Childish Rhyme ch07
FINALLY got this thing done. I'm getting back into the writing schedule so hopefully the next one won't take so long.
Previous chapters are linked here.
Title: Childish Rhyme
Chapter: 7/? ............ Underground, Suspect Found
Rating: R for safety
Spoilers: pretty much everything from the first game to the fourth
Warnings: This fic will be heavily into heavy levels of unsettling and creepy. There might be one or two incidents of real violence towards the end but for the most part it's children staring with dead eyes more than chainsaws. Ye be warned.
Summery: A fairy tale on fairy wing is something to make the birds all sing. Still I wonder what tale we sow since all I hear are the calls of the crow.
Ema drifted in and out of consciousness. She held onto the facts for dear life and fought to stay awake long enough to put the pieces together.
The basics. Focus on the basics.
She was chained to a wall, damp and slick with mildew. Water sloshed a few centimeters deep at her feet. The space felt heavy somehow, compressed. Instinct told her she was underground.
How did I get here? she repeated over and over to herself, the thought becoming a mantra. I was reading case files... the coffee, oh god I should have known.
She fought for the memory of how she was smuggled out of the building. For anyone to get an unconscious, injured detective out of the basement and into some kind of vehicle... well, it was unthinkable. But somehow the suspect managed it.
Very slowly the throbbing in her ankle came to the surface. The rhythm of the pain triggered something, a memory of a bumpy ride. The sound of water, both the patter of rain on the roof of the vehicle and the sound of it rushing and tumbling.
A rough road and a river... I'm far from the city...
"Wakey, wakey, little white rat."
Ice water was splashed into Ema's face. She gasped, the shocking cold nearly taking her breath away, and felt the adrenaline rush through her system. She lifted her head and recognized the shape of a person standing in front of her, but the drug's effect was too strong. She felt awareness slip away once again.
"Oh dear, I've used to much, haven't I?" said that same voice, high pitched and female with an undercurrent of barely checked hysteria. "This will never do..."
There was a sharp prick at Ema's shoulder and a spreading heat. Her heart suddenly went from sluggish to hammering. This time the detective stayed conscious.
"Stimulant..." she murmured, awake but still very weak. Everything ached, her ankle most of all. The pain spiked with every frantic beat of her heart.
"Oh, what a clever little rat you are."
Ema managed to lift her head again to get a better look at her captor. The light was dim, cast by a single flickering lantern, but she could see that the owner of the voice was a short woman with dark blond hair tied up in a bun. She wore a pencil skirt and sharp white blouse, both of which were splattered with mud and soaked in water. Her dark eyes were underlined by dark bags, the deep purple color accentuated by her milk pale skin.
The shrill-voiced girl didn't even come up to Ema's shoulders. It seemed impossible that she could be the one to do all this, especially kidnapping a detective from the police building, but something in Ema's gut told her this wasn't an accomplice. There was a smile on her face but her eyes were cruel and superior. A hard lump settled in Ema's stomach.
"You know," the girl said conversationally, "it really is a shame that we didn't meet under different circumstances. We could have been colleagues, fellow scientists, perhaps even friends." She threw up her hands in an 'oh well' gesture. "It's a pity that I have to kill you."
It was like a lead punch to the gut when Ema realized she was going to die in that place. Chained to a slimy wall in a dark chamber who knows where. This tiny woman was smart enough to avoid detection in two public poisonings. They weren't going to find her until she was long cold.
Will she poison me? Will they find me still chained to the wall? Will she cut me down and leave me to die on the floor? Three days from now will they pull me out of the river and make Lana identify my bloated corpse? Who's going to stand over me as I've stood over so many bodies?
All the questions spiraled in her mind like a tornado. The ones that Lana would ask, the ones her fellow detectives would ask, coming back to one singular word over and over.
"Why?"
"Why, why, why, why..." the girl mocked. "It's the question we scientists can't resist, isn't it? Why does the arterial spray make this pattern? Why does a high concentration of the poison cause the hair to turn white? Investigation, experimentation, it's out way!"
