(no subject)

[ladychapels]

♫

They worship Plants.

The way she sees it, it doesn't really matter why. At the end of the day, reverence and a coupla dead men is what pays the bills, keeps the devils off her back and out of her home, and so for the hundredth fucking time Wolfwood doesn't look a gift tomas in the mouth. Never did. Maybe that's why she ended up here. Maybe not. That doesn't matter, either.

What matters is Chapel.

He's devout in a way that leaves a bad taste in her mouth, a way that gets deep in her bones. Chapel's love for his apprentices that of a fanatic, it's undiluted; the few of them that are are all up on pedestals waiting for the bullet to hit the apple in their mouths, or miss it. What he calls "discipline" she calls "sick", but when he'd miss the apple she let it happen, because she'd known she wasn't the only kid he could put holes in.

She at least could weather 'em. That was the point of putting holes in her to begin with. Leastwise, so Chapel said. He said a lot, though, whole passages she's sick of hearing filled with blood, bullets, and quick mercy.

Now, Wolfwood hopes he'll say a little more: shed some of his disturbed light on what a Plant would want with them when he could knock out half the planet in the time it takes Wolfwood to load the chamber. Or what the deal is behind the goons he's already got pulling strings. What makes them so different from the rest of their pitiful race? She's real keen on that, too.

A disciple's interest, she's ready to call it, all while praying the old man doesn't call her bluff.

But that's her best weapon, that fanatic love. He took her on when he rarely did anyone, which is a point he likes to remind her with a quick bullet she's almost fast enough to dodge completely, now, and far as she knows and far as he tells her, she's his favourite. His current one, at least. Not a position she likes to be in, 'cuz shit flows downhill, but so does information.

So do words like "Legato" and "July". They call themselves the Gung-Ho Guns and they want Chapel to join their little get-together in Jeneora Rock, and that's all she knows.

---

At the foot of the church, Wolfwood leans the Punisher against the brick.

No one brings their crossgun inside. Anyone who does is jonesing for some of that quick mercy, and she's more in the mood for doling it out than getting it. Usually is.

It's Chapel's building in neither name or deed, but for how often he brings her here, it might as well be. Far as Wolfwood's concerned, the Eye of Michael consists of one man and his hundred shadows. She doesn't give a shit about the rest of them, because she can't get to them yet. That's all. As she steps through the doors, she pulls a cigarette from her pocket, follows the aisle down past the empty pews, and in the red shadow of the stained glass, Chapel watches her.

He's always fucking watching her.

"You heard."

Not a question. Good.

Nodding, she rolls the cigarette to her knuckle and back and lets a few fiels keep between them. It's how they both prefer it. "I heard."

Chapel looks as though he's soaked in blood. The way she sees it, that's not so far from the truth. Something about killing instinct and how it works its way to the bones. Another one of his passages.

"Do you want answers, Colette?" Dangerously close to baldfaced. For Chapel.

Wolfwood sets the cigarette between her lips just right of centre, ignoring the gleam in his eye when she does this, and ignores, too, the heat of the 9mm strapped to her ribs, the empty pouch below it, the fear rabbling at the front of her mind. Meets the old man's eyes head-on, because anything else'd be weakness, and she's no idiot. She damn well learned.

Strike and hiss of the match against her thigh.

"So," she says as she touches flame to paper and takes a drag. "Tell me about Knives."

Chapel opens his mouth.

---

It goes like this:

Knives is what the Eye calls divine. Maybe even more than, if you're up to asking about it. Wolfwood isn't.

Knives is the most powerful thing on this barren dustbowl they call a planet, aptly named in every way.

Knives likes to kill.

People, mostly, even the good ones—but so does the Eye. Only difference is they do it for pay, not even bothering to pretend like it keeps them up at night.

And the stinger: Knives is half-dead.

Wolfwood wonders what the hell they're supposed to do to change that.

Actually, she wonders what the rest of the planet's gonna be doing to make sure they don't. How many more people are about to start losing their heads, and families, and God knows what else, because Knives wants this planet dead, and Knives isn't picky how he does it.

