Chapter Text
Shaking fingers coax tips through worn eyelets. Nooses of cord tighten around disgustingly clean hands. Disused leather creaks from strain as she pulls the laces tight.
Awful fucking things.
She could have rid herself of them when the war ended. She could have thrown the boots, the uniform, and the godawful cap on the funeral pyre of a nation no-one mourned, and walked away like nothing happened. The work she did was infamous, but it was hardly public-facing. Known to most only by lurid rumor, it was the kind of thing easily dismissed as insane paranoia or masturbatory fantasy. Vanishingly few people could even have identified her face without proclaiming their own guilt, and most of those were scarcely able to breathe without her direct order. It would have been so easy to slip away amidst the chaos of defeat, to flee to somewhere far beyond the reach of everything that happened — and everything she did. She could have built herself a whole new life, a couple countries over. She could have become a whole new person.
But she’s seen enough of that to last the lifetime of the sun.
There’s no escaping from the crimes she’s committed. There’s no hiding from the person she’s become. The tortures she inflicted, the people she inflicted them upon, the ways those people changed — those things will remain a part of her forever. The woman she was before would have balked at the tamest of her methods, declared reprehensible acts which would with time become forgettably routine. That woman is gone now, dead and buried, rotting with the bodies of her victims and theirs. With each girl she broke — and it was always a girl, that was her specialty — some part of herself would break alongside, until she’d been altered as irrevocably as any of her subjects. She made herself her own final monster.
Except…
That’s not really true, is it?
She’s not a victim. To imagine herself as such is absurd self-delusion. It’s just a framing to help her cope, fiction she believes because she’s too weak for the truth.
The truth that as much as war may have changed her, change is all she did. She never broke, not in the manner of the unfortunate girls who wound up in her cells. What she sees in the mirror on her bedroom door is a person — profoundly repulsive, but a person nonetheless. A person who’s able to swallow what she’s seen and done and step out into the world of her own volition, master of her own contemptible life. She knows this for a fact because just beyond that door, kneeling obediently in anticipation of her presence, is someone who’s none of those things.
Subject number nine. She’s everything it’s not, and the difference between them is everything she took from it.
It’s the only one of her pilots to survive until the end, if what it has now can really be termed “survival”. Its heart still beats, and its limbs still move, but the person it used to be is long gone — and not just in the self-servingly hyperbolic way she imagines of herself; truly, irreversibly destroyed. Nine’s a former person, transformed into a tool through a process as intricate as it was garishly cruel. A process in which she was not merely a participant, but the defining component.
Her life’s work.
Nine’s the reason she couldn’t simply disappear in the final days of the old regime. Nine’s the reason why instead, as the world collapsed around her, she filled a handbag with its things and a suitcase with her own, then threw all three in the trunk of her old beater — the only vehicle on base without military plates — and fled the capitol.
Her motives were hardly pure: if captured and reprogrammed, Nine’s testimony could destroy her as thoroughly as machines it piloted, but she lacked the nerve to dispose of it herself. Yet as the hours passed, as the solitude of her little car forced her to consider her own future, the callous persona she had so carefully constructed began to slip. Listening to Nine whimper at every pothole and artillery scar revived something she’d thought long dead. By the time she found an intact gas station, she knew she was going to keep it; and as she watched it fill the tank, a jarringly mundane act for one so extraordinarily diminished, she knew she had to save it.
She was leaning against the pump, and absentmindedly lit up a cigarette — stupid, but not even the tenth most dangerous part of their situation — and when the girl flinched at the sight, something deep within her cracked. She’d built a fortress around her heart, a dam to hold back her own humanity, and the sight of the terrified girl steeling herself for punishment at the flash of her lighter struck it like a breaching shell. She tried to offer it a cigarette of its own, a pathetic attempt to reassure it, but it responded only with pained confusion, as if a burn would have been preferable simply for its familiarity, and that was it. The dam burst. A void opened in her soul. The character she’d made of herself, the cold sadistic handler standing tall over the girls she abused and the destruction they so obediently wrought, drowned in an instant amidst a cascade of everything she should have felt over the preceding decade. When the girl’s meek request for orders brought her back to earth, all that remained was herself.
Number Nine never went back in the trunk; in fact, it spent the bulk of their remaining journey driving, a skill it unsurprisingly took to with flying colors. She hadn’t intended to use the girl as a glorified chauffeur, but when caffeine and adrenaline could no longer hold back her exhaustion, it seemed marginally smarter than a roadside nap. At least this way if she died, it would be at Nine’s hands, a prospect made surprisingly agreeable by her newfound conscience. So she told it how to drive, told it to wake her when it needed her — a laughably stupid sentiment; Nine always needs her, that’s the point — and let herself pass out.
