Chapter Four
Yang really couldn’t have been happier to get the interrogation assignment than if Morgan had gone out and purchased a cake and had it written in icing. Well, that was actually a lie. Yang really really liked cake, and if Morgan had bought her a cake, Yang would be forced by her own desperate love of sugary treats to kiss him. She would never kiss him in a meeting-that would be taken all wrong, even if it would be absolutely hilarious. After all these years, he had never learned to deal with the little pecks to the cheek, much less a full-on smooch on the lips. Yang had no problem with being perceived as being his girlfriend, but Morgan would be far less comfortable with it.
She knew that if someone took her thoughts about Morgan and correlated them with her actions towards him, it would be very very weird and kind of creepy. She loved him to pieces, no doubt about that-she had devoted a full hundred years of her life to being his little army slave, after seventy-odd years in the very well-paying business of body-selling. Not, like, black market organs, although she’d had a boyfriend who’d done that for a living and made at least decent money. No, Yang had been a whore for a long, long time, catering to clients of all kinds-angels, demons, even humans who didn’t mind it being a little rough. It was bound to get a little rough when you had an angel with angel-levels of strength having sexual intercourse with a regular human. She tried her best not to hurt her clients-they wouldn’t come back if she did any real lasting damage-but there were definitely bruises when they left the motel rooms. All’s well that ends well, though, and Yang made sure her transactions ended well.
That was one of the things she liked to tell Morgan, anyway. She didn’t give a damn if she made him blush once or twice-she didn’t think her job was complete if she DIDN’T make him blush at LEAST once a day. That was just how she rolled.
So she was an ex-whore soldier now, and had been recruited by Morgan after talking to him during a lap dance. Not that the lap dance was what he had initially approached her about. Morgan had a creepy way of latching onto possible recruits and sort of stalking them for a few weeks, finding out where they lived, what they did for a living, their usual hangouts. He had talked to her at a bar one night, and she had bitched him out for stalking her, then when he had showed up the next night at her club-she danced occasionally on the weekend, because what a way to have fun AND supplement your income!-she had grabbed him and given him a lap dance while he gave her the points of why he wanted her in his team, clearly uncomfortable with the situation but determined to have her nonetheless. She had made him pay her fifty bucks AND wait a whole day with no idea if she’d ever answer before she approached him and agreed to it. She liked him-he was cute. She liked to exaggerate to him how cute he was, because it embarrassed him, and she liked him best of all when he was embarrassed, stuttering over his words.
And, she had discovered, she was good at what he needed her to do, which was really just about everything. In the hundred years she had been with him, she had served under so many titles she actually lost track of what her job was anymore. After he went thought a series of seconds-in-commands who all failed at their jobs, he had kind of just glanced at her and said, “Yang. You’re second-in-command now. Go tell the kids to clean up the goddamn mess hall.” When he gave you an order like that, you just shrugged and did whatever he said. For all that the archangels liked to point out how orderly their ranks were in comparison to the demons, Morgan’s ragtag teams tended to not follow those rankings. They all had positions in his brain, of course, but hell if they knew what those positions were. Yang cooked on Wednesdays, led patrols every other day of the week, tortured those it was really rather important to get information out of, and cleaned the bathrooms every weekend because hell if any of the team was as good at it as she was. She also enforced bedtimes for the young ones, and that was hell and a half because Morgan had taken to recruiting only young ones to replace the ones who had died. Yang had tried, in many tones of voice, to explain to him that she was NOT a babysitter who should have to worry about running around with kids who she had personally handed weapons, but Morgan seemed drawn to those high school college fairs, where he would grab a couple of the totally-lost looking ones and explain to them that they looked right for the job he had for them. It was all rather manipulative, and that was the beautiful thing about Morgan-he was manipulative as hell and would still die for his team any day of the week. Except Sunday. He really liked to sleep in on Sundays.
Yang barely noticed that she had actually gone down all the stairs into the basement, and subconsciously found herself at the cell that Gladys had transferred the demon to. The Angel of Healing was on her hands and knees in the cell, picking up pieces of what Yang privately suspected were lint off the floor like she had gone totally insane.
