Hollow Hush Of Trees
Who: Mitochondria Aya, Eve, and pretty much anyone who responded to Eve’s post if you feel like it.
What: Time to take down that annoying bitch in the Eastern District before she attempts to lay waste to the rest of the city.
Where: Manhattan ruins in the Eastern District.
When: Late Sunday Night.
Warnings: Death. Explosions. More death. Chances of ( Read more... )
What: Time to take down that annoying bitch in the Eastern District before she attempts to lay waste to the rest of the city.
Where: Manhattan ruins in the Eastern District.
When: Late Sunday Night.
Warnings: Death. Explosions. More death. Chances of ( Read more... )
Wiping her mouth and the tiny beads of sweat from her brow, Eve made her way through the blanketing darkness --slow and steady - counting her steps as if the closing distance depended on it.
Is that a star?
It was closer now-- the voice-concerned and confused. The intensity of it hurt her ears. It slid across her skin like an icy blanket, a sharp set of finger nails shredding her spine into papery shreds. She almost wanted to discard the glass shard nestled into the back pocket of her jeans. But she had a responsibility. Many lives were at stake.
Lives? What about her life?
Eve still was not used to this place, and she was beginning to doubt whether she ever would be… even if she’d started to meet people she’d one day like to call friends. Yet it was so...nice was the first word that came to mind. It was nice in that way that there had been people, living people; people that she was now and always, ready to fight for.
Mom?
Swallowing down the bile in her throat, an intangible fury gnawing at her stomach, she stalked past a pile of scorched cement out into the open, too obvious to fit into the rubble and discarded home wares littering the street. If Aya’s senses were as keen as she thought they were, Aya would already know her clone was hot on her heels.
“What? No warm welcome?” She was near. So very, very near. “Had enough yet?”
Stars?
In her training she had prepared for this many, many times. But in all that time she’d never had a voice telling to stop, to find another way of quelling Aya’s unimaginable destruction. Usually it had been a welcome source of instinct, driving her to survive, but this voice was different. It was the voice of doubt, eating at the courage she had built inside herself, telling her that Aya wasn’t always a monster.
She looked down impatiently. Aya was NOT someone she pictured herself with, but this other presence did care for her... maybe even loved her?
“You!” There was no hint of that love in her voice despite this however, only a seething glare as the woman she knew as a monster came into view.
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The only option she had left now had been to retreat. Find some place. Any place. Away from the bombing and the wave of attacks. Away from people who she had tried and tried and could not kill for whatever reason. Her deteriorating body and wouldn’t hold out for much longer. Her paces had already begun to stumble as she bolted through the streets.
If she tried changing forms now, she might not last much longer. Whatever it was about this place, this city, it was slowly and agonizingly killing her. Something here wanted her dead. And there could only be one force with enough will strong enough that wanted to see her that way.
What more, she could hear a voice calling for her. It was a voice similar to the one that called for her twelve years ago, that simmered ever since the night at the opera house until it was brought to a full boil. When this host had killed Mitochondria Eve, killed her child, pushing those limits...
The more you use those powers, the more you will start to become like me.
That’s what Mitochondria Eve had said. The host hadn’t been able to process what it meant. Couldn’t put it together. All there was left was the motivation to fight, to put an end to the fighting and put her dearest deceased sister to rest. Ah, if she had only gone after the original, the true Eve, she may have successfully done so. Pride and folly had blinded her to going after the wrong target.
Twelve years... Had it honestly been that long? Had so much time gone by without her even knowing of it? Life in lonesome as being virtually the sole survivor on the planet had become a lonely place; if not for her little doppelganger, the world would have been even lonelier. Perhaps that was the one thing that prevented her from killing the child.
That voice which called for her-that was not the same Mitochondria Eve that had awoken her cells that one Christmas Eve. The girl was an imitation, a carbon copy generated from both the host and her own body’s DNA. And yet, they had called her “Eve”. It sounded like a sick joke, a dumb play of words to place in the face of irony. That she would be destroyed by the creature she was supposed to become.
She ran until her body wouldn’t allow her to push herself any further. Until she stumbled and landed among the trees in a vague clearing, midst what appeared to be a forest. Until she could hear the voice of a girl that was no longer resonating in her blood but behind her.
You!
“Me.”
Slowly, she turned her head over her shoulder, rising to her knees as she glanced across the clearing. And it was the girl. Of course it was the girl. It had always been the girl who had been with her all along; her voice inside her head. As though it were calling her to a place called home, which this was not.
“You’ve caught me at the end, girl.” She reached up, grabbing a handful of her cheek as she could feel the flesh across it cracking and breaking, revealing the muscle and blood vessels beneath. A slight smile crossed her lips as a crazed look glazed over her eyes-hinted with a quiet imploration.
I know you’ve come to kill me now.
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Eve was trying to be slow, steady, calculated -- like the tortoise in the fable her father used to read her. But right now she felt more familiar with the hare; impatient, ready to jump out all guns blazing, and it bothered her to no end. With little hesitation she glared at the older woman, nostrils flaring and eyes flashing angrily. She was daring Aya to say something, do something, anything that would break the reverie and signal her chance to act. It was then she realised the irony. They were at a stand still. Once again, they were facing off against each other, and she was damn pissed at the world for it.
Time to think…
“Is this another one of your tricks?”
Clenching her hand in a little fist, she continued to edge her way through the dimly lit rubble, listening, looking, straining to discern the energies coming from the distance.
