I don't wanna fight

By the time Jackie was done working the knots out of her tangled psyche, it was too late to affect the escape she'd been ambitiously considering mere moments before. Never mind the fact that she was dressed in an examination gown, and wouldn't have made it more than two steps into the open without proper clothes, or that she hadn't the first idea where she, nor any of her possessions, were. The hard clack of heels on tiles summoned her back to reality, to find a figure looming just behind the frosted glass of the door.

Slinking back, her heart in her throat, her uncertainty ramped up to an almost unbearable degree, Jackie tried to think of what she might say to whomever was about to come through that door. How was she going to explain to a doctor why she had been so covered in blood that they had evidently had to take her out of her clothes, or how she'd been shot twice and had only a few scratches and bruises to show for it. Her heart pressed out into her mouth as she wondered if it might not be a doctor at all, but some constable instead. Wasn't that what hospitals did when they had gunshot victims, contact local law enforcement? Surely whatever served Vale for a police force would have found the men Mae had maimed, the men she had killed... Jackie felt faint. She'd been there. She'd been bleeding. Her DNA would be all over that crime scene, all over two dead men.
Jackie brought her hands up defensively, as though she might be able to wrest herself free of the crushing dread that had settled atop her. She stamped one bare foot, slapping it on the tile, then looked hastily around the room with fresh tears in her eyes, searching for a way out, for some kind of escape.
The simple logic that it took weeks, if not whole months to put together a good DNA profile aside, an inquiring detective wasn't the worst thing that could come through the door, just as it wasn't the most likely.
'Your friend', the Doctor had said; Jackie had no friends, and the only person she'd met since coming to this miserable backwater kingdom was Aeenmae Fontine. A doctor or a constable would have been bad, both would have questions Jackie was not equipped to answer, but the kind of questions the Fontine was wont to ask, the sort of expectations she was wont to have.
Jackie clutched hold of the edge of the examination table, as though it might keep her upright, as though she might duck behind it and hide. The latter idea had some appeal, if only because it would delay what was looking increasingly inevitable with each passing moment.
Squeezing her eyes shut, Jackie decided she was too hurt to be throwing herself into hiding anyway.
You're pathetic.
'Yeah? Tell me something I don't know...'

The door clicked open, a brief hush of muttered conversation swelling behind it, and swung aside to reveal exactly what Jackie had been dreading to see. Aeenmae fucking Fontine. The Other Girl might not have known the Fontines from Eve, but that wasn't a deficiency Jackie labored under. She knew exactly who the blonde haired, green eyed girl was, or at least she had a pretty good idea. Made dilettante by her family's training program, a system set up specifically for the Fontines, bought and paid for with more Lien than whole fortress settlements would see in their whole existence, Mae would have been into her third or fourth year of globetrotting at this point. A dull resentment ached, as Jackie considered the literal fortune at Mae's disposal, the opportunities afforded her by the simple quirk of her birth. And, of course, there was the fact that she was absolutely gorgeous. Some people had all the thrice-damned luck.
"Where am I?" Jackie demanded, voice cracking from disuse and more than a few frayed nerves. It wasn't like her to take the initiative, but the last thing she wanted was for the Fontine to start asking questions she didn't yet know how to answer. The last thing she wanted was to be speaking with the Fontine at all, come to that, but Jackie's life had ever been a long string of disappointment.
Aeenmae Fontine

Despite her best efforts, Mae looked at her just the way Jackie had been expecting. She tried to play it off, concealing the bemusement beneath a layer of sympathy that was almost up to the task, but Jackie had seen that same look too many times not to know what it portended. Like a mother looking at a child she didn't recognize, Mae looked at Jackie like she was a complete stranger pretending to be someone she knew.

Perhaps in the hopes of concealing her own momentary slip, Mae turned to the arrange a few transparent slides on the lighted frame mounted to the wall for that precise purpose.
With an explanatory finger, she indicated the first two, a skull and ribs respectively and, in the effective and detached manner any nurse would envy, explained, "Taken at your admission, minutes after you came in."
Moving her attention and her finger tip, she identified the next two, "And just a few hours later."