“Gladys!” she cried. “What the hell are you doing?”
The Angel of Healing looked up at her with a rather blank look on her face. “I’m cleaning,” she said. “The floors in here are trashed, and did you even wipe the floor up the last time you made someone bleed in here? For crying out loud, Yang, dried blood breeds INFECTION, and I can’t heal an epidemic once it’s infected everyone in the complex. I’ve showed you how to clean up before, I know I have, and it’s not that hard to even just take a wet rag and a little elbow grease to get the worst of it off the floor.”
Yang held in a sigh, instead waiting until the Angel of Healing had run out of things to say. “You finished?” she asked at a pause.
“For now,” Gladys said coldly. Yang almost winced. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Gladys-she just didn’t have time for all the coddling of the enemy that the woman did. Really, who cared if she left a little blood on the floor of a cell? It wasn’t like it was the guest bedroom, and they were at WAR for crying out loud. She tried her best to not be impatient with the Angel of Healing-she knew it was difficult being the only one of her kind in a pool of archangels who really just wanted to get out of there and kick some demon ass to tiny bits-but occasionally she failed to come across as not-harsh and she knew that Gladys saw her with a mixture of fear and contempt.
“Well then. Thank you for your concern about the state of being of our prisoner. I appreciate your thoroughness, and I apologize for my sloppiness. It won’t happen again. Now, if you could please get up off the floor, I have some work to do and I know you don’t want to be here for that.” She offered a hand to Gladys, who stood and brushed her (admittedly hideous, but Yang wasn’t going to say anything) skirt before glancing back at the demon who was lying unconscious on the steel bed behind her.
"Please don't hurt him," she half-whispered. "Not too badly. That's all I'm asking. He hurts just like we do, Yang, he feels everything you do to him. Just... Please."
Yang watched the body as he breathed, and she nodded quietly. "I understand, Gladys, but pain comes with the territory. I'll do my best to leave him mostly in one piece though. One /living/ piece, if that will make you happy." She smirked a little to herself as Gladys just rolled her eyes and left the room.
There. They were alone. Yang loved these moments just before she started in on a victim--it reminded of the good old days when she was sleeping with men for money. It was the striptease before the undies actually came off, the pretending that the diamond-encrusted thong he had bought you actually felt good to wear, hiding the smile as clothes were ripped off. Only in this case, it was a little stranger---she had to hide the smile as she traced his jaw line with her finger, began unbuttoning the buttons of his blood-stained shirt, just like she used to. It was all foreplay, foreplay to a torture session, foreplay to sex of a special kind with a demon she had bothered to save from death. She deserved this, deserved to be the one who hurt him, deserved to be the one who kissed his face while she broke his fingers, but didn't remove any limbs--she had said one piece to Gladys, and she didn't go back on her promises, especially not promises to her team members.
Finally she had all the buttons undone, and she slid a hand down his breastbone, straddling him while she leaned in to kiss his neck. This was how it started, with kisses, and then it ended in tears, like so many sessions with her exes who came to her looking for great sex and ended it demanding more than she wanted to give. Someone--maybe Morgan, maybe some jealous female--had called her a 'man eater' once long ago, and the phrase made her laugh. Oh, she ate men, that was for sure, and then she spat them back out when she was done. She didn't have to pay homage to anyone, she was self-made, and she liked what she did.
He began to stir under her touch, muttering something she couldn't quite make out--the name of an old lover, the word 'stop', calling out for his mother. She smiled, making sure to show all her teeth to him as his eyes flickered open and he just looked at her, his mind clearly foggy with pain.
