underneath the skin: part three

[girlwithout]

 

It’s impossible to tell how long he leaves her there to stew in her thoughts. Could be fifteen minutes, could be an hour. Her head’s still muggy from whatever sedative they hit her with. She tries a few times, half-heartedly, to see if she can loosen the cuffs any, but it’s not working so well.

She doesn’t look up when the guy comes back in, doesn’t want to so much as acknowledge him.

“Well, young lady, have you had enough time to consider your situation? Are you finally going to tell me what we’d like to know?”

She keeps her mouth shut.

“You don’t really want to continue with the silent treatment, do you? Things will go much more smoothly for you if you would just… communicate.”

Rikki finally lifts her head to look at him. “I am communicating. My disgust.”

He chuckles, the sick fuck. “You’re brave. Wow, you’re brave. Seriously, I’m impressed.”

And God, if some asshole never tells her again how impressed he is with her gumption or spunk or whatever before trying to kill her, it will be too soon. “Oh, please. Since you know who we are, you know who we’re connected to. Do you really think we waltzed in here without the Avengers knowing about it?”

His lips twitch again, like he knows she’s bluffing. “Well, if that’s the case, then we should probably step up our timetable, don’t you think?”

That went well.

He sits down across from her, rests his hands on the table. “One way or the other, Nomad, you will die here. Whether it’s swift and painless or… otherwise… that’s your choice. That’s on you.” He leans forward. “Who informed you? Just give us the name, and you’ll save yourself a great deal of misery.”

She keeps her mouth shut.

He stands and turns away. “You know what? It was our initial suspicion that you don’t have the knowledge we’re after. This is Black Widow’s operation. You’re a sidekick. A diversion.”

A dog, she thinks, biting back an inappropriately-timed giggle.

“Unfortunately, suspicions aren’t certainties, so we’ll have to let this interrogation run its course. You understand, I’m sure.”

She shrugs apathetically as he digs out a pair of latex gloves and pulls them on. “Do your worst.”

“That is the plan,” he says, letting the second glove snap on loudly for effect before backhanding her so hard she thinks she blacks out for a second.

The thing is, no one ever trained her for this. Maybe because no one was willing to volunteer for that job, but probably because no one wanted to be the first to admit that a teenage girl might be tortured someday, that she might have to know how to let people hurt her without losing herself in the process.

So she improvises.

She thinks about good stuff, to start with. Playing with Benji. Meeting up with Steve to continue their ongoing bowling contest. Hanging with Anya, both in costume and out. Meeting people at Milliways, getting a chance to make friends with people she doesn’t have to keep her identity secret around. Dancing. Getting the chance to meet John, the big brother she always wanted.

(He focuses on her face to begin with. Pretty soon, she has a couple black eyes and plenty of bruises, plus her nose and lips are bleeding. It hurts like a son of a bitch, but – she tells herself, it’s just a body. They can do whatever they want to it, it’s just where I live. I’m more than the body.)

It gets harder to hold onto happy memories after she’s blacked out a couple times, so she tries to focus on the things that piss her off, instead. John dying. Losing her world. Bernard’s basement, all the girls who died under the name Sophie. The way he targeted girls who had no one to notice them missing, how she was one of them.

(She grits her teeth and imagines the blade slashing her upper arm is creating a hole in her anger, bleeding it out like poison, leaving something hard and sharp behind. Hate. It’s good. She hates him with all her might, lets that focus her pain when he presses a gloved finger against the cut in her arm.)

She’s not sure if she’s passing out and dreaming or just having really vivid hallucinations now. At some point, she thinks she sees Dogmeat and Benji playfully wrestling each other in the corner of the room. Steve’s there for a couple seconds, too, saying words that she can’t quite make out. She’s definitely unconscious after that, though, because the next thing she knows she’s spluttering for air through the contents of a bucket of water.

“She’s a tough one, that Black Widow. Won’t talk, won’t budge. We even threatened to execute you, but she just laughed. Can you believe that? Laughed.”

Rikki coughs harshly, trying to clear out the water that got into her mouth and is streaming down her nose. “You wanna kill everyone. How do you think any sort of death threat is gonna go over?”

“Kill everyone? Well, that’s crazy. What would be the point? No, what we’re striving for here is a second chance for our planet. A chance to thrive and breathe again. To do that, we only need to kill most everyone.”

Cause that makes you better, she doesn’t say.

“I have a daughter about your age. She’s a lot like you, actually. Free-spirited. You two would probably hit it off.”

Not for the first time, she wonders if this guy even hears himself. Does he even understand that he’s talking like he’s about to set up a playdate when he spent the last fuck-knows amount of time doing his best to break her? Asshole needs a dose of reality. “Yeah? I’d like to meet her.”

“Is that right?”

“Yeah, sure. Cause if I met her, then I could make her face look exactly like mine. If it doesn’t already look worse naturally, that is.”

She’s struck a nerve. His jaw tightens and he stiffens as he stands and paces away from her. “I was wrong. You’re nothing like her.”

“You mean she doesn’t talk back when you beat her?” She calls after him.

Oh, a big nerve. She can see him losing his shit, and vaguely wonders if riling him up was a good idea. Still, it’s a change.

“You vile-! I would never! What I do in this room, I do to ensure her future happiness and the future security of the human race! I am just!”

She hadn’t thought he could possibly do any more damage to her head than he already had. She was wrong. She’s completely stunned, briefly, barely able to follow what’s happening around her. Which is great, because maybe it’s not something she wants to listen to.

“Any sympathy toward you, young lady, you just squandered. From here on out, it’s all business.”

There’s soft clicks in the room as he loads a gun, explaining to her what each one is for. “The first two bullets will tear through your kneecaps. The next two will take off your big toes. Then the fifth – “

The sound is honestly kind of sickening, a crunch that, yeah, she’s familiar with, but ugh. He freezes. “What was that?”

She’d had one little trick left, something she was saving for desperate times. She grins at him widely and crookedly, the expression probably kind of horrifying on her bloody, bruised face. “That was me. Breaking my thumbs.” Before it can register in his mind what she did, she rushes forward and lands a blow hard enough to knock him to the floor. She has his gun in her hand in seconds, and it’s possible she wavers for a second while she looks at him –

– But instead, she fires the rounds at the door, hoping it'll be enough to weaken the damn thing. It pays off when the door gives way under her assault, leaving her free to take off down the hall.