elegant-looking, with a silver cuff watch on his left wrist.

" And who is he?" A raise of the eyebrow. He was British, as well.

" Robin," she said.

" And what are you here for, Bird Boy?"the boy, Praevidare, asked. The secret depths of the Batcomputer had been right, the Khasekemwy children were bright.

" I heard about your ties to Intergang," he replied.

The two traded looks. A woman entered the room from the front, an artificially redheaded Chinese in a red silk robe and nothing else. She was gone in a moment, upstairs, and paid no attention to the gun in the girl's hand.

The girl, Memoria, pulled a chair out from under a nearby table, flipped it around, and sat on it backwards, while simultaneously placing the chrome shotgun on the table between them, its barrel staring him down and her finger resting on the trigger.

" What do you want to know and how will you pay us?" she asked. Her brother gave him a happy little smile.

" I won't turn you guys into the cops as a prostitution ring," Robin offered. A rotund man in a plaid suit left from upstairs.

Praevidare scoffed. " Please. We know the cops per-son-al-ee,"

" You people and your ethics," Memoria rolled her eyes.

Robin was thinking it through again.

" I think I can find a way for you to pay us," Praevidare suggested, winking at Robin.

" Don't fantasize, Praevidare. We'll figure that out later," his sister commanded. " Just tell us what you want."

" I need you to find someone for me in Intergang,"

" Who?"

He looked at the floor. " A teenaged girl."

" Name, age, ethnicity, nationality," the girl rattled off. As Robin stared blankly at her, she and her brother tapped their heads at the same time.

" We were bred for mental capacity," Praevidare explained. " Walking computers,"

" If it helps, I think she's working for Nevig Lockhardt."

" Bodyguard?"

" Yeah!"

She smiled. " Yes, we have that tape, too. I've never seen the girl before. But she's an Intergang baby, some orphan they picked up,"

" She's not!" he burst out.

" I know," she said calmly. " I just didn't want to tell you that."

" Do you know where she is?"

" No."

" Are you lying?"

" I'm not lying as much as I'm editing my information," she said. " You have to do that sometimes."

" Can you get me information where she could be?" he asked.

" Yes. But it would take time and money."

" What do you want in exchange?"

She smiled at him. " Some Wayne Enterprise stock,"

He glared at her. " Something else."

" That nifty belt!" Praevidare cried.

There was a heavy creaking sound coming from the stairs. Memoria watched blandly as a very large woman entered the room, dressed in a green dress trimmed in black silk roses with a big, whale-boned girdle encircling her giant waist. Her hair was salt-and-peppered, face heavily made up.

" First time customer?" she asked in a rich Southern bravado, gesturing at Robin with a lace fan.

" He's here for the other reason, Madame," Memoria said.

The woman blinked. " Praevidare?"

The boy in the corner giggled. " No, Madame. The other reason."

" Oh. He matches the décor with all that red, just make sure to stand him in a corner or something when you're done," Waving distractedly at them, she left.

" Excuse her, she's just here to watch over us," Memoria said. " Now, I believe the boy liked your belt?"

Robin reluctantly unbuckled his belt and tossed it at Praevidare, who put it on and flounced out of the room.

" Now that that's over with, can I ask why you want information on this girl?" Memoria questioned.

" Just...business," he said.

" Oh...Business," she said, stretching that last word out so it sounded like a curse.
***
Being dragged up from the depths of the water. Blue in the face. Unbreathing. She was slammed down hard on the bathroom floor. Mouth pulled open, head tilted back. Long, warm hands pumping at her chest. A mouth pressed to hers, forcing air into her lungs. Hot water coming out of her nose and mouth, coughing, spewing all over the tile. Saru turned her on her side and pounded on her back. Flashes of blue, pink. She went under.

She woke up to a repeated verse, something cycling over and over again, thinly lined with the robust tenor of someone adding their voice to the garbled, threadbare notes. She opened her eyes and sat directly up. Her hair was wet, sticking to her head.

The sound was Saru, dancing around the kitchen, wearing a ruffled pink apron and singing along with the stereo.

" Kotoba yori mo tashikana mono
karada yorimo aimai na mono
mitsukara nakute futari
kasuri kizu fuyash*te...

It's something more reliable than words
something less specific than touch
never to find it, we're forever lost
we will only get hurt more and more..."

X looked to her right arm and found about a dozen little gold pins sticking into the soft flesh. She stared at them. Acupuncture, manipulation of the nerves through the pressure of hair-fine needles. The same anatomical principles that Dim Mak was based upon, only acupuncture was meant for the release of pain, not the dispensation of it.

X got to her feet and padded towards the kitchen, holding her right arm straight. Someone had dressed her in a pair of red pajamas with cherry blossoms on them, the right sleeve rolled up to her elbow. It was dark outside the window in the kitchen. She watched Saru waltz around for a little while, then turned and explored the flat.

There were two bedrooms, one empty except for a futon, the other containing a feather mattress and two dozen motorcycle parts on the floor. Then one hall closet that was locked. The bathroom, floor still slick with water and a wet towel tossed into the corner. There was another locked door at the end of the hall, bearing a small tapestry of Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction.

She heard him halfway down the hall. " Garage," a voice behind her said. She turned. It was Saru in his pink apron, stuffing a muffin into his mouth. There was a streak of flour against the black of his temple.

" Hiramiaku has a motorcycle?" X asked as they went for the kitchen.

" Motorcy-kurus," he corrected. " Prura."

They sat down in the kitchen, at the counter, where Saru gently removed the pins from X's lower arm and replaced them into a suede pouch unrolled on the Formica.

" You saved my life," X said.

He stuffed down another muffin, nodding. He took out the last pin.

" Thank you,"

He shrugged. She reached down the front of her nightshirt and pulled the necklace over her head. The leather string was still damp from the bath.

" Here," She put it in his hand. " You want to be my onii-sama?"

He struggled to swallow the muffin. " Sure," Put the necklace on over his head, then jumped up and rooted through the cupboard. He came up with a six-inch butcher knife with a stainless steel blade and an ebony handle. In a single swipe, he cut his left palm open.

" Bloodo-pact," he explained.

She took the knife from him and sliced at her right hand. The palm opened with a tiny flash of red, and she and Saru clasped hands to seal the deal.

It would be remembered later that that was the exact moment the kitchen window imploded, the glowing glass shards catching the light and reflecting the blood.

[Sable Phoenix]

NOOO! Such a cliffhanger! Why do you do this to us, DoE?

[Tonbo_Rosso]

Yeah, my babys are finally in the...um... real world!! :D

Exellent work Doe. I can't wait til' you post the rest. I think people are going to pull out there teeth when they read this.

Tonbo

[Panther]

Exscuse me while I drool all over your FANTASTIC writing!

The Name! You finally used the name! Ok, keep going - don't stop now! For gosh sakes follow up on this! I'm gonna breack down and again make a plea for X's memories to return. I think at this point it makes sense due to what Robin is up to.
Which leads me into how much I loved Robin's sleuthing.


"No, Madame. The /other/ reason."

"Oh. He matches the décor with all that red, just make sure to stand him in a corner or something when you're done," Waving distractedly at them, she left.

LOL! These siblings are two very intersting characters. Not good - but they don't strike me as being all out evil. Perhaps anti-hero material? When you say you borow them form Tonbo - does she create them for this story, for her own fanfcition, for some other type of story? Just curious.


The sound was Saru, dancing around the kitchen, wearing a ruffled pink apron.
Can I date him? Please? :p

Please don't leave us hanging too long!

[The_NewCatwoman]

Forgive me for not replying until now, I did read though. I thought this part was fantastic, and Saru volunteering to be X's big brother like that was just beautiful. Too bad they had to get blown away like that. And YES! you used her name, whoo hoo! Maybe there's hope for these doomed characters of your's (and Tonbo's) yet.

[witness]

Ack! you actually used her name! now i'm really going crazy! even though it was in her mind.....still! and then you have to go and try to blow them up? come on!!! i can't stand it anymore, post already!

[Daughterof_Evil]

Ah, lots of indignation. I just wanted to take the time to thank all of you for the things you've said. And thanks to Tonbo, who creates the characters for her own writings and which I then kidnap and use to my own advantage. She's writing a Bat-fic of her own, soon to come out, so please be kind enough to drool all over it when it does.

Without further adieu...

[Daughterof_Evil]

This computer has done everything possible to sabotage me, so before I explode it, I'll post this. It includes serious violence and antisocial behavior...which is the best kind. Enjoy.
***
The man who came in the window was the first unfortunate one to go. Saru ripped off his apron and threw it over his head, dragging him to the floor and planting the already bloody butcher knife directly into the top of his skull.

“ Isoide!” Saru yelled. Through the hole in the window two black canisters flew in, struck the ground spinning, then began fuming out gas. “ Isoide!”

X vaulted over the counter and into the living room, landing in a crouch on the wooden floor just as two more men came in the front door. She saw immediately the dull, flat glow coming off their submachine guns, and laid flat to the floor as the rake of bullets sliced through the couch.

The one in the back went down the second Saru’s butcher knife, thrown from a good twenty feet away with astounding accuracy, hit him in the neck. X bounced up off the floor and struck the other in the stomach, grabbing the gun. She hit them in the chest with the butt of the gun, just then realizing it was a woman. Ripping the weapon free, X let off a short, powerful blast of gunfire at the kitchen window as two more people in black slinked in through the mist of gas. They fell back, outward, in an arch into the alley.

More windows were breaking, in the bathroom, maybe the master bedroom. Shouts came from outside the front door. Saru grabbed her hand and pulled her down the hall, toward the locked door bearing the mark of Kali.

He sent it flying off its hinges with a single kick. X bypassed the set of galvanized stairs and jumped directly over the railing, landing twenty feet below in perfect order, the machine gun still clenched in her fists. That’s when she saw them, lit up by the automatic movement-sensor lights. A dozen different motorcycles, every jewel-toned color reflecting the halogen lamps, chrome lit up like flares, leather embossed with tiny scratches and monograms. Two of them were partially dismantled, but the other ten looked untouched.

Saru jumped onto a particularly sleek-looking souped-up Harley-Davidson, one bearing the look of a hybrid animal with the micro-managed pieces of speedy little Italian roadsters. X got on behind him, accepting dully as he stuck the single helmet down onto her head, the helmet she assumed Hiramiaku ignored despite her younger brother’s pleadings. He jacked the kickstand up, breaking the engine into a loose purr, and took off just as the first bullets struck the concrete.

They hit the wooden garage door going forty, Saru’s head ducked in just slightly. The night outside was muggy, smelling like the dregs of sewage, and the street was wet from the vendors hosing down the brick-laid cement that afternoon. There was the growl of ceramic engines behind them, and X knew immediately what they were looking for.

One arm around Saru’s lanky waist, she turned half around and took out the three of the five riders with a single swipe of gunfire, the kickback of the weapon registering barely as a twitch, even in one hand. One of their motorcycles caught fire and exploded as it hit a building side. Two-hundred-year-old lead paint went up like a nova.

“ Saru-sama!” she cried over the noise. “ They’re coming for me!”

“ I know!” he cried back. He pressed his hand down on the accelerator, barely missing the front end of an antiquated museum-piece car, just clipping the back side of a fruit truck and scratching a rift down the lean flank of pretty chrome the Harley-Davidson flaunted.

“ Where are we going!?” she screamed.

“ Wherever this thing takes us!” he yelled in slightly accented Japanese. He pulled onto a major road, skipping through the ropes of waiting cars. Behind them, the two original riders were joined by three replacements, all of them riding mass-produced Japanese motorcycles with fiberglass frames painted in candy-like colors. Nothing as powerful as Hiramiaku’s hybrid Harley-Davidson.

Horns blared around them as Saru jerked the bike up and onto the back of a low-riding sports car, over its roof, and across two other cars. X noticed, rather strangely, that the sky overhead was beginning to seethe with dark clouds, and that the deep, gut-rending rumble she felt was not the motorcycle’s engine but the sound system of an oncoming storm. A thump, and they hit another car, bounced over its steel hood, then back down to the street. Saru cut off a German van and skipped up onto the sidewalk, into a pedestrian sidestreet. A rider caught up with them, side-by-side. X lifted her gun and blasted him off his bike with one shot.

