These are the outgrowth of my not-especially-healthy Mileena fixation. Arranged in a long list instead of by links and such, because I'm lazy when it comes to hypertext.
It's a terrifying place to live. But it hardly scares me, much of the time. Those things can't get me the way she can. My shadow. It's a stupid thing to be afraid of, but I am. I'm frightened most of all of my shadow, who follows me everywhere and fills walls with her presence and hovers behind me, unsolid and implacable, menacing.
Mirrors are even more frightening than her. I can't look. They show me awful things.
His eyes were brown--such a common color. She'd hated it in herself, plain and ordinary, but it fit him so well. Rich and discerning. Startlingly dark. A woman could vanish in eyes like those. It would be like a burial, or a landslide--the pressure of the earth and the scent of loam and not a whisper to mark her passage.
Dimly, she remembers being ashamed of her face--she remembers throwing herself against the wall, knocking pieces out of it, shattering the mirror in its frame before going for the shelves. It was a lifetime ago. Three hours and counting.
She's made friends with the glasses since, the glasses and bottles and everything in them.
"They'd laugh." He never cared. He used to whisper in her ear. Darling dear sweetness love angel beauty. He insisted she was beautiful.
He was dead.
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Not quite, said she, softly. It was a social punishment. Still is. There'd be a crowd come to see, gawking, jeering and pelting them with garbage and old meat and shit. The women were stripped to the waist. There were pauses for the reading of charges and the roll of the snares...The last sound they ever heard was thunderous approval.
Her tongue flickered over her fangs, scrubbing, and Kitana was suddenly and queasily reminded that Mileena ate people whole. Alive, when she could get them.
"So?" ventured Kitana bravely. Her voice only trembled a little.
"So," Mileena said with a little shrug, "you need a bath."
She began licking her sister�s shoulder as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
A frisson of reality dashed down her spine as her shoulder hit the doorframe.
�Come on!� she smashed against it again and this time it gave way. She darted in ahead of her companion, who paused only to glance back at their pursuers.
The mob had vanished. There was only darkness behind and a slightly less malicious darkness ahead.
Baraka took a deep breath and followed her in.
This was a new bar. Well, it was an old bar, by the weathered and grizzled quality of the wood, but the Continuum had never brought them here before.
Mileena was glad of it. She�d left some history behind at the others: Causality, The Ten Forward, The Bronze, P3. Everyone knew, and she knew better than most, that history did not bear repeating, particularly not when one�s present had a tendency to be�possessive.
Baraka looked right and left before retracting his arm swords and marching straight to the bar. There were times when the tension got to him, betrayed his military bearing. He stood at attention while sitting down.
�They�re gone,� he said, perfunctorily, scanning the bottles on the wall behind him. Most lacked labels, so he�d go by scent and color. Something aged and strong would do it. �Won�t to be following us, I don�t think.�
�Perfect.�
They were both looking for the barkeep, who arrived as if on cue, a tall hollow-cheeked fellow with an erratic ponytail slinking down the back of his close-cropped head. He carried himself with a wary arrogance. Between that and his build�he looked as if he�d missed a few hundred decent meals�Baraka guessed the man had done time, though whether in stocks or dungeon, he couldn�t say. His suit didn�t fit and his eyes held nothing but suspicion.
�Can I�help�you�two?� The words had a certain rusty slowness that Baraka was well used to, but they lacked the fear and tense disgust that normally followed.
This man was comfortable with, or at least resigned to, the company of monsters. That was interesting. It was also none of Baraka�s business. He shrugged.
�Sure, good man. You take gold scrip? Some of these places don�t.�
�Gold?� Kimbley stood a little straighter, his easy smirk gone. �Yeah, of course.� His feral smile never reached his eyes. �Lay it on me. What�ll it be?�
�Oh, that one,� Baraka said, pointing. �Two of them, both doubles.� He fished his last bits of pay from his pockets and stuck a third of it on the bar, behind his hand. The barkeep could look all he wanted, see that the money was good. Letting him have it now? That was something else again. �Please.�
The glasses had a deep film of dust and smoke, but they slid across the bar prettily enough, and the local spirits were a strong brassy color with a bewitching scent. It wasn�t made of grains, this�too much resin. Maybe it came from trees.
�Hard day?� Kimbley figured it was a bartender enough kind of question.
He didn�t give a shit, but that was real gold�you couldn�t fake out an alchemist�and he figured that if he made nice with the walking freakshow, hell. Damned if he wasn�t gonna earn his tip! Payday had just waltzed right in. Even if payday had a cutlery cabinet where its mouth should�ve been. All money was good money at the Devil�s Nest, and some better than most. Real gold! Shit.
