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fangirl_saysTitle: Stranglehold
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hanncoll
Character: Ava-centric
Rating: PG13
Word count: 2,300
Disclaimer: No infrigement is intended and no money is being made.
Summary: Ava had no choice.
Author's Note: Written because I wasn't satisfied with what we were told about how Ava went from a good person to an evil one. Most of this was written right after AHBL 1, and was slightly Jossed. (I thought a ghost town would have actual ghosts. Silly me!) Many thanks tozillah975 and the0neru for encouragement and betaing.
If she doesn't let herself think about it, about the things she's done and the things she's maybe going to have to keep doing, it's not so bad.
Well, as far as being trapped in some deserted town and fighting for her life every few days goes. Which, of course, is a whole other definition of "not so bad" than she would've ever believed possible, but there you go.
Since she figured out how to keep the demons away, there have even been stretches of time when it's almost sort of peaceful. Quiet. She got used to the food showing up out of nowhere after the first couple of days, and maybe the setting's a little bit...rustic...for a girl from Peoria, but, really, it could be a lot worse, and it sure as hell beats the alternative. The being dead alternative. 'Alive' trumps 'dead' any day of the week; it doesn't take a genius to realize that. She could be dead like Brady, eyes wide and shocked and staring at nothing in particular, lying in a pool of her own cooling blood -- and alive's always better than dead. Right? Sure, it has to be. Must be.
Anyway, she's not thinking about it, because if she thinks about it, she's going to freak out, and then she's going to die out here. Alone. That much is abundantly clear. She's going to die, in the most incredibly painful (and quite frankly, disgusting) way possible, and someone else is going to stand over her and watch the light go out in her eyes and be glad that it's not them.
God knows, she's tried to figure out another way; it's not like she wanted to kill all those people. She's not a killer -- if anything, she's the polar opposite of a killer. The one car accident she's ever had in her entire life happened because she was swerving to miss some suicidal opossum that sort of...threw itself under her car. And seriously? If she's going to total her car rather than kill some animal that looks like an overgrown rat with really unfortunate dental habits, she's certainly not going to kill an actual human. She's a good person -- otherwise, why would she have dropped everything to drive to some crummy little podunk motel to keep that Sam guy from blowing himself up? In retrospect, that probably hadn't been her best night, decision-making-wise, but still -- yeah, she's a good person.
But she's also not stupid. It didn't take long for her to understand that the demon girls weren't going to just let her leave, and you'd think there'd be plenty of places to hide, here in Ghost Town, USA, but really? Not so much. She tried it a few times, but it never took long for other people to find her -- and eventually, Ava began to suspect that Creepy Jaundice Guy was ratting her out. Why he'd do that, she's never quite understood, especially since he keeps dropping into her dreams and going on about how she's his favorite, he wants her to win, wants her to lead his army, blah blah blah.
At any rate, the fact of the matter is that they always find her. And nine times out of ten, they're not looking to swap frontier fashion tips.
It's weird, though. Some of them, it's like they get here, and fifteen minutes later they're on board with the whole 'it's you or me' thing, and they're slicing each other up and, like, gloating about it. This one guy who showed up in a t-shirt with "Fox River Detention Center" stamped on it? He seemed positively gleeful about the whole thing. If she's honest, she's gotta admit she wasn't very sorry to see that guy get skewered.
But in the end, it did come down to 'them or me.' No amount of freaking out on her part was going to change that fact. If she didn't kill them, they were going to kill her.
So the things that she's done? She had no choice. And eventually, it started to make sense to get rid of the other people quickly, rather than waiting around until they decided to try something on her. No, she still didn't like it, but doing it right away, before one of them smiled at her, or said something that made her laugh, or promised to protect her, and then tried to kill her... well, it was just easier that way. And, really, wasn't it more humane just to get it over for them sooner, rather than letting them suffer for days, getting more scared and upset and freaked? If she thinks of it that way, like it's a mercy killing -- or even that she's saving them from having to kill other people -- then she can stand it. It's like she's protecting their innocence, sort of sending them on to the next life with a clean conscience. She's saving them, really. It has a kind of poetry to it, Ava decides.
And since she's saving them, doing something that is, underneath it all, a good thing - so what if it's become less and less difficult over time? Yeah, there are times that there's been an element of fun to it; she'll admit that. But there's nothing wrong with enjoying doing a good thing, right? She's doing hard work, here, so why shouldn't she have a little fun once in awhile?
