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She was used to blood dripping from her hands. It never phased her much anymore.
Daisy crouched down noncommittally, casually, staring over the body with a practiced eye. It wasn’t so much clinical as thorough, a routine as familiar to her as morning coffee or washing her hair. She ran her eyes up and down, looking for any sign of movement.
The thing looked normal, besides the three gaping gunshot wounds in its chest that were crusted and dried over with blood and the pinkish grey of organ meat. Its hand was ripped off so cleanly, manipulated so it looked like it had never existed in the first place. No sign that just before then it had been plucking off fingers and feeding the squirming digits slowly and gleefully into the Institute’s piping.
Satisfied that it was dead for good, Daisy moved to her next mission.
She felt around the face of the thing for the eye sockets, sliding the back of her nail along the cheekbone and down under the ball of the eye with a slight squishing sound. It wasn’t her purpose, this part of her duties, it wasn’t her calling like the rest of it was. She didn’t enjoy it. Her movements were practiced and clinical. If she had gotten anything out of it she would have left the thing alive and let its screams propel her, but seeing as she didn’t she gave the mercy of a quick bite to the backbone.
Or in this case, two shots to the gut and one shot to the neck.
Her ragged nails found the optical cords and she severed them with a quick press, the already under pressure eyeball was ever so eager to pop out and drop onto the nearby ground. Daisy repeated the process with the other and grabbed the two of them, slimy and slippery in her palm. She left the body where it was. It could stay until she came back to drag it into the tunnels.
Usually Daisy had tunnel vision, staring straight ahead, seeing the world in red and blue and her next goal and the obstacles that prevented her from getting it. It was a strength that she knew helped a good deal in her job. Basira was the one who noticed things, the eyes to Daisy’s blinders, the calm instructions to her raw power.
Daisy wasn’t bad at noticing things, per say, but when she wasn’t hunting everything else seemed to blend into a blur.
This screaming, though. Well, even she couldn’t miss it.
Daisy loped to the breakroom, senses on high alert and looked in. Could the other avatar have had an ally? She took out her handgun, flicked the safety off, rounded the corner and pointing it at the breakroom entrance, eyeballs in her pocket and focus directly on whatever was inside.
She was not expecting to see Basira. She was certainly not expecting to see the new blue-haired one with mascara running down her eyes and a kitchen knife in her hand. Daisy leveled the handgun at her head, finger itching to pull the trigger.
“Daisy!”
She looked at Basira, keeping her gun trained on the blue haired one. “What?” She asked with a low growl. “What is she?”
“FUCK YOU!” Blue Hair picked up a plate and threw it directly at Daisy’s head. Daisy dodged easily, plate whistling past her ear before crashing against the next wall and falling in pieces to the ground.
“She’s fine. She just…” Basira dodged her own plate. “Going through it.”
“Get the FUCK away from me!” Blue Hair grabbed a handful of cutlery, scattering it in an arc around the room, dropping her knife in the process.
“Do I shoot?” Daisy’s finger was already kissing the trigger. Blue Hair wasn’t natural, was a danger, had just come this close to smashing Basira’s head in with a plate and that was unacceptable. She smelled like fear and rage, like the scent right after you fired a gun. It was wrong and Daisy was sure she could kill her from her if she wanted.
“No!” Basira sighed, “Melanie, calm down. Just talk. What happened?”
“I SAID, GET OUT!” Blue Hair- Melanie, evidently, took a kitchen cabinet in her hands and managed to rip it off of its hinges before burying it halfway in the drywall and kicking it for good measure. The breakroom was in a mess already, holes in the wall at fist height and broken plates shattered all over the floor.
“What happened?” Daisy asked Basira, keeping one eye and the gun trained on Melanie in case she threw another plate in her rampage.
“Close I can figure, Elias said something.” Basira said.
At the sound of that name, Melanie turned with fire in her eyes and grew deathly still, like a stick of dynamite right after someone lit the match and right before it burned down. “That fucking name.” She hissed, “If I had my way, he’d be DEAD.” Daisy noticed her gripping the countertop so hard it was actually starting to peel and distort away from the cabinets.
“Look, I feel the same way, but you’ve gotta tell us if he did something new. If he has some new power or anything, we need to know about it. To fight him.”