She’d planned to take back the wheel when she awoke, but Nine’s demeanor stopped her dead. For while before the girl had gazed listlessly out the window at a world she’d removed its ability to comprehend, now it seemed centered. Focused. Almost happy.
Like it was in the cockpit.
She’d never seen it in this state up close, and understanding what she saw was a sledgehammer blow to her heart: this is what she did to it. This is what she did to all of them. She took Nine’s former self and disassembled her, with immense cruelty and manipulative kindness, and what she built in her place was merely a person-shaped control system. Of course it was adrift without a suitable task — she knowingly and intentionally destroyed its ability to make decisions for itself!
And then she put it in a mech, and she ordered it to kill.
Steadier fingers tie the laces off with a precise surgeon’s knot. Despite her best efforts, the boot’s not tight enough to hurt — damn thing fits too well. Then, out of habit, she threads the free ends back down beneath the laces before starting on the other. It’s a practice she picked up to prevent the boot from coming undone at the hands or tongue of an overenthusiastic pilot.
Which was a real concern. It happened a lot!
Because the clothes she wore were as crucial to her process as any of the torture. When a subject finally broke, when she’d twisted its psyche past the point of no return, the resulting shell would be unworkably overwhelmed. It needed a reassuring constant, something it could grab hold of when nothing else made sense. Her boots were the perfect candidate, simple enough to comprehend but inextricably tied to her, and in their desperation that connection could become incredibly intense.
If she’s willing to be honest with herself — and she is, because taking these wretched things out of the closet has her in the mood for self-loathing — she took quite a lot of pleasure in it. She could have anchored them with a stuffed toy, or a familiar song, but no: she chose boots. Boots and fucking collars, because that’s the kind of person she is. A selfish and single-minded pervert cosplaying a woman.
And now she’s paying the price of that, for as much as she would love to burn the boots and knife the coat and stick the gloves down the garbage disposal with her hand still inside, number Nine latched onto them like no other. Many of the girls she consumed over the years used her boots as more than just a security blanket, but with Nine there was no ambiguity: its relationship with her boots was openly sexual. It used to stumble from its cockpit and fall to its knees before her after each successful mission, wordlessly pleading for a positive evaluation and its accompanying reward. It — she, fuck! It’s so hard to think of her as a person after years spent struggling not to — would make love to those boots like she was consummating a marriage, then shine them back to pristine condition with just as much enthusiasm, performing the task with meditative reverence and coming away with the sort of satisfyingly drained look one might expect after hours of intense, exhausting sex.
In her later years, as the war dragged on and cracks began to show, she would order Nine to her quarters late at night, greeting her in nothing but boots and lingerie and doing things that even now she doesn’t wish to ponder the ethics of.
No. Fuck that, there’s nothing to ponder. She demanded sex dozens of times, from a girl she’d rendered constitutionally incapable of disobeying her. There’s no bush to beat around; if she won’t call it what it is, then she really is a man.
Rapist piece of shit.
She ties off the second boot without much conscious effort, thoughts still trapped waist deep in a morass of guilt. Finishes the laces the same way.
It’s funny how much weight can be carried by something so small. They’re just boots, but they’re so much more. The boots aren’t just a piece of clothing, they’re the resigned compliance of her multitudinous victims. The horrifying ending each one would slowly but surely come to accept.
And if her boots were the end, then her black leather gloves were surely the beginning. Of everything in her uniform, they were the least practical, the most symbolic. They’re tight enough to be uncomfortable, so they spent more time in her pockets than on her hands, but they played a key role in the routine she’d perform for each new subject. A routine which, in her struggle to slip the gloves over fingers badly out of practice, she finds herself reprising on pure instinct.
It was almost comically theatrical. She’d stand in the open doorway with light flooding in around her, and her captive would have no choice but to look, her ominous silhouette the only thing it could see that wasn’t painfully bright after days in the dark. She’d conjure the gloves from her pockets like a magician, and she’d slip them on agonizingly slowly, holding her hand out to catch the light. It was ridiculous, cartoon villain behavior, and it worked wonders. Immobilized and gagged, it was impossible for the subject to avoid working itself into a terrified frenzy, as its mind conjured lurid images of tortures it might be about to endure. The practical reasons for the gloves hardly mattered — that reaction was the point. Her subject’s fear would become a crucial piece of its undoing, its own mind transformed into her most potent implement of torture. Each girl would think exactly as she needed it to think, long before it had consciously surrendered. She was very, very good.