Finding out that keeping the freaky little demon-girl things away wasn't all she could do -- that she could, in fact, make the demons do what she wanted them to do? Well, that day had been something of a revelation. Sure, for awhile she'd had a blast just sort of playing around with them, toying with them -- there was nothing quite like the sight of a freaky little demon-girl thing running in circles around the town square for hours at a time to raise a girl's spirits. It made up just a little for the fact that they'd been doing their level best to kill her ever since she set woke up in this place.
After that, getting rid of the other people was that much easier -- now, she didn't have to get her hands dirty, literally or figuratively. Just send a demon-girl thing after them (and really, the demon-girls seemed more than happy to do the dirty work, so it took next to no effort on Ava's part to nudge them in the right direction). It became almost routine -- a new group arrived, Ava played damsel-in-distress while she scoped them out, then waited for the weaker ones to go off alone and then just let demon-girl have at it. At some point, the screams stopped raising the hairs at the back of her neck, and she stopped getting sick at the sight of the blood. It was just something she did in the course of a day, like she used to make coffee and get in her car and drive to work every morning, before.
Oh, sure, once in awhile, something will still get to her. She hasn't figured out yet how to control the ghosts, for example, and in some ways, they're even nastier than the demon-girls. The demon girls are fairly straight-forward -- they want you dead, and they want it now. Ghosts, apparently, are different, though. Seems like they're less interested in killing her than they are in shaking her up, rattling her a little. And hell, maybe the ghosts are in cahoots with Creepy Jaundice Guy too, because Ava's not sure how a ghost wearing old West garb would know about what happened to Brady, but these ones sure do. They seem to like nothing better than pointing out that it's her fault Brady's dead. And maybe it is, a little, but these freaking ghosts take some really perverse delight in reminding her about it.
She's tried really hard to forget the night Creepy Jaundice Guy had come to get her. He'd jerked her out of bed, out of her sleep, and pinned her to the wall while he killed Brady. Slowly. Ava had screamed -- oh hell yeah, she'd screamed, and Brady'd screamed and Ava thought surely, surely, the neighbors must be calling the cops by now, and any minute now they were going to break down the front door and this would stop. The cops never came, though, and Ava still doesn't quite understand that part. What she does know is that it wasn't stopping; Creepy Jaundice Guy just kept ripping into Brady and smirking and chatting cheerfully at Ava like he was some smarmy plumber come to repair a leaky faucet. After a long time, she started hoping Brady would just die, that it would end, because it was pretty damned clear he wasn't going to survive in the long term with all of his internal organs no longer... actually internal. And really, how long could one person scream and gurgle and bleed before death finally came? So, yeah, she started hoping Brady would die, and then praying he would die, and then finally, begging Creepy Jaundice Guy to kill him. After a long, long time, he finally did. Maybe someday, she'll let herself think about that, that she actively begged for her fiancé to die. Maybe, years from now, when she's not busy fighting for her life every few days, because Ava thinks maybe that's something that needs to be revisited at some point, how she went from kissing Brady goodnight to begging someone to kill him a few hours later.
So was it any wonder she'd been such a mess when she woke up here and remembered it all, knew it wasn't any nightmare, no vision of something that might happen? That first group of people had stayed alive the longest of any group she's seen; for three days they holed up in the church, burning hymnals for heat and sharing the bag of trail mix one of them had in her backpack. The demon-girls and the ghosts and Creepy Jaundice Guy himself could still get in the church, yeah, but it seemed to Ava that they didn't really like being there, like they were a little uneasy, a little off their game. They never stayed there for long, at any rate.
And at first, none of the group really knew what they were supposed to be doing there -- or nobody admitted to knowing, anyway. Then Creepy Jaundice Guy talked to her in her dream, started telling her she had to kill the others or they were going to kill her. She'd told him to go fuck himself, naturally, and he'd laughed like that was the best joke he'd ever heard.
