Morals of a Villain

Chapter 5: A Truce

Damon looked Pandora over again, confused why she was acting this way. It was like she actually wanted to die, or at least to be hurt badly. "What is wrong with you?" He asked, batting her sword away and letting another attack fall gracefully to meet her defense. "You didn't listen to me before, did you?" She asked, seemingly a little disappointed. Damon shrugged. "What was I supposed to be listening to?" He asked. Pandora let out a light laugh. "The bit where I was explaining what's happened to me over the past couple of years." She said, hiding what she was really thinking and feeling under a smile. "Oh, yes. That." Damon said, slightly curious what it was she wanted to lock away beneath forced joy. She didn't seem the type to be troubled by much, so whatever it was had to be pretty bad. "Didn't you say you were kidnaped?" He added, remembering her words with a little jolt of realization. That had to be it. He didn't know why it hadn't struck him before; it wasn't exactly something normal people would just mention casually in conversation. 
Pandora grinned. "Now you're getting it." She said. She flicked away his sword and delicately drove her own attack towards him, turning the fight back towards the stairs. Damon parried quickly and pulled their duel back out into the open, determining that right now his best bet was to do the opposite of what Pandora wanted him to do. She had already technically won, but he still didn't want to let his guard down and allow her to seriously hurt him. The easiest way to do that was to read her body language, and simply refuse to give her what she wanted. "So what does you getting kidnaped have to do with your complete lack of sense right now? I can see how that would suck for you, but I would imagine that it isn't so bad that you have to seek out people like me to kill you." Damon said, still a little confused how everything fit together. Pandora sighed, a sad look flickering over her face for a split second before she managed to pull herself back together. "Well, it's not really that simple. I didn't just get kidnaped for no reason and then fight my way out of it. I was taken because someone saw me as valuable, enough so that they took the time to figure out my usual method of fighting and learn all of my weak points. Then they used that information to build two cages, and emotional one and a physical one. Those cages are made specifically to contain me, and because of that I can't escape either of them." She said, a pained undertone in her voice. 
Damon scrunched his brow, perplexed. "But aren't you a hero? Why would someone want to do that to you?" He asked, thoroughly confused. Pandora was supposed to be one of the 'good guys'. Why on earth would anyone on her side even contemplate such a thing? And why hadn't she been able to escape it? She had always had the reputation of a ferret, and was seen by most people he knew as a wily, cunning, slightly insane young woman who could escape any sort of prison she was put in, no matter how tough it was. Self-acclaimed villains had spent years trying to catch her, and they had all failed. So why would her own side put so much time and effort into doing something their opposition had been trying to do for an extremely long time, when they should have been aiding her? Nothing was making sense, and it was starting to get irritating. Pandora laughed, but it clearly wasn't a genuine sound. "That's right. I am a hero. Or, at least, I was. I dropped out of the whole thing a couple years ago to take care of my sister, after our parents got killed by another supposed 'hero' who had forgotten that the main point of being on the side we're on is not to hurt people. It was actually someone I was fairly close to, as well. And they just sort of shrugged it off with a 'shit happens' and a half-hearted apology. The business was soured for me after that." She took a deep breath, her eyes glistening with tears she refused to let spill over. "Anyway." She carried on, brushing at her eyes just to be certain that nothing was slipping through her barriers. "I took the small amount of money I made from my side hustles, since being a hero only ever pays you in pain and a self-centered attitude, and set up a house and a life for me and my sister. I vowed never to let myself go back to my old ways, deciding that I was done with all that. I was going to set up a farm and a new life, and raise my little sister to be a strong you woman who didn't rely on other people's validation to tell her that she meant something in this world, like I had done.  And for the first couple of months, that's exactly how things went. I'm sorry, this is kind of a lot of backstory just to answer a simple question. I know it's probably boring." Pandora added, breaking out of her sad tale to swallow the emotions welling up in her eyes. Damon shook his head. "Oh no, please go on. This is a lot more interesting than anything any other hero has spat at me." He said, batting away his opponent's sword with only half the vigor he had before. The fight was drawing to a close, and he wasn't intending to stop it. He had held suspicions that the hero side of things was a lot worse than his own side, and he was starting to realize that it was more important to him to hear what it was really like across the moral spectrum then to win. Pandora nodded, taking a deep breath and letting it out in a little huff. She clearly hadn't anticipated or wanted the emotions sweeping over her, and it was starting to show in her fighting. But despite that, she still pressed on, not wanting to let Damon win and not mentally capable of claiming victory herself. It was an odd place to be, and Damon had to admit that it wasn't one he liked seeing her in. He didn't want to fight someone who was in as bad a place as Pandora was. But at the same time, she wasn't giving him much of a choice. "Alright." Pandora said, starting back in on her story. "Like I said, things were fine for the first few months. They were better than fine, even. They were great. I set up the farm within a couple of weeks, and the work flew by quickly with both me and Angel doing it. Feeding the animals and tending the gardens gave me something to focus on, too, which kept me from sinking into the depression that always hovered just a few wrong moves out of sight. 