Very good at being a calculating, manipulative monster, maybe. It’s nothing to be proud of.
Every part of her induction process was meticulously planned. She’d have the girls kept in darkness for days at a time, so that the light outside their cells would both disorient and relieve. They’d be fed too little, woken from sleep at odd hours, restrained in positions where comfort was impossible; each banal torment another axis of control, another way to keep them off balance long enough to get inside their heads. In some cases — like with Nine — her aides would deliver girls to her sessions naked, leading them through the hangar or the mess so officers and technicians alike could gawk at their bodies in fascination and disgust; she knew who could be counted on to play that role by how they looked at her.
Behind closed doors, the gloves went on, and her conditioning toolkit was extensive. Overstimulation was a mainstay, bombarding the subject with intense, conflicting stimuli in so many senses at once that its mind could process nothing else. She’d pair that with visual and auditory hypnosis, strapping them down with headsets and visors and sometimes leaving them alone like that for hours. There was a scary looking injection kit, designed for animals and ludicrously over the top for her purposes, with which she’d administer a dizzying array of experimental drugs — or sometimes just saline, which really made them question their reality. She’d touch them in all the ways she knew they’d hate; the ways she’d hate, in their position. She’d beat them, she’d shock them, and frequently she’d find an excuse to put gloved fingers in their mouths, which she only barely pretended was for anything but her own gratification. And all the while she’d talk, her words carefully tailored to the victim at hand.
What she said to them was most often cruel; barbed words meant to bury themselves deep in the girl’s insecurity. These were easy to produce: most people are insecure about the same basic things, her subjects especially. More difficult, and much more insidious, was the kindness.
Hurting someone until they unravel is simple enough, and all her imitators could ever manage. It doesn’t take much actual finesse to locate someone’s pain points and press on them gratuitously. But identifying what they truly need, offering a victim salvation from a pain they’re so immersed in they don’t even recognize it’s there? That took real skill, and got real results. Once she did that, she could change someone from their very foundation, until nothing about them resembled the person they were before. That was her specialty. The skill that transformed her from a petty abuser to an inexorable corrupting force, twisting the will of everyone around her.
Nine was the golden example. The girl who would become Nine was an absolute mess of weak points. Hurting her was so easy it was boring. The girl hated her body, so she’d draw attention to it. The girl had been rejected by her family, so she’d spin lies about her own that hurt them both. Trivial. But Nine’s predecessor was resilient by necessity, and pain was never going to be enough to make her break. Instead, it was through genuine compassion, through honest and heartfelt solidarity twisted to malicious ends, that Nine was truly born. She spoke to it with the kind of understanding that comes only with experience, and looked at it with eyes that held no pity or disgust. She offered it a way out of the body it despised. She treated it as a person for the first time in its life, then exploited the trust she gained to steal that experience away for good.
If the girl had possessed a name, a real name, she would have used that against her too, but she never did. Many of her subjects never had real names, and that’s the part that really makes her sick. They'd have the name on their ID, the one her own aides undoubtedly addressed them with, but they wouldn't have a name that was truly theirs. Because somehow worse than the sordid detail of her crimes, worse than the torture and the drugs, perhaps even worse than the rape and the abuse, was her choice of target: girls like herself. Trans women. Snatched off the street by a government all too eager to be rid of them, and deposited in hands uniquely equipped to hurt them — her own.
That was her real secret. The actual reason she was so effective. She was never some brilliant psychologist, reading things in people others couldn’t hope to see; she merely had an endless supply of victims she already understood, and no moral code. She terrorized her own community far more viciously than the police ever could. To this day they hold a vigil for her victims, a moment of silence once a year for the girls who vanished in the night, girls no-one else would ever bother mourning.
That’s her legacy. That’s the mark she’s left upon the world.
She told herself she was changing the system from the inside, that the enemy was worse, that her position was breaking boundaries for the rest of them. More little fictions.
The truth is she was drunk on power, and never really cared.
The reckoning for that came a few years after the armistice. She ran into some girls on the street, idealists hoping for kinder treatment from the new government. She struck up a conversation with them, and before she knew it she’d been invited to a weekly meeting: a group of women she was nominally like, convening in a dingy bar to socialize, to commiserate, and to plan. She attended it religiously at first — it was a genuine joy to spend time in the company of other trans women, ones who still had light in their eyes. They loved her, too! Many of them looked up to her, inspired by a woman who survived so long under the old regime. She made herself a central figure in their little group, helping out as much as she was able, because it felt great to be doing something uncomplicatedly good for once in her life. She’d bring hormones, and lie through her teeth about her source. She’d produce contacts that seemed miraculous, drawing from an encyclopedic knowledge of underground support networks she’d compiled for the worst possible reason.
