I walked into Director Blackett's office and closed the door carefully behind me. He looked surprised to see me.

"Where is Chariot?" he asked, blankly.

"I will need you to place your sidearm on the desk slowly," I said, guns pointed while giving him a optics sweep to make sure that was all he had on him, and then another for exotics, to be safe.

He complied and I dismantled the firearm deliberately before dropping its parts in the trash bin and myself into a chair.

"No, please, make yourself comfortable," he said. I applauded his sarcasm by shooting out the holo next to his head and showering him in sparks.

"I do not suppose you have any liquor? Today has been a hell of a day," I said.

"Just tea, sorry."

"I will take some, if you please."

He got to work shuffling around in his drawers and I stopped him, removing an experimental device from his desk and disassembling it too into the trash can. Without further interruption, he soon placed two steaming cups of tea between us.

I took a sip. A slightly malty black tea with a hint of fruit, and quite excellent.

"If you do not mind me repeating myself, where is Chariot?" Director Blackett asked again now that we were properly situated.

"How am I to know?" I asked with a shrug. "Wherever his pet AI is. Wherever he can position himself to most brutally tear out my heart?"

"Ah," he said knowingly, though he knew not at all. "You also have problems with the boy."

I laughed into my tea. "Problems does not begin to describe it." I shot the tea back, wishing very much it were alcoholic and then put my feet on his desk. "I once considered myself an upstanding holy warrior, do you know? Like the paladins of old, I was a consecrated weapon of God against the evils of this world. And then I met him."

He smiled and nodded grimly but said nothing, allowing me to continue.

"I began to feel appreciation for his strength and virtues, realized that, in many ways, he was a purer and more devout soul than I. He was willing to sacrifice anything, even himself, for his beliefs, for those he held close, even if he saw their faults and failures, he was willing to overlook them, so strong were his convictions in truth and righteousness. I believed...I believed that if I followed him, I could learn to be like him, that he would be a guiding star towards my own path to justice."

I sighed. Why was I telling him this? Of course, no sooner did I have the thought than I also had the answer. I had nobody else. I had put myself so far above all I met that I could not talk to them in earnest. The only one I regarded as a true equal was Ashton, and I could no sooner speak to him on these matters than see the back of my own head.

"But the more his light illuminated my world, the more I realized how dark and craven a world it was. I realized I did not pursue him out of any right or just cause, that I was not an infallible weapon, handcrafted by God...I was a foolish girl who saw things in a boy and loved him for it. And the more I saw how this consumed me, the uglier I became. I...I tried everything. I rejected him, I put my family and my career and my principles first, but even that just turned to wickedness within me."

He poured me another cup of tea and I thanked him.

"I began arranging meetings at every opportunity, accidental, they might seem. And where we crossed, I took him, physically, whether he desired it or not. He never complained...never rejected me...he was too good, he cared for me too much...but at the same time not enough. I...I knew it was wrong. I began...began to crave absolution. I found myself facing Exhumans head-on when I had no right to, endangering myself and others, suffering blows merely to feel the pain of the world God created as punishment for my sins."

I held my wrist, tender under my flightsuit and guns. "I mutilated and harmed myself. For a time, it worked, it pushed Ashton from my obsessed mind, but soon...I found...I was seeking the pain because it brought me closer to him. I was disgusted with myself as my absolution just became something sexual and base."

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

I shook my head. "And finally, I lost. I said to myself after yet another near-death that I had enough. I was only human, I was not on the side of God, or of right, or of justice. I cast aside all that I had and all that I was an embraced the fact that I was a failed being, but still one which loved him with my entirety. And when I was finally ready to give in, to submit to him wholly and cast aside my fears and worries and principles if only it meant I could have him...I found myself cast aside instead."

I laughed in a way which felt wrong coming out. "I have nothing. I am the most degenerate of all things on this earth, all because of my own weakness and pride."

He smiled gently at me across the desk. "Not just because of your weakness and pride my dear. Because of Chariot as well. He has an inexplicable magnetism, and I know you and I both are his victims. No matter how simple it may seem to just remove him from my life, I always find myself scheming around him. I suspect his powers may even include a minor Code-Xavier subset to this end...I see no other way he can captivate so completely as he does."