So they just stayed there in the church and talked and tried to make sense of how they'd gotten there and why they all had these weird-ass abilities. It was water, or the lack of it, really, that screwed them in the end. None of them had any water on them, and a thorough search of the church turned up not one drop. They held out as long as they could, and then, when they'd just about given up hope, a picnic table full of food just...showed up. In the middle of freaking town square. They could see it from inside the church, covered with a red-checkered tablecloth and practically groaning under the weight of the food -- platters and bowls of hot dogs and hamburgers and fried chicken, potato salad and baked beans, and glass pitchers full of lemonade and iced tea and punch. Finally, they couldn't stand it anymore, and a couple of them volunteered to go get some. The freaky demon-girls were waiting, and apparently not being able to carve anybody up for awhile made them even grumpier than they normally were. The screams rattled in her head long after the people stopped screaming.
That night, Creepy Jaundice Guy made another of his little dream visits. Maybe it was hunger, or maybe it was the memory of the demon girls ripping apart her friends, but this time, Ava didn't tell him to go fuck himself. This time, she started listening to what he had to say. And he was right -- they couldn't just stay here; they'd all be dead in a few days if they did. I can help you, he'd said. All you've gotta do is let me.
What else was she supposed to do? They were all going to die anyway, so why shouldn't she live? So she listened to him, and found the fireplace poker exactly where he'd said it was, and she did what he wanted. And when all the others were dead, she staggered out of the church and drank down half a pitcher of lemonade, and ate the food with bloody hands. The demon girls left her alone.
The next day, five more people showed up, and Ava was determined that things were going to be different, this time. She told them about Creepy Jaundice Guy, gave them the whole rah-rah speech about how they all had to stick together to survive. That was all well and good until one of them tried to strangle her in her sleep. After that, all bets were off. She knew how it had to be, now.
Now, Sam showing up, that does sort of throw a wrench into things. Ava likes the guy, even if he is sort of annoyingly earnest. Not to mention ridiculously tall. And who knows -- maybe McGyver'll figure a way to get them out of here. Maybe. In the meantime...well, maybe she'd better go ahead and take out the weak ones. Just to be safe. There's no sense in taking chances, after all.
Besides, she hasn't had any fun in days.
Author:
hanncollCharacter: Ava-centric
Rating: PG13
Word count: 2,300
Disclaimer: No infrigement is intended and no money is being made.
Summary: Ava had no choice.
Author's Note: Written because I wasn't satisfied with what we were told about how Ava went from a good person to an evil one. Most of this was written right after AHBL 1, and was slightly Jossed. (I thought a ghost town would have actual ghosts. Silly me!) Many thanks to
zillah975 and the0neru for encouragement and betaing.If she doesn't let herself think about it, about the things she's done and the things she's maybe going to have to keep doing, it's not so bad.
Well, as far as being trapped in some deserted town and fighting for her life every few days goes. Which, of course, is a whole other definition of "not so bad" than she would've ever believed possible, but there you go.
Since she figured out how to keep the demons away, there have even been stretches of time when it's almost sort of peaceful. Quiet. She got used to the food showing up out of nowhere after the first couple of days, and maybe the setting's a little bit...rustic...for a girl from Peoria, but, really, it could be a lot worse, and it sure as hell beats the alternative. The being dead alternative. 'Alive' trumps 'dead' any day of the week; it doesn't take a genius to realize that. She could be dead like Brady, eyes wide and shocked and staring at nothing in particular, lying in a pool of her own cooling blood -- and alive's always better than dead. Right? Sure, it has to be. Must be.
Anyway, she's not thinking about it, because if she thinks about it, she's going to freak out, and then she's going to die out here. Alone. That much is abundantly clear. She's going to die, in the most incredibly painful (and quite frankly, disgusting) way possible, and someone else is going to stand over her and watch the light go out in her eyes and be glad that it's not them.
God knows, she's tried to figure out another way; it's not like she wanted to kill all those people. She's not a killer -- if anything, she's the polar opposite of a killer. The one car accident she's ever had in her entire life happened because she was swerving to miss some suicidal opossum that sort of...threw itself under her car. And seriously? If she's going to total her car rather than kill some animal that looks like an overgrown rat with really unfortunate dental habits, she's certainly not going to kill an actual human. She's a good person -- otherwise, why would she have dropped everything to drive to some crummy little podunk motel to keep that Sam guy from blowing himself up? In retrospect, that probably hadn't been her best night, decision-making-wise, but still -- yeah, she's a good person.