"Where am I?" he muttered finally, looking away from her. She took his chin in her hand and pushed it back so he was forced to stare at her face. Keeping eye contact was key during torture sessions, which was one difference between those and fucking a guy for cash. When she had sex with someone for money, she specifically didn't look at them, because it didn't matter, keeping a connection. You wanted as little connection as possible, actually, and maintaining that lack of connection became the most important thing to you as you worked. Here, though? You wanted connection, needed connection, craved connection. You wanted to make sure that he watched every move you were making, wanted him to feel everything you did to him, wanted him to remember your face. Fear was key, and if you didn't have a connection with him, how were you supposed to instill a sense of fear in him? It made no sense to her, the people who liked to stay hidden in poorly lit spaces while they were ripping the flesh out of someone--it was like having sex in the dark. Half the pleasure was in knowing just who you were fucking, or being stabbed in the chest by.
“Do you remember what happened to you before you blacked out?” she asked instead of answering, another trick she had picked up. Why do the thinking for them? Make them think, and it freaked them out more. Plus, technically this was an interrogation session, not a torture session. The two just occasionally went hand in hand.
He winced-obviously thinking was something that was particularly difficult for him to do. “I... remember getting mad. Some little cunt from across the line was insulting me. Damn she was fast.” He was no longer looking at Yang, even if his eyes were aimed at her face. He was sort of looking beyond her, completely lost in though. “Kept punching me and kicking me until I couldn’t move. And then I blacked out.” He looked back up at Yang. “Where am I?” he repeated.
Yang fought the urge to rip his tongue out for calling Janey that. She may not have been the biggest fan of the girl-little hotshot needed to be taken down a few notches, as good as she was-but she was team and no one got away with calling her team names. No one. “Where you are is of no importance,” she said, and went back to leaving her mark on his neck. “What is important is what was a guy like you doing in a place like the neutralized zones, and so close to the border too.”
“You’re cold,” he said, his voice distant. “You little-“ he tried to push her off him as everything clicked together and he realized what she was, but she had him pinned, tied down and she wasn’t going to let him go anywhere.
“What were you doing, bud?” she asked, pulling away from his neck to stare down into his face. “Hm? What were you doing crossing the border? You know that’s against the rules of the neutralized zones.”
“You maintain a presence in the neutralized zones just as much as we do,” he grunted, squirming under her touch. “And I crossed the border because that bi-ahhh!” He cried out as she grabbed his wrist and twisted, smiling as wide as her mouth would stretch.
“I’m sorry. Who is the prisoner here? Oh, that’s right-you.” She twisted his arm a little more. “So there will be no insults from here on out about anyone on my team. Are we clear?”
He whimpered in reply, which Yang took as an assent. She released his arm, and he hissed, lowering his head so all he could see was the ceiling. He was kind of handsome in a way-he had a strong jaw line and kind of pretty eyes. She could have fucked him while looking at him, if that’s what they had been doing instead of this. She leaned in close to him, and he tried to pull away, as if she was going to kiss him again, but she grabbed his head and held it in place firmly.
“This could be so much easier,” she whispered into his ear. “You just have to tell me what you were doing crossing the border, and we’ll ship you back to your friends.”
“I told you, I just ran over to put that girl in her place.” He wriggled under her, his voice betraying his near-panic. “It wasn’t for any other reason, I swear!”
“I never asked about plans,” she hissed, pulling his hair just enough to bring tears to his eyes-distort his vision, confuse him even further. If she wasn’t unsure about whether or not he had a concussion, she would have put him on some kind of drug-standard protocol for interrogation, really. “Why would you just tell me that if you weren’t lying?” Another sharp yank on his hair.
“I don’t know,” he gasped, his eyes shut. “Why are you doing this if it’s not to find out what the plans are for our next wave of attacks?”
“I believe I am asking the questions,” Yang growled, lifting his head a few inches off the steel bed. “Why mention the plans? What’s going to happen next?”
“I don’t know!” he cried. “If I knew I would tell you, but I just don’t know!” He was truly panicking now, and projecting his panic. Yang was struggling to keep her head, and while she knew rationally that he was telling the truth, and that he didn’t know anything, her frustration at being emotionally manipulated, even if it was on accident, was getting the better of her.
“WHY DID YOU CROSS THE LINE?” she roared. “WHAT ARE YOU PLANNING?”
“Nothing, nothing, I don’t know, I’m sorry, I don’t know, I don’t-“ Yang brought his head down onto the steel bed, hard enough to make him stop talking-that is, hard enough to knock him out. He went limp in her arms, and she knelt over him, catching her breath, feeling for a pulse.