"Hmm. If that were true...it would be an enormous relief," I said, sipping tea again. I gave the director a broad smile which he returned. "However, I do not believe it. I wish it were so simple to say simply that there is a mythical element beyond my grasp which has cast me into this hell, to focus all of my failings and hate into one external thing, imagined or true, but I cannot. God created man with the capacity to choose, free will to self-determine good or evil, and even if there is a force which draws me downwards, that means only that I must work twice as hard to pull myself up."

He laughed, and I hated him for doing so. "You can't just drag yourself out of a Code-Xavier's influence. That's not how powers or minds work."

"I refuse to believe it anyway," I said simply.

"If that is so," he said, changing tack visibly, "it must be lonely and miserable with nobody to lean on, nobody to confide in, struggling for righteousness all alone. I know much about this...I've dedicated my life, like you, to protecting humanity at any cost. Surely you've heard by now from Chariot what I've tried to do here...and you have no love for the Exhuman Saga. Chariot might be a bastion of good and right, but he is also fallible and arrogant beyond reason."

He gave me a broad close-lipped smile. "I think you and I have much in common and much to gain in cooperation. And with Saga under our control, it will not be long before the scourge of Exhumanity is brought to heel and the world can prosper as it never has before."

I gave him a smile back. I appreciated the offer, truly I did, and I knew that even if I did not agree with his methods, his actions could certainly make him humanity's savior and spare the world like none other it had ever known.

"Director Blackett, I already know why I am lonely and miserable and have nobody to confide in, and that is because talks like these are too rare and too brief. They are an unpleasant and guilty indulgence, but as I just admitted, I am a craven beast and so I ask your forgiveness."

I stood and primed a grenade as I walked back to the door. He, too, rose to his feet and yelled after me from behind the desk.

"Wait! Are you seriously going to choose following him...his dark influence, his corrupting influence, which has torn and twisted you up inside as you are...you're going to choose following him even after he rejected you...over the salvation of all of humanity?"

I shrugged and sighed. "As I said...I am willing to give up everything for him. This is what I meant of that."

Director Blackett shook his head. "Everything? That's insanity. Don't do this. Humanity needs us. The world needs us."

I allowed him one more sad, empty smile as I twisted the grenade's primer. "The world needs the XPCA, but I do not believe it needs either you or me. Thank you for the tea," I said, and threw the grenade into the room behind me.

The door closed with a click and the roaring sound of an entire room going up in flames at once. I remained at the door, bracing it closed as on the other side, as something screamed and banged against it, and the heat of the door soon scalded me even through my armor, giving me a moment of white-hot bliss which filled my body with another unnatural warmth and memories and feelings of Ashton rose unbidden, even as the screaming reached an apex and the smell and sound of burning flesh filled the air.

As the man died behind me, as my flesh burned, as the smell and sound and taste of the fire and flesh filled me, I found nothing in the pain but mild arousal, warped devotion to the new god of my world, upon whose altar I had just thrown the salvation of humanity.

The fire system had activated, but the incendiary was a hellfire compound, which released enough heat and oxygen to be unquenchable under most circumstances. But the water slinging across my visor out in the hall was refreshing at least.

Before too long the door was too hot to bear and I moved away, but nothing remained to open it from within.

I was finished with Ashton's dirty work and wanted nothing so much as to go home and perhaps find that drink which Ex-Director Blackett had not offered me. Perhaps a luxurious bath to wash all of this desert off of me, or I could stop pretending to myself and bleed myself into unconscious ecstatic bliss while pulverizing my innards, imagining Ashton to be my lover and tormentor both.

The options really were limitless.

I took the elevator to the VTOL port on the surface and left without a backwards glance. Whatever I did, I needed to be far from this place as soon as I was able and never return. In the map in my mind, I burned a hole out where New Eden once stood, and filed it away as another place like San Dimas where too many black memories remained for me to ever return.

As the desert flew past under me, I reconsidered perhaps just having the bath. I had enough blood on my hands for one day.