Chapter Text
It hurts. Every inch of her entire body hurts so badly , but she remains resolute in her decision, ignoring how her own blood trickles across her body and forms a puddle beneath her huddled form. The blood feels warm and sticky on her hands, and her stomach rolls at the awful texture. It feels just like how the blood of the person she killed’s did. It was horrifyingly warm even as the man was growing cold at her feet.
It was terrifying to see the eerie nothingness that fell over a person when they died. To no longer see any movement in their body. It was such a jarring difference because a living person was always moving, even when they tried to be still and not give anything away. Their chest rose and fell with their breath, miniscule muscles twitch depending on the person’s emotions, and their entire body swayed ever so slightly as they continuously fight gravity to stay upright. A dead person had none of that. They were so still and empty that the sight of it terrified her to her core and left a scar she’d never be rid of.
The One Who Is All regrets the day that man died with every fiber of her being. She wishes she never followed The Man into that building or followed his orders. She hates how she didn’t expect anything bad to happen. It’s made even worse because she had been so excited to leave the dark room again for the first time in so long. And the farther she traveled with The Man, the more things she saw that she never could have even dreamed of. There were so many colors, and the world was so vibrant and full of life. Millions of people milled about everywhere they went, far more than she thought existed.
Each person here in the outside world was far more expressive than the people dressed in black back home, and it was an exhilarating experience. The Man pulled her past a line of people waiting to enter one of the many tall buildings, and she saw that a man was displeased, a woman bored, and a child eager. Then The Man ushered her along and she saw a dozen more people with a dozen other emotions. So much was happening that it was almost overwhelming, but her excitement far outweighed it.
The sun was warm, there were a hundred new smells that made her stomach rumble, and she genuinely thought this was the happiest day of her life. Her jubilant mood didn’t even waver when The Man told her to change out of her soft new purple shirt and blue jeans and back into her usual black clothing.
She couldn’t even imagine what was to come when The Man gestured for her to be absolutely silent before leading the way into another tall building through a window embedded in a roof. As she follows The Man through the dimmed halls, she relies heavily on her years of training and muscle memory so she could take in as much as she could. There were weird machines and little lights blinking from odd little stalls. Piles of papers filled nearly every desk, and some chairs had the odd clothing that some people on the street were wearing slung across the back. She should be focusing right now or she might mess up and The Man will beat her, but there was just so many new things to look at!
After a minute, The Man gestures at a panel on the wall, and she immediately knew what he wanted her to do. The blinking panel looks different than the one back home, but seems to have all of the same basic components. Carefully, oh so carefully, she begins working on the device. Her tongue rests between her teeth as she concentrates, and before long, the lights she needed turned red. Now the moving pictures wouldn’t know they had ever been here. Feeling accomplished, she smiles and looks up at The Man, but it drops quickly as he glares at her. However, she must have done well enough, because he didn’t yell or hit her.
They continue making their way through the building, and only had to hide a few more times as the occasional person briskly walks out in the stuffy looking clothes and disappears into a glowing box. Eventually, they reach a door that has windows on either side of it allowing warm light to spill into the hallway.
The Man pauses and makes several gestures, followed by the word ‘kill,’ and she momentarily stiffens before nodding in understanding. She was supposed to use the dagger on whoever was on the other side of the door and be quick and quiet. At The Man’s pointed look, she starts creeping forward, taking steady breaths to calm her rapidly beating heart.
This was just like the missions she’d been sent on before, but not quite. All of the past ones she hadn’t been given any tools or weapons to complete it. She was directed to put people to sleep and secure them for retrieval teams. This was completely new territory for her. And since she had never used a dagger in this fashion on an actual person before, she wasn’t entirely sure what would happen when she used it on a living being instead of the training dummies she was used to. Now she’d learn in a few minutes whether she wanted to or not. Based on the other things The Man made her do on people, there would probably be blood, pain, and yelling. It would be unpleasant, but likely nothing new.
Oh how wrong she was.
The door opens silently under her careful hands, but she knows that the person inside will be able to see it move over the glowing box they’re sitting in front of. Only an oblivious few wouldn’t notice, and she was trained to never assume she’d escaped detection. So, the moment she was inside the door, she doesn’t hesitate and leaps straight towards her target. Vaulting onto the dark brown desk, she uses it to propel herself forward and bury the dagger into the person’s neck. With practiced ease, she flicks the blade through the man’s throat.