Once, she ordered Nine to cook, and showed up claiming credit for several coolers full of soup, perfectly portioned and carefully packaged, because it’s nothing if not precise. That felt particularly meaningful, like she was giving it its first connection to the same community she’d abused its desperate need for.
It didn’t last. Her fault, of course. Try as she might, it was impossible not to think of the girls there as the ones that got away. Each one was simply unused material, a potential victim who could have just as easily been snatched up and placed in her clutches. What’s worse, as she got to know the regulars, she found herself unable to look at them as anything other than a list of pressure points. Marie, so insecure about her femininity: a week without shaving and a hot dress from herself would crack her like porcelain. Elanor, whose family actually loves her back: she’d have them killed, then step in like a big sister. Kira, pre-everything and dysphoric as hell: nudity and mirrors and misgendering, then offer her the only cure, if only she complies.
The breaking point came when a new girl showed up one night, looking a mess and red from crying. As the respected older woman in the room, she obviously took charge. She sat the girl down, asked her what had happened, and listened with increasing emptiness as the girl described something all too familiar: some unknown man had slipped something into her drink at a bar across the city, and she’d woken up in the bushes hours later. It was a horrific story, and everyone else in the room reacted appropriately. But as the other girls piled in to comfort the newcomer, she realized with horror that she felt nothing in particular. All she could do was wonder what the girl had been drugged with — certainly nothing as advanced as the stuff she used to use. That was when she knew she shouldn’t be there, polluting a group of genuinely good people with her presence. She excused herself, made a hasty exit, and never returned.
Perhaps her soul was always this rotten. She barely remembers how she was before. Not that it matters: there’s no part of her that could ever hope to be redeemed. She shouldn’t have hidden away her uniform: she deserves to suffer. There’s no punishment in the world commensurate with the hurt she’s caused.
If she believed in hell, even that would be too kind.
With her head spinning and her eyes fighting back tears that would bring a catharsis she doesn’t deserve to feel, she reaches blindly into the garbage bag of her life and pulls out her officer’s cap. It looks brand new, and it takes her a moment to remember why: they gave her a promotion, just months before the end. Not just any promotion — a whole new division, new ranks and iconography and everything, with her as its head. Some rotting, senile general looked at a list of her atrocities, and thought to himself, “that’s the kind of woman I want running an entire branch of the military!”
Hopefully he died painfully.
He probably didn’t, though. Most of the leadership escaped justice, herself included. The man’s probably relaxing on the beach in some country even more corrupt than this one. As far as she knows, she’s the only one who stayed.
Unsurprising. It’s not like men to feel remorse for their actions.
She tosses the cap aside. It was only ever meant to influence those above her, and one way or another, all of them are gone. It doesn’t matter to her, and it doesn’t matter to Nine. And Nine’s the reason she’s doing any of this. The outfit’s a surprise for it, something she’s pretty sure will cheer it up. It really needs cheering up.
If time has been unkind to her, it’s been positively cruel to nine, which makes two of them. Drowning in guilt is one thing, but what Nine has experienced is far more existential. She’s moved on, if only slightly; Nine has simply stopped, and for all the expertise with which she took its mind apart, she has no idea how to reassemble it. She made it something that existed for a purpose, and absent that purpose it struggles to exist at all. Without a task to perform, it spends its time inhumanly idle, sitting quietly in its bed or following her at a distance waiting for commands. It doesn’t let on much of anything, but she’s seen enough to recognize when it’s sad. And recently, it’s been sad. Not about anything she did to it — because she’s not a hack — but it’s unmistakable.
It wasn’t like this in the immediate aftermath. In the months after they moved in, it was more animated than she’s ever seen. Part of that was just that there was plenty to do, and it was real work, not just contrived jobs. It was building furniture and painting walls, which really kept it engaged. She even tried to get it to decorate its room, vainly hoping such a creative task might rekindle the spark she snuffed out. Maybe more importantly, it had plenty of her. She talked to it, played games with it, showered it with physical affection. She even let it sleep in her bed, at first!