"However, the long hours spent working peacefully in my gardens gave me way too much time to look back on everything I had done in my life as a hero. I started to think about all the hundreds of lives I had taken in the name of 'good', and began to wonder whether or not I had ever been on the right side ot begin with. Of course, I knew that the people I killed and captured weren't exactly innocent, but it still seemed like there should have been a better way for me to deal with them then running their hearts through a spike when they were already disarmed and incapable of defending themselves, or forcing them to surrender with violence instead of actual, honest reasoning. I knew that most of the time, I hadn't had a choice. It was either me, or them. But despite that, I couldn't help feeling that there should have been a currency we could negotiate through that wasn't blood. Things seemed so violence-oriented, for absolutely no reason other than that it was easy to bend bloodshed and tears into a burning anger that could infest millions and win so many loyal supporters that would never leave their chosen side. I started asking myself what it was we were even fighting for in the first place, and had to admit that it seemed like we just wanted the our opposition to not have what we had, and vice versa. It was childish, to say the least. I had seen mothers lecture their kids on the very subject the people who I had worked under couldn't seem to get over, and it was honestly startling how close those lectures and the public speeches some of our opposition put out were to being the same thing. I realized that most supposed 'villains' didn't actually want to be a part of the fight, and it was only because they were either bored or didn't have a choice that they participated in it at all." Pandora stopped, looking down at the floor and taking a few deep breaths. "Sorry. It's just that I think of all the times I watched the light leave someone's eyes when I contemplate this sort of thing. It never gets any easier." She said, her words tapering off into a whisper as she tried to clear away the thoughts that were putting her in such a defenseless position. Damon stopped, too, dropping the sword to his side. "It's fine. I was getting a little tired of fighting, anyway." He smiled, handing the weapon back to Pandora and slipping his gun off the stair railing and into his pocket. She wasn't going to hurt him. That much was clear. The things that had happened to her had obviously left her incapable of killing someone, or even really wounding them. And while he was still wary of her, he was at least capable of seeing that he had no reason to continue actively fighting her. Pandora smiled, faintly. "You and every other villain." She said, doing her best to cheer up the gloomy air. Damon chuckled a little, if for no other reason than to make her feel better. She looked so weak, so piteous. Like a delicate flower caught in a frozen storm, where it could be torn down at any moment. "Do you want to sit somewhere?" He asked, gesturing to a sunroom attached to the foyer. Pandora shook her head, tucking her weapons away. "I'm fine to stand." She said, firmly. Damon shrugged. "Suit yourself." He muttered, smiling to himself. It was really quite refreshing to see a hero as powerful and feared as Pandora allowing herself to come to a draw with someone like him. And it was thrilling to think that she held such resentment towards the very people she had worked with. It was something that could be exploited, and whipped up into a delicious hatred of the heroes she had once adored and fought beside. Or...it could be left to fester and develop into something by itself. Damon wasn't sure why, but the second option seemed more appealing to him. It wasn't something that he would have normally thought about at all, but it just didn't seem right to manipulate someone like Pandora. Not after everything she had gone through in the short few of years since the two of them had last fought.