A flood of potential replies poured through Jackie's mind, of excuses or placatory explanations that might possibly allay the Fontine's unspoken question. She'd had to explain her unusual durability more than once after all, and there was really no shortage of possible responses. It was that abundance of answers however which kept Jackie from picking any, especially when just about any answer she gave that wasn't the truth would look like she was hiding something if Mae saw through it. Her hand moved unconsciously to her wounded side as she unwillingly examined the second set of images. Besides a few fractal traceries, her ribs were still in one piece, having stopped the bullet as surely as a steel wall. Of course, the Other had still been in control at the time, so the fact that the bullet hadn't simply bounced right off her was a surprise.
My body...
Jackie squeezed her eyes closed, goosebumps racing across her skin. She grit her teeth to keep the obvious reply trapped inside, to not give voice to her pleading demands while someone else was present to hear them.
'Just... be quiet. Please.'
But the Other twisted against her bonds, and Jackie became aware of the fury she felt that she should be speaking with Mae, that she should be making Mae think she was a weakling and a coward. A fury that promised retribution and retaliation from the Other, as sure as the rising of the fractured moon.

When Jackie opened her eyes again, Mae was looking at her strangely, as if scrutinizing some unfamiliar insect, fingers drumming impatiently on her crossed arms. Watching, Jackie had little doubt, for all the differences between what she did and what the past night had given her to expect.
"This is the Fontine clinic in Vale," She explained in that same executive air, "Just next to our main research center in the north section of the city. The address will be on your exit paperwork, you'll know exactly where you are if you're familiar with the city."
The phrase 'research center' made Jackie tighten up, despite how gently and offhandedly it was mentioned. Even the Other, locked away deep down in the depths of her mind, grew notably tense. Of course, Jackie knew exactly what the Fontines Researched, knew it was grimm behaviors and the best way to combat them, but that knowledge did little to set her at ease.

Mae gave no indication of noticing, but then weren't the Fontines famed for their subtlety?
"Repeat after me," She said and, before Jackie quite knew what to expect, she saw and felt the warmth of Mae's aura, flowing out from her like a spring in the sunwarmed highlands. It was an act familiar to anyone who'd been taught the basics of aura control, a simple expression of ones spirit. It roused a sympathetic response in Jackie's own aura, a subconscious need to answer in kind.
Her own aura was a closed off thing, frigid, fragile, and brittle as a hollowed out egg. Small cracks of black fringed blue spread out across her skin, showing fine fissures of ever increasing complexity, which seemed to grown deeper and more complicated with each passing moment.
Something moved beneath the surface, something near to Jackie's heart, but she shut down the expression before it could come into proper clarity. Her aura winked out as suddenly as a light with its switch thrown, and she wrapped her arms defensively about herself, horribly embarrassed and mortified by the brief exchange. If Jackie had been utterly naked before the Fontine, she couldn't have been more embarrassed.
"Atlas Academy." Jackie said, biting off the words with a abashed edge she'd not intended. She scowled and looked down at the floor between them, shrinking in and hugging herself until her side ached and made her stop, "But I assume you already knew that."
A fall of hair obscured her face, and she cursed herself for a fool. She'd done exactly what she ought not have done, and she'd practically invited more questions while doing it.
"I'm here..." She said, almost bitterly, "For the Tournament."

"Yeah," answered the Fontine, sliding a chair over and slipping into it with the effortless poise, the alluring grace, that seemed dust-honed to stab Jackie right through the heart. She realized, with incendiary calm, that she was not going to like Mae. Not one bit. The Other, still lurking at the end of whatever psychic leash constrained her, seemed to find that realization amusing. Jackie had little doubt that Mae's appeal had just sharply risen in her dark half's estimation. Spilling the remaining contents of the manila folder, the same one her transparencies had come out of, onto the small utility shelf between them, Mae nodded.
"Atlas came up." Leaning in reluctantly, Jackie's stomach gave an unwelcome heave as she noticed the insignia emblazoned on the top of one of the sheefs. Atlas Academy's water mark stared back at her. Not a cheap copy, but the real thing, as though printed on the Academy's own letterhead. Even the Other, acutely aware of the sort of information such a document might hold, seemed to shift uncomfortably in her mental bondage.
"But you don't really seem the tournament type." Mae pressed on, "Not that I don't believe you. Right now, you don't seem the barhop type, either. I won't pry"
'Then why did you say it at all? Just letting me know you noticed, huh?' Jackie thought bitterly, teeth bared in a faint grimace
"but I'm worried about you, Pretty Girl. the nickname snatched her eyes from the pages before her, and Jackie's expression turned sickly. "I. Not we."
"Don't call me that!" Jackie almost snapped, her outburst withheld by social convention and little else. Her skin crawled at the comparison, at the suggestion that she was anything like the girl who'd shared drinks and violence with Mae the previous night.
An equally resentful shifting came from that deep, dark place where the Other had been confined, that Mae could mistake the weakling before her for the strong and proud woman who'd seduced her.
"All this information is curated. I didn't see your full file. My brother did, but I doubt he looked too closely, unless something about you made him feel like he needed to. Considering how he met you, he's probably gone through and read a little more than he gave me, but you can trust him not to talk about anything he finds. Even to me. Altimeda is really good at being discrete about this sort of thing."
Oh yes, the vaunted Fontine discretion. You didn't get to be one of the biggest information brokerages on Solitas by giving away intel for free, now did you? Jackie's grimace took on a jagged appearance, a ragged slash of mingled disdain, discomfort, and deeply rooted wariness all jockeying for position.

