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“That wasn’t very smart,” Elendira the Crimsonnail says, though not unkindly.
Dominique holds the ice pack to her head, grimacing when it puts pressure on the stitches along her scalp.
It’s an honest statement: Throwing yourself off a building wasn’t very smart. She can’t refute it. But it was either that kind of self-autonomous end, or be eviscerated by one of her own fellow Gung-ho Guns for her failure. Secret Number Thirteen doesn’t understand the mutual threat they all pose to each other simply by existing; she is above them, beyond them, favored by their master as a trusted confidant instead of a tool. Dominique the Cyclops, by principle and the nature of her powers, prefers to take matters into her own hands instead of leaving her fate to chance and fickle mercy.
(Ironically, it was also one of her fellow Guns that peeled her broken body off of the streets of Jeneora Rock, impeding Dominique’s plan for a quick and painless send-off to prevent any chances she’d be tortured like Gale. A snapped neck, a broken spine, a punctured lung, a shattered skull; she’d take any of those fates over what the likes of E.G. Mine or Leonoff could’ve had in store for her. Or, god forbid, Legato himself.
Her body was all Dominique had — and her eye. She almost lost one that day to her own carelessness and ego. She was prepared to lose the other, too, if it meant she got to choose how it would be taken from her.
Instead, the Crimsonnail found her crumpled in a back alley, her fall from the roof of Jeneora Rock’s facility cushioned by colorful fabric awnings and the tangled laundry lines of an innocent bystander. The kind of people she’d been trying to spare with her “spring cleaning” of the Rodrick gang had indirectly prevented her death by forgetting that they left their sheets outside to dry.
What impossible irony, she thought.
Both of Dominique’s legs were broken and twisted at horrible angles, as if Bluesummers had truly gotten to her instead of gravity. She had a concussion from hell, which she later identified as a proper dent in the back of her head. She was unconscious for a week. But she was lucky, sturdy, saved by an accident; her ribs were shattered, but her spine was perfectly intact, and she only suffered severe whiplash instead of permanent brain damage or swelling.
Everything would heal, given enough time and patience. She would live to see another day. It wasn’t what she’d planned.
“—I missed the resurrection because of you,” was the first thing Elendira said to her, when Dominique opened her eyes and blinked at the IV in her arm. The faint hum permeating the entire space signaled that they were aboard the Crimsonnail’s personal airship.
“I’m sorry, Madame Mary Magdalene,” Dominique croaked. Her eye trembled. She and Elendira weren’t close; why was she here? She was supposed to escape. She was supposed to be dead.
Elendira scoffed, shook her head, and left the room. Disappointed.)
“It isn’t what you think,” Dominique says now, sitting up in her hospital bed. Her entire body aches with a vengeance; her shame aches even more. Her quick and utter defeat, not even worthy of a footnote in the greater narrative; a single chapter, come and gone in a blink. “My eye—“ the transplanted organ writhes in its socket with a mind of its own, “—is all I have. It was compromised. Therefore, I ended it before anyone else could.”
(Both the fight, and her life. Two birds with one suicide. Dominique is nothing if not an efficient hitwoman.)
“What I think is that it looked like a tantrum,” Elendira replies bluntly. Speed, strength, technique, tenacity; she has it all, complimented by a beautiful face and a sharp tongue. “Vash the Stampede didn’t even get a chance to put any bullets in you before you gave up.”
(Elendira’s strength, however, is also very black and white; she boasts complete and utter dominance over her opponents, in every possible category. Dominique’s strength exists in a gray area dependent upon deception and secrecy, making her greater-than-human only up until she is perceived. The observed electron, the mystery unveiled. Revealed as she had been, Dominique had no choice but to run.
The Crimsonnail would never understand what it is to flee.)
“I wish he had,” Dominique admits, feeling her head throb, “but he does not put bullets in anyone.”
Elendira sneers. “Should’ve done it yourself, then. I didn’t take you for a coward, Cyclops.”
Her demon’s eye rolls towards Elendira even when Dominique’s own continues to stare straight ahead. It dilates, contracts; even searching desperately, it cannot find Elendira’s senses to control and hypnotize, stunned as it was by Vash the Stampede shooting its covering point-blank and nearly killing it. Dominique wonders how long it will take for it to recover to optimal functionality.
Would her power be crippled from here on out? The desire to catastrophize, to fall into an easy, familiar spiral of panic and to let go, makes the edges of her vision swim with black spots. Dominique is calm up until she is not. Dominique is collected up until she is scattered like a hand of loose cards. She is the one who comes in close for the kill; the kill does not come in close to her.
The absence of buzzing in her teeth – a sensation she has lived with since the demon’s eye was cut from a carcass and shoved into her skull – is surprisingly pleasant, despite how helpless it makes Dominique feel.
