You are a super hero that as been captured by your ever greatest nemesis. You decide to make him/her monologue so you can have a bit of time to free yourself, but as he/she talks you come to realize the sad truth. You were the real villain in this story, he/she was doing what was good.
The bone witch’s hands curled at her sides, scratching at rough hewn metal wires. Her scowl cut through the air like a knife.
“Oh, you woke up,” The american said, looking up from the fire. The Bone witch flexed every command in her body to summon his spine, to tear it from his flesh like jagged spikes, but the American refused to obey her mastery of the body, just raising an eyebrow at her.
Then she sighed, and slipped into her English. Rusty, broken, awkward. The Veitnamese accent hung heavily over her words. “What… is it you want?”
The American took his kettle and set it up over the blaze, occasionally stoking it. Piece by piece, he stoked the fire higher.
“Your name,” The American said. “We’ve been fighting your ilk for weeks and we don’t have a name for you yet. The boys back in camp think you’re a ghost.”
“A ghost is… a poor name,” The Bone Witch said, wriggling in her restraints again. How the hell had the American managed to bend solid steel around her like that?
“Then do you have a proper one?”
“Same to you…” The witch said, scowling. If she kept him talking… well, it was unlikely that her handlers hadn’t taken necessary precautions in case their pet had managed to get herself captured. Her head ached from a head wound, though the crack in her skull had already healed over while she was out cold. She could smell her own dried blood, and felt the phantom pain of gun shots.
The American sighed and checked the kettle. His uniform was coated in blood. Probably hers. Had he beaten her? She wasn’t mortal. She wouldn’t die from something like that. Did he know that, and fight anyway? How many times had she plead for him to die, to the beast within her to kill him, and how many times had he stood standing regardless?
“Markus,” The american said, standing up. “Purple Capes. Code Named Brawler.”
“Brawler,” She tasted the words across her lips, and wished, not for the first time, that her powers would restore her teeth as well, chipped as they were from years of training when she was younger. “It’s… a decent name.”
“The forms to change it were way too complicated,” Markus admitted, plucking the kettle up. Then he poured it, hot and steaming, into the depths of an MRE to listen to it cook. “You would not believe how much of a pain it is, after you go legitimate.”
“I… fail to see what is legitimate about… wandering about the country side… killing.”
Markus’s head snapped up in amusement, his eyes narrowing. “Bizarrely, I could say the same thing about you, Bone-witch.”
“Rebecca,” she rasped, trying to shift her cage so it didn’t compress her lungs quite so much. “I’m Rebecca. I am not just Bone-witch.”
Markus smiled slightly and looked down at his watch, counting out the minutes for the meal to prepare. “Progress. Now, my men want you dead. Something about the slaughter for a few platoons of soldiers.”
Rebecca moved her head to the side, ostensibly for confusion, but more so she could get a look at her bonds. Perhaps with the proper placement of bones, she could start to saw her way out? “I have only defended myself, or acted to reduce pain that would be inflicted upon myself,” She quoted.
“Justifications,” Markus said, shaking his head. “They’re not exactly what you need out here. More guns and bullets than sense, and the bombers approach every day,”
Rebecca remembered the bloom of fire on the horizon, and the way the jungle screamed at night with the distant echoes of forgotten beliefs, desperately trying to save the people they belonged to, and stared at him. Her handlers must be listening. She hoped they were listening.
“Why do you burn?” She asked.
“I want this to be over,” Markus said, flicking open the MRE. Then he slipped over to her side and offered part of it to her. Rebecca stared at him for a long moment, cocking an eyebrow, and he helped her to the meal. “This is a stupid war, and the sooner it is over, the sooner I can go home.”
“And your mission is to hunt me?”
Markus shrugged. “My mission is to prevent you from slaughtering any other encampments,” he said, flatly. “Hunting and killing you was only implied.”
Her eyes flicked over to him. He had masters like she did, then. Did they watch from afar, monitoring every movement. Who did they threaten?
She understood that, at least. “Out here… justifications don’t matter,” She repeated. “There are savages behind every encampment and under every flag. The bodies rot with nobody to attend them except the flies and the corpse-worms, and no gods look down upon this place.”
Markus leaned next to her on the tree and hummed. “But we don’t need your body among them, do you?”
“You could not kill me if you wanted to,” Rebecca said. “It would take months, and I would only grow back together with time.”
“It was be unpleasant,” Markus said, his serene cheer never leaving him. “But I think we both know that disabling you can be as unpleasant as I want.”
The bone blades slowly dug into the steel, but Rebecca knew an out when she heard one. She was captured. A POW.
An opportunity, perhaps.
“Who sent you here?” Markus wondered aloud. “Who could forward such a deadly character to wander this place? What were you looking for?”
Rebecca mused over it for a long moment. He spoke of the greater good, and he spoke of not killing her. She faced… retribution back in that cold base she would rendezvous with. Retribution and hatred and knives.
She grew tired of knives on her skin.
“There is an encampment to the north,” Rebecca slowly said, selling her soul to the American Devil. Did she care anymore, to that strange sprawl of a country she didn’t belong to, or did she care about Markus’s immunity to the demands of her bones?
No.
Not anymore.
“And it is filled with the worst men you will ever meet,” Rebecca finished. “And they will keep the area red and raw until their purposes are met.”
“And what,” Markus said, his eyes flashing with interest, are those purposes?
“They want to see the soul of a country,” The Bone-Witch said, and the bonds were nearly free, but she tasted cinnamon from the food and she thought, perhaps, she might be free after all. “And they want to see it brought low. To rise screaming from the ashes to slaughter the invaders.”
“And?”
“So they can kill it,” Rebecca admitted. “They want to kill that which cannot be caged.”