Jackie did not comment. What could she have said that wouldn't have been plainly hurtful to her erstwhile benefactor, or patently dishonest? She was grateful to the Fontines for having helped her, grateful to Mae come to that, but none of that changed what she already knew about the slight little blonde haired girl seated before her. A girl who had killed as easily as flirted, a girl who had killed while flirting in fact. She was as bad as the Other, only in place of brute strength and monstrous endurance, place more money than could be spent in a lifetime and a semblance as indiscriminate as a hand grenade.
As if she could read Jackie's thoughts, Mae Fontine asked,"How much of last night do you remember?"

Blood, screams, a man's face crushed in on itself and then flung apart as he fell. The glint of a snub-nosed pistol, it's horribly loud report. Falling.
"Enough." Jackie said sharply, more sharply than she had intended, something almost like venom in the word, something like accusation in her eyes, which glanced fleetingly up at the Fontine and then just as urgently away. She clamped down again, teeth closing as a trap around any further words she might say on the subject. She remembered the Other's incandescent fury, as she visited enough violence on Walt that, had he not be aura trained himself, she almost certainly would have killed him. She remembered how the Other had actually wanted to murder him. How, in the fury of her rage fueled thoughts, she'd imagined holding him down and squeezing the life out of him, because she knew it would take longer for him to die. She remembered the arousal of her stolen body, when the Other had realized Mae was willing to kill as well. She could still smell the blood, savory and metallic. She could still taste it even, feel it's oily stickiness all over her arms and chest.
Swallowing, her throat clicked quietly, and she scraped back the hair before her eyes with an impatient hand which trembled visibly. She felt the faint sting of tears in her eyes, remembered the terror she'd felt while she hadn't known how bad the injury was. She remembered enough. She remembered far too much.
"Things get a little hazy, after the second whiskey." She lied. Even in her weaker manifestations, the Other's tolerance for alcohol was nothing short of super human. She probably could have drunk half of what was behind the bar and still been sober enough to get back to the airport. She wasn't sure why she lied, wasn't sure why she wanted Mae to think she'd been drunk. Perhaps she was merely looking for some insulation, some further degree of separation from herself and the girl Mae had really met last night.
"Bits and pieces," She shuddered quietly, folding that hand over her mouth as something else crowded in beside the horror and the revulsion. Two men had died last night. Did they have families? Were their brothers, sisters, parents, children, who would miss them? She knew next to nothing about Walt beyond his swagger and bravado and his impotent rage, a rage that had caused him to call together some buddies and hurt her down in the streets, but that couldn't be all there was to him, could it? She knew even less about the men who had been with him. Men who, in some misplaced sense of loyalty, had stood by him, only to be crippled and killed.
She had to ask, "What happened to... To the men that attacked us?"
Another lie. They hadn't attacked them, they had confronted them. It was Jackie, her body piloted by the Other, who had attacked Walt. A creep, but a creep who had not once actually tried to hurt her, not until it had been clear that the Other meant to see him dead. Not until after Mae had brutalized or murdered every man protecting him. What if they had only been trying to scare them? What if all Walt had wanted was some deference, some balm for his pride, wounded when the Other had done her best to kill him earlier that same night? For pity's sake, he hadn't even drawn his gun until he was already on the ground with Jackie's, the Other's, boot on his throat.
The guilt stabbed into her like a blade made of ice, hot and cold at once. What he had done was wrong, but he hadn't deserved what happened. He hadn't deserved to die. None of them had.