“That was a little overdramatic,” she heard from the doorway of the cell. She glanced up to see Morgan, standing just beyond the metal bars, smirking at her.
“Well, occasionally dramatics are called for. He’s worthless anyway.” She climbed off him, patting his cheek as she walked away. “Poor guy. I hope there isn’t any permanent brain damage.”
“Well, if he’s useless and doesn’t know anything, then I’m sure no one would really care even if there was some kind of brain damage.” Morgan watched her as she shut the cell door and began fumbling with the lock. “So his story matches up with ours?” Yang nodded, and Morgan seemed to relax.
“That doesn’t mean he’ll tell that story to his supervisors,” Yang reminded him. “Not to be a Debbie Downer or anything, sir. Just trying to be realistic.”
Morgan nodded. “I understand,” he said. “We'll turn over the security tapes, which they’ll no doubt declare doctored and the neutralized zone will become another war zone, but that’s how the cookie crumbles I suppose.” Yang nodded again, and suddenly out of nowhere, her stomach growled. She and Morgan looked at each other and began to laugh.
“I’m sorry, sir,” Yang choked between laughs. “I think it was the cookie part.”
“Un... understandable,” Morgan gasped. His laugh was high-pitched and reedy, like a teenage girl’s. “Cookies would be... would be...” He couldn’t seem to find his sentence, and Yang didn’t need him to. She knew exactly what he was thinking, and she should have been able to-they’d only spent 100 of their long years together. It took several minutes for them to each calm down and not start back up again, until Yang’s sides hurt like she’d just been stretched on a rack. She exhaled heavily and glanced at Morgan.
“Dinner time soon, Captain?” she asked.
“I would hope so,” he replied. “Gladys appeared to be cooking up a storm.”
“I don’t mean to hurt her feelings, sir.”
“I know, and I think she does to. I’m not sure it was hurt feelings she was cooking over.”
Yang bit her lip. “I don’t mean to hurt her.”
“None of us do.” Morgan sighed. “To dinner, my dear?”
Yang smiled and leaned in to kiss him on the cheek. She could already feel the blood rushing to his cheeks as he blushed, but she could care less. “To dinner, my captain,” she said, pulling away.
She knew that if someone took her thoughts about Morgan and correlated them with her actions towards him, it would be very very weird and kind of creepy. She loved him to pieces, no doubt about that-she had devoted a full hundred years of her life to being his little army slave, after seventy-odd years in the very well-paying business of body-selling. Not, like, black market organs, although she’d had a boyfriend who’d done that for a living and made at least decent money. No, Yang had been a whore for a long, long time, catering to clients of all kinds-angels, demons, even humans who didn’t mind it being a little rough. It was bound to get a little rough when you had an angel with angel-levels of strength having sexual intercourse with a regular human. She tried her best not to hurt her clients-they wouldn’t come back if she did any real lasting damage-but there were definitely bruises when they left the motel rooms. All’s well that ends well, though, and Yang made sure her transactions ended well.
That was one of the things she liked to tell Morgan, anyway. She didn’t give a damn if she made him blush once or twice-she didn’t think her job was complete if she DIDN’T make him blush at LEAST once a day. That was just how she rolled.
So she was an ex-whore soldier now, and had been recruited by Morgan after talking to him during a lap dance. Not that the lap dance was what he had initially approached her about. Morgan had a creepy way of latching onto possible recruits and sort of stalking them for a few weeks, finding out where they lived, what they did for a living, their usual hangouts. He had talked to her at a bar one night, and she had bitched him out for stalking her, then when he had showed up the next night at her club-she danced occasionally on the weekend, because what a way to have fun AND supplement your income!-she had grabbed him and given him a lap dance while he gave her the points of why he wanted her in his team, clearly uncomfortable with the situation but determined to have her nonetheless. She had made him pay her fifty bucks AND wait a whole day with no idea if she’d ever answer before she approached him and agreed to it. She liked him-he was cute. She liked to exaggerate to him how cute he was, because it embarrassed him, and she liked him best of all when he was embarrassed, stuttering over his words.