The reaction is immediate, but it isn’t one of anger or fear like she expected. What she saw was sheer panic and desperation in the man’s expression and body language as his hands fly up to his throat, futiley trying to keep the bright red liquid from leaving his body. Horrible gasps and wheezing sounds leave his throat and he struggles to breathe, and then he’s coughing up blood.
She is left standing in terrified shock as the man falls out of his chair when he tries to stand up. There’s red everywhere and the man is frantically scrabbling around, trying to find something to hinder the torrential flood of blood. The man makes eye contact with her and tries to speak, only for more blood to bubble out from his mouth and make his words incomprehensible. She stumbles backwards, tripping over the rug and tumbling to the floor in a heap.
There’s something warm beneath her hands, and when she brings them up, they’re covered in red. Blood is nothing new to her. She’s been covered in the sticky stuff from head to toe on several occasions and hardly been phased by it. But this? This is different. For one, it’s a much brighter red than anything she’s evere seen before. What’s more, her stomach is rolling, she feels nauseous, her hands are shaking, and the blood feels far more present than ever before. She’s never liked hurting people, but she’s also never reacted like this after carrying out whatever mission was assigned to her.
There was so much red.
Would it even come off? This blood was a far more vibrant red, so it could be different in others ways too. Would she be permanently marked from now on, a horrific reminder of what she’d done?
She could vaguely tell that her breathing was coming more rapidly even as the desperate gasps coming from the man lying before her slowed. His face was full of terror and despair even as his eyes begged her to help him. And then he wasn’t there anymore.
His body slumps down, completely slack, and his eyes became vacant, looking through instead of at her. The blood continued leaking from his throat at a slower pace than before, and then it completely stops. The man’s body was still there, but she could tell he isn’t there anymore.
The absolute stillness that had fallen over him terrified her more than anything else she’d experienced in her short life. A living person was always moving, always telling her something through their movements. But this? They weren’t alive. She wasn’t sure what had happened, but she had taken the life from him. He was gone.
And then it hit her. This is what The Man wanted. This was ‘kill.’ She had killed the man. This may be her first encounter with it, but she could tell that the man would never move again, and it was her fault. She had taken this man’s life away, and she had to live with that.
“What are you doing?! Get up!” The Man’s angry voice snaps through the eerie silence, pulling her from her thoughts. She looks up at him helplessly and points at the person who was gone, unsure what she was asking, but helpless to ignore what she had done.
When she didn’t move, The Man harshly grabs her by the arm and yanks her to her feet. “We need to go,” he growls as he pulls her out the door, leaving the little room and the man lying in his own blood behind. She risks one last look back, praying that she’ll see something from the man she’d kill, praying that he was still alive. But there was nothing, and something inside her broke.
As The Man takes her home, she swears to herself that she will never kill again. It was bad. It was something far worse than bad, but she didn’t know the word for that. No matter what The Man did, she would never, never harm someone like that again.
And she kept true to her promise. No matter how much The Man beat her, she refused to kill again. The Man tried many times to make her kill, and each time her refusal was followed by a horrible beating. But this time, The Man had clearly had enough of her obstinance. Usually, he would have stopped by now and stormed out of her dark little room. But this time, he just kept going. The blows kept falling and kept getting harder and harder. His screaming got louder, and her body kept getting weaker.
The blood on her hands feels eerily similar to the man she’d killed’s despite it being her own, and it only made her resolve stronger. She would not kill again. She’d rather become still.
She didn’t expect to actually become still, though. She thought The Man would stop and leave in a fury like every time before.
She didn’t expect to be staring down at her own still body.
Her body had hurt more than it ever had and there was more of her own blood than she ever expected to see. Then her body stopped feeling the blows, even though she could see them coming and how her body moved in response to them. After that was the cold. It was bone chilling, and she’d never felt anything like that. Then her eyes drooped. When she opened them again, she was looking down at herself and watching The Man continue to hit her.
The first thing she noticed was that The Man couldn’t see her, and when she took a risk and tried to touch him, her hand passed right through him. The second thing she noticed was that she looked awful. There was so much blood, and the stillness that haunts her to this very day has fully encompassed her body. The Man had killed her.
To her surprise, she didn’t feel much of anything at the discovery. She wasn’t sad or angry or really anything else. If there was anything, there was a sliver of relief. The Man couldn’t hurt her or force her to hurt anyone else ever again.
The Man finally realizes that she isn’t reacting anymore, and he bends down and places two fingers to her neck. Whatever he finds makes him scream in anger, and he kicks her empty body harder than before. He’s yelling words at the top of his lungs as he kicks her body so hard it flies several feet away, flinging blood across the room.
