Character Death: Anita
Apr. 17th, 2006 10:38 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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lkh_lashoutsThis... is bad. I apologize. But the plot bunny was insidious and would not go away. Blame it on the Mary Sues.
Enjoy with sadistic glee.
“Wake up, Anita.” The voice was soft, sweet, soothing. The pain in my head warned me it might be an exaggeration. I opened my eyes reluctantly. The room I was in was… not a room. I stared around in wonder. I was in a forest, the trees so thick only the faintest traces of moonlight penetrated to the ground where I lay, surrounded by the scent of fresh earth and pine and camp fires.
As I looked around, I found the source of the voice. And promptly shook my head, denying the sight before me. Juliana. Her brown curls were loose, flowing around her like a cloak. She walked toward me, her bare feet making no sound on the dewy earth, her white skirt floating around her.
“I am sorry it has come to this,” she said in that dulcet, faintly-accented voice that I’d watched work magic in Jean-Claude and Asher. Ever since her reappearance they had changed. Jean-Claude had distanced himself from me, and I watched him longing to return to their old ménage trois. He’d stopped sleeping with me, even when I offered to let him and Asher share me.
“What are you doing, Juliana?”
“I am doing what must be done, Anita. I do wish it might have worked out differently. If only you could have—well, it’s no matter now.” She knelt beside me and looked up at the dark silhouetted branches overhead.
“If only I what? What’s happening?”
“You could have accepted the last mark, you know. You could have sealed the triumvirate. You could have allowed Jean to return to Asher’s and my bed. You could have done a lot of things, Anita, but you didn’t want to. You wanted to cling to what you see as humanity and you wanted to cling to everything else as well.” Juliana shook her head and shrugged.
I struggled to free my hands, but the cords weren’t moving. The leg bindings were just as tight. Damn it. This was not going well. Keep her talking… Jean-Claude or Micah or Richard, someone, would be coming soon. “I’m sorry. That was shitty of me. But what does this have to do with us being here?”
“You made them miserable, Anita. You really shouldn’t have done that. They don’t like being made unhappy. Belle gets away with it because, well, she’s Belle and she has had lots of practice. But you? You should have known better.”
“Who’s miserable?” My mind was spinning as I tried to puzzle my way through her words. “Jean-Claude and Asher? They’re the only ones who’ve been with Belle…”
“Yes, Jean-Claude and Asher.” Julianna’s voice held the edge of annoyance. “For an investigator, you’re really very slow. Did you honestly think they were just two pretty faces? Did you really forget how Jean got to where he is? And Asher? How do you think he has survived the ages? By being some wilting beautiful flower?” Juliana’s laugh had nothing to do with sweetness now. It was musical mockery.
“Perhaps if I had not come along again, you might have been all right. But you did not handle that so well either.”
“What the hell are you talking about? Juliana- Anna, let me go!” I fought with the bindings on my hands, but they only seemed to get tighter. I had to get away. Juliana was acting too sane, too calm. Something was desperately wrong. “Does Jean-Claude know—“
“Oh god, you are dumb.” For once she sounded like the suburban 19-year-old she should have been as she stood up. “Who do you think helped me to get you here?”
And with that, my world started to crumble.
“Look, Anita. You’re too powerful. If you’d have sealed the Servant deal, or the triumvirate, you might have been safe. But with a demi-servant, lycanthropy-carrying, super-Necromancer Nimir-Ra, running loose and having sex and possibly reproducing, did you think it wouldn’t ring some alarm bells? Didn’t you stop to worry about people thinking you might be bit too much of a threat? Or were you too wrapped up in silky sheets and hookers to notice?”
“Leave Nathaniel—“ I started to launch into a rant, but she waved her hand to shut me up.
“Figure of speech. Whatever. Look, this is going to hurt, okay?” When she turned I felt my eyes trying to pop out of my head at the size of the knife in her slight little hand. Juliana was smaller than I was, built like Tinkerbell, and now she was wielding a knife that would have given Jack the Ripper a hard-on and walking toward me with it.
“Close your eyes, Anita. You don’t want to get blood in your eyes.” Her voice was once again soft and sincere as she knelt and brought the blade close to my face.
I screamed. I screamed and twisted away only to find that I couldn’t move much at all. I settled for twisting my head wildly.
“Look, keep it still or I’m so not apologizing for slicing out an eyeball.”
I froze and shut my eyes.
