Ugly

Based upon the song "Ugly" by The Exies, currently item 26 on my "Eradicate" playlist, the songlist for my novel. These characters are directly taken from the story.

"Are you ugly?" She asks it like a begger trying a new language, raw words on her slick tongue, her glazed eyes seeking but never finding. She sounds like she doesn't understand but she does.

Vax is normal. Born normal, raised normal, trained normal. He's playing normal now. Normal isn't ugly.

"No." He tries to be simple because that's what his commanding officer had said. Don't listen to her, buddy. The semi-retired agent had slapped his shoulder and given him a wink, the wrinkles and scars around her artificially replaced eyes crinkling like dry paper.

Katerin, who doesn't even begin to scratch his height and mass, all short limbs and weak bones, gives him such a look that he wants to fall to his knees and beg forgiveness. She is a lord in a peasant's realm, hidden claws beneath her furs and leathers. She crouches and hunches despite the lack of inches on her five feet but still commands. "But you are." She hisses, disorts the words in her mouth, accent slurring it further when mixed with alcohol and whatever drugs may be in her system.

(He knows there are drugs. That her blood alcohol content could kill a person much larger then her. He's taken samples in the night, run them through labs back in the Capital. But she's still fine. Never fumbles, never wobbles. Her resistance is off the charts, which is probably why she takes them in the first place.)

"You're a liar." She breathes it in his ear, impossible blue eyes yearning for the hunt. "You're lost, you're a fake." He tries not to shake, fears his monster and prays to whatever Gods may be listening that someone gives him a more mondane undercover assignment next time. Perhaps working with serial killers or drug lords. That'd be easier.

"You're afraid." He fails.

She touches his shivers like a scientist finding a brand new specimen. Presses her lips to his and takes without asking, as she does everything.

If it wasn't him, Vax knows, it would be the boy, the helpless youth that follows her like a brainwashed puppy.

Katerin knows and she knows that he knows he knows. He's a spy, the enemy, but she still brings him in to her lair, lets him touch and look and take things back.

He's a nobody, she's a nobody, but they both know he's lying, that she is lying.

Katerin, is a Vi'Kotan. Perhaps the last, or perhaps the first, depending upon your perspective of certain fires and mass deaths that had happened decades before. She is a villain, a monster, bred from a line of monsters, designed in some sick way to make the general masses compliant. Don't go outside, blue eyes will get you.

Katerin's got blue to spare, blue the color of death, blue the color of her house and crown, the color of her title and land, hidden deep within the snow of the south. Katerin's a nobody but she's a king to the theives and murderers that try to emulate her kind. He's bitter, she's angry, he blames her and she blames him and Vax lets her take from him what she will.

Katerin is ugly. Has an ugly face, disfiguring scars and sickly skin. She's rare, unhealthy but rare, like a diseased runt that you can't help but save.

(Under no circumstances does Vax share this opinion. She'd kill him. Very slowly and very painfully. He's seen the boy Felix survive things no human should survive because of her, he doesn't want to even think of how she kills.)

Katerin curls around him, touches and takes and sees, above all else, the ugliness buried in his head and in his heart. Sees the beginning of cracks in his ideals, sees how Vax falters.

Vax is ugly. Not because he's done terrible things in the name of justice, but because he has done horrible things in her name. He's done terrible things without the orders to back them up and he doesn't tell or he just says she forced his hand.

He's slipping, falling. He knows he was picked for this assignment because the agency suggested Vi'Kotan activity and the last agent was scared shitless and so they gave it to him, the resident expert on hereditary evil. He knows she knows and that's enough. That she knows he's digging but she lets him away.

(Because Katerin doesn't care. Katerin can make them all fall to her, can plant the seeds of doubt in bedrock. She will not fail.)

The only one who will fail is the nobody, the soon-to-be number in her rising death toll. He's dirt, just like her.

And in the belly of the planet, cradled by rock and support beams, he is so alone. More alone then he has even been, even with panic buttons and network links. But so is she.

In the dark, under the earth, nobody will ever find the cancer that chokes the world, and they will certainly never find his corpse.