After what feels like hours of watching The Man rage and yell and try to hurt her when she isn’t even there anymore, he finally falls silent, his cold mask sliding into place. With purpose in his steps, he walks over to her body, slings it over his shoulder, and walks out of the room.
With nothing else to do, she dutifully follows after The Man, mildly curious about where he was taking her empty body. The Man walks swiftly through the halls, and she follows after him. She quickly realizes that no one else can see her either, which she finds to be an interesting development.
As she follows The Man she wonders if she can get back into her body. If she can, does she even want to? This is the first time she can ever remember being completely pain free. And since things seem to pass through her, she can never be hurt ever again. The Man can’t touch her or make her do anything ever again when she’s like this. She’s free to do whatever she wants and go wherever she wants. After all, you can’t find what you can’t see.
Eventually, The Man stops at a cliff side on the far edge of the League of Shadows’ base, uncaring for the way the snow falls in sheets and how the wind whistles harshly past him. She watches in apathy as The Man who’d hurt her so much for so long throws her body off the edge. When her body is out of his hands, he turns around and stalks away, not even caring to watch her fall.
She watches silently as his form disappears in the midst of the snow as he returns to the base, and she isn’t sure what to do now. Part of her wants to see her body again. Just to test if she can get back into it. Now that she thinks about it, there were a lot of things she wanted to do that she won’t be able to do if she can’t touch things. There were so many yummy things she wanted to try, and there were so many pretty clothes that she’s always wondered how they’d look and feel on her.
Staring over the edge, she can’t even make out her empty shell through the snowstorm. She also knows that if she jumps from this height, it would hurt her if she still had a body. But she doesn’t have a body, so she might as well try. She’s always wanted to be what The Man called reckless.
She takes a flying leap into the air and waits to plummet, but that doesn’t happen. She is falling, but it’s very slow, almost like she’s descending a flight of stairs. The realization fills her with excitement because this was something she’d never be able to experience with a body. The wind whistles past her loudly, and she wonders if she could ride the wind. It’s something she dreamed about, and she’d always loved watching the birds dance through the sky whenever The Man took her outside.
Scrunching her nose in concentration, she tries to move forward and up, and to her absolute delight, her body responds to her wishes. Before long, she was dancing and twisting through the air, peals of joyful laughter that no one but she could hear filled the air.
With her newly discovered ability, she zooms through the air and gracefully comes to a stop next to her empty body. Her jubilant mood immediately deflates and she becomes more serious once again at the sight of her body. It truly does look awful. If she goes back in, it’s going to hurt so, so much. But there’s so much she wants to do that she needs a body for.
So, gritting her teeth in determination, she reaches out her hand and tries to touch her body. When her hand is vaguely inside, she tries to concentrate on going back. It worked for flying, maybe it would work for this. But no matter how hard she tried and no matter for how long she attempted it, nothing happened.
She was left there alone, next to her cold, murdered corspe.
It filled her with a sense of emptiness. She’d never get to try those yummy smelling foods, or twirl in those pretty clothes, or make those pretty pictures she’d seen people making that one time. And she’d always wanted to make a friend. A long time ago, a nice woman had come to see her. The lady acted like she was indifferent to The Man, but she could see the seething hatred lying underneath. But the lady liked her. She taught her about friends and how she hopes her son could be friends with her someday.
That would have been really nice. She didn’t realize how much she’d looked forward to the possibility until that wasn’t an option anymore.
What was she going to do now? She could fly around and see so many things, but what’s the point if you can’t do anything? No one can see or hear her, and she can’t interact with anything. Should she stay here and keep trying to get her body back? Should she stay with the League of Shadows, the place that has always been her home no matter how dark or cold it’s been?
She wasn’t sure, but there was suddenly a warm feeling in her chest that seemed to be pulling her somewhere, away from the League of Shadows. It was strange, because she hadn’t felt a single tangible thing since The Man killed her. The warmth was comforting and cozy, filling the emptiness that had encompassed her since she left her body and soothing the feeling of loss she was currently stewing in.
More than that, it felt like something was calling her. She was convinced that there was something out there waiting for her, and she needed to find it.
Looking down at her beaten and bruised body one last time, she quietly tells it, and all of the hopes and dreams she needed a physical body for, goodbye. With that, she steels herself to find whatever the source of that warmth is and kicks off into the snow filled sky.