True to her offer, she kept it minimal. I felt a sharp pain on my forehead, above my third eye, and then she stood up. “Gracias, mademoiselle,” she said in a voice that was far too cheerful for slicing into people in the middle of night-time forests.
“See?” she walked back to me, from wherever she had been behind the trees, holding a small vial. “It’s not much, but it will fix so much more. Imagine, you won’t have to worry about losing that humanity you love anymore. Jean-Claude gets his triumvirate, Richard escapes that unhealthy pattern you two have going, and Micah can finally find a Nimir-Ra who won’t be sleeping with half the city. Oh, and I get to be a necromancer and help Jean get his triumvirate. Everyone wins, really.”
“What’s in that vial?” I asked around the sudden sick, empty feeling in my stomach.
“The brew that is true.” She giggled, raised the glass up to the sky above then downed it with the ease of someone well-acquainted with the art of tequila shots.
She held up another vial. “And this is the chalice from the palace.”
I took it back. She wasn’t sane at all. Completely loony and then some. “You’re psychotic.”
“No.” Juliana shook her head and looked very serious. “I just have a job to do. It’s easy to be all doom and gloom with something like this. It’s expected. It’s passé. Look on the bright side- you could be burned alive.”
“A job?” My brain had stopped at that. This was a job? Juliana, girly, useless, pretty Juliana was an assassin?
“I’m Asher’s human servant. I lived with them in Belle Morte’s dominion. What did you think that meant? Just lots of sex and frilly dresses?” Her tone said that I had just revealed myself as a complete idiot. I was having trouble contradicting her. Instead I concentrated on freeing my hands. I almost had the knot out. Almost… She walked toward me, the vial gleaming in one hand and the knife in the other.
“Micah will kill you for this,” I said by way of changing the subject.
“Micah can try to kill me for this.” She giggled, a high girlish-sound, as she twirled the knife. “But I don’t think he’ll try. The new Nimir-Ra is very pretty.” The knife stopped and she looked at me. The light gleamed off her eyes. “She likes big men.”
“Bitch.” I spat the word, pouring all my hatred of her into the syllable, making it into a curse.
“Slut,” she said conversationally. A beep interrupted us before we could get any more juvenile. “Ah, it’s time then.”
Juliana laughed and twirled around, the skirt flowing around her as she lifted the knife up to the sky. “To freedom!” She knelt, I felt the brush of her hair on my cheek, her lips on mine. Oh god, she was kissing me… I was too shocked to move for a second. As she pulled away, my mouth was open in horror. Stupid me.
The contents of the vial were in my mouth before I could think, and her hand closed over my jaw and nose, forcing me to swallow. For Tinkerbell, she was a hell of a lot stronger than she looked… And then my chest exploded in pain.
My eyesight was dimming as I watched her lift something out of my chest. I couldn’t breathe to curse her again, as much as I wanted to. Or maybe I didn’t. They hadn’t come. All the times I saved them and they hadn’t come, hadn’t heard my screams…
“Now who’s the fairest in the land?” Juliana’s voice echoed as I slipped into the dark.
Juliana watched the life leaving the whore’s body, then looked back at the object in her hand. Wet, heavier than one would expect. She’d forgotten how much work it was to extract a human heart. Ah well, the sight of it would please Jean and Asher. She put it in the chest, next to the other she had already collected. She supposed she should have just told the whore that the stripper and the were-cat were dead, but it seemed needlessly cruel.
While she recuperated from the strain of heart extraction, she poured the gasoline on the body, sliced the head and set the fire. Smoky the Bear was on his own today.
“Well done, ma petite.” Jean-Claude’s voice was so soft she might have missed it over the roaring of the flames.
“Call me that again, Jean, and I will have your heart.”
He laughed. “You already have it, mon coeur.”
“Well then,” she smiled and went to him, careful not to touch him because of the blood which coated her, “should you say you have a small heart? Do you think so little of yourself?”
“No longer,” he said, pulling her to him for a kiss. The fire crackled and popped as it devoured the body within.
“Can we go now?” Juliana asked as she pulled away from him. “Fire is not on my list of favorite things.”
“Of course. Asher is finishing with le Chat. We shall meet him at the Circus. I am throwing a party to commemorate this night.”
“A party? I don’t have time to change-“
“The blood of an enemy is a mark of honor.”
“The blood of an enemy smells icky to those of us who are not vampires.”
“Then let us hurry. I have a change of clothing laid out for you.” He smiled as Juliana laughed.
