Echoes

Uncomfortably Numb

Vida has killed her employer after years spent under his control and, with his death, established safety for those in her territory. It's only when someone she doesn't particularly want to help asks for safety that she questions how much of her former boss she is going to mirror in her own leadership.
As months pass into years, Vida is faced with forming and breaking alliances based on her decision and is left wondering if she made the right choice with one Lucas Bradley's request for amnesty.

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CW for murder in the beginning scenes (done by our protag), implied murder, implied crime, a spattering of language, and some vaguely described but potentially graphic violence.

(Also the title is a reference to the Pink Floyd song 'comfortably numb', the rights of which go to them and not me)

Originally posted on 2021-02-07, on AO3.

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There was a club in her hands. Vol stood at one of her sides with a gun in their own. There was a door their way and nothing else.

Nothing else.

The body behind it was a walking corpse even if he didn't know it yet. She was ready to send that corpse to its grave. There were allies backing this, spellcasters, firepower, funding. A whole lotta people wanted the man behind this door dead. A whole lot were willing to pay for that to happen.

If Vida were one of those paying instead of playing the role of the weapon herself, she'd have offered all she had for it.

As it was...

As it was, she was ready for Eyler to die, ready to be the one to kill him, ready, ready, ready.

---

Whenever Eyler was angry, he'd show it by passing it on to someone else. He liked to pass on emotion and responsibility. It was always your plan with him. When she'd lose a bet, lose a deal, it was back to the drawing board and that drawing board itself was her punishment. It was pain. It was having absolutely no power while listening to Eyler stand behind her and tell her to make herself a new plan. A strategy designed to either fail or to hurt her. And when it would do either, it would be on her. It had been her plan, after all and its consequences were her responsibilities to bear.

If she returned empty handed, the fury wouldn't show on him. He'd just jab at his desk and meet it out and she'd know, somewhere, that it was his game but that awareness wasn't enough to stop it from dragging her down.

Always the same desk, always the same phrasing, always the same helpless rage felt afterwards that he and his lieutenant would just smile at.

Get over here. You have plans to make.

Hah. Always his plans, always his designs. Always made to hurt while carrying just enough illusion of autonomy and decision to dig that pain in because- because- when those plans inevitably hurt people: strangers, hers, herself, well...they'd been her plans that had lead to that, now hadn't they? They'd been her strategies, her decisions, her executions, that led to that pain.

Eyler left her feeling responsible for their plans every time when they had always been his.

Aware of that fact or not, it always hurt all the same.

But no more.

Vida shoved through the door and her head avoided Eyler's first shot by some stroke of luck. He didn't get the chance to shoot again. Not when she swung and his skull caved under metal. While the crimelord dropped, Vol raised their weapon at the second inhabitant of the room and shot. There was a screech. It wasn't Vida's focus. Not now.