The dogs will eat the dogs.

She sees Aunt Melanie in her dusty apron and all the kids whose names she'll never let herself forget and doesn't let herself think. They'll be older, now, almost catching up on her. Hopefully by the time they look it, she'll be dead and in the ground.

Do it, shouts a voice in her head. You won't die, but they're still able to. Are you really gonna test that?

Wolfwood cracks her neck, clears her throat. Chapel takes it as her being lippy, like he does most things.

"Don't misunderstand me, Colette. Your skills are adequate, it is your execution that is... flawed." She doesn't kill quick enough. Sometimes she actually cares who stands on the wrong side of the trigger. "In order to become a Gung-Ho Gun, you would need to be pushed harder I have ever pushed."

Nice way of saying not a chance in hell. Wolfwood feels the corner of her mouth drawing back and she rolls her smoke into it.

"You have potential, girl, but you fail to tap it. They wouldn't take you as you are. Your heart is too soft. Your very humanity must be forfeit."

He steps towards her, palm up. Suppose he figures she'll take it as a gesture of good will. How Christlike. Wolfwood closes her teeth harder on the cigarette and feels the filter come apart between her teeth.

"Good thing I'm not interested in bein' a Gun, then, huh."

Wrong answer, apparently. The hand retreats and passes briefly over his breast.

"Have you forgotten why we chose you? You were promising."

"I was a kid." Tonelessly.

Don't just stand there. Do it. Do it now. Are you just gonna blow your chance?!

She pulls the cigarette from her mouth and drops it beneath her heel. Slow exhale, the last of the drug passing through her system like a typhoon, the kind she's only heard about. There and gone in a heartbeat.

Chapel is watching her closely, not blinking, and God, if the Lord is half so good at looking into her...

He says, "Don't make yourself a fool, Colette. For Master Knives to request this, he can only be at his weakest, his most vulnerable, and yet... even so, none of us could ever hope to match him. His killing instinct is more than learned, it is an irreversible part of him. That is the tremendous power he possesses."

He says it as though it's a point to be made.

He doesn't blink.

"Do you understand?"

He knows.

"Yeah, well, the money's better like this, anyway," Wolfwood says, pushing a blandness she isn't feeling. Deadpan. She wonders if she won't end up just plain dead before this conversation's done and decides in the same breath that she'll deal with that when it happens.

"You are still green, girl." Chapel has this way of making her feel like that kid he plucked out of nowhere, east December with just his tone. "This has nothing to do with your pity money. It is to carry out Master Knives' will, as is the Eye of Michael's purpose."

Wolfwood thinks of Aunt Melanie and the kids. Shrugs.

"Alright."

And she caps him in the throat.

---

Seconds pass.

Seconds, just seconds, before a small, spreading, bullet-shaped heat goes through her at the join of arm and neck. Throwing her shoulder behind the rest of her, like all the muscle she's built in her time here means jack, moving down her gun arm, making her hand numb. Drop the gun, it tells her. Wolfwood grips it tighter instead. Hears her clenched teeth give a warning crack, then tastes copper. That's fine, they'll seal back up.

Next thing she knows, there's heat everywhere else, and she's staring at the floor.

It's black marble, probably worth more covered in her blood than the entire orphanage would be if Aunt Melanie polished it top-to-bottom and auctioned it off, piss-their-pants kids and all.

A cork pops, and by the time she's levered herself up and spat the blood from her mouth, Chapel's skin is just about finished steaming.

She hears herself laugh. It's the blackness in her gutting out with... the rest of her. "Got a couple left?"

Everything fucking swims, but she sees his eyes flick down—knew they would, so fast the average Joe wouldn't've caught it, but she isn't the average Joe—and if she hasn't damned herself like she's still half-sure she has, then she knows exactly how many he's got left. And even better than being half-damned is the half-round she has in the chamber.

