Warslave

Chapter 10: Confrontation

His brother nodded, appearing a little more tired to Viper than he had been a second ago.

"I just thought... It will be one of the others one day."

"Explain."

"I wasn't fighting superhumans, or... or any kind of human. They were ours, our kin. A lesser variant, but still, same blood. How long until they force us to fight each other?"

"That won't happen-"

"What if it does? Are you ready to kill them? Even just the newbloods, the ones we've not had the time to grow attached to. Could you kill them?"

"I... don't know."

Wolf nodded again. Viper understood that his brother had known that would be his response, even without asking it. But now it was out in the open. Now that the words were spoken, it was real. Viper had already decided he would return that favour.

"Would you?"

"I don't know."

The silence that followed was uncomfortable to both of them. Not because either of them was out of their element in the quiet, or because they didn't want to think about the subject. It wasn't even the first time they had talked about it. It wasn't even uncomfortable because of the pit in Viper's stomach that he felt when thinking about the prospect of killing one of their own.

The silence was crushing, because they both knew that the Wolf was lying.

The Wolf

He wished he could forget the earlier conversation. Wolf always did when it came to a subject he was uncomfortable with. There was the thing, after all. For someone who always spent his life stumbling from confrontation to confrontation, he was awfully unwilling to confront his own thoughts sometimes.

No doubt some would call that a flaw in his design, as it meant his mind would linger too long on certain subjects. Wolf didn't really give a shit about their opinions. He was what he was, which was to say: a pretty good killer, and nothing more. Or so he told himself, at least.

But there was always that nagging voice in the back of his head, especially when he was deployed on a mission, that told him these thoughts had no place in his head, and that meant he was not just defective, but bordering on useless.

Blood drowned that voice. Blood made him feel confident, even if it was his own. Rage was a great motivator too. It came hand in hand with his Bloodlust. Every time he saw something alive, he wanted to kill it. Every time he failed to do so, or kept himself from doing so, he felt anger boiling up.

They all had that anger, his brother, Caracal, the newbloods... even Greyhound. One way or another, there was always something to be angry about, someone to hate, even if they didn't want to. Even the people Wolf cared about the most had sometimes sparked that anger.

When Viper had first slashed him across the face, giving him the scar on the right side of his head, he'd wanted to kill his twin. It had been a short, almost unnoticeable moment, but Viper still carried the mark of it on his chest, where Wolf had involuntarily tried to rip one of his hearts out.

That burst of anger had cleared his mind at the time, and he recognised that what he had been doing was wrong. That was a clarity he lacked now. He was on patrol, and there was nothing to kill. Nothing.

No birds, no rodents, not even insects, though that was more a relief to him than a hindrance. He hated insects, spiders and all the other things he had simply labelled as 'creepy crawlers'. He owed that fear to an incident when he had been younger, only five or six years old, and some of the lab workers had thought it a funny prank to let some of their experimental giant spiders loose in the training area. He'd been alone, and nowhere near as well trained or powerful as he was now, and as a result he had almost died. That had jolted something awake in him, besides a fear of things with too many legs. The humans working in the labs had never been more afraid of him then when he let his Bloodlust take over then.