They blew through a wooden fence exactly ten seconds later, though it flipped up on invisible hinges and didn’t break as the garage door had. Two riders behind them weren’t as lucky, however, and caught it on the downswing. The twisted masses of flesh and metal hit the pavement behind them, and the squealing of still-turning actuators became further and further away.

They went two blocks without hearing or seeing anyone dangerous. From the sweating glow of red neon, X knew they were in Montmatre, back where everything had begun. Saru pulled a drastic left, onto Blvd. De Clichy, passing at the corner a huge, gaudy building with a windmill built into it. A fusion of something old and something new, something no longer functional with something older than human morality.

Everything was very quiet here, in this place of sin. They passed slowly, the prostitutes hanging glumly on the sidewalks, the johns walking with hungry eyes, the sandwich-boarded strippers advertising outside their respective clubs. Saru, perhaps from some concern for the mental health of his young charge, sped up, passing an American sedan paused at a stop sign. A flash of hot yellow flew by them, accompanied by the high-pitched whine of a ceramic motor. The rider stopped, turned, and stared at them.

Saru was swearing, now, and backing the bike up with his feet. The stopped sedan got in X’s line of sight, and she found she couldn’t face firing into a car full of potential innocents. Then, a gun in her face, another pointed at Saru. A woman wearing a ski mask, with grey eyes. She hung half out the back window of the sedan, a 7.5 mm pistol in both hands. The rider on the yellow motorcycle came up to the back of the car to head them off.

Saru put up his hands. The woman asked in French for them to turn off the motorcycle.

Saru shrugged. “ Cannot understand,”

The woman asked again, firmly this time, leveling both guns with Saru’s face. He smiled, charmingly, and reached over gently, putting his hands on the woman’s wrists. The yellow motorcyclist yelled and aimed his machine gun. The French woman was trembling, X could tell.

Saru leaned over. “ The safety is on,”

X got her cue. She put her bare feet to the ground and sent the bike backwards. Saru, a former pick-pocket, silkily removed the guns from the woman’s hands, flipping them behind him, to X, who dropped her machine gun. She slipped them into the elastic waistband of her pajama bottoms. The entire synchronization went by as a single, fluid movement. As they turned to escape, Saru struck out with his right leg, kicking the rider off his yellow Kawasaki and into the back windshield of the sedan.

“ Amateurs,” Saru scoffed, revving the engine and skirting a bicycle messenger at the same time. X could feel the cold, blank barrels of the pistols nudging slightly against her hip. She fastened both arms around Saru’s thin frame and held on.

She didn’t know how they suddenly got there, but there they were, in an empty tunnel, the lights mounted against the circular walls blurring past like one singular image. There were bullets. More riders behind them. A car trying to meet them neck-and-neck, the driver trying to blow out their engine. Saru dipped dangerously to the right, dancing with the sedan, taunting the driver with a raised middle finger. X took one of the pistols and fired at the undercarriage, trying to strike something, anything, that would give them an edge. Saru decelerated, swooping around behind the sedan.

The French woman had another gun, this time something semi-automatic, grey, the size of a dictionary. A single shot pierced the back windshield, throwing the woman’s head forward, her now limp arm hanging out the window and the gun going with it. X risked to looked behind her. Coming up hard and fast on the right was a woman with hollow black insets for eyes on a brand-new BMW motorcycle, painted mist silver. Hiramiaku.

She bobbed behind them for a second, taking a second to deliver a handful of steel spikes onto the road. There was a raucous snapping sound, a crash. Mangled fiberglass raking along the concrete, breaking bones. She accelerated, coming up so she was face to face with them. She was wearing black sunglasses, despite it being night, and an outfit of black leather. No helmet, just her bright red hair whipped back by the wind.

She and Saru exchanged brief information yelled through the turbulence. Then she sped up and away as Saru dropped back, behind the sedan. Hiramiaku matched the car for speed. She did something with the gas lever, pinning it down, and then jumped in a single graceful arch, hitting the top of the car just as her beautiful silver motorcycle fell onto its side and crashed somewhere behind them.

The driver began evasive movements, swerving erratically, firing up through the roof with his pistol. Hiramiaku turned backwards on the roof, hopped a little, and crashed feet-first through the flimsy safety-glass of the windshield. She disappeared inside. A moment later, the driver’s side door opened and the man flew out, striking the road and disappearing somewhere behind them.

They could see the cut-out image of the tunnel’s end before them, and with it, the dancing red lights of a series of police cruisers lined up across the exit. Hiramiaku gestured something at her brother, and he fell in file behind the sedan. He slowed, the tendons of his hand releasing as he took pressure off the accelerator.

X imagined Hiramiaku inside the car, alone, counting down. Did she, like X, see the numbers in her brain? The ten, eight, six? Or did she see, lit up in white reflective paint like the instructions painted onto the asphalt, CAUTION? SLOW? DEATH?

X held very tight to Saru.

He was grumbling, to himself, “ She is not wearing her sito-beruto,”

About one hundred feet before the end, Hiramiaku sped up, then jerked the steering wheel so the sedan flew in a horizontal wave at the cruisers. Tires burning, the squeal of the rubber. She struck the police cars side-to-side, knocking two out of the way. Saru sped up instinctively, flying through the gap his sister had made. Behind them, Hiramiaku reversed the broken sedan, then plowed through the tiny exit and escaped.

The police fired upon them, scrambling to pursue. X could feel Saru talking, and paid attention.

“ She will lose the car,” he told her, in Japanese. “ And we must lose this bike, or they will blow our tires out up the road.”

She nodded. He pulled a left, onto a one-way street, while Hiramiaku pulled a sharp right. X saw Saru’s target at once: a parking garage. He flew in, smashing through the automated arm at the check-in booth, and up six ramps to the roof level. They stopped immediately, leaving the motorcycle in the pathway. Saru popped open the seat and fished some things out: two harnesses, two grappling hooks attached to guns.

“ You stir have guns?” he asked.

“ Yes,” She handed one to him, which he stuffed into one of the million pockets of his pants. She kept the other, the one she had fired, for herself.

He gave her one of the harnesses, the type Hiramiaku had used the night they’d interrogated Georges, and put his own on. Fastened around the waist and thighs, a running cable around the edge. Velcro, metal clips, a dozen little snaps held it all together. It seemed a foolish thing to entrust one’s life to.

Then the grappling gun, an industrial-strength one, the type with a rechargeable, collapsing grappling hook that would spew out a one-inch steel-and-elastic cable guaranteed to hold two thousand pounds. The gun clipped to the belt. They could hear the sirens Dopplering in the streets, like the cries of wounded animals. Saru took her arm and pulled her to the edge.

X didn’t hestitate. She shot the gun, waited for the ping of its mark, then leapt. Behind her, on the parking garage, a police cruiser ran over their Harley-Davidson.

Falling, face-first towards the street. She leaned into the descent, body tensed but relaxed for the blow. She hit the side of the building on mark, and took off running, partially horizontal, the cable carrying her along. The glass and steel was cold under her bare feet.

Saru was behind her. Above her, Hiramiaku moved as lithely as some kind of predatory animal, a long, leather scabbard attached to her side.

Something fast, painful, and very hard hit her directly in the face. She could feel the soft, warm smell of flesh, a slight tinge of perfume. A woman, hanging off the roof by a cable, holding a truncheon, flinging herself across the expanse of glass. X smashed into her at full-force, tossing the mercenary off the building side. She jumped across the street in one move, landing on the facade of a faux Gothic establishment, hands hooked into the lacy loops in the stone. She stayed stationary for a moment, crouched horizontally, while Hiramiaku and Saru joined her.

At that point, X wondered where the boy in red was. In heaven? In hell? She had never believed in those places, but other people did, and it was times like these that probably incited them to think that way.

“ We have some things to discuss,” Hiramiaku told her as she landed.

“ Indeed,” X said calmly.

“ And I’ve never lied to anyone in my entire life, so I’ll be telling you the truth.”

X looked at her.

“ I have reason to believe you are a Hoshi Aka assassin, X. The last of their kind. But you must already know that, listening in on me.”

“ Yes.”

Hiramiaku pushed off from the faux Gothic and hit the one next to it. Saru and X followed, across art deco and post-modern and replicated baroque. They landed on a low tenement-style noodle house, behind a lattice-work red neon sign that advertised a specific type of microwave ramen in block letters.

The attacks came immediately, the moment they were vertical and stationary. People coming at them from all sides. X unhooked herself from her tether and used the cable as a weapon, deflecting punches sent at her from one tall, lanky man in ninja-black. He broke out a pair of sharp, steel razor sais and jumped at her. She ducked, punched him hard in the stomach, then swooped around behind him and snagged the cable around his neck. One sharp pull, and she heard his spine snap, right between the third and fourth cervical vertebrae. She took the sais and attached the suspension rope to the utility ladder running down from the roof.

She could hear Hiramiaku speaking throughout the fight. “ Raised in the darkness, trained fanatically, like I was. We’re flesh but not flesh.”

Saru took advantage of the elasticity of his cable and ran up the back side of the neon ramen sign, flying backwards in a spinning circlet once he reached the top.

He was in mid-air when X tossed him the sais. He caught them, still spinning, and hit the roof, jabbed at an attacker, then shied back as the opponent collapsed.

“ The girl!” someone yelled. A man. “ Get the girl!”

X stood back, arms raised in defense, as three others rushed at her. She turned, jumped, and spun, hitting one in the side of the head with such force he went down immediately. She landed upon the tarmac on all fours, flipped halfway up, and struck the next man in the chest with her heel. She could feel the vibration of his splintering sternum all the way up her leg.

She flipped backward and landed in a crouch. Gesturing mockingly with her two first fingers for the third to come at her.

He pulled a six-inch knife from his boot and jumped at her. She grabbed his knife-hand and crushed the fingers, prying the blade from him. He jabbed at her with the unbroken hand, and she dodged it with her wrist, plunging the knife into the inside of his elbow. He yelped, and staggered back.

She punched and kicked him in the stomach till he finally kicked her back, hitting her in the side, then planting that foot and coming at her with a roundhouse from the other leg. She ducked, and he swept straight over her. She stood at the last second and planted one fist into his bottom jaw, throwing him up and backward. He hit the ground about six feet away, limp.

It was about then, when the first drops of rain began to splatter the rooftop, that Hiramiaku produced from the scabbard at her side a long, lean katana, its handle wrapped in red satin cording. A man in black stood placidly across from her. She executed a series of intricate swordsman’s exercises, the blade flickering through the sparse rain.

Hiramiaku jumped backwards, off the building, and Saru followed her. X ran to the edge, grabbed the lead, and hooked herself up. She jumped to the next building.

There was no tension in the cord, and the further she fell, the more she realized there was something wrong. The next roof was three stories down. She covered her face, and crashed into a water-retention tank on her side.

The blackout was barely a second long. When her head stopped whirling, she found herself surrounded by carcasses of twisted steel, sheets of corrugated iron, long-rusted solders. There was an acrid, slightly sweet taste in her mouth. The metal around her shifted and creaked, she heard scraps of impatient German. She could smell their warm bodies.

X breathed quietly for a few seconds. There was a slightly bent piece of sheet metal balancing precariously above her, shielding her from view. She grappled at her waistband, searching for the gun. It was gone, lost somewhere in the forest of steel.

More German, louder this time. The bent plate of sheet metal above her shook, then fell. Spatters of rain hit her face. She looked upward directly into the bright blue eyes of a man with brown hair. The tiny creases around his eyes amplified as he looked at her.

“ Hier!” he cried. He turned to his comrades and exchanged a brief, quick conversation. There was a flash of grey, white skin, and he disappeared. She heard the squeal of metal around her.

“ Imoto-sama!”

She gasped. “ Onii-sama!”

A long, pale hand reached through the gap above her and pulled her out by her wrist. The left arm of her pajama top had separated at the shoulder, and her white skin was filmed with red. Saru, panting, tugged her across the roof, pulled her close, and fell.