But time’s made her grow distant, or the novelty’s worn off. These days, looking at Nine just makes her feel guilty, so she’ll go days at a time without talking to it much. She gives it token tasks to keep it occupied while she occupies herself. They don’t share a bed anymore, because it would sometimes try to initiate sex, and she didn’t trust herself not to take advantage; she really fucking wants to. Their only consistent interaction left is the weekly estradiol ritual — she does its shot, it does hers, a frankly inspired bonding exercise she figured out for Nine and repeated with nearly every girl that came after.
Amazing how she can make sinister something so intrinsically beautiful. She truly is a poison.
She’s only seen it happy again once in recent memory, when there was construction across the street, bringing with it industrial mechs. Nine sat in the window and watched them hopefully for weeks, just as trapped by the function she forced upon it as it had been at the height of the war. She briefly entertained the idea of getting it the job, letting it find a new facet of the same old purpose. A stupid idea, abandoned quickly. Nine can’t pass for a person, not even close. It would be found out in an instant, and she’d be found in turn. They’d take her away from Nine, and Nine away from her. She’d face a firing squad, which she probably deserves, but Nine… there’s no telling what they’d do to it.
And isn’t that just so fucking convenient!
She can’t let herself face justice, because they might hurt Nine. She can’t burn her memorabilia, Nine’s too attached to it. She can’t even clean her own house, because Nine needs tasks to keep it occupied! Every time she might have to do something hard, or face up to anything she’s done in any real way, there’s a convenient Nine-shaped excuse to indulge her worst impulses!
Is she even helping it? Has she ever?
No.
Not really.
She’s ordering it around for her own benefit. It spends its life stuck in an apartment, a glorified maid for the woman who abused it. That any of this is “for Nine” is just another of the lies she tells herself. She’s using it, just like she did before, because without Nine how would she justify her own existence. Without it, what right does she have to live, when so many better people died?
And so she says it’s all for Nine, because that’s the person she is: not just despicably selfish, but absurdly self-deluded. Convinced that there’s somehow a good person under everything she’s done. And now here she is, wallowing in her guilt, as if knowing that she’s wrong negates her wrongness!
She’s not even confident Nine can’t be rehabilitated. The truth is that she’s barely tried! Of course she’s read the papers, other people’s failed attempts at deprogramming the various pilots that have resurfaced over the years, but the difference is that those people are all idiots. She’s the goddamn expert! If anyone could manage it, it’s her! But she doesn’t try, because if she were to succeed, then Nine would be free of her. Nine would be gone, and the woman it would become would despise her.
She’s barely survived her own hatred. Nine’s would obliterate her.
For an instant, her eyes flicker to the nightstand. Her service pistol’s in the drawer. She should do it. A stronger person would. But she’s done this dance before, and she’s too fucking weak to follow through.
Besides, if she killed herself...
She’d be killing Nine.
It’s impossible not to chuckle at her own hypocrisy as finally, at long last, it’s time for the centerpiece of her uniform. Her personal favorite part; the coat. A boot-length black leather custom job selected partly for the imposing figure it cast, partly because it made her look damn good. And as she slips her arms into its familiar sleeves, admiring herself in the mirror as soft leather caresses her body almost as perfectly as ever, she remembers the why she hid this all away; the reason why the first thing she did when she bought the place was to throw her whole uniform in a garbage bag, and abandon it on the highest shelf she could find. It wasn’t guilt that made her do it, or the painful memories it might surface. It was fear.
Because she looks fantastic. She may be older, but aging doesn’t scare her like it once did. If anything, the suit she’s wearing under it in lieu of a military uniform makes the whole ensemble look even better. She can’t wait to see the look on Nine’s face.
She feels powerful. As much as it nauseates her to admit, it’s a good feeling. Mere moments ago, she was a person who moved through the world as forgettably as possible, ashamed of her own existence. The woman in the mirror is the kind who turns heads, not with fetishistic lust, but with respect and fear. The kind who quiets a room of a hundred with a snap of her fingers.
She feels alive. For nearly a decade, she’s been scraping by, spending time with Nine as a panacea for her conscience. At times she’s felt at peace, or even vaguely hopeful, but she hasn’t felt like this. It’s electric. Intoxicating.
She’s been using Nine. But Nine was meant to be used. That’s what the woman in the mirror made it for. To consciously acknowledge that makes her want to scream, but what would be the point? Why bother feeling guilty? She’s far beyond redemption, and she’s never going to change. She’s not a good person, a fact laid out by everything she’s ever done. And she never will be.
So why keep fighting it?
“Accept what you are.”
That’s what she told Nine, all those years ago, on the night she finally broke it. This uniform is what she is.
It’s all she is.
And after so many years of neglect, her boots could really use a shine.