On the wall, there was an unsettling picture of a man giving them all an approving hand gesture as the rest of the poster said something about mental health and healthy ways to reduce stress in the workplace. As Basira spoke, Melanie grabbed another knife from the drawer and walked over to the poster. One stab per eye, driving the knife all the way through the paper and into the wall and twisting it so that great crumbs of drywall scattered out and littered the floor. The eyes were mutilated beyond repair. She turned to look at the both of them.
“He’s a monster.” Melanie said.
Daisy lowered her gun. Not all the way, but no longer pointed at her head.
“What did you see?” Basira asked.
“He- My dad.” Melanie dropped the knife again, clattered on the ground as she stepped back and drew her hands to her head like she was trying to shield her brain from a thought. “He showed me. Exactly how he died. He.” Her hands turned to her arms, to her neck, scratching like they were covered in hives and rot. Her nails drew little uneven pinpricks of blood down her arms that shimmered and dripped down like a million tiny bullet wounds.
“So he- He told you this?” Basira extended her arms but didn’t step forward.
“No. Fuck, weren’t you listening?” Melanie asked. She seemed to suddenly be aware of the fact that she was no longer carrying a knife and she picked her first one up from the floor. Why a break room needed a butchers knife was beyond Daisy’s scope of knowledge. The one back at headquarters barely had forks. “GAH! He like, put it directly into my brain somehow.” She waved the knife around again at nothing in particular before shouting again in anger and driving it into the cabinet, breaking off a piece of plastic countertop.
“Wait. You mean, Elias can… blackmail us using the Eye?” Basira asked.
Melanie growled and it wasn’t quite human. Daisy didn’t drop her gun but she didn’t raise it either. Melanie took one step towards Basira, knife in hand.
“Oh, so much worse. He can- he shows you things, tells you things. You know ignorance is bliss, right? He’ll find whatever hurts you the most and…” she hiccoughed and turned, finally, to Daisy and the gun pointed directly at her head.
“Step away from her.” Daisy said, very clearly, very levelly. Melanie did, still holding the knife, and walked three steps in quick succession towards Daisy. She grinned, leaning forwards and resting her forehead against the barrel.
“Watcha gonna do, shoot me?” She asked, laughing a little bit. “Fucking try it, I dare you.”
“Daisy…” Basira warned.
“Relax. I’m not going to.” Daisy said, still trained on Melanie, who looked up at her. Her mascara had run all the way down her face but there were no tears in sight, just a cold certainty.
“I knew it.” Melanie batted the gun out of the way with her hand and Daisy let her. “I knew I wouldn’t catch a lucky break.”
Knuckles white on the grip of the knife, she stalked off. Daisy and Basira watched her go, standing in the ruined breakroom.
“ I was trying to talk her down.” Basira said.
“How’d that work out for you?”
“Hm.” Basira assessed the porcelain shards behind her. “Not. As planned.”
“You gonna go after her before she stabs the Archivist with that knife?”
“I think I’ll let her cool down a bit.” Basira grabbed a broom from the floor that it seemed Melanie had snapped in half and started to sweep. “I need to think about what she said, anyways.”
“Threat risk?”
Basira laughed. “Low. Low-medium.” She picked up a particularly large shard of plate. “If she wanted to kill me she’d do better than this.”
Daisy walked over to the cabinet door and with three tugs pulled it out of the crumbling drywall. “I don’t like what she said about Elias.” Unsure where to put it- the hinges were ruined beyond repair- she tucked it inside the cabinet. “I’ve experienced what he can do.”
“I mean, what can we do about it?” Basira sighed and Daisy knew it wasn’t a rhetorical question. Daisy took out her gun again, feeling the eyeballs squish against her leg in her pocket.
“I know what I can do.”
“What does that mean?” Basira watcher her as Daisy power walked out. Daisy knew she wouldn’t try to stop her. “Daisy!” Not in any way that mattered, of course. She would want to talk it out because truly it was a bad idea, but Daisy ran on rage and impulse and the sound of blood rushing in her ears.
She was at Elias’s offices before she could think twice and she kicked open the door. “Bouchard, you slimy rat bastard.”
“Detective Tonner!” Elias looked positively chipper to see her. “Come in, come in!” He patted the table. “Do stand up.”
Daisy took the eyes out of her pocket with her other hand and dropped them onto the table like marbles. Elias’s gaze flicked down, approving expression on his face.