It seemed that her captor had no intention of telling her anything, so Ema withdrew. She silently went over the facts in her head, trying to find something to tie it together.
She's hurting the people who put Dahlia Hawthorne away, obvious reven-
She didn't know that she was mumbling those words out loud until the girl's hand struck her cheek.
"How dare you speak her name!?" Another slap. "How dare you pass judgment on her?"
"I didn't!" Ema tried to shout. "I didn't judge! I just stated fact, please..." The detective grasped at straws. "I mean, all I know is what's in the public record, and I know how much corruption there was... do you know about the murder of Bruce Goodman?"
"... And Neil Marshall," the girl murmured dispassionately.
"Yes! Gant framed me for Prosecutor Marshall's murder, then he used that forged evidence to blackmail my sister into taking the blame for Goodman's death."
The girl suddenly turned her back on the detective. "If you're just going to state things anyone would know, then-"
"Wait!" Ema cried. "He framed others! To date we've found solid, real evidence of five other murders he committed, and dozens of other lesser charges. I know firsthand how corrupt the system was back then. So... I don't know. I don't have enough facts so I can't pass judgment either way."
The girl slowly turned around and sat on an upturned bucket. For a few seconds that stretched into forever she considered what Ema had said.
"You are right," she said at last. "After all, a scientist cannot make assumptions, yes?"
Ema nodded weakly.
"You're a reasonable woman, Detective Skye. I deeply regret that we didn't meet under better circumstances. It's nice to be myself for these few minutes, after so long pretending."
The silence was worse than her shrill threats. Ema was losing grip on the finer parts of her control, between the exhaustion and pain and the stimulant working her heart overtime.
"What was she like?" she asked without meaning to. The instant the words left her mouth she regretted it. Without waiting for an answer she held her breath and braced for the blow that was sure to land on her already stinging cheek.
"She was..." the girl said softly after several moments passed. "She was perfect."
Her voice was rapturous. Ema remembered a newspaper clipping that referred to Hawthorne's boyfriends as The Red Cult. The tone of the girl's voice made it obvious that Dahlia's influence wasn't limited to the opposite sex.
The girl eagerly continued. "Her beauty was without match. You've seen pictures of course?"
Scarlet hair, porcelain skin, heart shaped face... Ema answered truthfully, "There's no denying that she was gorgeous."
The girl's face was dreamy. "What you can't see in those pictures is her grace. The way she moved, the way she walked, everything. She was always elegant. Charming. And oh, she was clever. She had plans that would span years." Her eyes suddenly fell to her tightly clasped hands. "...And she was as harsh as she was beautiful. Her hair like fire but her eyes colder than the coldest ice. Her fury was as incredible as her passion."
The girl hugged herself and looked off to the side, unable to meet her captive's eyes. Ema struggled between the detective instinct to find out as much as she could and the survivor instinct to keep quiet in the vain hope that the girl would let her go.
"You think I'm crazy, don't you?"
Ema bit her lip hard enough to draw blood. Do not answer that question.
The girl went on, "Crazy for loving her, for being devoted even now... I will always love her. I will love her with my last breath." For a brief second the hysteria fell away and in its place was a small self-depreciating smile. "No, she didn't."
"Wh... what?" Ema asked, confused as to what question that last phrase was supposed to answer.
"The answer is no," the girl repeated sadly, "she didn't love me." Suddenly the anger was back, but it was more defensive than violent. "You think I'm crazy for loving her when she didn't love me!" she accused.
Ema grasped for something that would sooth, but the girl's attention quickly turned away from her captive. She turned her back and talked to the wall.
"It was just a chance we met, you know. For her an initiation and I a desperate bid for acceptance that I knew wouldn't succeed..."
She sighed and reached up to tug at her hair, which turned out to be a wig. Her real hair was a frizzy mousy brown that had been cropped very short in rough chunks. She tossed the wig into the water at their feet and then continued her narrative.
"Dahlia... she had first pick. And out of all the other girls there she chose me. She saw something in me. Me! The little bug catcher nerd, and then the most beautiful creature in existence picks me. And then through it all I was the only one she trusted with everything. She'd give the intensifier compound to her toys but she only took it herself when she was with me. She always came back to me."