Time to… evolve?
Images flooded to the surface. Ridiculously powerful tendrils of energy wrapping themselves around her friends, her family, flames that licked and lingered extraordinarily long, eliciting painful screams from the victims caught within. She wrinkled up her nose, unable to shave the memories from her mind. In fact, she'd actually stopped trying to shake the images. It was keeping her going.
“I hate you...”
She watched with disdain as a large baseball sized chunk of skin cut itself loose from Aya’s face. Underneath it would be muscle, tendons and several veins pumping merrily along crimson veins; but it was only a facsimile of a human. For Aya wasn’t human at all. She was a shell; a broken shell. And it would have been so, so easy just to end it here…
End it?
So why couldn’t she?
In her world you did what you had to in order to survive. Where her ‘mother’ or what passed for a biological matriarch was concerned, she was forced to become numb and cold, vengeance in a tiny body with fists that packed one hell of a punch.
“Tell my mother I’m sorry…”
I only want to set you free
Staggering forward and reaching for the woman’s neck Eve locked onto the face of Aya, flashing a regrettable smile. One of them was going to die tonight; she couldn’t let it be her… Could she?
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On some level, she understood the nature of this place better than most would have. She could sense the life flowing from it. What history there must have been! Each cell and organism here could have very well been part of her. She was the beginning. She had dwelled in dormant in the lives of many for eons. It wasn’t until twelve years ago that she had decided to wake up and pay her respects to her couriers. Say hello.
Say goodbye.
“No tricks. Not this time. You can see that I’m very tired. There must be something about this place and my host that’s not... agreeing, quite right. But oh well, not much we can do about that! Can we?” She could sense, as well, from this girl-who and what she was. Not the sad, weepy child clinging to mommy. But a killer dormant within that child.
A killer who buried a hatred so deep it would consume her. If this was how it was going to end, then so be it. What the girl was now and today may not be the same Eve she will be tomorrow or the next week. In the long run, the world that she would return to would be a sad and lonesome one either was, wouldn’t it? We’ll see who’ll be the one feeling triumphant after that.
Her own smile was met not with the slightest bit of regret or pain. Not even when the fingers of the girl wrapped around her own bloody throat and breaking skin.
The smile was calm and cool and accepting.
The smile was one that cracked before the deaths of millions.
The smile was cruel in its farewell. Because in the end, even as the life passed through her and the warmth of her body turned into a corpse-she knew that she had won. She would always win. If not from one Eve and one host, it would always be the next. Someone else would finish the cycle.
“I’ll be sure to pass the memo onto her, then.” If she could, she would have laughed. Not now. Don’t laugh. It’d only make her skin crack more.
Oh, what did she care? She was in hysterics. She choked on it until the world faded, darkened into a blur, and fell into the very face of it and nothing more.
Say goodbye.
Goodbye.
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Half the night was already over, and yet it was probably the most important night of her life. Would she ever forget it?
Many friends lie within
Eve shivered slightly, unconsciously confined to her position on the ground, knuckles changing to a ghastly white as her fingers refused to move, refused to give the monster in her grasp any molecule of oxygen what so ever. But despite her intentions, every fiber of her being screaming out for her to finally eliminate the woman who’d caused her so much pain, she was… crying? She could still hear it. The last echoes of her other self slamming against her brain as she mirrored the actions with her own hands. The other Eve was still there, haunting her like every other image in her mind. Her mother… Her enemy… Herself?
The more you used them… The more you became like me…
She saw her own body strapped to a metal gurney. People who she once knew and loved changing innocent people with instruments she’d never witnessed before, stripping their skin free as she watched in terror. Then there was Aya… Her savior? She recalled the woman holding her -- or rather, the other ‘her’ -- aloft and spinning her around as she laughed.
Yet in her reality however, Aya was laughing. In fact she was in fucking hysterics.
I’m done waiting…
THUMP
“SHUT -- UUP!”
Screaming, half at Aya’s incessant laughter, half at the words that cut at her thoughts, the part of her that remained in control snarled like a feral beast, zealously lashing out at the only thing she could. She squeezed with all the strength her small hands could manage, building herself into a maddening crescendo of fear and hate.
THUMP
For a moment everything, the sky, the earth, the already decomposing body fell totally silent, the lack of sound akin to the breath of God incarnate. Was this what it was like to witness death? Become a murderer? Murder what was almost… yourself?
“Aya…?” Eve babbled with tears streaming down her face, dragging two parallel lines of crimson red tears down to her chin.
THUMP
Slamming her head to the ground in a silent wail, closing her eyes as the disjointed images flooded her mind; she grabbed to two fistfuls of hair and preyed her skull wouldn’t crack open in two.
Now is the time…
Electricity ran in from many directions, more so then before and oh - it was so warm; inviting. Every centimeter was touched and energized. Every cell given freedom… Protons, neutrons, electrons, they didn’t understand it, but she did… Her human self was fighting, and fighting well, but even Aya had known that it was useless. Meat sacks just couldn’t stop mother nature.
A sound victory. As her eyes turned from blue to green, spearing out from the boundaries of a human iris, she smiled proudly. All the waiting, the plotting, the failed grabs at power, it was finally over and in a spectacular blinding finale, she sat back and reflected, spiraling up and up in an eternal orgasm of cellular euphoria. Oh how a new day would bring better promises. She would soon do what her predecessor had done. Only this time… she would succeed.
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