And, she had discovered, she was good at what he needed her to do, which was really just about everything. In the hundred years she had been with him, she had served under so many titles she actually lost track of what her job was anymore. After he went thought a series of seconds-in-commands who all failed at their jobs, he had kind of just glanced at her and said, “Yang. You’re second-in-command now. Go tell the kids to clean up the goddamn mess hall.” When he gave you an order like that, you just shrugged and did whatever he said. For all that the archangels liked to point out how orderly their ranks were in comparison to the demons, Morgan’s ragtag teams tended to not follow those rankings. They all had positions in his brain, of course, but hell if they knew what those positions were. Yang cooked on Wednesdays, led patrols every other day of the week, tortured those it was really rather important to get information out of, and cleaned the bathrooms every weekend because hell if any of the team was as good at it as she was. She also enforced bedtimes for the young ones, and that was hell and a half because Morgan had taken to recruiting only young ones to replace the ones who had died. Yang had tried, in many tones of voice, to explain to him that she was NOT a babysitter who should have to worry about running around with kids who she had personally handed weapons, but Morgan seemed drawn to those high school college fairs, where he would grab a couple of the totally-lost looking ones and explain to them that they looked right for the job he had for them. It was all rather manipulative, and that was the beautiful thing about Morgan-he was manipulative as hell and would still die for his team any day of the week. Except Sunday. He really liked to sleep in on Sundays.
Yang barely noticed that she had actually gone down all the stairs into the basement, and subconsciously found herself at the cell that Gladys had transferred the demon to. The Angel of Healing was on her hands and knees in the cell, picking up pieces of what Yang privately suspected were lint off the floor like she had gone totally insane.
“Gladys!” she cried. “What the hell are you doing?”
The Angel of Healing looked up at her with a rather blank look on her face. “I’m cleaning,” she said. “The floors in here are trashed, and did you even wipe the floor up the last time you made someone bleed in here? For crying out loud, Yang, dried blood breeds INFECTION, and I can’t heal an epidemic once it’s infected everyone in the complex. I’ve showed you how to clean up before, I know I have, and it’s not that hard to even just take a wet rag and a little elbow grease to get the worst of it off the floor.”
Yang held in a sigh, instead waiting until the Angel of Healing had run out of things to say. “You finished?” she asked at a pause.
“For now,” Gladys said coldly. Yang almost winced. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Gladys-she just didn’t have time for all the coddling of the enemy that the woman did. Really, who cared if she left a little blood on the floor of a cell? It wasn’t like it was the guest bedroom, and they were at WAR for crying out loud. She tried her best to not be impatient with the Angel of Healing-she knew it was difficult being the only one of her kind in a pool of archangels who really just wanted to get out of there and kick some demon ass to tiny bits-but occasionally she failed to come across as not-harsh and she knew that Gladys saw her with a mixture of fear and contempt.
“Well then. Thank you for your concern about the state of being of our prisoner. I appreciate your thoroughness, and I apologize for my sloppiness. It won’t happen again. Now, if you could please get up off the floor, I have some work to do and I know you don’t want to be here for that.” She offered a hand to Gladys, who stood and brushed her (admittedly hideous, but Yang wasn’t going to say anything) skirt before glancing back at the demon who was lying unconscious on the steel bed behind her.
"Please don't hurt him," she half-whispered. "Not too badly. That's all I'm asking. He hurts just like we do, Yang, he feels everything you do to him. Just... Please."
Yang watched the body as he breathed, and she nodded quietly. "I understand, Gladys, but pain comes with the territory. I'll do my best to leave him mostly in one piece though. One /living/ piece, if that will make you happy." She smirked a little to herself as Gladys just rolled her eyes and left the room.