Suddenly the girl's head snapped around and she leapt to her feet. Her fists were clenched and her eyes burned with rage.
"She did love me!" she shouted as though Ema had questioned it. "She did! It wasn't the same kind of love as I had for her, but she did love me!"
"I believe you!" Ema cried as that hand rose again. The blow landed anyway.
"Don't you dare patronize me!"
"I'm not, I'm not," she sobbed, the pain and stress and fear finally cracking her resolve. The cool headed detective fled and she was left with the same scared little girl who cowered underneath a desk while lightning flashed and lives ended.
"Explain, little rat," her captor said, her tone pointed and deadly, "and explain well."
"I..." her ankle throbbed, her cheek stung, the cold seeped into her soaked form. She grasped at straws. "Her twin, Iris, she helped her but even she didn't know everything. She trusted you more than her own identical twin sister, right?"
This time it wasn't a slap. It was a savage kick to her casted foot. Ema screamed in pain, almost drowning out the girl's shouting.
"I told you not to patronize me! Stating facts isn't going to save you!"
Ema's broken ankle was kicked again and again until she was a complete wreck. When she started begging for it to end the girl suddenly stepped away and left her hanging from the chains. Ema's lungs burned and her own tears choked her. Pain lanced up from her ankle until her entire right side felt like it was being stabbed with burning daggers and shards of ice.
She was just starting to get a grip on herself when her hair was roughly grabbed and her head forced up. The light was dim but it was enough to glint off the metal syringe the girl held. Her look was manic, fractured, desperate, but her voice was even and as toxic as the poisons she made for Dahlia.
"This will cause seizures," she said with a sneer, "terrible convulsions, agony beyond your imaginings, and hallucinations of terror that will seem more real than the world itself. I was going to drown you, but for your insolence this nightmare will be your end."
Ema struggled but the chains were too thick and she was too weak. When the needle pieced her skin she was back to that room as Joe Darke advanced on her, the lightning illuminating his gaunt face in patches and glinting off his insane grin. She thought that maybe it would somehow be easier the second time she stared down death, but she was wrong. She was still terrified.
She shut her eyes as the first tendrils of stinging heat twisted down her arm, but then like the lighting that haunted her dreams the answer came to her in a blinding flash.
"We don't know who you are!"
The girl paused, needle still wiggling in her captive's flesh but the plunger was still. Ema tried to gather enough of her frayed self to make coherent sense.
"We don't know. We have no idea. No suspects, no persons of interest, no leads... nothing."
The girl's smile was smug. "I already knew that. Do you think that this will save you from a death worse than death?"
"No- I mean yes! I mean... she never said anything about you. She could have cast the blame, said that you acted on your own. Since you made the poison it wouldn't have been hard to make it stick. She could have betrayed you to save herself but she didn't."
The needle withdrew. The girl backed away in a daze and sat down heavily. The syringe slipped from her lax fingers and fell into the water with a splash.
"She..." the girl's voice broke. "She could have saved herself... I could have..."
Ema gasped for breath. She wasn't sure how much of that poison had gotten into her veins. All she knew was that the world was lurching.
"WHY!?" The girl suddenly cried out, her despair rebounding off the walls and filling the small chamber. "Why wouldn't she save herself? How could I have been so blind? I could have saved her!"
When the girl looked up and softly whispered, "Why?" her sorrow was so intense that, for a moment, Ema forgot where she was. She felt sorry for her captor and she tried to comfort her.
"She must have a good reas-"
"I would rather be dead that see her locked away and taken to that cold chair," the girl ranted as she leapt up and tried to pace in the narrow space. "I tried. I tried! The moment they poured that poison into my butterfly's arm I leapt. But I lived. I lived on without her!"
She suddenly rushed forwards and Ema suddenly remembered where they were. She winced, tried to get away, but no blow came. The girl wrapped her arms around her captive's waist, buried her head in Ema's chest, and cried.