“I’m never going to choose my own clothes again, am I?”
Enjoy with sadistic glee.
“Wake up, Anita.” The voice was soft, sweet, soothing. The pain in my head warned me it might be an exaggeration. I opened my eyes reluctantly. The room I was in was… not a room. I stared around in wonder. I was in a forest, the trees so thick only the faintest traces of moonlight penetrated to the ground where I lay, surrounded by the scent of fresh earth and pine and camp fires.
As I looked around, I found the source of the voice. And promptly shook my head, denying the sight before me. Juliana. Her brown curls were loose, flowing around her like a cloak. She walked toward me, her bare feet making no sound on the dewy earth, her white skirt floating around her.
“I am sorry it has come to this,” she said in that dulcet, faintly-accented voice that I’d watched work magic in Jean-Claude and Asher. Ever since her reappearance they had changed. Jean-Claude had distanced himself from me, and I watched him longing to return to their old ménage trois. He’d stopped sleeping with me, even when I offered to let him and Asher share me.
“What are you doing, Juliana?”
“I am doing what must be done, Anita. I do wish it might have worked out differently. If only you could have—well, it’s no matter now.” She knelt beside me and looked up at the dark silhouetted branches overhead.
“If only I what? What’s happening?”
“You could have accepted the last mark, you know. You could have sealed the triumvirate. You could have allowed Jean to return to Asher’s and my bed. You could have done a lot of things, Anita, but you didn’t want to. You wanted to cling to what you see as humanity and you wanted to cling to everything else as well.” Juliana shook her head and shrugged.
I struggled to free my hands, but the cords weren’t moving. The leg bindings were just as tight. Damn it. This was not going well. Keep her talking… Jean-Claude or Micah or Richard, someone, would be coming soon. “I’m sorry. That was shitty of me. But what does this have to do with us being here?”
“You made them miserable, Anita. You really shouldn’t have done that. They don’t like being made unhappy. Belle gets away with it because, well, she’s Belle and she has had lots of practice. But you? You should have known better.”
“Who’s miserable?” My mind was spinning as I tried to puzzle my way through her words. “Jean-Claude and Asher? They’re the only ones who’ve been with Belle…”
“Yes, Jean-Claude and Asher.” Julianna’s voice held the edge of annoyance. “For an investigator, you’re really very slow. Did you honestly think they were just two pretty faces? Did you really forget how Jean got to where he is? And Asher? How do you think he has survived the ages? By being some wilting beautiful flower?” Juliana’s laugh had nothing to do with sweetness now. It was musical mockery.
“Perhaps if I had not come along again, you might have been all right. But you did not handle that so well either.”
“What the hell are you talking about? Juliana- Anna, let me go!” I fought with the bindings on my hands, but they only seemed to get tighter. I had to get away. Juliana was acting too sane, too calm. Something was desperately wrong. “Does Jean-Claude know—“
“Oh god, you are dumb.” For once she sounded like the suburban 19-year-old she should have been as she stood up. “Who do you think helped me to get you here?”
And with that, my world started to crumble.
“Look, Anita. You’re too powerful. If you’d have sealed the Servant deal, or the triumvirate, you might have been safe. But with a demi-servant, lycanthropy-carrying, super-Necromancer Nimir-Ra, running loose and having sex and possibly reproducing, did you think it wouldn’t ring some alarm bells? Didn’t you stop to worry about people thinking you might be bit too much of a threat? Or were you too wrapped up in silky sheets and hookers to notice?”
“Leave Nathaniel—“ I started to launch into a rant, but she waved her hand to shut me up.
“Figure of speech. Whatever. Look, this is going to hurt, okay?” When she turned I felt my eyes trying to pop out of my head at the size of the knife in her slight little hand. Juliana was smaller than I was, built like Tinkerbell, and now she was wielding a knife that would have given Jack the Ripper a hard-on and walking toward me with it.
“Close your eyes, Anita. You don’t want to get blood in your eyes.” Her voice was once again soft and sincere as she knelt and brought the blade close to my face.
I screamed. I screamed and twisted away only to find that I couldn’t move much at all. I settled for twisting my head wildly.
“Look, keep it still or I’m so not apologizing for slicing out an eyeball.”
I froze and shut my eyes.
True to her offer, she kept it minimal. I felt a sharp pain on my forehead, above my third eye, and then she stood up. “Gracias, mademoiselle,” she said in a voice that was far too cheerful for slicing into people in the middle of night-time forests.