'Stupid, stupid men.'

She hadn't even heard Mae's answer before the tears started trickling down her face, squeezed out as her eyes squeezed closed. She didn't need to hear Mae's answer. She had seen the one's face explode, seen the others buckle like chairs with the legs kicked out. She had felt the formless gruel of one man's hip when she'd landed on him, she'd heard the pitched, inhuman keening of his agony reignited. She had seen what Mae had done to them, had seen her main and cripple every one she hadn't outright killed. She knew what had happened to them. She had been there, after all.

Jackie turned, hand scrabbling, and took hold of the wastebin she'd noticed before. With a nasty wrenching sound, she emptied the watery contents of her empty stomach into it, bile hot in her throat. She coughed, sobbed, and heaved again, spitting burning bile that seemed clawed right out of her aching side. She folded onto her knees, dry heaved again, and then again, the pain that came with each like fire across her ribs. Her feeble efforts to hold back the tears broke, the dam punched through by her sickness and her pain, and the part she'd played in it all.

She stifled a sob, felt her stomach roll, and fanned futilely at her too hot face. The corners of her vision were going dark again and, along the blackened edges, she saw men dying less than a foot from her face. She ached out a sound somewhere between sob and a pained groan, and felt the need to retreat. To give up and hide. To let the Other deal with the mess she'd made of things.
Sensing weakness, the Other surged forth, making Jackie's fingers twitch, and her burgeoning sobs cut off with shocking suddenness. Eyes squeezed shut, the aching girl was hauled bodily back to her senses and she hauled, in turn, the Other back.
Through gritted teeth, a firm, "No." escaped her trembling lips, and the Other fell back into the pit where she lurked whenever she was not in control of Jackie's body.
A moment of indefinable rage boiled through her, hot as the surface of the sun, scalding Jackie to the core, but she held the gates shut and closed herself off as best she could until the moment passed.

That had been too close.

Lifting her head fractionally, eyes red and wet, snot trickling from one nostril, Jackie cringed away from Mae, as if only just remembering she was there.
"No..." She said again, more weakly, "I don't want to know... Whatever you did with them, I don't want to know."

Mae had moved behind her, delicate and dexterous hands soothing and holding her hair out of the way as Jackie hunched over the waist basked. The other twisted inside her, dangerously near the surface and fixedly furious still. Jackie paid her as little mind as she was able, and relieved to simply not be alone.
Never alone.
Jackie shuddered.
Mae felt the shudder, and her gentle ministrations faltered, "Well you're in good hands, for now," she said, reassuring, but pulled away all the same. Jackie coughed, smeared her face clean on the shoulder of her gown, then shoved the weighed down wastebin back. Her own sudden disgust in her behavior was mirrored from within, the Other's dark reflection sneering contemptuously up from those cold, sodden depths.
"We'll be able to get you back into shape for the tournament, if your body hasn't done its thing already by then."
Jackie wanted to laugh at Mae. Laugh right in her too pretty face. It was meant kindly enough, she knew, but there were few things on Remnant she wanted less than to fight in the tournament. Not that she had much of a choice.
"It's really crazy how fast you healed up, y'know? Mae remarked, apropos seemingly to nothing, and making Jackie grow even more tense, "You have our physician scratching his head."
Jackie shifted, sent a worried glance over one shoulder, sure she'd find Mae's accusing eyes upon her, and instead finding the young Fontine apparently fixated on the transparencies. They looked like they had been taken weeks apart, and not merely a handful of hours. Her hand tracked up and gently touched the bruising that was all that remained of a gunshot to the ribs, and shook her own head in abject disbelief. Even if she had been inclined to proffer some explanation for the data-hungry Fontine to gobble up, she wasn't sure she had one available. The fact was that she didn't have a strong enough aura to knit bones back together over night and, even if she had, she'd been unconscious for most of it. Maybe the Other, with her seemingly unlimited aura, could have managed such a feat, but it had been Jackie who'd been brought to the clinic, and Jackie who had awoken there that morning.

Hadn't it?