But she's also not stupid. It didn't take long for her to understand that the demon girls weren't going to just let her leave, and you'd think there'd be plenty of places to hide, here in Ghost Town, USA, but really? Not so much. She tried it a few times, but it never took long for other people to find her -- and eventually, Ava began to suspect that Creepy Jaundice Guy was ratting her out. Why he'd do that, she's never quite understood, especially since he keeps dropping into her dreams and going on about how she's his favorite, he wants her to win, wants her to lead his army, blah blah blah.
At any rate, the fact of the matter is that they always find her. And nine times out of ten, they're not looking to swap frontier fashion tips.
It's weird, though. Some of them, it's like they get here, and fifteen minutes later they're on board with the whole 'it's you or me' thing, and they're slicing each other up and, like, gloating about it. This one guy who showed up in a t-shirt with "Fox River Detention Center" stamped on it? He seemed positively gleeful about the whole thing. If she's honest, she's gotta admit she wasn't very sorry to see that guy get skewered.
But in the end, it did come down to 'them or me.' No amount of freaking out on her part was going to change that fact. If she didn't kill them, they were going to kill her.
So the things that she's done? She had no choice. And eventually, it started to make sense to get rid of the other people quickly, rather than waiting around until they decided to try something on her. No, she still didn't like it, but doing it right away, before one of them smiled at her, or said something that made her laugh, or promised to protect her, and then tried to kill her... well, it was just easier that way. And, really, wasn't it more humane just to get it over for them sooner, rather than letting them suffer for days, getting more scared and upset and freaked? If she thinks of it that way, like it's a mercy killing -- or even that she's saving them from having to kill other people -- then she can stand it. It's like she's protecting their innocence, sort of sending them on to the next life with a clean conscience. She's saving them, really. It has a kind of poetry to it, Ava decides.
And since she's saving them, doing something that is, underneath it all, a good thing - so what if it's become less and less difficult over time? Yeah, there are times that there's been an element of fun to it; she'll admit that. But there's nothing wrong with enjoying doing a good thing, right? She's doing hard work, here, so why shouldn't she have a little fun once in awhile?
Finding out that keeping the freaky little demon-girl things away wasn't all she could do -- that she could, in fact, make the demons do what she wanted them to do? Well, that day had been something of a revelation. Sure, for awhile she'd had a blast just sort of playing around with them, toying with them -- there was nothing quite like the sight of a freaky little demon-girl thing running in circles around the town square for hours at a time to raise a girl's spirits. It made up just a little for the fact that they'd been doing their level best to kill her ever since she set woke up in this place.
After that, getting rid of the other people was that much easier -- now, she didn't have to get her hands dirty, literally or figuratively. Just send a demon-girl thing after them (and really, the demon-girls seemed more than happy to do the dirty work, so it took next to no effort on Ava's part to nudge them in the right direction). It became almost routine -- a new group arrived, Ava played damsel-in-distress while she scoped them out, then waited for the weaker ones to go off alone and then just let demon-girl have at it. At some point, the screams stopped raising the hairs at the back of her neck, and she stopped getting sick at the sight of the blood. It was just something she did in the course of a day, like she used to make coffee and get in her car and drive to work every morning, before.
Oh, sure, once in awhile, something will still get to her. She hasn't figured out yet how to control the ghosts, for example, and in some ways, they're even nastier than the demon-girls. The demon girls are fairly straight-forward -- they want you dead, and they want it now. Ghosts, apparently, are different, though. Seems like they're less interested in killing her than they are in shaking her up, rattling her a little. And hell, maybe the ghosts are in cahoots with Creepy Jaundice Guy too, because Ava's not sure how a ghost wearing old West garb would know about what happened to Brady, but these ones sure do. They seem to like nothing better than pointing out that it's her fault Brady's dead. And maybe it is, a little, but these freaking ghosts take some really perverse delight in reminding her about it.