(A worm’s eye is what they’d called it, though Dominique often doubts just how much worm and how much eye was left over in the appendage by the time it was given to her. It often felt more like a second little brain than an eye, feeding her images and pathways and predictions that her own gray matter had to carefully parse through in order to understand. They were not born to speak the same neurological language; still, Dominique learned of its chemicals, and it learned of hers.
Dominique does not remember the surgery. It certainly does. She was not born exceptional; Dominique the Cyclops was made, and they made sure she remembered this.
Once, she believed that to lose her abilities would mean that she would lose her life. When they put the demon’s eye in her head they said they had connected it directly to her central nervous system, hard-wiring its optic nerve into the soul of her so that if it died, she would die with it. Likewise, if she was killed, it would also perish; the mutual interest in survival shared by woman and worm would be what bound them to cooperation. The assured destruction would not come to pass as long as she was smart about it.
Without her functioning eye, Dominique could not grasp at the illusory threads corresponding with sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell; she couldn’t pluck them away, one by one, to hold her opponent in induced stasis while she played them like the devil’s stolen fiddle. The lack of sensory input was jarring. Dominique still lived, and she did not have to puppet Elendira’s mercy in order to make that happen. She would have floundered, lost and confused, if her limbs were not being held straight by splints and expensive plaster casts. If pristine white pillows and bedsheets, soft as clouds, were not supporting her back.
A spoiled, doted-upon cockroach, clinging to a beating heart put back in her chest by someone she always regarded as her most unpredictable enemy.
— Unpredictable sure was right.)
“You can do it, if you’d like,” Dominique says, releasing the muscles in her abdomen and letting herself sink back into the pillows. Everything on the airship is plush, too plush; she grunts as she hits the headboard. “I won’t hold it against you. I’ll probably even thank you for picking up my slack.”
Elendira the Crimsonnail famously hates cowards, because a coward is someone who does not have enough conviction to see a task to completion. Calling Dominique as such means more to them both than any other insult in the world; it means that Elendira disapproves of her. What she chose to do. How to go out, on her own terms.
It’s unfortunate to hear from the patron saintess of Autonomy herself. Dominique grits her teeth and shuts her eyes when the Crimsonnail sits down on the bed next to her hip and reaches for her face.
“Oh, stop the theatrics. I’m not going to kill you,” says Elendira simply, holding Dominique’s chin between her thumb and first finger.
She’s wearing no makeup. Her nails are bare, unpainted, lacking lacquer. Golden hair hangs loose around her shoulders, and the soft robe worn over what look like silk pajamas is half-open, vulnerable. Through the gap, Dominique can see a sliver of the compression suit Elendira wears every hour of every day to keep herself from throwing her joints out of their sockets with a simple too-strong movement.
(In the shadow of a dingy bar, on a mission she only half-remembered through the haze of whiskey and crimson lipstick, Elendira told Dominique why she wore the suit. Her strength was inhuman, unnatural; everything that Dominique envied and admired was also a danger to Elendira herself. Her muscles could generate force that their atomic structure was not suited to handle. Her bones were not reinforced to withstand the impact of her fists, her kicks, and her nails. Her joints were overly flexible and tended to slip out of place.
“Like a tin can spaceship,” Elendira had said, whispering into Dominique’s ear, “rocketing towards the stars and melting on its way up through the stratosphere.”
None of these things bothered her, because she was able to regulate them all with self-imposed limitations. To her, it was another opportunity to control her body, a brutal resistance training that never stopped. To make every movement feel deliberate, like she had to fight for it. She made the suit resistant to movement, an impediment upon her speed so that when she ultimately loosened her restrictions she would find herself faster than when she’d begun.
Dominique realized at that moment that the Crimsonnail liked to fight for what she didn’t have. To Elendira, the act of pursuing something made her get up and move; it satisfied her in a way that settling within her means never could, accepting her reality as it was without asking the age-old questions of why it had to be that way and how she could change it. Stagnation was her enemy. Settling allowed them to catch up to her.
(Who was Elendira’s “them”? Dominique never dared to ask.)
If she could have something, why shouldn’t she? If she alone could decide her fate, why should she allow anyone else to have a say? Master Knives gave her the ability to answer both of these questions, and then some. He gave her the kindest thing someone on this uncertain hellhole could ever hope to receive; a guaranteed future, and a guaranteed end.
Elendira said he freed her. She then joked about him setting her loose upon the world, with a quirk of blinding white teeth and smudged lipstick. Dominique did not doubt that she was right for a second.
She did, however, ask Elendira why she was talking about a man while seated squarely in Dominique’s lap. Mixed messages, madame. Elendira had crooned, soaking up the hints of jealousy like an over-eager sponge.)
Dominique looks at her now, delirious with shock. “Why?”
Elendira retracts her hand, glancing over her nails for any chips. “It’s late, and I don’t feel like it.” It feels like a half-truth. Dominique doesn’t push her luck. “Now that he’s back, you’ll be dying soon enough, anyway, and it won’t be a bullet that kills you.”