�Something like it,� said the female. She was a notch or two over decent�solid body, if a man�s taste ran to muscles with curves, long dark hair, big dark eyes. Her face was a nice match for her boyfriend�s.
She craned her neck straight back and dropped the liquor in. The bottom of the glass hit the bar at the same instant her swallow reflex kicked in. She had a long throat. Something about it reminded him of a snake.
She was all kinds of smiles. �Not bad.�
�So.� He inclined his head toward the male, kept an eye on both of them. �Been in town long?�
�We�re not staying.� Her lips curled up at the corners, showing even more teeth as she grinned wider. �Not long.�
Freaks from nowhere with a pocket full of gold and no plans for the day. Kimbley twisted on his feet, turned away from them to clean set-in stains off the rear shelf as he watched them in the mirror. They had arranged their heads together and were whispering in some kind of language with a lot of s�s in it. It wasn�t Ishballan, or Drachmin. Who knew what the hell they were?
Kimbley thought for a second that he�d shake hands with the male, find out what they were made of, and just fucking blast them, get rid of them before the boss and his animals came back. But just for a second. Those teeth were a problem, especially if they went for his hands. Too risky.
Besides, he got the feeling they were the boss� kind of strange.
Mileena wondered if it were possible to know fear without love. Or if she had to be frightened of someone before she could love them. That was really the same thing, and at least partly her father's fault. How could it not be? He left his own marks in his own ways on the lives he consumed. She knew, in a passive and not quite remorseful way, that he had eaten her soul a piece at a time, and that it was gone for good long before humans lived in anything but caves.
She had loved him, and did still, but dared say nothing against him. What a misplaced loyalty that was! She hoped he would choke on it. He might kill her for it, or she might kill him--both happened at night, in her sleep. In her dreams. She suspected it happened to all female creatures, if not with the same intensity.
All men were like him. Or perhaps all the men she chose were like him, but so far, she�d never met one to prove her wrong. They were more subtle, to be sure. Peasants couldn�t be too careful. They weren't allowed the various excesses of kings. The lords were delicate by comparison. They battered furniture instead of people, or simply fumed and shouted until their lungs were raw. But at the core they were the same. The names they called her were the same.
Maybe not this one, maybe he was different. He was different, she decided, and bit her lip in resolve. A better man than the rest of them�a safer man, at least. He professed attraction, if not love, and was all for a good solid thump in the sheets. There was none of the usual poetry or pressure or wheedling for an audience with her sister--the one he'd rather have had in the first place.
Most of them tried that, just as her father did; they angled for her sister, using her as the bait. While none of them looked like him, they did all look the same: clean-cut, blond or once in a great while dark-haired, with pale greyish eyes and pale soft lips that pouted apart for pale soft teeth, even and bland. She could see why they called their first set, when they were children, "milk teeth".
The idea that their teeth fell out, that they did so on purpose and grew back larger and stronger, mystified her. Her teeth had come in suddenly, almost all at once, and were simply as large as they were going to be, and that was that. At the time it was the worst pain she had ever known.
Mileena came to realize that the world held endless varieties of pain, and that all suffering was relative. Growing teeth had hurt much more than breaking her nose, but somewhat less than breaking her back. She�d always been careless, reckless, and perhaps the western battlements weren't the best place for a game of tag in the rain. Her spine snapped in thirds, and she spent the rest of the year staring up at the same grey patch of ceiling and living for Kitana�s rare, guilty visits and brief murmurs of pity.
Caring about her latest round of hide-and-go-sleep? That hurt more than anything else. The pain was real, physical, and it tended to settle just under her collarbone whenever it decided to linger. It must have been because he said she was beautiful. And when it got down to shouting, he called the right name.
How much had having a soul hurt? She couldn't remember. It probably wasn't as painful as his sincerity, his honesty. He hadn't gotten a peek under the veil yet, and he wouldn't, either. None of them were allowed to see her face. Not even if it matched theirs.
In his case it did. She had never seen a mutant up close before, and had been astonished by the resemblance�by its exactness. He was stronger, harsher, and in all respects male, but otherwise it had been like looking into a mirror.
Except that she hated mirrors. Mirrors were evil. They trapped everything they touched and spit it out backward, inverted, cold and incorrect. Drapes did nothing against their power in the long run. She was always drawn back, bewitched, and the glass always showed her the same things.
No, he was not a mirror, at that. He was no sneaking horror sent to catch her face. He was just himself, a mutant who happened to look a little like her--very little�she�d only thought they looked so much alike because he went about in public unconcealed.
