[100 prompts - How?]
081.How?
Fandom: The Shadow
Characters: Myra Reldon, The Shadow and an alternate Myra Reldon
Word Count: 454
Rating: PG
Summary: Myra finds out how she dies in an alternate world.
Author's Notes: I wrote this because the idea hit me the other day without warning…
There’s something strange about the concept of sitting down to watch yourself die. After all her talk about not wanting to know, Myra had finally decided to go against her initial intuition and asked The Shadow. She had been expecting paperwork, but what he’d provided along with it was almost more disturbing: a video of the event. It was a rectangular box that was marked as a security tape, and it contained images of her last moments in his world. She wasn’t about to ask him how it was possible, so she silently watched him as he slid the tape into the VCR and she kept her eyes on the screen.
A grainy, black and white image blinked into view and even with the poor contrast, she was able to pick out her face in the crowd outside of a small grocery shop that she didn’t recognize. She was either off duty or the Bureau had sent her as her own self again, any traces of the Ming outfit were absent. A small crowd brushed by her form, and then hardly a second later, she collapsed. People around her flocked to her form, an ambulance came, and then the street resumed its pace as if nothing had happened.
That’s it? She blinked.
“Can…could you replay it, please?” He rewound the tape for her to view the scene again. She had not expected something so…uneventful. Carefully, she watched the crowd brush by her and then she spotted the moment. One of the bodies stopped as it gently bumped into her, and she seemed to give them a terrified glance over her shoulder before they walked off.
Quickly, Myra shifted through the paperwork before her, and noted her autopsy had provided a clear answer to her death: poison by injection. The person who had poisoned her had been quickly apprehended by the Bureau and admitted to the crime during their inquiry. Apparently they were some trivial member of a local gang that Myra had help disband, which was part of the reason why she had been caught so off guard. It was a perfect stranger in a crowd of strangers, camouflaged in a busy marketplace. She looked at the date of the report and frown lines creased her face darkly.
She was 52 and the man….rather boy, who had killed her, was only 19. In her own time, he wasn’t even born yet, but before her she had a short personal file that had been created for the investigation of her death and it included his place of residence at the time of the crime.
Now the question was: how would she use this information?