There. They were alone. Yang loved these moments just before she started in on a victim--it reminded of the good old days when she was sleeping with men for money. It was the striptease before the undies actually came off, the pretending that the diamond-encrusted thong he had bought you actually felt good to wear, hiding the smile as clothes were ripped off. Only in this case, it was a little stranger---she had to hide the smile as she traced his jaw line with her finger, began unbuttoning the buttons of his blood-stained shirt, just like she used to. It was all foreplay, foreplay to a torture session, foreplay to sex of a special kind with a demon she had bothered to save from death. She deserved this, deserved to be the one who hurt him, deserved to be the one who kissed his face while she broke his fingers, but didn't remove any limbs--she had said one piece to Gladys, and she didn't go back on her promises, especially not promises to her team members.
Finally she had all the buttons undone, and she slid a hand down his breastbone, straddling him while she leaned in to kiss his neck. This was how it started, with kisses, and then it ended in tears, like so many sessions with her exes who came to her looking for great sex and ended it demanding more than she wanted to give. Someone--maybe Morgan, maybe some jealous female--had called her a 'man eater' once long ago, and the phrase made her laugh. Oh, she ate men, that was for sure, and then she spat them back out when she was done. She didn't have to pay homage to anyone, she was self-made, and she liked what she did.
He began to stir under her touch, muttering something she couldn't quite make out--the name of an old lover, the word 'stop', calling out for his mother. She smiled, making sure to show all her teeth to him as his eyes flickered open and he just looked at her, his mind clearly foggy with pain.
"Where am I?" he muttered finally, looking away from her. She took his chin in her hand and pushed it back so he was forced to stare at her face. Keeping eye contact was key during torture sessions, which was one difference between those and fucking a guy for cash. When she had sex with someone for money, she specifically didn't look at them, because it didn't matter, keeping a connection. You wanted as little connection as possible, actually, and maintaining that lack of connection became the most important thing to you as you worked. Here, though? You wanted connection, needed connection, craved connection. You wanted to make sure that he watched every move you were making, wanted him to feel everything you did to him, wanted him to remember your face. Fear was key, and if you didn't have a connection with him, how were you supposed to instill a sense of fear in him? It made no sense to her, the people who liked to stay hidden in poorly lit spaces while they were ripping the flesh out of someone--it was like having sex in the dark. Half the pleasure was in knowing just who you were fucking, or being stabbed in the chest by.
“Do you remember what happened to you before you blacked out?” she asked instead of answering, another trick she had picked up. Why do the thinking for them? Make them think, and it freaked them out more. Plus, technically this was an interrogation session, not a torture session. The two just occasionally went hand in hand.
He winced-obviously thinking was something that was particularly difficult for him to do. “I... remember getting mad. Some little cunt from across the line was insulting me. Damn she was fast.” He was no longer looking at Yang, even if his eyes were aimed at her face. He was sort of looking beyond her, completely lost in though. “Kept punching me and kicking me until I couldn’t move. And then I blacked out.” He looked back up at Yang. “Where am I?” he repeated.
Yang fought the urge to rip his tongue out for calling Janey that. She may not have been the biggest fan of the girl-little hotshot needed to be taken down a few notches, as good as she was-but she was team and no one got away with calling her team names. No one. “Where you are is of no importance,” she said, and went back to leaving her mark on his neck. “What is important is what was a guy like you doing in a place like the neutralized zones, and so close to the border too.”
“You’re cold,” he said, his voice distant. “You little-“ he tried to push her off him as everything clicked together and he realized what she was, but she had him pinned, tied down and she wasn’t going to let him go anywhere.
“What were you doing, bud?” she asked, pulling away from his neck to stare down into his face. “Hm? What were you doing crossing the border? You know that’s against the rules of the neutralized zones.”
“You maintain a presence in the neutralized zones just as much as we do,” he grunted, squirming under her touch. “And I crossed the border because that bi-ahhh!” He cried out as she grabbed his wrist and twisted, smiling as wide as her mouth would stretch.
“I’m sorry. Who is the prisoner here? Oh, that’s right-you.” She twisted his arm a little more. “So there will be no insults from here on out about anyone on my team. Are we clear?”