She's tried really hard to forget the night Creepy Jaundice Guy had come to get her. He'd jerked her out of bed, out of her sleep, and pinned her to the wall while he killed Brady. Slowly. Ava had screamed -- oh hell yeah, she'd screamed, and Brady'd screamed and Ava thought surely, surely, the neighbors must be calling the cops by now, and any minute now they were going to break down the front door and this would stop. The cops never came, though, and Ava still doesn't quite understand that part. What she does know is that it wasn't stopping; Creepy Jaundice Guy just kept ripping into Brady and smirking and chatting cheerfully at Ava like he was some smarmy plumber come to repair a leaky faucet. After a long time, she started hoping Brady would just die, that it would end, because it was pretty damned clear he wasn't going to survive in the long term with all of his internal organs no longer... actually internal. And really, how long could one person scream and gurgle and bleed before death finally came? So, yeah, she started hoping Brady would die, and then praying he would die, and then finally, begging Creepy Jaundice Guy to kill him. After a long, long time, he finally did. Maybe someday, she'll let herself think about that, that she actively begged for her fiancé to die. Maybe, years from now, when she's not busy fighting for her life every few days, because Ava thinks maybe that's something that needs to be revisited at some point, how she went from kissing Brady goodnight to begging someone to kill him a few hours later.
So was it any wonder she'd been such a mess when she woke up here and remembered it all, knew it wasn't any nightmare, no vision of something that might happen? That first group of people had stayed alive the longest of any group she's seen; for three days they holed up in the church, burning hymnals for heat and sharing the bag of trail mix one of them had in her backpack. The demon-girls and the ghosts and Creepy Jaundice Guy himself could still get in the church, yeah, but it seemed to Ava that they didn't really like being there, like they were a little uneasy, a little off their game. They never stayed there for long, at any rate.
And at first, none of the group really knew what they were supposed to be doing there -- or nobody admitted to knowing, anyway. Then Creepy Jaundice Guy talked to her in her dream, started telling her she had to kill the others or they were going to kill her. She'd told him to go fuck himself, naturally, and he'd laughed like that was the best joke he'd ever heard.
So they just stayed there in the church and talked and tried to make sense of how they'd gotten there and why they all had these weird-ass abilities. It was water, or the lack of it, really, that screwed them in the end. None of them had any water on them, and a thorough search of the church turned up not one drop. They held out as long as they could, and then, when they'd just about given up hope, a picnic table full of food just...showed up. In the middle of freaking town square. They could see it from inside the church, covered with a red-checkered tablecloth and practically groaning under the weight of the food -- platters and bowls of hot dogs and hamburgers and fried chicken, potato salad and baked beans, and glass pitchers full of lemonade and iced tea and punch. Finally, they couldn't stand it anymore, and a couple of them volunteered to go get some. The freaky demon-girls were waiting, and apparently not being able to carve anybody up for awhile made them even grumpier than they normally were. The screams rattled in her head long after the people stopped screaming.
That night, Creepy Jaundice Guy made another of his little dream visits. Maybe it was hunger, or maybe it was the memory of the demon girls ripping apart her friends, but this time, Ava didn't tell him to go fuck himself. This time, she started listening to what he had to say. And he was right -- they couldn't just stay here; they'd all be dead in a few days if they did. I can help you, he'd said. All you've gotta do is let me.
What else was she supposed to do? They were all going to die anyway, so why shouldn't she live? So she listened to him, and found the fireplace poker exactly where he'd said it was, and she did what he wanted. And when all the others were dead, she staggered out of the church and drank down half a pitcher of lemonade, and ate the food with bloody hands. The demon girls left her alone.
The next day, five more people showed up, and Ava was determined that things were going to be different, this time. She told them about Creepy Jaundice Guy, gave them the whole rah-rah speech about how they all had to stick together to survive. That was all well and good until one of them tried to strangle her in her sleep. After that, all bets were off. She knew how it had to be, now.
Now, Sam showing up, that does sort of throw a wrench into things. Ava likes the guy, even if he is sort of annoyingly earnest. Not to mention ridiculously tall. And who knows -- maybe McGyver'll figure a way to get them out of here. Maybe. In the meantime...well, maybe she'd better go ahead and take out the weak ones. Just to be safe. There's no sense in taking chances, after all.
Besides, she hasn't had any fun in days.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-06-22 10:33 pm (UTC)Plus? This was creepy. Reading Ava's rationale behind why she chose to do it, and how it eventually became fun? *shudder* Nice job writing this!
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Date: 2008-06-22 10:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-22 10:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-22 10:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-23 01:21 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2008-06-23 02:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-23 10:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-23 06:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-23 10:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-23 11:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-23 10:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-23 10:26 pm (UTC)well done, honey. *is proud*
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Date: 2008-06-23 10:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-23 10:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-24 11:39 pm (UTC)I like that you got into Ava's head very well, it rings true and simply believable.
Lovely.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-25 12:03 am (UTC)