Chapter Text
"How the Mighty have Fallen," he warned tauntingly, "ain't your Prince Charming coming to get you soon, honey?"
She bit back a growl in response, a rumble croaked at her throat in protest.
A gun cocked at her head, but her mind could only swirl in circles that had no end.
"Look, I'll give him a minute, how about that?" it seemed a jest more than an act of kindness, "he's ought to be downstairs, charging his way through our grunts. Let's see if he finds his sweetheart before I blow her brains out, aye?"
She was awake, but her body was like a dead. It could not move and could not function, could not feel. It was numb like the paralysed she would soon be-- and the more she fought against it, the more it ran deeper into her, shutting down the littlest senses she still maintained.
Shouldn't have drunk that wine, she meaninglessly realized, they had definitely tucked something in it, so tasteless and so scentless she did not notice at all-- fuck, it wasn't even just a childish sleep drug.
She felt herself going.
Going where? She didn't want to know yet. It wasn't her time, she believed, and she didn't want to go anywhere but stay right here.
"You ignoring us, lassie?" the man taunted with mockery, a harsh foot hooking at her abdomen, swinging her body off balance and throwing its limp form toward a wall-- sending her head spindling out of consciousness, a final wave of pain hitting her so strong she gasped and her body threw the last of its energy for a vomit of blood from her stomach.
Everything was numb. Her eyes, her hands; her feet and her fingers; her lungs and her ears; her head and her blood; even her throat was numb to her tongue, vocal chords thrumming but the tongue unable to fluctuate, to form the words she wished to compose.
How pathetic, she cursed, how pathetic I am now, taken down by a measly cup of poison.
She burned and boiled and bumbled in rage, in hate in curse in spite and in contempt-- but willpower did not prevail. Life wasn't a T.V. show, there was no such thing as the power of will that prevailed over all perilous situations.
"They say that shit works on elephants," one of them scoffed, "it's amazing how she's alive after all that, y'know?"
"I don't think she's in for a long run, dude," another sneered.
I, of all people.
Ridiculed, looked down upon by these lowly scum?
She glowered at their jeering faces, so full of glee and elation; her throat roared in furor as it ripped itself apart in rabid ire.
She forced her fingers to move. Her limbs to wriggle into the place she wanted them; for her body to obey instructions; for her brain to send out those signals; for these motor neurones to do their work. But nothing was going her way.
A childish ring-a-ding-ding croaked out of his corny wristwatch, a requiem so devastatingly terrible it was hard to feel sympathy for--
It was over.
"Time's up, miss," the safety thumbed off with a click, "I'll be seeing you down in hell."
She could only close her eyes, submitting to the fate she so, so hated being at the mercy of.
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Is fate decided? And why are we unable to go against it? Who is up there, watching us love and laugh only to fall bitter down?
Do they elate in our sufferings? Indulge in our sorrows?
Why must we suck it up and bear it? Why is it sinful to reject it?
Why must we live with the false belief that our personal decisions mattered in our lives?
ー
She was not interested in revenge.
Not any of that hassling bullcrap, wherein one party kills another, and vice versa, over and over again. The war between her Famiglia and his had gone on for years.
It was nigh time to put it to an end, with her miserable death.
What was the point of going on further? It was clear who was to lose the battle-- her. She had lost men one after another-- to betrayals, to dismissals, to denouncements.
Even if she were to summon the powers of the gods to bring herself back to life, to take revenge for herself-- was there a necessity to it? Was there value in this new effort? They had more men. She would just be returning to die once again.
She was not a good leader-- strength was all she had, love was something she didn't. No one stayed by her side, and finally, she was left alone on the stage to die on her very own.
It was a fitting curtain call for a wretched woman like her.
She sought solace in the quiet that did not reject her; she found comfort in the darkness of the void that did not make her suffer.
She hoped she could stay here forever, and finally, finally forget about everything in life that had ever caused her to languish.