"Try," Wolfwood snarls, and puts a bullet through his fingers before he can. Another in the chest for good measure, where their pouches buckle in and strap across the ribs. Satisfying wet spot soaking through the white of his coat. She can taste the shit from here, so that makes one thing she was right about.

But, God, her arm is heavy, might drive her outta her skin, how badly she wants to fire the next shot, pain shivering up her hand, swaying, dropping before she can commit, what the hell, what use was everything she went through, is this seriously as far as she's gonna make it—?

Then she's down again and there's a cold weight on the back of her neck. A needling edge that digs in and cuts her cleaner than a surgeon could, or had. Shame that none of 'em ever brought their healing hands to the Eye looking to heal. They just put folks like her back together.

Probably not this time, though.

She breathes a long breath, not raising her head, and watches the reflection of Chapel leaning into the gun. Her gun. How did he get that—when did he get that, how long was she down for? Doesn't matter. He's there, bearing her down under it, its barrel tucked against her breast, until the only thing in her head is a plea: Not like this, God, it can't be like this— Wolfwood clawing for her throat, nearly missing the vial tucked down her shirt that she shoves into her mouth whole and sets between her teeth, asking, "What are you gonna do after he's killed all the rest?"

Right as Chapel leans into the trigger.

People at the Eye, they hear themselves break more than feel it.

---

But they do feel it.

Lungs first. Spreading her ribs, pushing back out the fluid that'd rushed in. Eardrums next, so Wolfwood can listen to herself gurgle and wheeze, breaths sludging up in her throat like she's under the water this planet never has and never will have. Joints snapping, flesh knitting itself back together, feeling and hearing herself being born again from the teetering brink of eternal sleep itself—

Wolfwood's never much liked that shtick.

But there's nerves reconnecting to her fingers, painfully alive with purpose, so they surge up, blindly up, and born-again or not, Wolfwood knows Chapel and she knows these guns; he's left her propped up against it, like some kind of symbol, but she's sure as hell a lot more than that.

She's a trigger finger that lands on the missile release.

---

And after the bang, over the adrenaline-squeal, Wolfwood realises he's screaming, dragging her given name down into the blood with him, twisted and howling and inhuman. Doesn't sound a thing like when Aunt Melanie used to say it. Which is how it oughta be, probably. Aunt Melanie would do best not to say that name ever again.

Coming from Chapel it's paralysing. It's a sound that's got her kneejerk staggering to her feet, staring into the bloodshot eyes of the man who put a gun in her hand and synthetic in her bones and never called her anything else but Colette. Like he was eternally damning her to be the kid the Eye tore apart.

Thing is, that kid wouldn't have had the guts to pull this off. Wouldn't have had the know-how. But they went and fixed that when they put her under the knife, the Punisher achingly heavy and a little lighter each day, so Wolfwood tells herself it doesn't mean a damn thing to call her that anymore, and practically believes it.

And he's screaming about heresy, too, so that helps.

She feels herself move forward when what she really wants is to get the hell out before he ices her for real.

"Shut up." Moving, though—moving starts the anger moving, too. It's good, an adrenaline kick that numbs twice as well as any drug. Wolfwood likes it. Always has. "Shut up! So what? If you really wanted me dead, you should have done it. Couldn't stand to lose your precious apprentice? Huh?!"

His hand jerks out, misses her, and paints a wide, slick red arc across the floor. She gets this sudden, insane urge to laugh, because it just figures he still thinks he can put a finger to her, but being untouchable ain't anything to laugh at. And if she starts laughing now, Wolfwood doesn't know she'll stop.

She makes herself pick the pistol from the floor, instead. Chapel watches.

"Do you think there won't be repercussions for this?" he rasps in his dying, gore-thick voice. "Think about it!! You have made your bed among devils, Colette the Punisher, you belong to the Eye of Michael—"

Wolfwood pulls back the hammer. Satisfying click that doesn't tremble the way her fingers do.

"Go to hell," she breathes. "I am the Eye of Michael."

---

And she'll never be able to come back.