Thread: Cat and Mouse Games [sevenpercentsolution and Seraph]

Healing had taken time for both of them - it had been Nuala who had plunged the knife into her own body to stop her brother, but Nuada had suffered the same effects as though he had put the knife into himself. It was unclear if Nuala had intended for them to die that day, or if her aim had been exactly where she wanted it to be, but even a millimetre of miscalculation would have killed them both. But instead, it had left them with a shared scar, a clean line just beneath the navel - it was still so fresh that it stood out on their skin, red and angry beneath their clothes, and when Nuala ran her fingers over the mark on her belly to check it's progress, Nuada felt it, the feather-lightness of her fingers. His sister, his dear sister, who only had the best intentions for everyone, who had never even hurt a blade of grass, who cried for humans and monsters alike - she had done the extreme just to stop him. The two of them, though similar in appearance, were like day and light. She was the bright spark, the sunny extravert who wanted nothing more than to see the world prosper and for everyone to live in harmony, while he was the one who just wanted the humans to - - go and die already. They were greedy, hostile, and perpetually unsatisfied with what the Mother Earth had to offer them - so they would take and take, and take more, they would continue to dig and destroy and consume until there was nothing left, until they had destroyed every other creature, every plant, every space of clean air. They would never stop until it was just them and a dead planet, and when that happened, they would destroy eachother, hunt eachother down like the animals they were. Nuada's intention had been to stop them - the Golden Army had been the key to do so, he had controlled them, the unstoppable war machine. No, not even a war, war implied it was two-sided, but this would have simply been a massacre, had the Golden Army left the underground, they would have sought out every human being on the planet and wiped them out, and nothing the humans did would stop them. All the bullets and nuclear warheads and viruses in their ridiculous arsenal wouldn't have even left a dent in the mechanical soldiers - they would have picked off every one of them without emotion, without mercy for woman or child. And Nuada - he knew the barbarism of his own views, he understood Nuala's views because he had to, because they shared their thoughts, because they knew eachother so intimately, and no matter how they tried to escape it, they would always understand eachother. And it was because Nuala understood him so keenly that she had made her choice - she had known he would never relent, and he had known she would never willingly give him the last piece of the crown, regardless of how much he wished she would stand at his side, it simply wouldn't have been like her to do so. Nuala was not like him, and he understood that, and loved her for the beauty of her mind. But he would not share that view with her he couldn't. And that, of course, was why he had been locked away in the sub-level of the B.P.R.D, caged and guarded like a wild animal, but given the modest accomodations of a human prisoner. He was stuck between two worlds and the dreariness of it would have been mind-numbing if not for the literature his sister had insisted on supplying him with - at first, he had refrained from opening the books. They were human literature, and he had been certain nothing they had to say would be of interest to him - but he had secretly been pleased to discover that the rare member of the horrifying species actually had a modest amount of intellect. Some of them had been too dreamy for him, too filled with the ideals that had defined and shaped his dear sister's views of the world, but it was juxtaposed by the darkness of some of the poets he read, and the bleak and honest outlooks of some of the philosophers. Day and light even the humans understood duality - how quaint. Company was sparse in those weeks Nuala did not come to see him often, but he understood why they clashed in a beautiful way, wanted and loathed eachother, couldn't live without eachother, but couldn't be around eachother for long, lest they be infected by the other's views - her soppy sweetness or his raging cynicism. They were a disturbing and precious pair, so they kept their visits sparing. Otherwise, his only company had been the guards on the other side of the door - two human men who looked at him cock-eyed and twisted their mouths at the sight of him, like he was the disgusting one. Some days he was amused by them, and others, he wished he could get his hands on their throats and squeeze the very breath out of their bodies, just so they would understand, so they could begin to understand what their kind did to the planet. They would never fully understand, not until they saw their own race slowly wiped out, and when they were gone - there would be peace. On that particular day, his feelings towards the guards were - apathetic. He had spent some time picking their minds and had found it incredibly dull - neither of them seemed to have actual lives outside of their jobs and as such it gave Nuada very little to work with, aside from having the mild amusement of knowing that his life in a cell was more interesting than theirs outside of it. Aside from the few seconds of face-time with the guards when they delivered meals - which Nuada frequently refused to eat - it had been a week since he had been engaged by a visitor, the most recent one being the B.P.R.D's director, Manning. The idiot had tried to negotiate with him, tried to reason the aggression out of him as though he believed his very presence could change a lifetime's worth of belief - even more insulting, he was a human, and an unintelligent one at that. The whole thing had left a foul taste in both of their mouths, the visit only reaffirming both their beliefs in - the other side. But on one very unspectacular day, Nuada found himself with unexpected company - the amphibious male that his sister had become so fond of. He had seen her feelings for him, heard them in his head as though they had been his own thoughts - and he couldn't disagree with darling Nuala's choice - Abraham was a rather spectacular specimen, both in appearance and mind. A bit naive, however. Abraham, Nuada said, a curt greeting, but not a particularly friendly one, How strange. He didn't need to ask if Nuala had sent him he could see into the man's head if he tried - Abraham had come down by his own volition, a curious matter, but Nuada was so bored by his surroundings that he found he didn't want to pry into the other's mind. He wanted to take his time. Have you run out of books to read? he asked mildly.