"I could have saved her. I never saw it. I could have taken her place. Why... why..."
She sobbed brokenly, repeating those words over and over. Ema wasn't sure what to do. She couldn't hug the girl or strike her; the chains didn't have enough give. The detective in her surfaced and made the point that this was the time to push for her release.
She wondered, what would move a sociopath to protect her accomplice at the price of her own life? What answer would she accept... what answer is right?
Ema wrestled her fears aside, swallowed hard, and spoke.
"Maybe... maybe the way she loved you... maybe it was a little closer to how you love her? Maybe... maybe she couldn't live without you either?"
The girl pulled away and Ema held her breath. The seconds stretched on and finally the girl made a move. She hugged Ema close and whispered a quiet, "Thank you."
Ema blinked.
"I never..." the girl stepped back and wiped her eyes as best she could with soaked clothes. "I never knew. I never needed more, I never wanted more... and all along I had it."
Her smile was bittersweet. Ema dared to hope.
"I want to give you a gift, my dearest friend. I will treasure this truth that you have given me. It gives me the strength to continue."
The detective's stomach sank. I helped her... oh god, I helped her keep going.
"I am truly sorry that I must kill you, but I will take away the agony of your death."
Ema's eyes went wide as all hope was extinguished. She struggled. The shackles cut into her already bleeding wrists. "Wait! No, please, I don't want to die!"
The girl ignored her pleas. She dug around in her coat and withdrew another syringe. Ema's begging devolved into sharp shrieks as she rattled the chains in an effort to escape.
"No," the girl reassured, "it's not that other compound. This is my own medicine. I made it to relax my leg on the bad days. You'll drift away and when the water reaches your lungs you'll hardly notice." She jabbed the needle into Ema's shaking arm and administered the dose.
Ema realized that the water had risen from her ankles to her knees. The rain was filling the chamber. She continued fighting when the girl left, but the relaxant numbed the panic. Without the adrenaline she didn't have the strength to struggle.
She hoped that the cold would be enough to slow decomposition so that her sister wouldn't have to identify a bloated, waterlogged body. Then there was nothing but gray wind and the sound of water.
Previous chapters are linked here.
Title: Childish Rhyme
Chapter: 7/? ............ Underground, Suspect Found
Rating: R for safety
Spoilers: pretty much everything from the first game to the fourth
Warnings: This fic will be heavily into heavy levels of unsettling and creepy. There might be one or two incidents of real violence towards the end but for the most part it's children staring with dead eyes more than chainsaws. Ye be warned.
Summery: A fairy tale on fairy wing is something to make the birds all sing. Still I wonder what tale we sow since all I hear are the calls of the crow.
Ema drifted in and out of consciousness. She held onto the facts for dear life and fought to stay awake long enough to put the pieces together.
The basics. Focus on the basics.
She was chained to a wall, damp and slick with mildew. Water sloshed a few centimeters deep at her feet. The space felt heavy somehow, compressed. Instinct told her she was underground.
How did I get here? she repeated over and over to herself, the thought becoming a mantra. I was reading case files... the coffee, oh god I should have known.
She fought for the memory of how she was smuggled out of the building. For anyone to get an unconscious, injured detective out of the basement and into some kind of vehicle... well, it was unthinkable. But somehow the suspect managed it.
Very slowly the throbbing in her ankle came to the surface. The rhythm of the pain triggered something, a memory of a bumpy ride. The sound of water, both the patter of rain on the roof of the vehicle and the sound of it rushing and tumbling.
A rough road and a river... I'm far from the city...
"Wakey, wakey, little white rat."
Ice water was splashed into Ema's face. She gasped, the shocking cold nearly taking her breath away, and felt the adrenaline rush through her system. She lifted her head and recognized the shape of a person standing in front of her, but the drug's effect was too strong. She felt awareness slip away once again.
"Oh dear, I've used to much, haven't I?" said that same voice, high pitched and female with an undercurrent of barely checked hysteria. "This will never do..."
There was a sharp prick at Ema's shoulder and a spreading heat. Her heart suddenly went from sluggish to hammering. This time the detective stayed conscious.