"So, what happened after a few months of living your new, happier life as a hero-turned-farmgirl?" Damon asked, trying to make it sound jovial. "Two things." Pandora said, scrubbing the tough leather gloves she wore against her face to keep her tears back. "The first one was devastating, the second one was terrifying. It only took a few weeks after our parents died for my sister to develop an extremely strong connection to me, almost to the point that I would call it an attachment issue of some sort. Our aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins were all either nonexistent or dead, which meant that I was really the only person she had. And because of that, she saw me as a saint I was so extremely far away from being. I tried to show her how flawed I am, even going so far as to sit her down on day and explain that I was absolutely not perfect, and I was really the last person she wanted to be like. I gave her examples of some people she should  have looked up to as role models, which was a depressingly small handful of anyone with influence. But she didn't care. She said that I had saved so many people's' lives, and hunted down so many bad guys that I literally couldn't be anything other than a hero and a perfect person. I was starting to get a little suspicious and panicked at this point, since she was constantly asking me to recount stories of what it was like to be a hero, and completely ignoring the many warnings I gave her about how dangerous it was. I tried to only tell her the stories that showed just how awful of a person I had to be to kill people who could have done something great for everyone if they weren't constantly shoved into boxes and booed at by the majority of the populous, but she didn't care in the slightest. She had me repeat my accounts of being cheered on by random people in the streets over and over again, clearly dreaming about the few highlights that come out of a life as a martyr and a public figure of justice. Then, as I had expected and feared, she asked me how people became heroes. And not in a curious way, either; she sat there and grilled me about the exact process for nearly half an hour, until I eventually shut down her attempts to get what was probably a how-to book's worth of information out of me and told her to go to bed. The next morning she didn't come down at the same time that she always did. I brushed it off, figuring that she was just sleeping in because it was Sunday and she was planning on taking one of our rabbits to the county fair in a few hours. But after about thirty minutes, I started to get an uneasy feeling that I knew from experience meant I needed to go into fight or flight mode right at that moment and keep an eye out for any danger around me at all times. It was the same sort of sensation that I felt when I was about to be ambushed or taken hostage in the past, and it wasn't something I intended to take lightly.
"My first thought was to make sure that my sister was ok, so I ran upstairs and kicked in her door, hoping that she would just give me a weird look from her bed and ask what was going on. But she wasn't in her room. I searched the rest of the house, even going back over it once or twice to make sure I'd cleared all of it, but she wasn't inside. And after a thorough inspection of the farm, the only thing I could find from her was a note tacked to the barn door that said she had gone to visit my old boss, and she would hopefully get herself a job as a hero, as well as get me my old job back. There was almost a paragraph of just her fantasizing about the two of us getting to be partners some day, after I had trained her and she had been on a few less important missions. I was horrified by this, and of course I wanted to storm right down to my boss's office and stop Angel before she made an irreversible mistake. The thing was, I hadn't put in any sort of formal notice, so coming back to the office would only be seen as me coming back to work, and I would never be able to leave if I got put on some new mission. It took me years to find the time to make a break for it as it was. And even if I had turned in some sort of message that said I was leaving, I would have been either demonized as a hero turned villain and not been allowed by my neighbors to have anything close to a normal life, or been sent on an impossible mission that would almost certainly kill me. I had known what would happen if I gave a heads' up that I was leaving, and done my best to make sure no one knew where I was, particularly my old boss. I had covered my tracks and spent countless hours making myself feel secure in the thought that nobody would figure it out and come looking for me and Angel. I had burned all documents regarding the jobs I worked to support myself and my family, the purchase of the farm, and everything else that could have been considered even slightly important. And yet, because of my sister, the very people that I wanted to get away from now knew where I was. On top of that, they had her as leverage, and they knew exactly what kind of control that gave them over me." Pandora sighed, putting her face in her hands for a moment as she recalled everything that had happened. "I was such an idiot. I should never have let Angel listen to my stories about being a hero. I shouldn't have poisoned her mind like that." She muttered, more to herself than Damon. Damon tilted his head and examined her, biting his lip a little as he felt his heart go out to the poor dear. He hadn't felt real, un-mocking