She hadn't seen her reflection, not even in her own bathwater, since she was fourteen. She washed her face with her eyes shut and removed and replaced the mask by rote. Her servants knew better than to move it. If it had to be taken away, they exchanged it swiftly and left its replacement in the exact same spot. The price for trickery, laziness, or any sort of delay was beheading.
Few people disappointed her. No one did it twice.
She�d quit trusting human servants with the errand. They had no mercy for ugliness, and cheap, uninventive senses of humor. The joke was on them, at the business end of the guillotine. It was wonderful, at first, but it had worn thin somewhere �round a baker�s dozen of stupid peasant girls. They died with as little variation as they lived. Baraka chased them off for her.
Maybe he was different. He seemed to be good for her, if madness were good. She'd always liked risk more than she let on. She kept it close to the vest. Mileena knew better than anyone the price of failure, of accident. It had cost her life before, and the lives of others. People she showed affection for had a way of vanishing--mostly to the gallows.
But that was neither here nor there, not now. Now she was standing at the edge of the dresser, or vanity or whatever it was called. It was an idiot's box of identical clothing in one color and a few things that mattered to her with the massive, vile mirror on top.
A line of bottles stretched across the bottom of the mirror, the usual trinkets and powders other women put such stock in. Her gentlemen�such callers as her father allowed--brought her these things, hoping she might remove the veil in front of them. It had never once happened. She dusted the damn things and kept them neat, but they aged and soured and were thrown away unopened. They always had an army of convenient replacements. There was always one more lord waiting to clutch her arm and push and prod her across the dance floor.
It would help so much if Kitana just liked men a little less. Not that Mileena was in a position to criticize. But was she ever? She�d never had the right to say or do or become anything that her sister was not already, first, best, and most. She was beginning to wonder whether she ever would.
The makeup was trickery disguised as a gift. It gave off the illusion that she could be normal. The vanity was a shrine to being normal, and whenever the mirror was uncovered it showed her the backsides of the bottles, prim and sealed. That was an obscene idea to have about them.
Makeup was obscene all by itself. It came in such pretty containers. They were delicate crystal and porcelain red flags, insisting that she never once let down her guard. It was natural to hate and demean them. They were nothing but what they seemed to be. She envied them in secret.
That was her entire problem: fear and jealousy and the love of risk. She had no soul to contain them.
If the same dizzy thrill that almost killed her were a good thing, she was feeling plenty of it now. She wanted to laugh at her fingers for shaking. It was silly but not funny. If she started to laugh now, she might not be able to stop, and hysterics had a way of attracting her father's attention. Indirectly, through spies and threats, but those were bad enough. She certainly didn't want anyone else taking a look at her just now.
She touched the scrap of curtain over the glass and it wavered, trembled, ghostlike. The hinges of the dresser creaked in shock when she tore the cloth away.
Silver: that was how she looked, cold and alien. She was leaner than she'd expected, more angular than she felt, more spidery than she wanted to believe herself to be. She was strong, as spiders went, suspicious and furtive. The woman in the mirror seemed afraid of her. There was a glint somewhere in those dark eyes that said she loved this, that she had no idea why she should have been so scared. Her heart ignored that idea and kept hammering.
Anyway, this was with the mask on, with more to hide behind. Mileena, always Mileena, never escaping, not even in death. There was always more to hide behind, weapons and sharp remarks and scraps of silk. Her reflection watched, waited to see what she would do; their hands never touched, so they couldn't steady each other.
Once confident that the thing in the glass, woman or shade or self, couldn't get out, Mileena debated removing her mask. Would her reflection hate her for it? Or run off screaming? Laugh at her, perhaps.
In the end she did none of those things. She simply stared, and kept staring. It was a sight. She looked a sight, as the girls said, as Jade or Tanya would have put it. Horror wasn't quite the right word. Spectacle might do. Or grotesque, in its original meaning, its old meaning, a thing so alien and weird that it was terrible.
The girl in the mirror considered this. Her forehead rippled and creased as she wrestled with some dark thought. Then, suddenly, she smiled.
The glass didn't shatter.
Mileena inhaled sharply. The stifling afternoon breeze blazed in off the arena and brought too many smells with it. Too many scents and voices. The shrieking approval of the masses and the reek of the dead. The overwhelming velvet stench of blood.
She was going to drown in it. She'd go mad, right here, and run screaming into the stands to attack the nearest person stupid enough to get in her way. She'd tear his throat out and bathe in it. Wash her hair. Peel his face off--the same as skinning a grape--and lave his eyes clean from his skull with her tongue.
