Memento Mori

It was a long list of expectations that Margaux had drafted for herself mentally on Death Bunny’s particular reaction to what she would have to say. Disgust, revulsion, and utter rejection ranked rather high. They were slightly below the likelihood that the Dread would simply reach over and grasp her fingers around the Frenchwoman’s dainty neck, letting that be the end of things as she sunk away into the darkness to never be heard from again. Annoyance was another possibility. Margaux could have equally expected to be outright ignored. That had happened more times than she could count on every hand under employ, though she was distinctly less confident in her ability to run the Reaper through the instant she turned her back. So many possibilities, so much anticipation.

Never once could she honestly expect humility of all things to flow forth from the woman cloaked in dark and disdain. Margaux raised an eyebrow, breaking her moment of composure to fully open herself to the revenant. Her tone was oddly tender, sincere. Margaux could tell it was not a trick. Legends of Death Bunny’s exploits had long dwelled in her mind of a creature in the night that ate men whole. Tore bodies asunder and left stains of red splattered on the midnight walls. The oddly honorable and singularly humble individual across from her seemed far removed from those stories told to her in hushed rooms and quiet corners. The longer they spoke, the better of a picture she was able to piece together of the shapeless thing sat across from her, nursing her dear Robespierre back to health.

That tenderness came and went, of course. It could never last with women like them. It was an oddly refreshing experience all-in-all. Margaux held her shoulders with a shiver rippling through her. She loved the contempt in her voice. It had been so long since she’d had the chance to hear her title said in anything other than a broken accent. Death Bunny’s French was remarkably well-composed. She let out a slow sigh. “Time will simply have to tell then, my dearest Reaper. I find every mistake laced with a line of opportunity. Every defeat, a victory, as you might agree."

“Lioness. Queen of the Night. Titles I have all claimed at some point or another. But you, ma chère fleur Alice, have been lost in this land for far longer than perhaps even you have come to realize. This curious land of mystery has tamed you, and you have given into this insanity. Fitting, no, zat you are ultimately consumed by it? Zat would ze point forthcoming, Madame Death. I possessed but a single fear when contemplating my first step into Friction. But...now that I see that shadow at my back was little more than a...trick of the light...well...” A Cheshire cat’s smirk befell the Frenchwoman’s lips as she stood from the bench. When she turned to look down at the Reaper, it was with an almost childlike gaiety. Her hand came to her throat, slashing a line to the neck beneath that innocent smile. “How does she say it...off with your head?”

A quiet cackle slipped from between her pristine canines.

“Get out here!” The woman threw her head back and roared. The sound of rushing feet echoed into the hall, two sets of feet closing in and puncturing the relative silence encircling the two women on their lonely bench. Two men hurried in from around the corner of the side halls. At a first glance, they may have been mistaken for businessmen, or bartenders from an up-scale establishment dressed in white undershirts beneath their black vests and matching ties. It would seem as though the French mobster had picked them out from behind her favorite counter and stuck a heavy wrench in their hands. Tools they’d clearly grabbed in a hurry.

“KILL HER!” She yelled and pointed at the tall woman holding a bear. The man from Margaux’s side rushed by her without a second thought, scraping his handheld steel across the floor as he ran. “KILL THAT WOMAN!”

As the man rushed at the Grim Reaper from the wraith’s right, another would take the blind spot on her left. They raised their bats high and threw them down in perfect sync, moving swiftly to crack the hare’s battle-hardened cranium with relentless blunt steel. Their knuckles turned white in the effort, ear-shattering yells accompanied their haste. Behind the pitch black of their outdated shades, the foreboding terror and desperation lingering in each bloodshot pupil remained concealed. It had to be. In service to their Madame, no force on Heaven or Earth could stay their feet. Death came for everyone. Perhaps that was the reason for the eerily content grin on Margaux’s face.

What picture will your death paint, Madame Death?

