"How did you become the Scourge?"
The question, barely rasped out from dry lips, made Allison look up at the man - a stranger she had managed to pull from the wreckage of the U.S. Steel building after the dragon had hit - over the tops of her sunglasses. She hadn't bothered to clean off any of the blood that had managed to accumulate upon her arms and hands; the muted red of humanity was blending together with the black ichor that ran through the veins of a dragon. Steepling her fingers together, she leaned back in her chair, shaking her head. "...you don't want to know."
Watery blue eyes somehow kept their focus upon her as he repeated himself; this time, though, he had to try a couple of times before he could get his voice to come out of those moving lips. "...I want to know. How did you become the Scourge?" His voice was cracking near the end - he was getting weaker by the minute. She had done what she could for the man, but there was nothing to be done about the slash across his chest; the sheet was clinging to the gaping wound like a second skin, filling in the terrible wound to reveal a landscape that was as bleak as she felt. Silence, heavy and oppressive, filled the room as the Scourge found herself unable to meet his gaze. Why shouldn't she tell him? He was a dying man, for Chrissakes... but what comfort could her story possibly give him? She hadn't been lying when she said it was nothing worth hearing. Do I lie to him, make something up to keep up the illusion he's under until he passes on... or do I tell him the truth and make him see? Ultimately, she took a deep breath and allowed her eyes to return to his.
"...most people assume that it's some glamorous process, but it's not."
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The bathroom mirror was what did it, she would tell herself later when she looked back upon this night. Granted, there was nothing special about it; a cheap plastic frame of what had once been gaudy bright pink holding glass hung upon a cement brick wall in a bathroom that was as stark as a jail cell. The sink was over almost a foot to the left, but the wall above the worn porcelain was cracked badly enough to not support the relatively meager weight of the only looking glass the landlord had been able to afford. Here or there, small chips from the tenants that had lived there before her had shown up in the glass, most of them surrounded by scrapes of half-assed cleaning jobs.
She wasn't feeling any better, really; the daily grind of working twelve hours a day in a factory was hardly how she had imagined her future. <i>Then again, when does any little girl look at their mommy and go 'When I grow up, I wanna spend all day standing next to a conveyor belt counting jars?'</i> Usually, the thought would have brought at least the ghost of a smile to her lips; tonight, though, Allison was beyond consolation. But why? The answer was everywhere; the cold industrial wasteland of her work, the apartment that was barely furnished as if it were abandoned. Hell, her entire life was... was...
...empty.
That was it; there was nothing left for her to accomplish. No future, no relationship... no family. Why should she even bother going through the motions if it would never improve? For once, she couldn't give herself an answer. Staring at her reflection in the mirror, she could see the wrinkles already setting in around her eyes and upon her forehead: 'worry lines', as her mother had called them once upon a time. She looked spent at twenty-two, like she had been chewed up and spit out well before it was supposed to happen. <i>Why slam yourself into a brick wall over and over again when you know that you're not going anywhere?</i> It was futile to even try.
It was easy enough to break the frame, easier yet to smash the glass inside. Seven years bad luck, Allison thought almost giddily, eyes dancing with madness as she brought the biggest shard to the waiting flesh of her wrist. There was pain - of course there was pain - but soon she was lying upon the cold tile, her life's blood flowing out from two jagged slashes of her wrists. As blood loss set in, she felt as if she were flying... she had found the door, the way through the brick wall. The white light was blindingly brilliant as her soul slipped free of aching flesh, a spectral hand lifting towards the gates that she swore were just within her reach. It was so close; finally, she was approaching salvation...
Only to have the way closed off, a voice that resonated with age telling her that it was not yet her time to go. Back into that battered corpse was she sent, her spirit screaming with rage as Eden was denied, the gates closed... for all time. If she had thought she had felt pain before when she had slit her wrists, the agony she endured when whatever god had brought her back to accursed life forced them to heal was tenfold that. Every severed muscle, every single tendon that was rejoined with its mate sent agony screaming through her veins to the point that it tore free of her lips to shatter the tomblike silence that had fallen over the room. Her voice was a whisper for days afterwards, her eyes bloodshot as the pain of further healing forced her to forgo sleep.
About a week later was when the markings showed themselves for the first time. At first, she had sworn that the healing scabs of her suicide attempt had gotten infected, the flesh becoming reddened and far more tender to the touch; from there, the discoloration had spread and gotten darker until her forearms were criss-crossed in thin black lines that resembled thread left to dangle beneath the surface of her skin, the scars of her wounds taking on the shape of daggers made of the same off-toned 'sickness'. Doctor after doctor was stumped; it was a passerby that labeled her as 'the Scourge'.
She would not know until the dragon's attack just what the so-called 'Scourging' had done to her.
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"...and that's how it happened." Her voice, rough with the pain of scars that never really went away, went quiet as she slumped further back into her chair, her head tilted forward. The quiet now was the kind she could deal with, the sort that one finds in hospitals at night. She didn't know how long they stayed within that almost companionlike silence, she not moving a muscle, he slowly bleeding out. It took her a few minutes to notice how badly he was struggling to breathe.
Forcing herself to her feet, she walked over to his side. One of his weak hands reached out to clasp the blood-stained flesh of her hand, his grip as tight as he could make it. It took a few tries for her to figure out what it was he was trying to rasp out; finally relenting and leaning in close, she managed to catch his words this time. "...thank you." His chest rose one last time, the breath bursting with promise of more to come... then fell, never to rise again.
Reaching into her pocket, the Scourge pulled out a pair of quarters and put them over his eyes after she carefully closed the lids. Another life extinguished, she thought as she drew the sheet up over the nameless man's face. For a moment, she found herself sending out a silent prayer to gods that she didn't even know were listening that the man's soul would find Heaven, that whatever family was up there would find him; the seeming whimsy vanished as reality set in. This building would probably not survive the dawn - his funeral pyre would be the wreckage of this tenement, the fire set by Allison herself to give the enemy one less place to hide.
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