"Stimulant..." she murmured, awake but still very weak. Everything ached, her ankle most of all. The pain spiked with every frantic beat of her heart.
"Oh, what a clever little rat you are."
Ema managed to lift her head again to get a better look at her captor. The light was dim, cast by a single flickering lantern, but she could see that the owner of the voice was a short woman with dark blond hair tied up in a bun. She wore a pencil skirt and sharp white blouse, both of which were splattered with mud and soaked in water. Her dark eyes were underlined by dark bags, the deep purple color accentuated by her milk pale skin.
The shrill-voiced girl didn't even come up to Ema's shoulders. It seemed impossible that she could be the one to do all this, especially kidnapping a detective from the police building, but something in Ema's gut told her this wasn't an accomplice. There was a smile on her face but her eyes were cruel and superior. A hard lump settled in Ema's stomach.
"You know," the girl said conversationally, "it really is a shame that we didn't meet under different circumstances. We could have been colleagues, fellow scientists, perhaps even friends." She threw up her hands in an 'oh well' gesture. "It's a pity that I have to kill you."
It was like a lead punch to the gut when Ema realized she was going to die in that place. Chained to a slimy wall in a dark chamber who knows where. This tiny woman was smart enough to avoid detection in two public poisonings. They weren't going to find her until she was long cold.
Will she poison me? Will they find me still chained to the wall? Will she cut me down and leave me to die on the floor? Three days from now will they pull me out of the river and make Lana identify my bloated corpse? Who's going to stand over me as I've stood over so many bodies?
All the questions spiraled in her mind like a tornado. The ones that Lana would ask, the ones her fellow detectives would ask, coming back to one singular word over and over.
"Why?"
"Why, why, why, why..." the girl mocked. "It's the question we scientists can't resist, isn't it? Why does the arterial spray make this pattern? Why does a high concentration of the poison cause the hair to turn white? Investigation, experimentation, it's out way!"
It seemed that her captor had no intention of telling her anything, so Ema withdrew. She silently went over the facts in her head, trying to find something to tie it together.
She's hurting the people who put Dahlia Hawthorne away, obvious reven-
She didn't know that she was mumbling those words out loud until the girl's hand struck her cheek.
"How dare you speak her name!?" Another slap. "How dare you pass judgment on her?"
"I didn't!" Ema tried to shout. "I didn't judge! I just stated fact, please..." The detective grasped at straws. "I mean, all I know is what's in the public record, and I know how much corruption there was... do you know about the murder of Bruce Goodman?"
"... And Neil Marshall," the girl murmured dispassionately.
"Yes! Gant framed me for Prosecutor Marshall's murder, then he used that forged evidence to blackmail my sister into taking the blame for Goodman's death."
The girl suddenly turned her back on the detective. "If you're just going to state things anyone would know, then-"
"Wait!" Ema cried. "He framed others! To date we've found solid, real evidence of five other murders he committed, and dozens of other lesser charges. I know firsthand how corrupt the system was back then. So... I don't know. I don't have enough facts so I can't pass judgment either way."
The girl slowly turned around and sat on an upturned bucket. For a few seconds that stretched into forever she considered what Ema had said.
"You are right," she said at last. "After all, a scientist cannot make assumptions, yes?"
Ema nodded weakly.
"You're a reasonable woman, Detective Skye. I deeply regret that we didn't meet under better circumstances. It's nice to be myself for these few minutes, after so long pretending."
The silence was worse than her shrill threats. Ema was losing grip on the finer parts of her control, between the exhaustion and pain and the stimulant working her heart overtime.
"What was she like?" she asked without meaning to. The instant the words left her mouth she regretted it. Without waiting for an answer she held her breath and braced for the blow that was sure to land on her already stinging cheek.
"She was..." the girl said softly after several moments passed. "She was perfect."
Her voice was rapturous. Ema remembered a newspaper clipping that referred to Hawthorne's boyfriends as The Red Cult. The tone of the girl's voice made it obvious that Dahlia's influence wasn't limited to the opposite sex.