How seamless would it be. To allow the natural course of events to transpire as presented. Death witnessing it all unfold within the lifeless void of the equally barren eyes from the stuffed ursine within her hands. Margaux's words becoming nigh incomprehensible as if warbled from the sound distorting depths of an ocean blue, from within which Death had felt herself spiritually entrenched. Anchored down where no spectrum of light could ever reach and time progressed at a lethargic pace. The dominoes falling all around her as Margaux revealed herself to be the verminous snake Death expected her to be, but whom she allowed to bite her anyway. Calling for her life's thread to be cut with her tools being the henchman barreling towards her from both sides. The ones D.B. had taken notice of earlier on but did nothing to safeguard herself against. Everyone's story reaches it's bookend eventually. The anti-climactic conclusion she'd previously alluded to having in fact been in reference to herself, not Margaux. Perhaps she was the one Fate is calling on to be Death's ultimate destruction. The one to impale her through, kicking her off that cliff into the abyss below. Whereupon a new blight would take the mantle of the previous...

Death was in a plain of flowers now. Witnessing a meadow wafting with the wind's breeze, and within her gaze was a sole figure knelt upon one such rolling hill. The silken dress and flowing hair of the revealed upon young girl flowed along with the gentle gusts and all complimented the immaculate scenery along with the cloudless skyline. Picturesque in it's presentation...until closer inspection revealed her head tilted downward where her attention was centered naught on the beauteous fields around her, but what was held within her hands. A dead rabbit gutted with it's crimson, pulpy entrails strewn about and staining the young one's dress where a sanguine splotch tainted it's purity. Whatever expression she had upon her face mirrored the vacant soullessness of Death. Looking towards Robespierre with the same dead-eyed fixation now having been brought back to the point in time where faint footsteps could overheard from both sides of her. Only now, where she once slumped with calm leisure...an intensified tension hardened her posture. Passing clouds blotting out the sun's rays from the window with the fluorescent lighting beginning to flicker spastically. Whispered words being uttered under her breathe seconds before their presented weaponry would come within striking distance.



The pitch black crow from earlier shattered through the glass fixture with a sudden accompaniment of several squawking others, flying forward with feathers fluttering about and overall generating a scene of mass chaos that caused the hit-men to hesitate and impede their ordered assault. Suddenly gawking in fear and covering their heads when the flickering lights began dying down to only show brief glimpses of what was unraveling within the hallway. One of Margaux's henchman final sights being Death before she'd thrust her flattened palm square against his face in a cracking compression of his nose that had him hurtling backward with his face bloodied and the bat he had in his hand being swiped out by The Grim One. His partner in crime witnessing Death from afar and taking a swat at her from behind only for the lights to black out again at the moment of his swing, their illumination revealing he had indeed swung at nothing. His intended target somehow standing behind him with a cocked swinging posture before thwacking her bat into the back of his knee, crumpling him down to the floor on his knees in agony. Whatever pained wails he'd growl being muffled out from Death clamping onto the back of his head and ramming it straight through the adjoining wall beside them. The lights dying out once again...

...but coming back on permanently to reveal Death still sitting where she was, but the remnants of the barbaric scuffle strewn all around her with no signs of the crows aside from scattered feathers and shattered glass. One hitman splayed out on the floor gurgling haggardly with the other's head still thrust through the wall and who was overall inert and lifeless. Death eerily raising her head to a centered fixation on Margaux. Robespierre being settled onto the bench as D.B. quietly arose, an inferno lit aflame in her eyes as she trudged towards the Frenchwoman. "...Like I said...very intriguing. You only get one chance to kill a king, and you just fucking missed..."  Death stood before Marg with hands at her side and clawed. "You should know what the price to pay for that is. However...I respect ambition. It appears we owe each-other an obligation. For us to meet again, shelve the niceties for one night, and let one inner demon meet another. If you want my head on a platter, than I cordially invite you to rend it with thine own hands. A parting gift, from me to you. Because what you will be giving me is an opportunity to cake these hands in blood once more, drag La Bête du Mende down into the fiery black pits, and prove all your presumptuous pontificating to be utter bullshit. On that...I promise...not to disappoint you..." Seething madness being the parting message as D.B. backpedaled one step at a time to the bench behind her while leaving Robespierre sitting in the middle. Suddenly a random stagehand carrying boxes would pass between them with The Reaper disappearing from sight once he passed by. Time seemingly progressing uninhibited now as the hallway became robust with life once again. The henchman and all signs of chaos being nowhere to be seen...their fates...being easy to determine.