He whimpered in reply, which Yang took as an assent. She released his arm, and he hissed, lowering his head so all he could see was the ceiling. He was kind of handsome in a way-he had a strong jaw line and kind of pretty eyes. She could have fucked him while looking at him, if that’s what they had been doing instead of this. She leaned in close to him, and he tried to pull away, as if she was going to kiss him again, but she grabbed his head and held it in place firmly.
“This could be so much easier,” she whispered into his ear. “You just have to tell me what you were doing crossing the border, and we’ll ship you back to your friends.”
“I told you, I just ran over to put that girl in her place.” He wriggled under her, his voice betraying his near-panic. “It wasn’t for any other reason, I swear!”
“I never asked about plans,” she hissed, pulling his hair just enough to bring tears to his eyes-distort his vision, confuse him even further. If she wasn’t unsure about whether or not he had a concussion, she would have put him on some kind of drug-standard protocol for interrogation, really. “Why would you just tell me that if you weren’t lying?” Another sharp yank on his hair.
“I don’t know,” he gasped, his eyes shut. “Why are you doing this if it’s not to find out what the plans are for our next wave of attacks?”
“I believe I am asking the questions,” Yang growled, lifting his head a few inches off the steel bed. “Why mention the plans? What’s going to happen next?”
“I don’t know!” he cried. “If I knew I would tell you, but I just don’t know!” He was truly panicking now, and projecting his panic. Yang was struggling to keep her head, and while she knew rationally that he was telling the truth, and that he didn’t know anything, her frustration at being emotionally manipulated, even if it was on accident, was getting the better of her.
“WHY DID YOU CROSS THE LINE?” she roared. “WHAT ARE YOU PLANNING?”
“Nothing, nothing, I don’t know, I’m sorry, I don’t know, I don’t-“ Yang brought his head down onto the steel bed, hard enough to make him stop talking-that is, hard enough to knock him out. He went limp in her arms, and she knelt over him, catching her breath, feeling for a pulse.
“That was a little overdramatic,” she heard from the doorway of the cell. She glanced up to see Morgan, standing just beyond the metal bars, smirking at her.
“Well, occasionally dramatics are called for. He’s worthless anyway.” She climbed off him, patting his cheek as she walked away. “Poor guy. I hope there isn’t any permanent brain damage.”
“Well, if he’s useless and doesn’t know anything, then I’m sure no one would really care even if there was some kind of brain damage.” Morgan watched her as she shut the cell door and began fumbling with the lock. “So his story matches up with ours?” Yang nodded, and Morgan seemed to relax.
“That doesn’t mean he’ll tell that story to his supervisors,” Yang reminded him. “Not to be a Debbie Downer or anything, sir. Just trying to be realistic.”
Morgan nodded. “I understand,” he said. “We'll turn over the security tapes, which they’ll no doubt declare doctored and the neutralized zone will become another war zone, but that’s how the cookie crumbles I suppose.” Yang nodded again, and suddenly out of nowhere, her stomach growled. She and Morgan looked at each other and began to laugh.
“I’m sorry, sir,” Yang choked between laughs. “I think it was the cookie part.”
“Un... understandable,” Morgan gasped. His laugh was high-pitched and reedy, like a teenage girl’s. “Cookies would be... would be...” He couldn’t seem to find his sentence, and Yang didn’t need him to. She knew exactly what he was thinking, and she should have been able to-they’d only spent 100 of their long years together. It took several minutes for them to each calm down and not start back up again, until Yang’s sides hurt like she’d just been stretched on a rack. She exhaled heavily and glanced at Morgan.
“Dinner time soon, Captain?” she asked.
“I would hope so,” he replied. “Gladys appeared to be cooking up a storm.”
“I don’t mean to hurt her feelings, sir.”
“I know, and I think she does to. I’m not sure it was hurt feelings she was cooking over.”
Yang bit her lip. “I don’t mean to hurt her.”
“None of us do.” Morgan sighed. “To dinner, my dear?”
Yang smiled and leaned in to kiss him on the cheek. She could already feel the blood rushing to his cheeks as he blushed, but she could care less. “To dinner, my captain,” she said, pulling away.