“Don’t mind that little ordeal with Melanie, she’s still got a bit of Slaughter in her. They do tend to overreact, you know.”
When Elias looked up, Daisy was standing directly in front of him with a gun pointed at his head.
“Hm. Seems you minded it.” Elias looked perfectly comfortable sitting with a gun pointed at his head, reclining back like he was a kitten in a sunbeam.
“What did you show her?” Daisy growled. “What did you do?”
Elias rolled his eyes, and Daisy was suddenly overtook with an image. Crawling rot up her arms, her neck, unable to move, sobbing for someone anyone to help. Maggots squirming into her cheeks and down her throat and nose, infesting in her stomach and eating back out through her belly. Alive for every second and wondering what she did to deserve this.
“AGH!” She shouted and the vision faded. Elias hadn’t moved, but his smug grin had been replaced with a smug-er grin.
“If you like, I can take a second and come up with something more… personalized.” He said, spreading his fingers and tilting his head to the side. “Is there anything troubling you lately? Perhaps you’re wondering exactly how your beloved partner felt when she saw you in those woods.”
A tidal wave of nausea passed through Daisy, but she didn’t give in to it. She kicked the table aside and focused all her energy on Elias.
“Please, Detective Tonner, you know if you shoot me then everybody you love will die.” He waved his hand. “Well, every is a strong word. Detective Hussain will die. And then you’ll have nobody left to hold your leash, would you?”
“Fair enough.” Daisy said. She dropped her gun lower, focusing on Elias’s upper shoulder. “Thing is, I don’t have to kill you to make you hurt.”
What was that?
Coming from Elias in waves, the sharp tang of it so familiar and welcome on her tongue. Fear. Ice cold and beating like a heart. Outwardly he didn’t change, but Daisy smiled as she got a whiff.
“Up against the wall.”
Elias put up two hands in a mock surrender and he got out of his chair, backing up to the wall until his shoulderblades were pressing against it. Each step sent another delicious wave of uneasy to Daisy. She grinned.
“Did you know, that with appropriate medical attention, most gunshot wounds aren’t fatal?”
“I assure you, I do. Would you like to hear the statistics?”
“Some are much more painful than others, though.”
“I’ve felt worse.”
Daisy was inhaling fear with every breath and Elias could tell, evidently. His eyes had now grown a little shifty, like he was thinking about something. His palms, turned away from the wall, were glistening with beads of sweat.
“Are you scared of pain, Bouchard?”
“Really, I’m sure we can talk about this.”
“Because you seem awfully uncomfortable for a man used to this.”
Darting eyes. Sweaty palms. Daisy knew every sign that prey was going to dash off. Her finger brushed over the trigger.
Fear. Disappointment. Shame in a gut wrenching sense, the kind of nausea that comes hand in hand with I trusted you and why didn’t you tell me? Who was she kidding, believing that the only blood on Daisy’s hands was from monsters? Who was she kidding, believing Daisy didn’t enjoy it?
Think logically about this. Feelings could wait, they always could, pushed aside into a little box, but the sting of betrayal leaned over her like a shadow as she saw a someone she didn’t know with a knife pressed to the throat of someone she was starting to care about. Pause. Collect. Intervene.
The sound of a shot took Daisy out of her mind, dragged her back to the present time along with the blood curdling scream of Elias. Daisy looked down and saw blood leaking out of his upper arm, right where she knew it hurt the most to move. He looked pathetic, grabbing at his arm with surprise and shock and screaming again in pain.
“Stay away from us.” Daisy said. Elias would know the us that she meant. “Stay away from her.” Daisy crouched down, less than a foot from Elias’s face. She grabbed the arm and twisted it in one fluid movement, and blood spattered onto the walls as Elias screamed yet again, eyes wide open in what Daisy could only assume was agony. “Stay away from me.”
She held her grip. Elias didn’t nod, but the fear coming off of him was enough to satisfy her. Daisy delivered one last squeeze, making him groan again in pain, before turning and picking up the table, setting it right side up, taking the eyes- his trophies- and setting them on the table. Maybe he could watch himself, pathetic and in pain now. Maybe he could learn a lesson.
She closed the door behind her with a click, droplets of Elias’s blood coming off onto the knob.
That was okay. She was used to having blood on her hands.