Using her as a balance on his left side, he ran along the building sides. It was raining harder now, and through the veil of silver-grey, she saw a bit of Hiramiaku soaring up the street and onto one of those glass and steel monstrosities that were beginning to eat away at Paris’ quaint and ancient exterior.

X twisted abruptly, using the momentum to toss them across the street, up against the windowed office building. Saru hit the retract button on his grappling hook, and they both ran horizontally up the building side.

They could hear, somewhere in the distance, the hum of the roving police helicopters, and see the pale sweep of their searchlights against the buildings.

The ping of crashing steel was the first thing they heard, along with the long, thin wail of the wind as it whipped over the top of the building. Hiramiaku, tall form silhouetted against the dousing rain, locked in sword combat with another, a man. It was obvious, with the slant of the challenging blade, the defense moves, the attacks, that this opponent was her equal.

Saru let out a little wail of horror and went through the pockets of his pants. When he realized what was missing, he looked to X.

“ Shimata…” he murmured.

X stood out there near the edge, holding the gun in two fists. She had it pointed at the man who was fighting Hiramiaku. She took a step forward.

“ Stop!” she cried. “ Or I’ll shoot!”

The man deflected a blow from Hiramiaku, then looked at her. He had no face; he was wearing a ninja mask, the type with optic lenses where the eyes should have been. Hiramiaku stood back.

“ Uguisu,” she said into the wind, “ this has nothing to do with you…”

With one flick of his wrist, the man in black hurled a silver throwing star at her. X raised one hand and caught it between two fingers, not even blinking. The man sort of grinned at her by a contortion of his mask. She fired four times, two bullets were deflected with the blade of his eighteenth-century saber, two others sailed just past his ear.

Hiramiaku had hit him with about four different attacks within the next .2 seconds, pushing him towards the edge. X followed, circling them nervously. Saru, in turn, followed X. His straight, dark hair was plastered to his head.

The fight was unrelenting and brutal. Hiramiaku once took the time to whip the handle of her katana across her rival’s face, bringing a bloody splatter from his cheekbone. X could somehow hear and feel the veins rupture. He turned on Hiramiaku, kicking her straight across the roof. He pulled two silver darts from his wrist pocket and threw them. They flew right past Hiramiaku’s face as she jumped for him, and both struck Saru in the upper right arm, bringing a gout of blood from his pale skin.

X slid over to him on the slippery glass, tucking her gun into her pants and pressing one hand over his wounds. He was breathing strangely, his eyes had gone all blank, and his mouth sort of hung open, bottom lip shaking. Both darts were lost in his arm, deep in the flesh.

“ Kso,” she heard him mutter. “ Kso, that hurts…”

X dropped the gun before him and got up, throwing herself into the middle of the fray. Someone’s blade cut a little notch across her back; she had a feeling it was Hiramiaku. She turned in mid-air and drove her bare heel into the man’s chin. He flew back a little, and X hit him again and again in the stomach until the plush of red up his throat was almost palpable even to her.

His fist in her hair. “ Don’t get feisty, syau ning,” said an electronically garbled voice. His knee jacked up and hit her in the face, along her left cheekbone.

She pulled away from him with an angry jolt and struck him hard on the chin with the flat of her palm. Unfazed, he turned on heel and kicked at her, but she jumped in an impossible backward flip, landing on one foot and driving her fist towards him, at the same time spinning again, madly, in a pinwheel striking out at him at all angles. She stopped, back to him, turned, two fingers poised for his throat, and struck.

One hand knocked her away, and the sword’s blade came down hard on her left arm, striking sparks. He shied back, then hit again. More sparks. X whirled over in a horizontal flip, hitting him in the head with her fist.

Catching her off guard, he turned and hit her in the temple with the hilt of his saber, but she ignored him and reached over to crush his neck. Something very hard hit her in the ribs, and she tumbled to the side, just barely catching herself from falling over the edge.

Hiramiaku stood over her. “ Gomen, Uguisu-chan. I regret that I must hurt someone Saru so cares about,”

The battle resumed immediately. Saru got to his feet, one hand gripping his bloody arm, and began circling the fighting pair. His eyes met X’s once or twice, but he was calm, maybe too calm.

And suddenly, it was over. A slice of silver as the katana went flying through the pounding rain, and Hiramiaku hit the tarmac on her side. Her opponent held his blade to her neck, then removed it and stood back.

It took X a moment to realize it was Hiramiaku’s laughter she heard, and not some very deep, very earthen thunder. She looked up, brushing fronds of wet red hair out of her eyes. She was smiling.

She got up. “ This is it, then. My final mission. You know, I thought I was born without all that kamikaze crap,”

She turned on heel, and without another single word, ran to the edge and leapt.

The more X thought about it, the more she thought she heard Saru screaming before Hiramiaku’s feet ever left the roof. The man in black had disappeared. X stood there, cold, numb, barely breathing. Saru stumbled to his feet, seeming now to be only a skeleton, a pale white cut-out against the blackness of sky. He was screaming, screaming like she had never heard anyone scream before. It was an animal sound, cold and primal, dredged up from the very base of him. He went to the edge, screamed again, collapsed, sobbing uncontrollably.

She went calmly to his side. He was shouting about not leaving him alone, about wanting to go with her, wanting to be with her, and X was abruptly holding him back as he thrashed for the edge. Her right cheek was pressed to the small of his back. He was wailing, all his warmth seemed to come from that. She began to whisper, very quietly.

“ Onii-sama, don’t go, please. I need you here. Don’t leave me all alone in this world. I’d have died if it weren’t for you…”

That was the way the Intergang mercenaries found them five minutes later, sitting near the edge. The boy/man Saru was curled up on his side, shaking, eyes wide with fear. His head was up against the girl’s chest, and she was holding him very close, one hand on his shoulder, the other smoothing out his hair. She was wearing torn red pajamas with tiny white flowers on them. Soaked through, the cotton sticking to her muscles.

They both seemed to know that the street below was bathed in their mistress’s blood.

She didn’t look at them as they approached. They had their guns drawn, night-vision goggles on, bundled in capes of kevlar and leather. Their pirated helicopter beat noisily behind them, searchlight catching them in its beam. Suddenly, she glanced up at them, briefly, then back at the boy. She didn’t say anything.

[Tonbo_Rosso]

BOne jarring motorcycle chases, deuls on the side of sky scrapers, mysterious ninja that can beat Hiramiaku, and the sudden plummet of our fearless theif? What's next folks? :eek:



In other words POST DOE POST!!

Thank you

Tonbo :D

[witness]

Post DoE Post!!!!!!!!!!

Wow, this was an exciting chapter to read. The fight was incredible, and I want to know who that ninja was thata could actually beat Hiramiaku. Very sad that Intergang now has X and Saru. I wonder what they'll do to Saru? I can't wait much longer for the next chapter!!!!

[Panther]

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.........



I'm sorry, I just drooled all over the story.

Also, I'm afraid at this point all I can do is incoherently bable excitidly about [swear word deleted] awesome this story is.

I just re-read it for the fourth time and I am in still in shock about the sheer force that leaps from the words and hits you right between the eyes, leaving the reader, quite frankly, gasping for air.

Must go catch my breath, (agian!)

please post more soon!!!!!!!!!!!

later,

[Sable Phoenix]

Whaaat?!

I'm at a loss for words after that last episode. I still am in shock at Hiramiaku's death (or is she really dead? People "die" in Batman's universe all the time and come back...). But I really cannot describe my feelings other than that.

And the fight on the rooftop... wow. Incredible episode, DoE.

Now I've got to know... who's the mysterious, invincible ninja, and what part does he play in the story? Things are becoming so complicated they're almost difficult to follow.

[The_NewCatwoman]

Nooooooooo!

Hiramiaku was NOT supposed to die!

Okay, maybe she was...

I know I can't really talk, I mean I killed off Bruce Wayne for God's sakes, as well as Superman, Barbara, uhhhhh.... Tim/Robin, errrrr.... Harley, The Joker (but I doubt anyone misses him)...

So I guess I REALLY can't even complain about you killing off such a great character.

Okay, I love you, buh-bye
- Mindy


-tNC

[Daughterof_Evil]

Oh, how excited I was to receive so many replies! I'll get to you all, I swear!

Tonbo: Nice to see you, babe. Just checking up on your characters, eh? Making sure there are no indecent exposures? Thank you for the encouragement, doll. I'll get to it soon enough. Saw Revolutionary Boy Wonder and loved it. You've got such a handle on the Utena universe!

witness: Thank you for saying it was exciting...I wrote it while on a two-day Underworld bender, so it really goes with the music. I have to say though, that your story ended wonderfully. The allusion to violence is always more fun than the act itself...

Panther: For gosh sakes! Wipe up your drool, woman! If anything, I am the one currently salivating over your work! It is, to say the absolute least, divine.

Sable Phoenix: Sorry about the complicatedness of it...I am afraid it only gets worse. But thank you for your kind words, and an interesting point about the Batman universe, there really have been some resurrections for the books. But you'll have to ask Tonbo about that; Hiramiaku is, after all, her demented brainchild.

the New Catwoman: Yes, I do remember the much contested deaths you have executed in your stories! Evil, evil woman! I'm reading your current stories and am shocked and stunned at appropriate turns. Got to love you, tNC.

[Daughterof_Evil]

Thank you for the riotous reply I received for that last post. I'm very glad you all enjoyed it, even if you were in several degrees of indignation.

This part involves very little objectable matter at all, other than some sexual innuendo and mild swearing. Enjoy.
***
Barbara unlocked the door and slipped inside. Her office was velvet-dark, outlined slightly with abstract bits of grey and blue coming through the tightly closed mini-blinds. She put her coffee on the desk and reached for the lamp.

It snapped on for her. She traced the hand on the switch to its owner, from the watch up the thin, tan arm, to the rolled cuff of a white dress shirt. Tim looked at her from just outside the circlet of light the lamp cast.

She dropped her files onto the rolling chair behind the desk and pulled open the blinds. Pale afternoon sunlight streamed in, illuminating the lines and curves that made up the tiny office.

“ Had Alfred drop you off here?” she asked.

He shrugged in the visiting chair. Not in a talking mood, he simply propped his sneakers up on the desk.

“ How was school?” she questioned, sitting down.

“ Okay, I guess,”

She put her elbows on her desk and rested her chin on her hands. “ What’s wrong, Tim?”

He folded his arms and stared, in a somewhat angry fashion, at the file cabinet in the corner.

“ Alright, now tha-“

“ She’s alive, Barbara,”

She sat back. “ What? Who?”

“ Her. She’s still alive.”

She picked up her coffee and blew on it. “ The assassin girl.”

“ She’s working for Intergang. I saw her on that tape from the airport in France..." He jumped up suddenly, with a very rash, Robin-like movement cultivated through nights of training. “ I can’t believe she’s alive! Just…out there!”

Barbara was silent, watching him over the rim of her coffee mug.

“ And Bruce has been hiding it from me! I can’t believe he would do that.”

She furrowed her brow. “ I’m sure it’s-“

“ It’s like lying!” he cried.

She smacked her coffee mug down on the table and stood, whole body tensed. “ Dammit, Tim, I was the one that hid that file.”

He stopped. “ You did?”

She stood back. “ I zoomed in on that picture and recognized her face, so I saved it.”

“ Why didn’t you tell me?”

She looked away. “ Because you cared about her.”

He stared at her for a moment. “ I hated her.”

“ No, I don’t think—“

“ I hated her. I hated the way she was so emotionless, so cold, always pushing people away when they tried to help her.”

“ When you tried to help her,” Barbara filled in. “ It angered you that she was so self-sufficient.”

“ I guess I’m just like Dick was, huh?” he snapped.

She folded her arms delicately. “ Yeah. You both are alike that way.”

They stared at each other for a few seconds. Then Tim went for his backpack, which was propped up against the chair he’d been sitting in. He started for the door.

“ Some part of me wanted you to find it,” Barbara said behind him. He stopped.

“ Then why didn’t you just tell me?” he asked, quietly.

“ Because it would have hurt you. Because, after that Clayface thing, you weren’t the same. I could see it in you. You felt like it was your job to save everyone, that you failed every time you couldn’t.” He heard her shift, leaning against the window. “ Yes, I thought you reminded me of Dick, but what scared me more was that you were becoming like Bruce.”