She shut her eyes and tried to slow her breathing. It didn't work. Air came and went in short, hard huffs past her teeth. Her hands shook like things possessed. She clenched them again. She needed to be still. It would go away soon if she could be still.
Her knuckles crackled; her nails sliced into her palms.
Somewhere far away there was the dull, solid thump of guts and corpse hitting sand. Another cheer went up. She had to get upwind as soon as her legs remembered how to move. She could not afford to put her fingers in her mouth again.
She unfurled her hands and watched with interest as wine-dark crimson welled to the surface in thin sharp crescents. She would never bleed true red; that was for humans. Mileena's humanity was as deep as her skin and as easily shredded.
�That's not to be helping much.�
She rounded on the noise, growling, her fangs bared and wet under the veil.
Baraka stood there unblinking. He didn't move when she recoiled.
�Go away,� she barked, sneering.
His gaze raked over her from top to bottom and came to rest on the palms of her hands, frozen smeared and trembling just a few inches from her face.
�Sure'n you're in a pretty mood.� The ends of his lips curled back, into that smirk they all said mutants weren't smart enough to know how to make. He turned his hands palms-up and slowly raised them to waist level.
�Don't touch. I'll tear you apart." Conviction and anger helped her move, brought her hands in loose fists to her sides.
�Should be hoping so,� the smirk twisted apart into a grin as he deliberately misinterpereted the threat. He made threats of his own, and promises, using only posture.
�Wasn't a pickup line, soldier,� Mileena ground out.
�You're wishing I leave you be?" He shrugged, kept his voice down. They couldn't afford to be noticed together, and she looked too ready for a screaming match. �You're wanting I'm to go?"
What she needed was a good clean kill and a round of two-backs-beast, but he knew her well enough by now and knew she'd not put up with any such suggestion. There was too much palace lady in her.
"Yes." It was a sharp hiss. "Get lost."
�Go on, then. You're a strong one." He leaned back on one foot and dropped his weight, prey hiding along the shelter of the wall. Hot nothings in a woman's ear only went so far, whether they were whispered or not. He left himself open to attack and waited. "Make me."
�Don't know who you're playing with,� she said.
Her sai whistled in her grip and lashed forward. His head snapped back against the wall so hard that his ears rang. Her knee flew up the inside of his thigh and stopped short, nailing him to the wall as she forced her weapon higher, levelling it against his throat. She grabbed the sai's tip with her other hand and beared down hard.
"Don't I just."
The hoarse, half-gagged cast of the words drained their power, but nothing wiped that stupid grin off his face. He had to be seeing stars. A human man would have passed out cold. Mileena snarled in frustration and squeezed.
Baraka's hand swallowed hers up to the wrist. His grip crushed the feeling out of her hand and forced it open. He kicked her weapon across the ground without much trouble.
"I'll scream," she growled.
"Oh." His chest bucked under her elbow as he coughed. He tasted blood. "I'll bet."
"I mean it," Mileena said, and joggled her knee up, hard.
Pain creased across his face. The monster, the animal, was shrieking in the back of her head, starved and intent. He smelled like male and dust and just faintly of the arena. The control, the precision that spoke of drove hot hungry spikes of want down her spine.
If he felt the same, he gave no obvious sign. She would have noticed, this close. If she strained she might have been able to taste it in the air between them. That meant he already could.
"Was I saying I doubted you?" He squirmed aside, breath whickering through his fangs. "You'd scream, all right."
"Fuck you." Her free hand clawed his collarbone. They were metal inside, mutants were, and she was going to crush him like an old tin can, starting with the thinnest pieces.
"Promise?" He twisted forward, into her grip, eyes alight. It was more fun when she fought back.
"Fuck you," she insisted, snarling, trying to think, to rationalize, to do something more than grind up against him like a bitch in heat.
�Come on, then,� he said, his interest pressing against her thigh. �Let's go.�
"Not here," she said, and it was just noise, and he wanted her back.
But he took her seriously. Enough so that he swore a hair-curling oath. "This way, then."
He scooped her up with one arm. Her heart hit her throat in raw, sudden panic at how strong he actually was. He could snap her neck with a flick of the wrist and smile about it.
"Put--"
He growled, flexed his free hand down over her mouth, roughly. "Quiet! It's faster. Hold still, too."
Mortal Kombat belongs to Midway. Brin, Koteth, and Armano belong to me, and it's just as well that they do.
I am not currently accepting submissions. This is just a corner-pocket place for my junk to hide in case the LJ moguls ever freak out again.