She blinked and reared back. They weren’t joking. She took a peak at their aura, just to make sure, and it was blacker than she’d ever seen from them. She almost fell off of her chair. They weren’t supposed to be dark, and in pain. They were SwordBright.
They’d said they were from the future, a dark and terrible one, but this was the first time in this conversation that she truly believed it.
“That’s not something I thought I’d ever hear you say,” she remarked flippantly, trying to regain control of the conversation. “New policy?”
“No,” they said, and then apparently ran out of whatever determination they had had to hold her gaze. Their eyes slid away and landed on their abandoned coffee cup. “I always felt like that. Like sometimes violence is required to save the world. It’s just that… When the time came to act, I used to always chicken out. I was…”
They trailed off, and rubbed a hand on their face. “I was so young. The ‘me’ you know now was a coward. When there was the need for it, I couldn’t start a riot, I couldn’t punch a cop in the face, I couldn’t bring myself to deviate from the expected ‘good superhero’ behaviour. But then the world got really bad, and there was basically a war in the streets. I had to step up. Eventually peaceful solutions just stop working, you know? But even then, I failed.”
There was a short pause. Oasis reached out and touched their mug, running their hand over the rim like the gesture comforted them somewhat. They still looked like they had more to say, like they were considering their words with the utmost seriousness, and Karry resolved to wait them out.
“And even now I’m not sure I can kill baby Hitler, even though the Tyrant will destroy millions of lives,” they continued after a while. “But the world’s running out of time. There’s something that’s going to happen this year. I don’t know what, or when, but in every interview he always said that what set him on his path happened when he was eleven. The media used to think that he meant his interest in politics, but I think he meant his will to take over the world. Whatever it is that will make him the Tyrant, it’s going to happen soon. I have to stop him before that happens. I don’t know yet what form it’ll take, if I’ll have to… I don’t know. But I’ll do whatever it takes.”
They cradled their hands to their chest and slid down the couch with a world-weary sigh, like the will to sit up straight had deserted them. “I still kinda don’t want to murder him, though. I just. I don’t want to do it. Some hero I am.”
Karry set down her own empty cup, starting to get a better grasp on the situation. “And so you came to me. You want me to kill this child?”
She’d be offended, but then again, it was perfectly logical. If you needed a murder to be done, then you hired a murderer. She’d thought this entire affair had been one of friendship, of standing together against the end of the world, but she’d been wrong. This was business. She pulled her dress down her knees briskly, wondering if perhaps she shouldn’t have worn something that showed a tad bit less leg.
Oasis let out a long, bone shuddering sigh. “No. No, I’ve taken this upon myself, it’s my responsibility and I’ll see it through. I came to you because he’ll use your necklace.”
She froze.
Quite without conscious input, her claws unsheathed, and she straightened up in her chair, ready to fight. She fixed her gaze on the hero, awake that her pupils were dilating, and of the roaring of stolen blood in her ears.
No one was supposed to know about her necklace. No one knew about it, actually. She was certain; she’d spent centuries looking for it.
When she’d been shoved into this mortal body, all of her dark essence entrapped and bound by magic, a necklace had been made. A singular, blood-red stone in a bed of silver runes, meant to control her. And it had, for several decades; but one day she’d returned from war to find her captors dead, decimated by nameless enemies. And her necklace nowhere to be found. She’d waited, and fretted, expecting it to be used any minute to bring her under new, even more cruel control. But it had never happened, and she’d been forced to admit that it had perhaps only been taken as a spoil of war, its new owners none the wiser as to what it truly was. What she truly was, and the power she could bring them should they call upon her.
She’d looked for it for centuries now, eventually ending up in Toronto, where the trail had gone cold.
“My necklace?” she asked, layers upon layers of cold threat in her voice.
But Oasis wasn’t looking at her, wasn’t even paying attention. They were still staring at their cup of coffee, now doubtlessly gone cold, and nodded miserably.
“I didn’t understand,” they said, “Not at first. When you stole it from that museum and started wearing it all the time, I thought you were taunting me for not having been able to stop your robbery.”
Museum. The word echoed in her ears, pounded in time with her human blood.
“What museum?”
“But then the Tyrant took it from you, and he started using it, and…” They looked up at her, anguish in their gaze strong enough to rival her own. “and it controls you, doesn’t it? Whatever you are.”
“What museum”, she repeated, slowly. Dangerously. Pulling all of her thrall up like a veil around her even though it would slide off SwordBright like water and ducks. “Tell me.”
They held her gaze, something of their dread seeming to evaporate, replaced by determination. “The Royal Ontario Museum. It’s a new exhibit, and it’ll open next week.”
Something pounded in her chest. Her heart? She wasn’t aware that it even still worked. She felt light-headed all of a sudden, and sank back in her seat, fingers tightening over the chair’s arms and claws ripping through the expensive red leather. Next week. Her necklace.
She’d looked for it for over three hundreds years in screaming, agonizing solitude and there they were, that bright idiot, just giving her the answer as if they didn’t know what it was worth to her. What’s she’d have done to retrieve it. How she’d have tortured the answer out of them if that’s what it would have taken.
On the other side of her glass table, in her stupidly posh living room, Oasis leaned forward, steel eyed and serious, as if they were about to share a secret.
“I thought we could steal it first, and then deal with the Tyrant. What do you say?”
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