Dominique almost snorts at that. She refrains, knowing how much it would hurt her ribs to laugh.
“How exciting. I can’t wait,” she says, knowing that Elendira is being serious. It is, after all, her favorite just plain fact.
“Besides; you’ve eaten too much of my monthly budget in blood transfusions. It’d be a waste if I let you die now.”
“I’m sorry.” Dominique means it. “I’ll pay you back.”
Elendira doesn’t respond to the comment, not one to entertain placations. Instead, she looks out the window and says, “I missed my master leaving the tomb. You were the second-best resurrection I could choose to attend today.”
“Second-best,” Dominique echoes. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of you settling like that.”
(And oh, it would hurt more if Dominique had ever dared to delude herself into thinking that the missions they’d shared and the invites slipped under her door ever meant anything more to Elendira than simple distractions. A little bit of fun, for the woman who took whatever she wanted before reality could come to a smashing end. It wasn’t that Dominique didn’t think that Elendira wanted her; on the contrary, it had been the Crimsonnail who formally invited the Cyclops to join the Gung-ho Guns. She was hand-picked.
Being a prize thrilled her until she was caught. Until Elendira picked her up, turned her over, and figured out the secret to the smoke and mirrors with those analytical gray eyes. Dominique had nothing left to hide; she had nothing exciting hidden up her sleeve, no new reasons for Elendira to keep seeing what she didn’t have. She was in the palm of the other woman’s hand, completely and utterly, and she did not expect to be tolerated for much longer with her truths laid bare.)
“I just complimented you, you fool. I put you second to Master Knives, and you take it as reductive?” Elendira raises one perfectly manicured eyebrow, gesturing in a circle as she talks. “Though, it’s a real shame I had to miss seeing Bluesummers get twisted into a pretzel for his impudence finally crossing the line. Now that would have been a sight to warm my frosty heart; he’s been a pain in my ass since we were snotty little teenagers and never once got his comeuppance for it. Except for all the times I stabbed him a bit.”
Dominique listens to her, putting the flow of words together. They don’t fit, even when she rotates them to check if she’s just looking at the puzzle wrong. They’re… pointless to tell Dominique. And nothing Elendira says or does is ever pointless.
“...Of course not. I’m sorry,” Dominique says, genuinely at a loss.
Elendira sighs again, tilting her head towards the ceiling. Even troubled and put-out, Dominique still finds her beautiful. Massaging the bridge of her nose, she says, “Honestly, Dominique, it’s a simple formula; he was fine without me. You weren’t.”
“I don’t see why that mattered to you,” says Dominique.
“Oh, quit that. I don’t like petulant women.”
“I’m not being petulant. I’m confused.” Dominique chews on the inside of her cheek, biting down until it bleeds. She focuses on that pain, a single spark of discomfort to anchor her, like Vash the Stampede had done. The demon’s eye buzzes in its socket.
“Don’t you still want to see the end of the world with me?” Elendira blurts.
And she seems to regret it, in the moments after, because she gets up from her seat on the edge of Dominique’s bed and starts to pace around the room. Elendira never paces; it’s too telling, too honest about her mental state to an audience she never wants to give a chance to hold power over her actions or feelings. It’s easier to stay untouchable when they aren’t even aware something exists. Dominique, in all of her brilliance and inhuman prowess as a trained hitwoman, stares dumbly as Elendira crosses the room back and forth.
And then, softly, softer than she has allowed herself to speak in the presence of another in years, Dominique asks, “You meant that?”
“Ah,” Elendira says ruefully, stopping to prop a hand on her hip, “I deserve that, don’t I?”
She runs a hand through her hair carefully, as if she expects her nails to catch. When they don’t, she sweeps the blonde locks over her shoulder and combs through the ends of them, preening to keep herself grounded.
“Yes, you do. A little bit,” Dominique admits as her mouth pulls into a smile. Elendira doesn’t like women who spare her feelings, either.
Elendira walks back towards her. Dominique watches her every calculated step, a moth drawn to her dancing flame; she knows that every single movement Elendira makes to bring herself closer to Dominique is a choice that must be committed to, body and soul. She would not do that for something she is bored of. Feeling her pulse in her throat, Dominique waits for this natural disaster of a woman to come to rest by her bedside, close enough to touch despite the risk of burning. She shuffles in the too-plush pillows and the too-soft sheets in order to raise herself up to meet her.
“—I’d like to start over from the beginning. Can we do that?” Elendira asks, bringing her face close to Dominique’s. Her fingertips trace Dominique’s jaw, tilting it with a fraction of her true strength. Perfectly controlled, so that her nose does not bump against Dominique’s when she leans in.
“Considering that I have died and been resurrected by you,” Dominique replies, closing the distance between them, “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
(Elendira still tasted waxy, like lip balm and synthetic jelly, though the whiskey flavor Dominique remembered was nowhere to be found. That could easily be changed with a single drink; after all, they had all the time they could ask for until the end of the world.)
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