The girl eagerly continued. "Her beauty was without match. You've seen pictures of course?"
Scarlet hair, porcelain skin, heart shaped face... Ema answered truthfully, "There's no denying that she was gorgeous."
The girl's face was dreamy. "What you can't see in those pictures is her grace. The way she moved, the way she walked, everything. She was always elegant. Charming. And oh, she was clever. She had plans that would span years." Her eyes suddenly fell to her tightly clasped hands. "...And she was as harsh as she was beautiful. Her hair like fire but her eyes colder than the coldest ice. Her fury was as incredible as her passion."
The girl hugged herself and looked off to the side, unable to meet her captive's eyes. Ema struggled between the detective instinct to find out as much as she could and the survivor instinct to keep quiet in the vain hope that the girl would let her go.
"You think I'm crazy, don't you?"
Ema bit her lip hard enough to draw blood. Do not answer that question.
The girl went on, "Crazy for loving her, for being devoted even now... I will always love her. I will love her with my last breath." For a brief second the hysteria fell away and in its place was a small self-depreciating smile. "No, she didn't."
"Wh... what?" Ema asked, confused as to what question that last phrase was supposed to answer.
"The answer is no," the girl repeated sadly, "she didn't love me." Suddenly the anger was back, but it was more defensive than violent. "You think I'm crazy for loving her when she didn't love me!" she accused.
Ema grasped for something that would sooth, but the girl's attention quickly turned away from her captive. She turned her back and talked to the wall.
"It was just a chance we met, you know. For her an initiation and I a desperate bid for acceptance that I knew wouldn't succeed..."
She sighed and reached up to tug at her hair, which turned out to be a wig. Her real hair was a frizzy mousy brown that had been cropped very short in rough chunks. She tossed the wig into the water at their feet and then continued her narrative.
"Dahlia... she had first pick. And out of all the other girls there she chose me. She saw something in me. Me! The little bug catcher nerd, and then the most beautiful creature in existence picks me. And then through it all I was the only one she trusted with everything. She'd give the intensifier compound to her toys but she only took it herself when she was with me. She always came back to me."
Suddenly the girl's head snapped around and she leapt to her feet. Her fists were clenched and her eyes burned with rage.
"She did love me!" she shouted as though Ema had questioned it. "She did! It wasn't the same kind of love as I had for her, but she did love me!"
"I believe you!" Ema cried as that hand rose again. The blow landed anyway.
"Don't you dare patronize me!"
"I'm not, I'm not," she sobbed, the pain and stress and fear finally cracking her resolve. The cool headed detective fled and she was left with the same scared little girl who cowered underneath a desk while lightning flashed and lives ended.
"Explain, little rat," her captor said, her tone pointed and deadly, "and explain well."
"I..." her ankle throbbed, her cheek stung, the cold seeped into her soaked form. She grasped at straws. "Her twin, Iris, she helped her but even she didn't know everything. She trusted you more than her own identical twin sister, right?"
This time it wasn't a slap. It was a savage kick to her casted foot. Ema screamed in pain, almost drowning out the girl's shouting.
"I told you not to patronize me! Stating facts isn't going to save you!"
Ema's broken ankle was kicked again and again until she was a complete wreck. When she started begging for it to end the girl suddenly stepped away and left her hanging from the chains. Ema's lungs burned and her own tears choked her. Pain lanced up from her ankle until her entire right side felt like it was being stabbed with burning daggers and shards of ice.
She was just starting to get a grip on herself when her hair was roughly grabbed and her head forced up. The light was dim but it was enough to glint off the metal syringe the girl held. Her look was manic, fractured, desperate, but her voice was even and as toxic as the poisons she made for Dahlia.
"This will cause seizures," she said with a sneer, "terrible convulsions, agony beyond your imaginings, and hallucinations of terror that will seem more real than the world itself. I was going to drown you, but for your insolence this nightmare will be your end."
Ema struggled but the chains were too thick and she was too weak. When the needle pieced her skin she was back to that room as Joe Darke advanced on her, the lightning illuminating his gaunt face in patches and glinting off his insane grin. She thought that maybe it would somehow be easier the second time she stared down death, but she was wrong. She was still terrified.