He didn’t turn around, didn’t look at her. “ I’ll stop doing that, okay? Just, don’t cry,”

Barbara angrily wiped the tears off her face with the back of her hand, saying nothing.

He still didn’t turn around. “ It wasn’t the same. She’s not an innocent, she didn’t want to be saved…and she doesn’t want to come back.”

“ You want a ride home?”

He shrugged. “ I think I’ll walk.”

“ It’s a long way.”

“ I need to clear my head.”

She swallowed. “ I’ll see you tonight, then. I still have to analyze the data I got from Agent Arroway’s place.”

He didn’t answer, just walked out, letting the door close behind him. The hallway was too bright, he frowned down at the floor all the way to the elevator. Someone came up beside him.

“ Tim, right?”

He looked up. It was Detective Montoya, dressed in a spectacular blue outfit only slightly set off by the shoulder rig strapped across her back. She smiled at him. She had a lovely face, all creamy brown with deep, murky eyes. Her dark hair was curled up at the ends perfectly, like it was just made of wax.

“ Your Barbara’s friend,” she said. “ Bruce Wayne’s ward?”

He nodded.

“ Trouble at school?” she asked, shifting her armful of files. He made a gesture offering to hold them and she handed them over. “ I know that look.”

“ Sort of,” The stack of files was heavier than it looked. The top file said Kingsley. He’d busted that guy last month, in a crack house.

“ A girl?”

The muscle in his forehead worked on its own, screwing up his eyebrows.

“ Ah, a girl,” she half-laughed, the copper-finished elevator doors opening for them. They got in.

“ Lobby?” she questioned.

“ Oh,” he stammered, “ yeah. Please.”

Montoya leaned back. “ So what’s her name?”

He looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “ I’m not sure.”

“ Have you asked her?”

“ I’m afraid that if I ask I’ll regret it.”

“ Ask her friends.”

“ I’m trying to do that right now, actually,” he answered. Shifted the files, trying not to look weak in front of what was obviously a fantastic specimen of the female race.

The buttons flashed past twelve. “ You want to ask her out, you take the initiative. Girls like a take-charge guy.”

“ Not this girl,” he muttered.

“ Why not? What’s so special about her that has you worrying so much?”

“ She’s…not like other people. I’m not sure what to expect from her.”

“ Women are mysterious, you’ve got to let them have that,” She brushed a bit of dark hair behind her ear. There was a little gold hoop in her earlobe, though it was so soft and natural looking she could have been born with it there.

At the fifth floor the doors opened. Montoya stuck her foot in the gap and accepted the stack of files back into her arms. She carried them with significant more grace.

“ Thanks, Tim,” She smiled again, perfect white teeth. “ And don’t worry about the girl. I’m sure she’d like you, just give yourself a chance.”

He smiled back, crookedly. She disappeared behind the closing copper doors. The elevator sank.

He plowed through the lobby once he got there. The floor was teeming with people; police, suspects in handcuffs, a few prostitutes lingering around the benches set up at the edges of the room. It all looked like one single organism, its different appendages splayed out across a checkerboard floor. He nearly ran into a police officer pulling a drug dealer through the muck.

The street was just as bad. He turned to set off down the sidewalk just as an arm wrapped itself around his shoulders.

“ Hello, chum,” said a British voice into his ear.

He turned. Praevidare batted long lashes as he grabbed his arm in his own.

“ Oh you’ve been working out,” he purred. He was dressed in a white long coat with white ruffles spewing from the cuffs and collar, a black vest, white knickers, black stockings, black shoes. There was a tiny onyx stud in his right ear.

“ So who was the hot redhead you were talking with on the fifteenth level?” said Memoria into his other ear. It felt like he was in a very bad nightmare. Everyone on the street strolled past, eyes lingering for a moment, then away.

Tim pulled his arm away from Praevidare and shook Memoria off his other shoulder. “ I don’t know what you guys are talking about,”

“ Stop the charade,” Praevidare said. “ We know everything. You can’t hide from us.”

“ Unless you want the redheaded lovely to hear you’d been visiting a whorehouse as of late,” Memoria reminded him. She was wearing this black French waistcoat cut like something Japanese, a kimono or a yukata, with gold buttons and white nylon lace frothing out of the collars and cuffs.

“ I don’t care,” He began to walk off.

“ You wanted to know about the girl,” Memoria said after him. He stopped, looking back. Praevidare had folded his arms and smiled a little triumphantly. Memoria was her usual stoic self.

“ We’ll just follow you till you speak with us. We have all the time in the world, and nothing to lose,” she said.

He walked back.

“ Your secret’s safe with us,” Praevidare said with a suggestive wink.

Tim scowled. “ Where do we talk?”
***
They had dragged him into the most unseemly, most decrepit part of the city, dominated by decomposing tenements and long stretches of grey, wasted concrete. The shops here were either deserted to time by dusty windows or hollowed out by rioting. There were scorch-marks on the sidewalk outside something that might have once been a deli.

Next to the deli was an unmarked building, unmarked except for a strange, chimera-ish creature painted onto the door with fading yellow. Memoria opened the door and held it while they went in, scanning the street.

The inside seemed, in all respects, to defy the exterior. Dark, highly polished woods filled every inch of bare wall and floor, and everything that wasn’t wood was dark green leather studded with tiny brass furniture nails. There were about a million booths, all empty, and a long counter made out of dark green resin. An ancient Union Jack hung over the doorway.

The bartender, a sharp-faced Englishman, watched them come in and poured off three beers with time-worn speed.

“ Henderson, can you make sure we’re not disturbed?” Memoria asked.

“ Aye, mum,” he answered gruffly, hitting a button under the bar. The door clicked shut, locked.

They took a booth in the corner. A freckled redheaded girl delivered them three beers. Tim didn’t touch his.

“ She’s no longer with Intergang,” Memoria said first, into the silence. She sipped her beer pensively.

“ What?”

“ It’s been a few months since the incident in La Havre. She could be anywhere. But not with Intergang. She’s…ceased to exist, really.”

“ That’s impossible. You can’t just fall off the planet.”

“ Oh, you can. I reamed Intergang thoroughly. They haven’t heard of any living Hoshi Aka assassins for the last year or two.”

“ What about Lockhardt? His people would know.”

“ I tried them,” Praevidare emphasized. “ They didn’t hear of her, either. Said the girl who was his assassin had simply disappeared. No one could tell me where she was, or even her name.”

There was a TV above the bar playing a British world news broadcast. The barkeep turned it up.

“…resulted in a dramatic chase through Paris last night.” A night scene of crunched, scattered police cars at the end of a tunnel. Three flashes of black against the white face of a Gothic building side. “ Authorities claim it was Intergang activity that spewed out into public. The chase went from the high-speed streets up to the building tops as on-lookers claimed people were flying along the city’s historical buildings. Seven police were injured when a car rammed through a blockade, two remain in hospital tonight. Though an unusual amount of blood was found on the streets later, no one was confirmed dead.”

“ A dead end,” Tim said, “ unless you’re trying to throw me off.”

“ Which we would have no motivation to do. This girl means nothing to us. She’s an anonymous face in the millions of faces we know. Just another speck in the universe,” Memoria explained eloquently, sipping her beer.

“ You know, alcohol kills brain cells…”

“ Which we regenerate constantly and at a rapid pace until we die,” she replied.

Tim stared at the soggy coaster under the beer in front of him. “ Can I ask something else?”

The two stopped, seemed to meet a simultaneous agreement solely through eye contact, then looked at him.

“ Go ‘head.”

The edge of the table was beveled down unevenly by the friction of thousands of random fingertips. “ What is X?”

“ It’s not ‘what’ X is, it’s ‘who’ X is.”

He looked up. “ What?”

“ X is a living creature,” Memoria said. “ Something like human,”

“ Very top secret,” Praevidare agreed, nodding.

She went on, ignoring him. “ Not quite living, not quite dead.”

“ Then, who is X?”

“ A weapon created by Intergang and several lucrative sponsors. She is the darkest of their fallen angels.”

“ ‘She’?”

“ ‘She’ as in female,” Praevidare scoffed.

“ Are they trying to make an assassin?”

“ An experiment, mostly. Tinkering around with things. Nothing very special. It’s mostly been a failure. They might end up euthanizing her.”

“ Like a dog?”

“ Yes,” Memoria said, bored. “ If they can’t find a use for her. But they’re dealing with dangerous stuff.”

“ Like what created you two?”

Praevidare and Memoria smiled, at once and together.

“ Not really. Our way was much more fun,” Praevidare said, sniveling cruelly.
***
Palam International Airport, crowds hustling in and out of tiny spaces and through dated corridors with posters still featuring Soviet retreats like West Germany or the U.S.S.R. He pushed his sunglasses up his nose and dove on, losing himself in the flurry of colorful fabrics worn by the locals.

His digital phone, the one with the frequency bounced illegally off a Russian satellite, rang in his coat pocket. As he reached in to get it, he noticed his dress shirt soaked all the way through with sweat.

He hit the receive button, waving distractedly at a girl selling paper flowers at the doorway. “ Yes?”

“ Brugnon,” The voice was metallic-sounding, the trademark of Coquin’s voice scrambler.

“ Yes, what is it?” he asked, stopping outside the door.

“ The girl has been returned to Intergang,” Coquin said.

“ How? Surely Hiramiaku would not-“

“ Hiramiaku is dead. They captured X and forcibly brought her back to Mullen. She’s being shipped to Berlin soon.”

“ W-Wait,” Brugnon stammered, wiping the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. “ Hiramiaku cannot die.”

“ It was seppuku,”

He leaned his head back. “ They got her. Sons of b*tches got her.”

“ I cannot talk for long,” There was hesitancy in the dead, fake voice. “ Intergang scanners have set up to catch my frequency and root me out. Someone else is interested in the girl. Someone in Gotham City.”

“ Gotham? Who?”

“ Discard this phone as soon as possible. It will be tainted. I’ll find another way to contact you,” A click, and the conversation ended. Brugnon turned around and pushed his way through a group of men in saffron robes, then back into the terminal. Budapest, Oslo, Kiev, Tokyo. He settled on Kwangju and planned for the counter. On his way, he dropped the phone onto a heap of trash in a corner.

[Panther]

May I please /smack/ Tim upside the head? For one thing, he's being a total idiot about his feelings for her. And another thing - he had all the clues laid out for him in the bar and he didn't put anything together?!?!?!? I mean - shouldn't he have least figured /something/ out? Idiot boy.


Ok, I'm done ranting. I really like the twins. You can't not /like/ them - they're so ... charming, I beleive is the word I'm looking for. Loved the clothes, they have excellant taste. But what is their stake in all of this? I wonder if they simply want to /know/.


“ Like what created you two?”

Praevidare and Memoria smiled, at once and together.

“ Not really. Our way was much more fun,” Praevidare said, sniveling cruelly.

Lol!!

I must also mention, in case I haven't before, that I love the international flavor to this story - the way it hops all over the globe.

But where is Saru? Is he okay????

please post more soon!

[Kali]

Originally posted by The_NewCatwoman
Nooooooooo!

Hiramiaku was NOT supposed to die!

Okay, maybe she was...

I know I can't really talk, I mean I killed off Bruce Wayne for God's sakes, as well as Superman, Barbara, uhhhhh.... Tim/Robin, errrrr.... Harley, The Joker (but I doubt anyone misses him)...


-tNC


You wrote a Bruce Wayne death ficcie? Darn! Would have loved to have seen it. :( Unless, it is somewhere around here, and I missed it?

As far as poor Hiramiaku.... :::sniffle::: alas, she will be missed.

And the twins, well, I'll go with Panther's opinion on them, they're charming. Rather intriguing characters. :)

[The_NewCatwoman]

I'm finding this just plain adorable how Tim is handling his frustration over X, or *ahem* should I say Hollye. It also seems she can't get him off the brain either. I can't wait until they meet again, they both need some closure.

[The_NewCatwoman]

Originally posted by Daughterof_Evil


the New Catwoman: Yes, I do remember the much contested deaths you have executed in your stories! Evil, evil woman! I'm reading your current stories and am shocked and stunned at appropriate turns. Got to love you, tNC.

