Here Be Dragons
@agentannakelso (Prompt: Undressing.)
It was improbable. Impossible. There was no way they could have gotten so lucky.
For years the NSF worked to neutralize the MJ12, taking more blows than throwing them with their underarmed and undermanned forces. Now the resistance fighter standing before Anna Kelso claimed they had secured the ruthless shadow organization's second in command in their hands. How they had managed to capture Director Walton Simons and bring him in alive bewildered her, and made her wonder if his surrender was an elaborate ruse. They had either struck gold or the worst land mine in history.
She squints incredulously; her mechanically augmented eyes forming two amber slivers in the darkness. "And he's...he's here now?"
The man wriggles his blonde whiskers like one shy of a sneeze and tosses his head in the direction he just came. "They've got the bastard in one o' them tunnel cells. Jammer's down there so he shouldn't be able to call with his augs, but..." his shoulders shimmer, chilled by a stray thought or draft, "Ma'am, I'm thinking we shouldn't have that rattler snake anywhere near us. Being who he is and all."
'What he is', Anna adds mentally, her lips set thin and grim. Her golden-brown eyes wander back and forth over a blank wall as if they held answers to the dilemmas she faced. She did not know how to proceed.
No. That was a lie. Nothing would please her more than ramming that war criminal's face through the stone and mortar wall she stared at, but despite the arguments forming in her head in favor of Simon's quick death, she was certain Lebedev would not approve. They would paint him, this illustrious "protector of the free world" as a martyr and stain the resistance's name with a deeper shade of red.
"Lead me to him." Her command comes as a question, but if the sergent notices her hesitation he does not comment. His singular grunt betrays his own displeasure.
...
The passage into the tunnels is narrow and gently sloped, but both Anna and the sergent hold on to the railings that line the barren walls. Her augmentations make her traverse easier - her eyes mapping the dim lit terrain and her legs stabilizing her steps - but condensation collects upon the stone floors as thick as the sense of unease layering within her gut and the grip of her gun does not soothe her well. The deeper they descend the more she imagines herself slipping down into a hungry, hollow maw.
Here be dragons.
She shakes her head from the thought. No. Simons was still a man: still a coding of X's and Y's...and ones and zeros. Despite his graduation into a higher physical existance he was still a creature of flesh - still capable of folly and of reason. She could not let what she knew of him put him on par with the unknown.
Simons, after all, was not foriegn to her. The severe looking man appeared on the news every other week, and his slippery voice poluted press clips every month. She had danced violence with him before: felt his ribs bruise under her blows, his arms constrict around her waist, and his fingers crush into her neck. However, it had been years since she had seen him face-to-face, barrel-to-barrel, knife-to-sword, and she begins to wonder if he would recognize her, and if she, in turn, would recognize him without the diplomatic facade he nested himself in over the last woeful decade.
A breeze smelling of rot and dirt pushes against her face, brushing her auburn hair out from behind her ear. Though underground and untouched by the sun, it is warm like a breath or a laugh to a joke she does not want to understand. She imagines it is him who taunts it with those glittering, dark eyes and those even, white teeth, although the man was never known for jest.
A scream rips through the breeze, her heart, her mind. It is of a man's - pained and angry - the sound not unlike a call to death. Were it not for the years of conflict, pain and training, she would have gasped and paused. Instead her brow furrows and her resolve hardens. Both she and the man quicken their pace towards its source with firearms at the ready.
The horror errupts again. It twists at her soul and burrows into her mind like all the others she had heard in her turbulent years. She wonders if it is Simons's cry, and for a second she has to purse her lips to keep herself from laughing. For all the suffering he had caused, the vision of him broken now that he had been bitten, could only be called just desserts.
But it was not him, and, ashamed for her malice, her heart sinks a little for it. A stream of curses rounds on their ears - too high pitched and strained to be his, and when they burst through the holding cell door her fears are confirmed. In one corner a cowed man slips and slides on the damp ground between two others attempting to hold him up. His face is ashen grey like those whom die of the plague, but his eyes are bright and wild. In his hand he attempts to hold his wrist and the two protruding bones that jut out of his flesh in place. There is no blood - not yet - but in seconds dark lines trace down his arm and paint the floor a muddy red. "YOU BASTARD!" he screams across the room, his face contorting in pain, "YOU - SHIT - shitshitshit - PIECE OF SHIT!"
The back of her neck prickles as a movement stirs in the corner of her eyes. Warily she turns towards the other corner to catch a darkness standing calm and complete under the lasered crosshairs that dance across his chest and face. He is without his usual heavy overcoat, and his tussled hair falls across his forehead, but he remains perpetually formal despite this. Calmly, his hands knit before his waist.
He has not seen her, but she knows he knows she is there for he adjusts his stance to face all those whom oppose him, although his gaze continues to sneer over the one who's wrist he had rendered. Like a vacuum he suffocates by merely being there, so her grip tightens on her firearm as she draws its sights towards his neck.
It is this movement that draws him to her - this movement that makes him look at her with shadowed eyes.
Nothing verbal is said, yet her gut churns again.
"Undress, Simons. Damn you," barks a guard, tired of the entire display. "We will not ask again."
He releases her and she remembers to breathe. "Yes, that worked out so well for you last time," is his soft reply - a strange catharsis amist tensions running high.
"SCREW YOU, SCUMBAG," the other screeches now back upon his feet. Blind with rage he takes a step forward before two sets of hands drag him back, jostling his damaged arm in the process. Simons head lowers as he turns his attention to the buttons on his cuffs, but Anna could see the smug curl of his lip beneath the bow as the rebel yelps again.
Three leave. Four stay. And Anna finds herself wishing she were not with the latter.
She is no stranger to nudity: male or female, augmented or pure, lover or stranger, whether it be in moments of pleasure or in moments of pain. Nonetheless it is different here, now, in the same room as this monster - no, man, she remembers - whom appeared to have no qualms on undressing before others. The simple act turns into a hideous ritutal, a catastrophe - one that she could not avert. Her skin itches and burns with each unfastening pop of a button, and at once she wishes she were a snake and able to shed and slither herself away.
He did not smell. Even with her heightened senses the most she could pick up beyond the scent of her comrades' cloth, gunpowder, and stress-born sweat was the faint tinge of electricity, pine, and musk. Still, her senses recoil. She felt too close to him in this confined room. Trapped. Alone. It was as if her fingers were dancing across his buttons and undoing his tie and her hands pushing and pulling that expensive cloth aside.
It made her sick.
Yet as his vest and shirt slip from his form, as his tie, belt and slacks fall to the side, a contrasting wave of relief gently tickles the back of her mind. He was not the behemoth her mind's eye continuously threatened to imagine. He was not overly toned or sinewy. His chest and arms and back and thighs, though athletic, were not imposing or impressive. They did not make her tremble in fear or hold her breath. He was just a man - a man with scars and faults, she reminds herself for the third time tonight, despite his powers both within and without.
Yes. Just a man.
A laugh bursts from her lungs, shattering the air and tearing the cobwebs of fear that strung through it. She forgets herself and the danger even as his colourless gaze peirces her soul, her mind alight with hope. "That's it?" she gasps, "I figured you for something more."
For a small fraction of a second those stern, proud eyes waiver and drop to the floor: a moment of rare humility - bashfulness, perhaps - from the man who reaped acres of souls.
For this and for an even smaller fraction of a second, Anna's cheeks flush the lightest shade of pink.
She quietens as his eyes, now ringed with white return to burn into her own, and a faint bluish-white light flashes across his flesh in geometric pattern.
His skin shimmers like scales.