Jackie's fingers curled, nails digging into her side. She noticed how quiet the Other suddenly was, and her heart started to race.
"Then they are just as surprised as me." She croaked, throat raw and stinging with bile, voice made tight by a noose of apprehension drawing taut around her neck.
Drawing herself unsteadily to her feet, she turned to face the Fontine, at least mostly.
"This has never happened before," Said Jackie, eyes fixed on the floor between them instead of on Mae's slender back, slender waist, or well-sculpted calves, trying not to feel like a paper poppy beside a blooming rose.
"Then again," She added with a bit of bitter bite, I've never been shot before either..."
She hadn't meant it for an accusation, but her voice betrayed how she actually felt. It made Jackie wince. She knew it wasn't Mae's fault, not wholly. It was the Other who had escalated things, the Other who had made a man so scared for his life that he tried to take Jackie's first. Mae had only been there, egging her on.
"I'm sorry," Jackie slouched, arms wrapping around herself once more, as she tried to make herself believe the lie, "That was unkind."
She pressed the words out tightly, the dutiful fullfillment of an undesirable task,"You helped me. You," her eyes swiped to the manila folder, the papers with the Atlesian crest, "and your brother. I don't wish to seem ungrateful..."
'But I am done playing twenty questions with you? But I am tired of holding myself together? But you are a violent murderer and I have you to thank for the most traumatic experience of my life? But you and everything you represent frightens me, and if I never see you again, it will make my miserable life the tiniest bit more bearable? But, despite that fact, I just want to reach my hands into your hair and...'
"But I would like to leave now."

Mae showed only dull acceptance for Jackie's stated desire, as though it had been something she was expecting. The blonde twirled idly, light as a dancer, and flicked open the drawer on a nearby cabinet. Her back to Jackie, she assumed a utilitarian pose and rummaged for a few seconds
"Your things should be right..." she said, by way of explanation, before suddenly springing upright, "Yep!"
A small bundle had appeared in her hands, and she turned to face Jackie once more and proffered her burden for the taller brunette to take.
"Your uh, your clothes are not here." She explained, "I'm going to hope are obvious reasons."
Jackie's automatic move to take the clothes from Mae faltered somewhat, her head dipped and her eyes flicked to the floor, and she tried not to think about what it had felt like to be soaked with blood.
"I got you, though," The Fontine persisted, psychopathic in her blitheness,"Not many girls as tall as us, but you're in luck."
She looked over the clothes in her hand, felt the reassuring weight of fabric thicker and heavier than the tinsel thin operations gown she was dressed in, and could almost have wept with joy at the idea of being properly dressed again. She hesitated on taking the bundle however, the fineness of the clothing not lost on her. It was all pretty simple, a jersey, a pair of jeans and a light tank, along with some unmentionables that stirred all sorts of uncomfortable recollections in Jackie, but none of it was cheap. In fact, she was half certain the panties were made out of silk.
"Kinda took a shot in the dark with the bra," Said Mae, noticing Jackie's lingering stare, "But the tank and sweater will keep ya until you get home."
'It had better...' Jackie thought to herself, remembering the provocative way she had been dressed the night prior, and all the ways the Other had exaggerated certain aspects of that attire. She hugged the bundle against her chest, suddenly not wanting the underwear to be visible, and felt the edge of something hard jam into her breast.
"You can keep what you like," Mae was saying, "This is just stuff from the back of my closet. I don't really dress up much,"
'Of course it was', Jackie thought, with a bitter twist. That would help her feel a little less guilty when she burned the entire outfit later that night, in an effort to forget this had all happened. Hardly her worst sin, given how loaded the blonde's closet must be, and how she was ultimately responsible for ruining the clothes Jackie had been wearing. Clothes she had only owned for a few hours. She wondered bleakly if the stores the Other had bought last night's outfit from might have held onto her actual clothes, left disdainfully in the changing rooms, or if they would have just thrown them out. Not that she would have the nerve to go and ask at any place the Other had been only a day before.