Awwww *blushes*, well to tell the truth, I'm just a big sucker for making my characters suffer. Just the sadist in me I suppose. I was thinking back to Fragile Beings and Fallen Angels (Don't beat me up if these aren't the exact titles) and Hollye's "Mommy" getting blown up in the subway, and Tim finding Hollye in that coffin, and it just amazed me at how far this story has come. Congrats! This has been quite the page clicker!

Also Kali: I know this'll dissappoint you but, until they get the old boards back online, Breakdown--as it's called-- is completely inaccessable. Believe me I miss it too. It was the first time I'd made Bruce a drunken idiot, and explored Dick's underlying hate for him. Plenty of bathtub drowning attemps, escapes from the hospital, stank answering machine greetings, and mourning citizens abound. Eventually I'll get to posting the sequel staring none only than Gwen and Lila, Bruce and Selina's twin daughters.

I'm taking suggestions for a name... anybody....?

[Daughterof_Evil]

Thanks go to Panther, Kali, and the New Catwoman for their most wonderful replies, and my complements go back to you for all three of you have great stories that I admire to an alarming degree.

This part has some major disturbing content, is rated a strict R, and includes depictions of vivisection, torture, and depictions of violent death. There is also quite a lot of swearing.
***
They had a chair, one done in black vinyl that tipped backwards with steel sheath restraints in every corner for the arms and legs. It was surrounded on the bottom by a sort of metal scaffold, and attached to the scaffold were thousands of tiny instruments made of chrome and stainless steel. When they put her in the chair, the scaffold popped up, and each of the instruments bore down and stared at her as they balanced inches above her body. The light above blazed brighter, illuminating every pallid muscle and inch of bared skin.

The doctor’s name was Bradfield, Dr. Ian Bradfield. His skin was olive-colored, he wore tortoise-shell glasses, and his hair was dark. He worked on her arm with the cold sterility of a seasoned physician. Once and awhile, another doctor came in and reviewed a chart. He was black, with glasses and a goatee. She remembered him from Britain. Vale had later told her he was a geneticist specializing in gene therapy for dangerous hereditary conditions.

She couldn’t tell what Dr. Bradfield was doing with her arm, because her head had been turned to the right and anchored down with plastic bands. The chair smelled like chemicals. A sudden pop in her skull, behind her eye.

“ Where is Dr. Vale?” she asked.

He didn’t answer. “ Snips, please,” An assistant came in, then disappeared.

She moved a little. “ Let me out, please.”

He still didn’t answer. An outsider, he had probably been advised against speaking with X001 on the grounds that she might corrupt his mind. They had a strange feeling like that about her, like she was a disease that could easily contaminate the public.

Dr. Bradfield finished with her left arm and examined her ear, then flashed a penlight in her eyes. Mullen came up behind him.

“ Anything odd?” he asked.

“ Nothing. She’s in working order,” Bradfield said.

“ Let me go you son of a b*tch!” suddenly burst from X’s mouth, uncontrolled. Like some medieval demon was now residing at the back of her throat.

Mullen stood back. “ Mm-hmm.” He left.

Time became like water: there, but gone, transparent, but solid. It, like pain and misery, no longer existed. There came a point where she bled before they made the opening incisions, when her injuries healed before the bandages were applied. Unanesthetized vivisection was a nasty thing.

Lines up and down her skin, down the chest, down the spine, little grey scars. She thought aimlessly of Saru, of Hiramiaku and the single moment after she’d jumped when it seemed like she was flying. The boy in red appeared behind Dr. Bradfield, smiled at her kindly, and walked away. The doctor carved another line down her leg, rechecked the neural fiber-optic lines, then left it. She became bound in miles of white bandaging, but never where she needed it.

There came a time when Bradfield and X were alone. It could have been weeks since they brought her back. She wiggled her right arm under its metal restraint. He took up a syringe, filled it with clear liquid from a vial. She wiggled her arm again, tightening her hand into a fist. She could feel the very low vibrant frequency of the lock. He lowered the syringe to her bare right thigh and pressed the needle to her skin.

The metal bands on her arms and legs slid away all at once, and she was up on her haunches, snarling like an animal. Her fingers deep in gore. His head came apart like a fleshy machine, parts spewing out on the floor in ribbons of red and pink and bolts of white bone. Crimson all over the sharp muscles of her naked stomach and down along the deeply hewn tissue of her legs. The white bandages dyed with blood.

Dragging her, hissing and clawing, across a cold stone floor. In a second, they had tied her down and put her in a tight-fitting undersuit, one black and made of spandex. Heavy, buckled knee-high boots nearly cut off the circulation to her feet, her arms were wrenched behind her and chained. Loops of cotton bandaging remained along her scarred legs and arms. In ten minute intervals, her head was wrapped in a wet, white bedsheet tied behind her head, and through the cold she could feel the flash of a camera flicker over her bare skin.

She hated the pictures the most. They were more painful than the vivisection, the experiments. The flashbulb cut her down right to the bone, laid her open, took her apart. It was a violation that went deeper than the flesh.

As he unwrapped the sheet from her head, X noticed Asmodeus had a new tattoo, one on the back of his left hand. It was a thorned, purple rose upon the crux of a black cross, the word CERISE scribed on it in Roman lettering. It hadn’t even scabbed over yet; she thought he had maybe gotten it in the time she was gone, but now that she was back, she realized they didn’t want her to remember that time at all. It would become a black scar in her sense of time.

He hit her in the head a couple of times, then burned her with the cigarette lighter of an old Volkswagen till her skin blistered, burst, then healed itself. She was silent with the roiling edge of rage. The pain wasn’t real, not registering in her brain or along the system of her nerves. The blows came and went as bursts of color in her eyes, but nothing else. He beat her until he was panting with anger, then turned her on her back and opened her face with a straight shaving razor. Slash, slash, two, then four cuts thick into the flesh. The blood was the only estimate of the damage: it was dark, and the wounds deep. The pain was nonexistent. He then left and returned with Mullen.

They slammed her down on a table and ran a tube up her nose, then poured industrial chemicals down it. An oddly familiar sensation of foam rushing up her esophagus. Then they fed Macchina directly into her veins. It came back sweet at first, the aching presence in her bones filling the gap left by its absence, every nerve and neuron screaming for it. Then it was excruciating. She broke out in a sweat, tears ran uncontrolled from her eyes, her muscles twitched and seized as her veins distended.

“ I hate you,” she gasped out.

Mullen bent over, smiled at her. “ You’ll fall into line all the same,”

“ You…killed her…” It was getting harder to speak.

“ Hiramiaku?” he asked. “ Your new owner killed herself, X. You belong to us again.” He flicked her shuddering upper arm. “ Death over dishonor, X. Remember that?”

Her mouth fell open.

“ She tried to sell you, you know. That night in the bar, the fight was over you…”

“ Liar!”

“ The circus boy was in on it, too. We sent him to some nice Bulgarian brothel, though. He’ll be well taken care of. Hope he likes it in the ass.”

“ I wo…won’t be your puppet!” Her mouth flooded with a taste like corroded brass.

They turned up the dial. She spat blood at Mullen, then forced herself under, into the world of dreams she loathed to leave.

When she awoke, Saru was standing next to her. There were grey circles under his eyes, little crescent-shaped bruises where a fist might have connected with his face.

“ Onii-sama,” she whispered, “ I was just dreaming about you. Where have you been?”

“ Away,” he said, almost silent. He looked like a hollow, vacant replica of Saru. His skin had gone grey, his mouth was twisted into a perpetual scowl. His long hair was oily and matted.

She licked her lips. They tasted like blood. “ Why did Hiramiaku die?”

His left eye twitched. “ She felt it was time to go.” He reached down the anonymous white wool smock he was wearing and pulled the jade necklace off of his lank collarbone.

“ No,” she moaned as he slipped it on her neck. “ No, no,”

He laid his lips to her forehead, then kept them there as he whispered.

“ Kowagaranaide kudasai,” [“ Don’t be afraid,”] he murmured, his words a tattered salad of English and Japanese. He had lost control over his brain. “ Deru mae ni, I want teru you somo-thing.” [“ Before I leave…”]

“ Nan des ka?” [“ What?”]

He put his smooth cheek to her forehead. “ Boy in akai, he is arrive.”

She was quiet.

“ You must reave. Now. Escape. Find the sentaku-ya,” [“…laundry room,”]

She shut her eyes. Saru’s hair fell over her face. “ Onii-sama, where will you be?”

He put his hand to her chest, to her beating double hearts. “ In here. Shinzo,” She could see, on the bare flesh behind his ear, a tattoo. A bluish number that could have been a bruise. She was sorry she was tied down.

“ You escape?” he asked of her. “ Kito des ka?” [“ Is that a promise?”]

“ Yaksok shi mas,” [“ I promise,”] she swore.

He stood up, brushing bits of black hair behind his ear, and smiled in a ghostly way. Shoved his hands into the pockets of the smock. “ Then I wiro see you rater,” He removed one hand from one pocket and clasped one of hers. The lacquered wooden handle was smooth and small in her palm, and she turned her hand over.

“ Arigato gozai-mas, onii-sama,” [“ Thank you very much, older brother,”] she whispered.

Then he was gone, the memory of his smile the only thing left, like an image lingering on the screen of a television. The door, beyond her line of sight, opened ten minutes after Saru disappeared. The smell of tobacco was immediate. The wounds on her face were still raw, but closed.

“ Hello, again, lovely,” Asmodeus said, pulling a stool up to the side of her bed. “ You have no idea how I missed you while you were away. There is nothing I enjoy more than your screams.”

X tilted her head away. He grabbed her jaw in his fist and pulled her face back to meet his.

“ Except you haven’t been screaming lately,” He pouted, cocked his head to the side. “ You don’t love me anymore, X,”

The steel switchblade bit right through the leather binding on her right arm, sharp and true, and she delivered a neat, hard punch directly to his head. He slumped, unconscious, across her chest. She cut the bind on her left arm, her legs, and pushed him off. He fell limp to the floor. She checked the door, which had been electronically unlocked, then went down the empty hall. The floors were cold marble, the walls moist granite. There was a room on the left with a red door. Wäscherei. Laundry room.

Inside, three combination washer/dryers were whirring away up against the wall, across a checkerboard linoleum floor. Sitting on the floor, legs crossed, was a woman in a brown caftan, brown catsuit, loafers, and a red veil secured over her face with a gold band. She looked up at her. There was a gold bangle around her tan ankle.

“ Fatima,” X said, with a nod. The woman nodded back, standing in a fluid movement. Fatima was Darby Whitacre’s “companion”; a euphemism, Asmodeus said, for her lesbian lover.

The Pakistani woman went through the laundry cart in the corner, pushing aside a load of unwashed white clothes and pulling up a brown paper pouch secured with twine. She cut the twine with a penknife, and removed from the pouch a long length of thin black kevlar. The suit was high-collared and sleeveless, matte black, and secured up the back with a zipper. She handed the bodysuit over to X, who got into it, letting Fatima zip it up the back with soft, hurried hands. As she did, X noticed what Dr. Bradfield had been doing with her left arm: X001 was tattooed directly onto her shoulder in two-inch letters.

The woman searched the cart again, this time coming up with a cardboard box containing a pair of knee-high, cybernetic combat boots made out of gunmetal-grey steel with ridged black rubber knee guards. As X put them on, Fatima continued to deal out surprises: several bandoliers of high-caliber bullets; two thick, steel wrist gauntlets with mini-crossbows; eight chrome handguns set into a complicated hip rig with eight holsters; a leather utility belt; an additional belt of clip ammunition and stun grenades; a mass-produced Japanese dirk; and last of all, X’s katana with a new nylon scabbard.

X assembled it all on her person within a few seconds, like going through an automatic exercise she had done a million times before. From one of the dryers Fatima took a billowing piece of grey-black kevlar: a hooded cloak. She demonstrated to X how to pull the face hood up on her bodysuit as the girl fixed the cloak on her shoulders with a heavy-duty metal clasp. The entire costume was heavy, but she bore the weight gratefully.