pity in an extremely long time, but this was definitely what it was like. "Let me guess." He said, deciding to fill in the gaps for her. "Your sister, through her own idiocy and warped perspective of reality, gave your former boss everything he needed to not only bring you back into his cult of heroism, but also keep you there indefinitely?" He said, seeing very clearly where this led. Pandora nodded. "It only took about three hours after I found my sister's note for them to search out the house and burst in without so much as knocking. I expected it, of course. No one on my side was ever polite when it came to fighting villainy or gaining power, and to them, they were doing both by hunting me down. I of course tried to fight back, but my boss had unbeknownst to me taken a lot of time over the past few years to study everything I did and come up with a method of keeping me trapped if I ever tried to escape his hold. With that knowledge, it didn't take long for a group of heroes that I had both fought with and been friends with to capture me and bring me back to a hidden room in a building my boss owned. Both the building and the room were monitored constantly, andthe room-or, rather, cell- was made up of the few materials I couldn't work through and the locks I couldn't pick. It was a cage, in every sense of the word, and not a pretty one. I sank into depression after that, pretty much incapable of getting up off the scrappy little bed to train my sister or anyone else to be a hero. The little hope I had possessed that the people I worked for weren't all that bad was shattered, and I felt closer to being trapped by some maniac vilain than I ever had felt before. Eventually, they started using my sister as leverage to get me to do what they wanted. And it worked. If they chucked her into the face of danger, I wouldn't be able to let myself rest until I had rescued her. They made it seem to her like they were giving her these important spy missions, and they showed the full, brutal truth to me. That's why I'm here in the first place. Because they pushed my sister to come to your party, and gave her just enough help that she would live but not escape. I think she's starting to suspect what they're doing, but it will be too late for her before she finally comes to the conclusion that things aren't as rosy as they seem." She said, her voice quaking.
Damon thought of the letter Angel had left him, remembering how she had described herself as a fool and a pretty face that was simply thrown into danger and certain death to garner pitty from the masses. She knew something was going on, all right. She just didn't have all the pieces arranged in the right order. "So, you're still here because you see death by my hand as a better option than life under the egotistical rule of your boss?" Damon asked, pretty sure he had gotten everything correct up to this point. It was horrible to think that someone with as much life and potential as Pandora was driven to this extent just to escape from a world that couldn't let her live outside of heroism. He had met many heroes in his life, and never pitied any of them, because what they were doing was a choice that they could easily reverse if they wanted to. But with Pandora, that clearly wasn't the case. And because of that, he found himself questioning just what right he had to kill her. After all, she hadn't done anything other than give him the equivalent of a cat scratch. She clearly didn't have it in her heart to hurt him. So what reason did he have to hurt her?
Pandora nodded, a single tear sliding down her cheek. "It sounds so pathetic. But yes. Please Damon, I'm begging you. It's the only way out of this mess that I have. I can't bring weapons into my cage, and even if I could there would be someone there to stop me before I did anything. The only time I have to die is when I'm fighting, and even that's limited now because there's always someone timing me so that they can send out a crew to bring me back if I'm gone for longer than agreed upon. My sister is going to distract them for long enough that I have a chance, and then I'm having an old friend who sees things the same way I do kidnap her and take her to a safe place where she can't be hurt by my boss and won't be seen by the public. She'll be thought of as dead, and you'll probably be held responsible for it. I took care to make sure that your reputation isn't ruined by her escaping. Now please, give yourself the boost you need to be seen as extremely powerful and threatening. Expand your influence so that heroes and villains alike tremble at the mention of your name. This is just as good for you as it is for me, and there is no other way for me to get out of this. Please, Damon. Kill me."
Damon watched her for a long moment, mulling her words over in his mind. She was so young, only a couple years younger than him. And yet, despite her age, she had achieved so much power. So much talent. Just as he had. This was not how she deserved to die. There were many deaths that fit a hero of her degree, but this was not one of them. And simply because of that, he couldn't kill her. His conscious would never leave him alone if he did. "Tempting." He said, making up his mind with a little nod. "But no." He smiled, gently. Pandora's eyes welled up, and she made no attempt to hide it this time. "Please! It's the only escape I have." She said, almost sobbing. Damon grabbed her wrist and led her towards the stairs, a plan forming in his mind. "No. There's another way." He said.