A Brutal is rarely a still creature. Though she has long given up the hopes of a Medic finding a way to reverse her condition, it hasn’t stopped her from these late-night visits.
Perhaps because a Medic’s curiosities were rarely satisfied and do no harm rarely applied in turn. So she allows him to touch her, to quest and search that what he does not understand. The cool of her skin, the strange shifting and glitching that fought against injury, defied death itself.
They stare at one another, Shannon tensed and malleable under his touch. Her chin jerks up, attentive and obedient. It was that way with men like him, those willing to be, to take, what they want. To satiate desire.
She is nude, her skin prickling with goosebumps in the cold of the medical theatre. He is a doctor, after all, he must see everything. She likes these meetings of theirs, even as his deft fingers brush her hair aside and find the tender scar between brows.
Her expression darkens, but still, she does not move. He sees her. Not at a monster, like so many, but perhaps as some grand culmination. A beautiful anomaly worth his time, his attentions.
Her words come out like his, hushed and reverent of the strange energy buzzing between them.
“I know you do. That’s why I’m here.”
She looks almost vulnerable in her stillness, ready to crack at a brush of the hand. But glass was brittle too until it breaks, then it becomes sharp.
No uncertainty. No hesitation. No bashful reaction.
He’s done this countless times before in his own clinic. Bodies laid willing bare waiting for his mark. The cloth of his white coat whispers its hush as Wilhelm begins methodical inspection. With her chin still pinched tight his grip he snaps her head up as far as it goes as she speaks. Reverence requires the devout to worship. A steady knee ready to crash down. She fascinates him, so he is kind. He listens to every word, features say nothing of mind or thoughts as he tilts her head away -- one side then the next. For all of her vast emptiness there is no satiation. Fingertips linger only as long as needed, long leached of their warmth. Life doesn’t push against the pads. It’s hard to ignore the beauty of melancholy tracing every single line already there on the Brutal’s skin. But he withdraws.
Each of their late night visits bring the same diagnosis and there’s no evidence that suggests this will be any different. There is no cure. Those words, heard time and time again that he suspects is the only thing that can leave its fresh mark. But this is no disease. Perhaps it’s part of a long suffering game to put to words what she must already know by heart The body recalls it’s sufferings well but it adapts. Wounds repeatedly sliced open became scars, healed into callouses until nothing but the dull memory of an ache was all that was remembered. He wants to mark her, carve into her in a way that she’ll remember but nothing as pedestrian as knives, nothing so dull as to leave an ugly scar forgotten with the rest.
Fingernails scrape her scalp tangling in those dark threads of black. “Tell me what you want.”