“See?” she walked back to me, from wherever she had been behind the trees, holding a small vial. “It’s not much, but it will fix so much more. Imagine, you won’t have to worry about losing that humanity you love anymore. Jean-Claude gets his triumvirate, Richard escapes that unhealthy pattern you two have going, and Micah can finally find a Nimir-Ra who won’t be sleeping with half the city. Oh, and I get to be a necromancer and help Jean get his triumvirate. Everyone wins, really.”
“What’s in that vial?” I asked around the sudden sick, empty feeling in my stomach.
“The brew that is true.” She giggled, raised the glass up to the sky above then downed it with the ease of someone well-acquainted with the art of tequila shots.
She held up another vial. “And this is the chalice from the palace.”
I took it back. She wasn’t sane at all. Completely loony and then some. “You’re psychotic.”
“No.” Juliana shook her head and looked very serious. “I just have a job to do. It’s easy to be all doom and gloom with something like this. It’s expected. It’s passé. Look on the bright side- you could be burned alive.”
“A job?” My brain had stopped at that. This was a job? Juliana, girly, useless, pretty Juliana was an assassin?
“I’m Asher’s human servant. I lived with them in Belle Morte’s dominion. What did you think that meant? Just lots of sex and frilly dresses?” Her tone said that I had just revealed myself as a complete idiot. I was having trouble contradicting her. Instead I concentrated on freeing my hands. I almost had the knot out. Almost… She walked toward me, the vial gleaming in one hand and the knife in the other.
“Micah will kill you for this,” I said by way of changing the subject.
“Micah can try to kill me for this.” She giggled, a high girlish-sound, as she twirled the knife. “But I don’t think he’ll try. The new Nimir-Ra is very pretty.” The knife stopped and she looked at me. The light gleamed off her eyes. “She likes big men.”
“Bitch.” I spat the word, pouring all my hatred of her into the syllable, making it into a curse.
“Slut,” she said conversationally. A beep interrupted us before we could get any more juvenile. “Ah, it’s time then.”
Juliana laughed and twirled around, the skirt flowing around her as she lifted the knife up to the sky. “To freedom!” She knelt, I felt the brush of her hair on my cheek, her lips on mine. Oh god, she was kissing me… I was too shocked to move for a second. As she pulled away, my mouth was open in horror. Stupid me.
The contents of the vial were in my mouth before I could think, and her hand closed over my jaw and nose, forcing me to swallow. For Tinkerbell, she was a hell of a lot stronger than she looked… And then my chest exploded in pain.
My eyesight was dimming as I watched her lift something out of my chest. I couldn’t breathe to curse her again, as much as I wanted to. Or maybe I didn’t. They hadn’t come. All the times I saved them and they hadn’t come, hadn’t heard my screams…
“Now who’s the fairest in the land?” Juliana’s voice echoed as I slipped into the dark.
Juliana watched the life leaving the whore’s body, then looked back at the object in her hand. Wet, heavier than one would expect. She’d forgotten how much work it was to extract a human heart. Ah well, the sight of it would please Jean and Asher. She put it in the chest, next to the other she had already collected. She supposed she should have just told the whore that the stripper and the were-cat were dead, but it seemed needlessly cruel.
While she recuperated from the strain of heart extraction, she poured the gasoline on the body, sliced the head and set the fire. Smoky the Bear was on his own today.
“Well done, ma petite.” Jean-Claude’s voice was so soft she might have missed it over the roaring of the flames.
“Call me that again, Jean, and I will have your heart.”
He laughed. “You already have it, mon coeur.”
“Well then,” she smiled and went to him, careful not to touch him because of the blood which coated her, “should you say you have a small heart? Do you think so little of yourself?”
“No longer,” he said, pulling her to him for a kiss. The fire crackled and popped as it devoured the body within.
“Can we go now?” Juliana asked as she pulled away from him. “Fire is not on my list of favorite things.”
“Of course. Asher is finishing with le Chat. We shall meet him at the Circus. I am throwing a party to commemorate this night.”
“A party? I don’t have time to change-“
“The blood of an enemy is a mark of honor.”
“The blood of an enemy smells icky to those of us who are not vampires.”
“Then let us hurry. I have a change of clothing laid out for you.” He smiled as Juliana laughed.
“I’m never going to choose my own clothes again, am I?”
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Date: 2006-04-18 06:47 pm (UTC)Unfortunately I now have a Julianna character that I quite like and nowhere to put her. le sigh.