Fatima pointed at the door. “ Dâhinî taraf, agle kone par muriye,” [“ To the right, turn at the next corner,”]

Fatima stood back, clasped her tanned hands, and bowed her head. “ Nek khwâhishât,” [“ Good luck,”]

X bowed back. “ Bahut bahut shukriyâ,” [“ Many thanks,”]

She went out the door in as smooth a fashion as possible, her cape billowing around her artificially strengthened form. They were obviously in the sublevels of a very large compound from the racket of working machines X could hear above and around her. She could still feel the hot, bright flush of the Macchina in her veins, the dilating of her pupils, the tense poetry of her mechanized muscles, and suddenly came to realize that all of her being was nerves. She paused outside the room that had been her torture chamber, then tried the door, which read Büro. It was still unlocked, the card-swipe at the jamb scrambled electronically.

Asmodeus was still unconscious on the floor. X noticed suddenly how light he was as she threw him over her shoulder, and remembered the time in Normandy when he had complained about how much she weighed. She glided down the hall as silent as a passing breeze, turning right down the next corridor. Something was distracting the guards who were supposed to be watching her. Thirty seconds after she left the hallway, the security cameras jolted back to life, showing nothing but a clear, grey picture of the stretch of granite.

A stretch of switch-backing stairways led to the cool outside, and X took a moment to orient herself. The expanse of smooth, olive-colored granite above her yielded a brass-plated insignia: a stylized L, and below that, Rostock, Deutschland. She remembered Saru’s switchblade and tossed Asmodeus to the ground, rousing him awake.

“ What in bloody hell…” his muddled English accent stammered. She punched him in the stomach, then began going through the pockets of her utility belt for something.

Fatima left the laundry with a cart of clothes as two LexCorp guards pushed their way down the corridor, guns drawn. They kicked in the door of the office down the hall, and went inside. Frantic German was heard. She disappeared into a utility elevator.

When she surfaced on the third floor, three Intergang guards pulled guns on her. She put up her hands, they lowered their weapons and gestured impatiently for her to leave the lift. She did so, pushing the cart down the hall as they piled in and left.

On the third underground sublevel, Mullen was briefed on the situation by Darby Whitacre, whose stride at his flank reminded him of the U.S. military rumors.

“ X001 has escaped,” she said. “ We don’t know how long ago, but there was a thirteen and a half minute lapse in function of some ten security cameras on this level.”

“ Dammit!” he shouted. “ Why wasn’t I aware of this before hand?”

“ It was an impromptu thing, sir. Obviously very well calculated.”

“ Where is the boy?”

Darby stared. “ The Japanese kid?”

“ Yes, yes! Where is he!?”

“ I don’t know. I thought Asmodeus had taken him to a cell.”

“Well, obviously not!” he barked, turning on a nearby LexCorp guard with a headset. “Where is Behm!?”

“ Checking outside,” he said with a thick German accent. His headset spewed static; he pressed one finger to his ear.

“ She says go outside,” the guard advised.

Mullen and Darby Whitacre went down both halls and tackled the steps, three Intergang members and two LexCorp guards at their backs. They all spewed out into the night like a mismatched band of refugees.

Annaka Behm was swearing, staring at the ground. Her shoulder had been bandaged since the nightclub in Paris.

“ What is it?” Mullen questioned.

Annaka glared at him briefly, then pointed up at the building without looking there herself.

“ Son of a b*tch,” Mullen heard himself say.

High up on the building face was Asmodeus, crucified to the brass L logo of LexCorp. He had been stripped naked, wrapped in a white bedsheet, and nailed to the building side, arms outstretched, his wrists and ankles pierced by nine-inch chrome tent nails. To speed his death, she had sliced open his neck almost to the spine. His eyes were wide open, mouth sealed with a strip of duct tape.

Mullen stepped back. “ I want men all around the perimeter!” he yelled. “ Get some dogs out here!”

“ Jesus, Mullen,” Darby mumbled. “ Dogs aren’t going to do it. You’re gonna need a *****ing tank to take this kid out,”

He began laughing. “ Yes, I know,”
***
Agent Arroway was on her cell phone in the hallway when the elevator glided open and her brown eyes came to rest on Bruce Wayne as he made his way into the corridor.

“ Can I call you back, Quincy?” she asked, hanging up before she got a reply.

Bruce paused outside the open door to the suite. Boxes of FBI files were being stacked in the sitting room area, various electronic devices sealed in bubble-wrap sitting atop them. And at Agent Arroway’s feet was a single tweed suitcase she had probably owned since she was twelve.

She shrugged. “ I travel light; they don’t.”

“ So you are leaving,” Bruce said grimly. “ I guess I had to see it for myself.”

She leaned against the wall. An FBI agent pushed past Bruce with an armful of computer equipment.

“ The investigation wasn’t going anywhere,” she admitted. “ We thought there’d be action in this sector because of Mullen’s ties with Gotham, but nothing came up.”

“ You’re heading back to Washington?”

“ Yeah,” she sighed.

He cocked his head. “ I suppose retribution for your partner will have to wait,”

She nodded. “ You better leave. If Agent Carter sees you, he could file a complaint against you for impeding justice or something.”

He was next to her in a moment, in a single move that made her gasp and blush all at once. Masculine grace, she thought as his hands went up her arms to her shoulders.

“ Bruce,” she whispered. His lips laid on hers, soft, but hungry, his hands went to her back. A feeling of warmth washed over her, protection and safety offered in Bruce Wayne’s encircling arms, promised in his kiss. Sudden weakness forced her to lay her hands against his broad chest. He made her feel like a woman, not some androgenous government robot. There was something different about him, something she knew about and at the same time couldn’t place.

The tryst in the Bahamas had only strengthened her resolve to stay as personally unavailable to Wayne as possible. She hadn’t even thought of calling him to tell him she was leaving. So they were lovers for an afternoon on the white sands of a Caribbean sea. A meaningless fling. It hadn’t been important till then.

Bruce broke the kiss. Flushed, Helen muttered, “ At least I can say I’ve had Bruce Wayne,”

[The_NewCatwoman]

Asmodeus reminds me an awful lot of Donald Dilly, especially in their similar tastes for women's screams. Creepy huh? I really enjoyed this, although I found the crucifiction scene a little disturbing. Too bad for Saru, poor baby. And Bruce seems to be getting a little p***ywhipped, excuse the expression. I hope this doesn't interfere with his concentration. Oh yeah, and a lot of women can say they had Bruce Wayne unfortunately.:D

[Panther]

Why oh why did I read that before lunch?

Other than that - suburb, splendid, wonderful, and all those other feeble attempts in mere words to tell you how wicked awesome this story is. (If this reply sounds slightly disjointed - I'm slightly buzzed on Easter candy. Hurray for chocolate! The female drug of choice!)

I too was somewhat disturbed by the crucifixion - but more surprised by the fact he is now dead. For a big enemy of a main character to die, well, that's always a big thing. But at least she has lots of other people to worry about. I'm just afraid the death of someone this major in the story signals the beginning of the end of the story - and I am now convinced that I don't ever want this story to end.

You weren't kidding about the violence here. Nasty business, that. I swear, after reading this, I will never complain about dental work again. Those descriptions merit one word: INTENSE. But i really got chills when they took the pictures. I agree - that's worse. The last line in this post "At least I can say I’ve had Bruce Wayne" was, I think, a great choice, artistic wise, as a way to break the nerve raking tension you built up in this post.

That was sooo gruesome how she killed the doctor. Was that her acting - or the Macchina. Even if it was drug induced I’m tempted to say she has so definite unresolved anger. (can you tell I'm studying for a test in my abnormal psych class?) I'm just itching to start trying to diagnosis characters.

And YEAH - Suru's alive!!! You have no idea how worried I was they were just gonna kill him to get rid of him 'cause they just wanted X. But, ohhh, the poor boy, they may not have killed him, but they apparently did a number on his spirit. Shades of '1984'. Shades of quite a lot of things actually. I think i saw definite influences from things like 'Dr. Strangelove', 'Marathon Man', and quite a few WWII movies. And Star Wars when tehy torture Hans Solo.

That was quite a complicated rescue/escape. Who on earth had the ability to co-ordinate that? Not Suru. Although that was such a touching sequence when he spoke with her. I dearly hope she does indeed see him "rater". I hope you will be explain in the near future how he knows "the boy in red" is alive - and what, pray tell will she do with that info?

May I point out it’s been almost a year since you started this story and she /still/ doesn't have her memory back? I also would like to go off on a literary criticism tangent and reflect on how the story seems to be a backward telling of the life cycle. Let me explain. in 'Flesh and Blood' the readers meets her in a cemetery curled up inside a coffin. We go quite far along in the story before she meets her father 9and i won't spoil the surprise for those who didn't read ‘Flesh and Blood’) Then she "dies" and is submerged in the water. In 'Shadow of Angels she is still submerged in water at the begging, then worked upon - built, designed, created with n name and no memory and no identity. Not even born yet in a sense.

And in conclusion (gosh that was a long reply) I do not think is in any way an exaggeration to say that every word in this part was a perfect choice.

Ex.
the tense poetry of her mechanized muscles

[witness]

So it was Batgirl who snuck in and copied that file from the FBI lady!!! Interesting that she was also the one who kept that file of X on the Batcave's computer. Perhaps Batman doesn't actually know??? Nah!!!!!!

Ha ha ha ha ha! I love it when the bad guys get what they deserve! Asmodeus was a real jerk and I'm glad you killed him off. Yay for you! I don't think that this means you are nearing the end of your story though.

Yay also for Saru still being alive! But he's merely a shell of the young guy that he once was it looks like. Intergang did a real number on him! I do hope that he does see X later as well.

One more thing that was in the chapter previous to this, was a conversation between Brugnon and Coquin. They know that someone in Gothom City is looking for X. Will they get to find out who soon?

Can't wait to see the next chapter! Has it really been almost a year since the beginning? Geez, I thought I was bad. Also, is there any way at all that I could read "Flesh and Blood" in its entirity (sp) ? I caught like the last chapter. I've always wanted to read the rest of it.

[Daughterof_Evil]

the New Catwoman: I realized that too, but only after I posted it. I really modeled Asmodeus on a character from the William Gibson novel Neuromancer, a techno-illusionist named Riviera who is hunted by various world governments for his habits of torturing women. You'll have to wait and see on Bruce's concentration...you know him, hell could freeze over and he'd still be in that damned Batcave.

Panther: Wow! Thanks for the long reply! I really enjoy it when people delve deep into the work and tell me what they think...it's the ultimate complement! Yes, their torture of X and Saru was indeed based off of 1984; I really love that book and I thought it had some good applications here. Thanks again!

witness: There isn't anywhere on the Internet where Flesh and Blood or any of my previous stories are permanently housed, and I'm currently still cleaning F&B up because I really couldn't spell well back then(Keep in mind this was less than two years ago). And this story's been the longest I've ever written! Geez, I'm so long-winded! I've got to plan these things better. But thanks for hanging on, even in the early days.

[Daughterof_Evil]

Hello, again. Just leaving you something to chew on till I can get back. Enjoy!

It doesn't have much in it, some mild violence, some swearing, and some bare allusions to violent death. On a side-note, bosozoku are Japanese teenaged gangs. They've shown up in such well-known anime as Akira and are really apart of the society of Japanese pop culture. Irezumi are tattooes worn by yakuza members to show their rank.
***
The Korean police had stormed the cyber-café minutes after he had left, the systems’ safeguards triggering the alarm that illegal activity was being perpetrated on their computers. It had been only a little, tiny shaft of time, but still it was enough for him to log some genuinely bizarre tricks into the net, throwing off Interpol for a little longer.

Coquin had delivered their part of the bargain, scrambling the access codes through the satellite feed to that LexCorp base in Germany so the girl could escape. It was a hard job, something even the hacker Asmodeus might not have been able to pull. As far as he had heard through the underground, Asmodeus, known in real life as Arnold James Bridgeway of Lower East London, had been quite brutally murdered very shortly after the girl’s purported disappearance.

Brugnon laughed a little, leaning up against the building side. Curving, pink Korean glyphs marred every surface. And he thought Montmatre was bad.

The sleek, shining taxi pulled up a minute later, and he pulled open the back door and got in.