She shut her eyes as the first tendrils of stinging heat twisted down her arm, but then like the lighting that haunted her dreams the answer came to her in a blinding flash.
"We don't know who you are!"
The girl paused, needle still wiggling in her captive's flesh but the plunger was still. Ema tried to gather enough of her frayed self to make coherent sense.
"We don't know. We have no idea. No suspects, no persons of interest, no leads... nothing."
The girl's smile was smug. "I already knew that. Do you think that this will save you from a death worse than death?"
"No- I mean yes! I mean... she never said anything about you. She could have cast the blame, said that you acted on your own. Since you made the poison it wouldn't have been hard to make it stick. She could have betrayed you to save herself but she didn't."
The needle withdrew. The girl backed away in a daze and sat down heavily. The syringe slipped from her lax fingers and fell into the water with a splash.
"She..." the girl's voice broke. "She could have saved herself... I could have..."
Ema gasped for breath. She wasn't sure how much of that poison had gotten into her veins. All she knew was that the world was lurching.
"WHY!?" The girl suddenly cried out, her despair rebounding off the walls and filling the small chamber. "Why wouldn't she save herself? How could I have been so blind? I could have saved her!"
When the girl looked up and softly whispered, "Why?" her sorrow was so intense that, for a moment, Ema forgot where she was. She felt sorry for her captor and she tried to comfort her.
"She must have a good reas-"
"I would rather be dead that see her locked away and taken to that cold chair," the girl ranted as she leapt up and tried to pace in the narrow space. "I tried. I tried! The moment they poured that poison into my butterfly's arm I leapt. But I lived. I lived on without her!"
She suddenly rushed forwards and Ema suddenly remembered where they were. She winced, tried to get away, but no blow came. The girl wrapped her arms around her captive's waist, buried her head in Ema's chest, and cried.
"I could have saved her. I never saw it. I could have taken her place. Why... why..."
She sobbed brokenly, repeating those words over and over. Ema wasn't sure what to do. She couldn't hug the girl or strike her; the chains didn't have enough give. The detective in her surfaced and made the point that this was the time to push for her release.
She wondered, what would move a sociopath to protect her accomplice at the price of her own life? What answer would she accept... what answer is right?
Ema wrestled her fears aside, swallowed hard, and spoke.
"Maybe... maybe the way she loved you... maybe it was a little closer to how you love her? Maybe... maybe she couldn't live without you either?"
The girl pulled away and Ema held her breath. The seconds stretched on and finally the girl made a move. She hugged Ema close and whispered a quiet, "Thank you."
Ema blinked.
"I never..." the girl stepped back and wiped her eyes as best she could with soaked clothes. "I never knew. I never needed more, I never wanted more... and all along I had it."
Her smile was bittersweet. Ema dared to hope.
"I want to give you a gift, my dearest friend. I will treasure this truth that you have given me. It gives me the strength to continue."
The detective's stomach sank. I helped her... oh god, I helped her keep going.
"I am truly sorry that I must kill you, but I will take away the agony of your death."
Ema's eyes went wide as all hope was extinguished. She struggled. The shackles cut into her already bleeding wrists. "Wait! No, please, I don't want to die!"
The girl ignored her pleas. She dug around in her coat and withdrew another syringe. Ema's begging devolved into sharp shrieks as she rattled the chains in an effort to escape.
"No," the girl reassured, "it's not that other compound. This is my own medicine. I made it to relax my leg on the bad days. You'll drift away and when the water reaches your lungs you'll hardly notice." She jabbed the needle into Ema's shaking arm and administered the dose.
Ema realized that the water had risen from her ankles to her knees. The rain was filling the chamber. She continued fighting when the girl left, but the relaxant numbed the panic. Without the adrenaline she didn't have the strength to struggle.
She hoped that the cold would be enough to slow decomposition so that her sister wouldn't have to identify a bloated, waterlogged body. Then there was nothing but gray wind and the sound of water.