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CHAPTER FIFTEEN bite the hand that feeds you
⋆*✧･ﾟ:⋆*･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ:
AT THE COMMISSION, in the hefty book they were given about the ways of torturing and assassination (which were all written in such a nonchalant way a stranger to the subject may have thought it was a cookbook), there was a subsection, a guide, that told you to know who you were beating the shit out of. Sometimes, all it took for a particularly stubborn victim to talk was the threat of their favourite necklace being thrown in the fire, perhaps, or ripping their completed manuscript to shreds.
Because everyone had a weakness. An Achilles Heel. Something that would loosen your tongue. You just needed to find it, and the best way to do so was to know who you were interrogating. Know thy enemy, as Sun Tzu had said. And he was right.
In Klaus Hargreeves' case, after hours and hours of attempted strangulation, waterboarding, and classic bashing, Hazel and Cha-Cha finally found his necklace. His weakness. And that happened to be the packets of drugs he kept in the pockets of his coat.
After he was forced to bear witness to Hazel and Cha-Cha crushing his pills beneath their shoes and sharing his special chocolate, Klaus had finally blurted out everything he knew. Not only did he spill the secrets of Five's mad rambles about the prosthetic eye and the apocalypse, but he also blurted out what little he knew about Nadine Vidal, which was, given that he'd only known her for four days, not much. Still, the information was surprisingly helpful, especially a certain tidbit of information Nadine had mentioned to Klaus in passing. It was a small thing, just a hint about her past, but it helped Cha-Cha, at least, form a tentative plan. She'd always been more of the brains of her partnership, while Hazel was the brawn (though that wasn't to say she didn't have skills in fighting—she could knock people to their knees easily), so even with her mind slightly addled, she found herself formulating.
As she bit into another piece of that special chocolate, she stared down at her mask. Bubblegum pink, black eyes like coal. It was the only way the mark had seen her. Which was why, as she prepared to go out and burn the lab to ashes, Cha-Cha found herself smiling.
Klaus, of course, stayed behind, his body quivering, his eyes glistening with unshed tears, sobriety and withdrawal slicing into him like a knife. Dried blood had congealed on his upper body, sticky and uncomfortable, and his hair plastered to his forehead with sweat. Guilt sowed into the pit of his belly like a seed, acute and painful, and fear prickled through him. He hadn't had any obligation to keep his mouth shut regarding Nadine or Five—Five had treated him like shit the entire time since his return, and Nadine was still practically a stranger—but it still felt like a betrayal. Perfidy. Blowing the whistle. Biting that hand that fed him.
I'm sorry, he thought. He couldn't say it aloud. There was still tape around his mouth, sealing his lips shut. His limbs twitched. Why did he have to be so weak?