Lowering her eyes even further, she found it was her scroll that was jabbing her. Jackie loosened her hold a little and, before she could react, Mae had plucked it from where it had nestled.
"Also yours," She announced, "and rescued from a noser."
Jackie's eyes flicked momentarily up to meet the Fontine's, filled with question. Mae only grinned back and affected a pose that would have been cute if it didn't remind Jackie how hungry the Other had been.
"I found Meda with it, and he was in it. Not sure what he was actually looking for, or how long he had it, but I grabbed it as soon as I saw him with it and closed all the apps on it. I did, do one thing, though."
She actually physically winced. Not because there was anything especially salacious or incriminating on her scroll, the few photos it had were mostly the result of her accidentally opening the camera app when she pulled it out of her pocket, while the handful of contacts were food delivery services, dust supplies, and two contacts she hadn't the heart to delete. Her history was a weekly call to a dust shop in lower Atlas, with a scattering of incidental calls to the aforementioned delivery chains.
Mae turned Jackie's scroll toward her, not offering it out, but displaying the screen. It took Jackie a moment to realize why. Then she saw the blonde's smile, and read the name displayed on screen, along with a scattering of contact details.
Feel free to do with that whatever ya wish." She said pleasantly, tucking the phone back into Jackie's arms with Mae's name and number still proudly displayed. Then, with a wink, she strutted out of the room.

Jackie watched her leave, broken of her trance only when the door clicked softly shut behind her, making the brunette jump. After a moment, once she was sure Mae wasn't coming back, she maneuvered her hand to pluck her scroll out from where it had been precariously slipped, and found the Fontine's entry again. She immediately deleted it.

---

Jackie's shoulders hunched, her back itching, as she made her way through the clinic and towards the double doors that served as its primary egress, sure that at any moment someone would call out for her to stop. Nobody paid her any mind however, not even about the crumpled manila folder she was tightly hugging, they merely continued about their mundane tasks like she wasn't even there. That suited Jackie just fine. The sooner she was back at Beacon, the sooner she could hide in the room she'd been given there for the duration of the festival, the happier she'd be...

She forced the door open, eyes downcast, like not making eye contact with the people around her might keep them from talking to her. Jackie was so close to escape, to putting this whole awful experience behind her. She stepped out onto the pavement, and was just getting her bearings, when a man seated at the curb called out to her.
"Afternoon, sweetie." He said. She thought he must have been talking to someone else, must have mistaken her for someone else, but then he raised a fast-food take out bag in one hand and patted the curb at his side with the other, all while looking Jackie dead in the eyes. She hesitated. Every impulse in her told her to ignore him, to step right on past him, but she could see no way to do that, no way to pretend she hadn't obviously noticed him.
Spotting her hesitation, the older man clarified his invitation, "Sit with me a minute."
His face was vaguely familiar, and he was looking at her with that expression people always get when they think you should know who they are. Not like an acquaintance from first grade, but like someone famous who had condescended to speak to her. Then she recognized him, in both ways at once. He was the man from the night before, who'd helped Mae bandage Jackie up after she'd been... After all the unpleasantness. He was also she realized with a hammer blow of recollection, Altimeda Fontine.
His face softly crinkled as she recognized him, but he made no mention of it. Instead, he shook the bag in his hand again.
"I can't imagine you aren't hungry, whether or not your stomach cooperates with it,"

Jackie wanted very much to tell this philanthropist, this giant of research and industry, precisely what he could do with his offer of food. She wanted even more to act like he didn't exist, like the whole world didn't exist, and slide back into the obscurity that suited her so well. Jackie did neither of those things however. She knew who the Fontines were, knew the influence they commanded, and could easily imagine how the events of the previous night could be made to pale in comparison to whatever an agitated Altimeda Fontine was capable of. She didn't want to talk to him, but she did not see how she had any choice but to.

Jackie stiffly slouched onto the curb beside Altimeda, taking the bag from his outstretched hand and uttering a sound that could have been generously considered a 'thank you'. She opened the bag and looked into it without seeing the contents, then closed it again with the evident decision that she wouldn't be eating any of it. It wasn't that she expected the meal was poisoned or something ridiculous like that, she just wasn't even the slightest bit hungry, in spite of having recently emptied a stomach that had already been close to vacant at the time. She kept on seeing red meat, pulped as if beneath the blow of a sledgehammer, and that wasn't doing great things for her appetite.
"Thank you for helping me." She said, after a few strained moments spent marshaling her courage. Good girls always said thank you, after all. She didn't venture to say anything else though. She had reckoned the Fontine would tell her what he wanted, and was in no hurry to find out.