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daybreak777: on Victor’s talk with Adelle when he was recruited. R. Warning for images of violence and rape. Spoilers: "Echoes". Wordcount: 350.
Tim can’t help but scan the foyer carefully, taking in the way its occupants ghost from the recreation room to the cafeteria rather than move, the way the stairs lead up and higher up to a balcony that’d make for the most excellent spot if a sniper decided to take them all out.
The way DeWitt comes up behind him is absolutely quiet too, and yet he can feel her looming in his back the moment she appears.
“We can take it all away,” she says, her voice luring him in like a hyena just before the kill. Or possibly just like a salesman, since Tim hasn’t been confronted with either for a while. “All that pain would be gone.”
Tim isn’t impressed. He walked in on a civvie one time about to rape a woman on a sheet covered in gore. Her golden skin had looked a sickly kind of yellow, and she’d been screaming and sobbing and cradling her arms like she expected a child to be there. Tim had shot the guy right between the eyes before he could try anything funny.
He’d shot the woman, too. Her legs had been covered in blood, the way she’d moved her knee too unnatural to be healthy, and he couldn’t have taken her along. It hadn’t been that kind of patrol, and he’d learned from his mistakes. She’d have died either way.
It’s hard to impress him with anything these days.
The dolls don’t know that there are people in the world who could just walk up to them and break their necks and move on. Bliss on their faces, they aren’t aware that the stairs could be good for anything but walking up and down and up again. They wouldn’t ask why they should have to, either.
Tim knows a lot about being a toy.
“I know,” he says without checking if he’s answering the last thing DeWitt said, or if she said anything else thereafter. It isn’t important- it isn’t like she’s giving him orders.
He’s already made up his mind anyway.