“ Airport, please,” he said. He suddenly realized there was no driver; one of those crazy Japanese robot cars, the type that drove themselves.

He checked the email on his palm-held as they went along. Yuri congratulated him on his quick handling of the Intergang situation; then commanded him to show his face in Kiev to scare some Russian mafia. For Yuri, it was just a seasonal thing. But Brugnon was left with a constant reminder of his failure. He would never see his dear sister’s face again.

The car wove through a tightly packed bunch of automobiles and paused at the curb. The door unlocked automatically after he swiped the money-changer with a credit card, which he left in the car, on the seat.
***
Whitacre paced cautiously through the trees, the forest enwrapped in a wet, grey mist like living silk. Her laser rifle was drawn, her heat-vision goggles shielding pensive brown eyes. The warm bodies of the other searchers registered as flashes of red on the purple as they wove in and out of the trees.

Mullen had sent her and the others all the way across Germany for this, to track a creature that they had created. Fatima was back in Rostock, at the LexCorp facility that had so generously furnished their weapons and ammunition from its research and development department. That was almost four-hundred and fifty miles away, a distance they had traveled in the back of a LexCorp semi, smuggled in beside packing crates full of plastic computer cases.

There was a chirping sound slightly to her left, and she turned just in time to see the flicker of red disappear up into the lofty branches above. A bird, or some other woodland creature. Stupid Schwarzwald. She began pacing again, loping through the black forest.

She heard rustling about fifty feet away. A red ghost-like figure thrashed through the greenery.

“ Komm her!” someone yelled, a man. She recognized the voice as she met them; it was Hertzen, a big blonde guard from LexCorp.

“ Was!” she exclaimed quietly. German wasn’t one of her favorite languages, and though she could understand it, she wasn’t adept at speaking it.

He pressed his index finger to his mouth and pointed through the forest. “ Da drüben,”

She stared intently into the thick stalks of the trees. Everything was purple, still. The other searchers had fanned out. She couldn’t see their warmth anymore.

“ Was?” she repeated.

He primed his laser cannon with a strange sound and stalked off, waving at her to follow. Darby growled and grabbed his shoulder, pushing him behind her. She would never follow him. She was the seasoned warrior here, not the hapless damsel.

They continued on through the mist, their figures nothing more than streaks of minimalist black in the slippery white. Despite the frigid night, beads of sweat gathered on her face. She tugged the baggy collar of her cloak up to her neck with one hand.

The trees above shook, and a slight wind brushed against Darby’s cheek as she whipped upwards to catch it. Her mouth fell open as she struggled the heat-vision goggles down to her chin.

“ Hertzen,” she muttered.

He whipped around, his form enveloped in fog. “ Huh?”

She pointed her rifle up, the laser sight skipping over the chunks of black. A sudden breeze scattered the bank of white. Hertzen finally looked up, and stepped backwards with a gasp.

The bodies were about twenty feet up, each one hanging by its neck on a length of dark steel cable. The fog subsided; she saw more, in the clearing ahead, hanging among the branches like decorations. She and Hertzen fell in back to back. Every tangled mass of black suddenly formed a dangling human body. There was a whoosh, and a sharp crack behind them. A tree branch fell right out of the air, and the girl was gone in a swirl of her black cape.
***
So. This was it.

Robin scanned the rooftops casually with a pair of night-vision binoculars, watching for the telltale flicker of white through the static green and black. The streets below, encrusted by decades of slow and painful decline, were empty save a single prostitute in a red pleather dress. A flash of white as she lit a cigarette under the fly-spotted light of a lone street lamp.

Two young boys walked past the girl, ignoring her as though she were a piece of scenery they had passed too many times to notice any longer. The older boy carried a plastic bag of groceries, the younger one toddled faithfully at his side. They disappeared into one of the old tenements, one that could have been as old as the Pantheon but without the same grace of age.

He sighed and sat back. The city was drawn out around him in art deco chunks of black and red. He was supposed to watch here for a few hours until Batgirl or Batman called him and told him to move, but he found the more he stayed here the more likely it was they just wanted him out of their way. It was a bôsôzoku drug dealer he was looking for, a man who frequented this area and its cadre of young prostitutes.

Bruce wasn’t the least distracted by the untimely exit of the FBI lady he’d been dating, but then again, very rarely did women faze him. He’d been using her, like he’d used others, for information, and in his deep, strange way the ends justified the means. Even if he’d had to sleep with her, and make her believe he cared about her, and probably break her dear heart.

He checked his watch. Half past midnight in the little red LED numerals on the inside of his glove. He remembered talking with Barbara in her office and was slightly embarrassed at how he had just confessed himself the way he did. He hadn’t really done anything wrong by doing his job, had he? He didn’t want to disappoint Barbara, or Bruce, or Dick. Their approval was everything to him, the single thing he had wanted most in his life since he was a little kid.

He put his arms on the building edge and laid his head on them, yawning. He had an algebra test the next day, and he hadn’t studied. He would probably fall asleep in class again, have to take a note home to Bruce that Alfred would sign. The girl on the corner ground out her cigarette and folded her arms over her chest. He thought about the girl named X that Memoria had talked so blandly about. What kind of girl was she? A mercenary…a type of underground saint? Or was she the kind of slave Bruce had told him about, someone doomed by her debt to Intergang?

As he thought about X, he came to think of her, the girl in his mind who no longer had a name, but just a single pronoun to describe her. It seemed sad to reduce her to that one tiny word, but as her image faded from his memory, he found it was the only way to recall it. He wondered about Memoria and Praevidare, about their everlasting memories and how they could bring themselves to think of everything at once, never forgetting and always remembering. What pain that would be, to never let slip the things that hurt you the most.

So that was why he was making himself forget her, a bit at a time. He had to be careful, or as he forgot her he’d forget others, as if she pulled them down with her, like a black hole. She was the one who exiled him from her. It was her fault.

The girl on the corner took up another cigarette, raising the plastic lighter to her face. A very young man in a leather jacket, tropical print shirt, and leather pants approached her from the side street. Robin zoomed the lenses in, picked up a dark, smooth face with long eyes and black hair slicked back so severely it could have been plastic. The girl stretched her arms over her head, red pleather flattened over a slightly wasted frame. The man rubbed the back of his neck. Robin amplified the resolution, zoomed in again. There was a scaly, green tattoo over the back of his hand. Faux irezumi. Bôsôzoku.

He shot out a grappling hook and swung down into the street, his outstretched boot hitting the bôsôzoku in the face. The girl screamed, dropped her cigarette, and ran into the dark. The man hit the sidewalk, dabbing at his chin with his cuff. Robin readied his handcuffs.

“ You’re coming in,” he said.

The man glared at him from the corner of his eye, then jumped up and swept at him with a switchblade he produced from his cuff. He parried, then thrust at Robin’s R, then shied back and went for the stomach. Robin grabbed his fist in two hands, turned, and tossed him over his back. The switchblade came loose as the bôsôzoku hit the brick wall of a tenement. Plaster dust puffed out fine as mist.

He tied up the man in a second, then sent Batman, who was occupied, a message. He knelt behind the man, looking at the switchblade he held. It had a hardwood handle, lacquered red with cherry blossoms painted on it. He looked at the suspect, who grunted, unconscious. A man who hunted for prostitutes at night, brought them to his local group of yakuza-wannabes, where they brutalized her and then mutilated the body, leaving a cold, inhuman pulp of human being in a gutter.

And suddenly, he understood how she could sometimes lose it, just cut the throat or disembowel them with a single swipe. It was pure, unadulterated rage that had controlled her, that controlled her still. She couldn’t have died because he wasn’t yet her victim.

He shook the idea from his head. It was wrong to kill. Taking human life was a sin, a dirty, hated thing. Completely ineffective, when taken into account that one’s suffering was over once they were dead.

He called Batman again, this time getting a reply.

“ I’m on the street over,” he said. Robin recognized the purr of the Batmobile in the background, but couldn’t hear Batgirl. They’d split up, undoubtedly after talking about him.

The man on the cement gurgled, then lay still.

So. There was nowhere for him to go but forward, forgetting. He had never hated her, never saved her life, never let her save him. Her face was dissolving from his memory like sand.

The Batmobile pulled up a few seconds later, the engine slowing from a boiling growl down to a steady thrum. The oil-glossed hatch opened, and Batman swept out. Reached over and wrenched the bôsôzoku up off the ground by his lapels.

“ What are we going to do with him?” Robin asked curiously.

Batman didn’t answer, but slapped the man around till he came to. And screamed like a frightened animal.

About ten minutes later, they balanced at the edge of a skyscraper in downtown Gotham, the bôsôzoku hanging off the end of a flagpole by his belt. He twisted and thrashed, squealing. His blazer had been pulled off, the sleeves of his dress shirt rolled up and his tattooed arms exposed to the night air.

Batman stared at him, brow lowered, cape drawn about his body like a pair of kevlar wings. Robin leaned up against the building, arms folded. This was the part of the job that was most enjoyable, the minutes when the perp was still fresh, still raw, his sweat bleeding off his brow and into the dark space underneath.

“ Mr. and Mrs. Donatello would like to know where their daughter is,” Batman muttered, loud enough so his voice bounced slightly off the city street, combating the noise of traffic below.

“ I-I don’t know what you’re talking about!” the man cried.

“ A prostitute, runaway. Brunette. Big blue eyes. Ring a bell?”

“ Never met her!” He looked down. Twenty-five stories of pure, cool air between him and the cement.

Batman took a step forward, putting one boot on the base of the flagpole. It swayed slightly.

“ Samantha,” he hissed. “ Sammie,”

Robin could hear the bôsôzoku gasping from where he stood. “ I don’ know!”

Batman leaned on the base harder. The pole swayed a little more. “ She was fourteen.”

The man threw up. Robin looked away, slightly bored.

“ Fine,” Batman turned away from the edge and began walking away, down the length of the ledge. “ Robin,”

The boy pattered after him. The man on the flagpole screamed.

“ The viaduct…I think! There were so many…” He threw up again.

“ Which viaduct?” Batman asked from down the ledge.

“ Don’t know…” He coughed. “ Viaduct E, the one that goes into the bay. That’s where usually…”

Batman turned back around and continued down the ledge, Robin following closely.

“ Wait!” the man cried, voice rasping. “ Bring me back in! You said you’d bring me back in!”

Batman didn’t turn. “ I never said anything about pulling you back,”

As they rounded the corner, Batman shot a grappling gun out into the dark. He leapt off the edge, soaring across the street in a concave arc. Robin followed, catching the wind in the concrete gully, deflecting off a building across the way and hopping back up to where Batman stood in a single seamless action.

“ You’re not going to bring him in?” he asked, crouching on the billboard next to his mentor. Some big advertisement for microwave ramen splattered the canvas behind them.

“ Batgirl’s going to get him in an hour,” he replied.

Robin sat down and crossed his legs under him. Sometimes, he found himself crossing that boundary between people like Batman and people like Mullen. Pain was the thing that linked them, this common entity that stained the miasma of their existences. Like a flesh bond, a brother they never wanted anyone to know they had.

He was quiet the rest of the night. Batman didn’t complain. Even when he was back home, in bed, his mind was blank, like a cleaned slate. And he suddenly realized he had forgotten her. Till that moment, when she was dredged up out of his mind. An involuntary impulse. A dear, hated thing.

He turned over in bed. Memories didn’t work that way, then. They couldn’t disappear on command. It was a process that took decades to even begin to work. In the end, the memories you least wanted were the ones that always stayed close, under the surface, like a cancer beneath the skin. She would invade his dreams, and exist there, no matter if he wanted her there or not.

He dozed off. And she was there. Waiting for him, blade drawn.

[Sable Phoenix]

Oh yes... finally, the quentissential scene of Batman hanging the thug from the rooftop.

Once again, a great installment. It's cool to see everything starting to come together, the divergent plot threads begining to weave their way into a plot rope. Ooooh... Plot rope. Have to remember that one.

Do hurry with the next installment, DoE. You realize, of course, that after that absolutely mind-blowing installment with the ninja on the rooftop, that you're going to have to top this story off with a real corker. Let's give it up for another of DoE's gut-wrenchers! HRAAAAAAH!

[Panther]

I agree with Sable Phoenix, hanging-the-thug-off-the-roof is classic Batman, 'plotrope' is a good word, and how will you top that fight scene? I bet it'll be awesome. Huzzah!

I will have to repeat myself on several things:

Why is Tim being an idiot? May I pretty please smack him upside the head in an attempt to knock some sense into him? Here we have X carrying teh flame through Heaven, Hell, everywhere in between and back, and then we have Tim hating and trying to forget her?! And why hasn't he made the connection yet between X and "her"?

Again, I love the international flavor. An escape/rescue from a jail in Germany co-ordinated from a cybercafe in Korea - how cool is that?

X has really flipped this time, hasn't she? Or is the overdoes of Machinna doing a real number on her system?

And, as always, beautiful, wonderful details that bring the story to life.

Please post more soon!

[The_NewCatwoman]

Ahhh, yes, as Sable Phoenix and Panther said, a classic truly. I really enjoyed this part, especially the bodies hanging fromt he trees. It seems as if it's just more and more fun to come up with weird unconventional ways to kill people off. Maybe I'm just a little demented... NEway, about Donald, I know you didn't steal him or anything, I just thought they were kindred spirits of the worst kind.

[Sable Phoenix]

Where's the next chapter?

[Daughterof_Evil]

This was how it would be, then.

Hope had never been one of his things. It was an escaped creature to him, an animal that he had once possessed but had lost. Life, love, revolution were not so optimistic. And to think, children came into the world every day not knowing what a terrible experience living could be. The sweet and the bitter were supposed to balance; they were supposed to make the unbearable gauntlet of life worth more than this.

He picked up his cup of green tea and drank hungrily. Sporadic bursts of sleeplessness had been his hell for eight years, ever since Arina’s death, and he was in one of his bouts now. Placed his palms flat against his eye sockets and rubbed. Still, the hot, calculating blade of insomnia bit fiercely into his brain. The computer screen in front of him flickered, and he sat bolt upright, tossing his feet off the table.

Crucifying Asmodeus had been her parting gift. He had been the one to permanently scar her face, her body, her brain. Even Mullen himself had been at unease at Asmodeus’s love of torturing the girl. Causing agony in someone so repressed gave him power, connected him with a real, physical world of pain. X and Asmodeus were startlingly similar in that respect. Violence was in their blood, on their minds. Receding within themselves and their own dreams made the gore seem rational.

Jealous, that’s what he was. Because he had never had the chance to punish her himself. See her body break and heal and scar with a pain that seemed so solid he could taste the screams in her throat, even when she never made a noise. What does she dream of, he wondered silently, when she falls into her fantasy-world? Death, a final release of pain? Or the pointless life as the corpse that she was, bits and pieces of human within a metal shell?

Luthor would be pissed when he’d find out the girl was missing. She was the key to months of intensive research and development; it didn’t help that she was also evidence of his exceedingly illegal activities. Not that Luthor couldn’t handle it. He was good friends with nearly every legislator and politician in North America and beyond, and it wouldn’t be hard to twist the rules on human experimentation to accommodate his actions. As if anyone would ever know…

Mullen sat back and smiled. What a horrible joke this was.
***
The Schwarzwald stained the land behind her in a great, dark mass, the sky above bruise-purple with the impending peak of dawn. It didn’t seem like there was any end to the night; it would stretch on forever, blotting out whole sections of her memory until it destroyed her, dismantled her, and removed every trace of her existence from the grid of humanity.

But still, there was a sliver of hope she retained in the future. If she was going to continue living, she would have to leave Intergang behind her, cast it like an old skin. She drew her katana and held it up to her face. The wounds Asmodeus had carved there –his last gift- had healed over into gnarled scars; one vertical under each eye, two more horizontal on the left cheek. The razor he’d used had been infected with something.

His crucifixion was a comfort to her. She had demeaned and destroyed one who had demeaned and destroyed her; it was the relentless cycle of pain that the world revolved about. She had completed that cycle and was now moving on. In a sick way, it was justice for Mademoiselle, the woman who had loved him and died by his hand. The most beautiful woman X had ever known, hardly to be considered human. Yes, X and Asmodeus had things in common; they were the only two capable of killing those they loved. His death was her suicide.

Now that she was out, she was only sorry that she had not found Saru within the borders of Germany; she would have liked to thank him for his help, maybe give him the hug she had always wanted to. She had a feeling they would meet again, someday. They were too much alike to stay apart.

She gazed at the katana. There was a minute pattern to its surface, like microscopic chain mail. She remembered once hearing about how blademakers in Japan strove for the most unique amalgamations of metal to produce the most beautiful patterns on their swords. That sometimes mixing inferior metals like manganese with steel made the blade stronger. This sword she held, like herself, was not pure metallo, but a mixture of a thousand different alloys to produce something better than the original. Metallo, steel, carbon. Metallo, flesh, bone.

This story had begun with a rebirth, and it would end with one. Her life, her body, her mind, all had conjoined back into one single package that was hers alone. She had decided she was renouncing the human race and joining the ranks of the untouchables, the outcastes and the reviled. She replaced the katana in its scabbard and hopped down from the satellite dish, landing on the forest floor twenty feet below with barely a flap of her cloak. Its broad white face, among other identical white faces, was stamped with the golden L logo she had learned to hate.

It wouldn’t be easy to just walk away from them. She knew that they would come hunting for her, and if the slaughter in the Schwarzwald had been any indication, she would be ready for them. She adjusted the new bulk of the stolen LexCorp laser rifle on her back, its adjoining night/heat vision goggles clipped onto a bandolier crossing her chest. Her skills as a warrior were becoming more apparent; it was easier to kill every time. The warmth in her veins, the white of her mind, it was a sick, cheap thrill but a fuel all the same. The whole world was her battleground. She could go anywhere.

She intended on avoiding Berlin; there was a large and particularly brutal faction of Intergang there, and though they were enemies to Mullen it would still be unwise to test their territory. To the east there was a slew of former Soviet countries with unstable governments and thriving organized crime, a place she could easily lose herself and perhaps find a few underground allies. To the west there was France, crawling with Intergang and a place she never wanted to see again in her life. The Middle East afforded no protection, she checked it off the list. Asia was a far-off possibility; Communist China was out of the question, but down through Pakistan and India and up through Japan she knew the languages and could at least make some deals for aid.

So now it was only her. She began walking along towards the light spot in the sky where the sun was beginning to scythe through. She had no allies, no friends, no one who knew of her existence out in the big, lonely world. Only those who had given her her freedom, the ones who she left behind, the ones without names or faces. They were as anonymous as she was, stripped of identity down to the tips of their fingers.

And the boy in her mind, locked away from her. The way she remembered things, it was hard for her to believe he was alive. It filled her with a deep, extreme pain, an empty feeling like when she would shut her mind off and succumb to the dream-world where he laid, waiting for her. Her hate was unraveling, springs of deep-seated rage towards the boy in red; the tender, kind thing. Her most holy beloved. But now there was no way for her to love, no outlet for that type of emotion, and no way to be loved back. Apathy was the only thing left to feel.

It wasn’t immediate, or even something that happened in the first forty-eight hours, but she stopped thinking about him. She didn’t forget him; she knew that was impossible. He simply slipped into the back of her mind. As she hopped aboard a LexCorp semi on its way out of Germany, she steeled herself for what she knew was going to be a long battle. And she would be ready for them, when they would come.

THE END

[witness]

Why oh why did you stop now???? I was hoping for her and Robin to meet again! Oh I cannot believe it! When I saw the word Epilogue, I was so disappointed that it was finally ending. You didn't end it where I had hoped. You've left the door wide open. Left me at least with longing for more. So many questions.....


But I will just pose this one. Will you PLEASE write another story about X in the future?????




P. S. I absolutely loved this story!!! You have done an excellent job with all of these characters, most of them being ones that you've created yourself, or borrowed from your friend. I really do hope you continue to grace us with your writing.

I tip my hand to you. You are one of the greats.

[Panther]

Oh no! The end? The end! Ai yi yi what a horible way to end things! And good lord woman, I could trip and breck my neck on all the loose ends lying around! So many unresolved issues and conflcits and questions! I can only hope you mean to turn this into a triology. I absolutly love all of these characters way too much to accept the fact that's it. And no way Robin and X decide just to forget about each other and move on. No way! This felt too sudden to be an ending. A lot like there was no way the end of 'The Empire Strikes Back' was The End.

Besides that, I loved all the detail. I think 'tapestry' might be a good word to describe your writing style. Alll htose minute, metiuclte deatil woven inot the story and everything fitting together perfectly to make up this fabulous, exceptional, magnificent, wonderful, suberb, death defying, descriptionless story.

right on! write on!

[The_NewCatwoman]

Oooooooooo! How could you stop now?!

Oh yeah, um, you just.... stop.


Well besides that, this was superb, and I just /know/ this isn't the last we see of X and Timmy-tim-kins. Or Bruce for that matter.

Happy Posting!!!

Bwa ha ha ha ha ha HA! *cough* *Choke*, Ack! Okay, gotta lay off the oreo's.

Thanks for such a spectacular story.

-tNC

[Sable Phoenix]

The end? How COULD you do this to us DoE? That hardly seemed like the best place to stop, there were so many loose ends left flopping around. Please, please post the sequel soon.

[Daughterof_Evil]

You think that’s it!?

I should tell you here and now that I had originally planned Shadows of Angels to be a one volume story. Seeing as time constraints have proven that impossible, I found it necessary to end it here, for now. The sequel I have been working on for about a month now. It shouldn’t be too long before I post it, though I want to get everything straightened out since I have realized that I’m only making an already complicated story more incomprehensible. So, long story short, the sequel will be out within a month, whether its complete or not.

Now to the thank yous. Since the old boards are inaccessible now, I couldn’t go back to find everyone who encouraged me over the time it has taken me to write this story. So I’m guessing here:

SilverKnight: A wonderful person, a caring friend, and a hell of a great writer.

Susie: A professional tear-jerker from Time Too Short to Long Journey Home, though she’s been missing for awhile and we all hope she comes back soon.

Panther: My oldest supporter and a great listener, as well as a damn good writer! She’s been with me since I wrote that sob-fest Children of the Night, and she always encourages me.

Maxine: Always told me the truth, no matter what. What else can I say?

Coran: A talented writer and an altogether nice guy.

Sable Phoenix: A buddy way back from our BTAS comic days (did you guys ever finish that thing??) and a gifted artist. Not to mention the inventor of the word “plot-rope”.

witness: A good person who has always supported me, or told me when I’ve gone too far and killed off a good character. Also a very good writer.

The Game: Incredibly gifted, I’m still reeling from the Return of the Phantasm.

the new Catwoman: Can screw up the best of minds with her incredibly complex Elseworlds! Inspired me to go further with my writing than I ever thought I could. Also once suggested using a baby spoon to displace a spinal cord.

Tonbo Rosso: Let me borrow, abuse, and ship her characters back in small boxes. She’s my best friend, a talented writer, artist, and altogether miraculous person.

I couldn’t have done anything without you guys. Your praise and outrage has sustained me and pressed me further. When I first started this whole assassin saga, I didn’t think it could ever go so far. You have all convinced me it can. Thank you all.

I must also thank several not-so-private people who have inspired me. Yukito Kushiro, manga creator of such masterpieces as Gunnm, Last Order, and Ashen Victor, inspired me with his character Gally, an amnesiac cyborg searching for answers through battle. I salute you, sir. Also thanks to Chiho Saito, manga creator of Revolutionary Girl Utena, for convincing me that a girls’ revolution is truly possible, and to Kunihiko Ikuhara, director of the Utena movie, for transfixing me in his hallucinogenic world. Also thank you to Mitsuhiro Oikawa, whose song “ I Want to Be Your Fiancée,” I used for Saru’s waltz around the kitchen.

Thanks go to Bruce Timm and Paul Dini for TNBA, and also to the dearly departed Bob Kane, who created something that still defines culture decades later. Thanks to Dick Grayson for this wonderful site, and also to all the moderators who give their spare time to make sure none of us are being naughty.

So, all together now, ARIGATO!