FREAK: A Dark Medical Romance

by Loki Renard

  The Head cocks her head, unconcerned by my words. She’s arrogant. And evil. And… damn it, now I look in her face, I do see some of my features reflected there. They are much older and far more broken, but I can see the resemblance. How did I not see it before? Maybe I just didn’t want to.

  Ken and Tom are talking somewhere behind us, discussing strategy. Ken is armed, but Tom isn’t and Mary just looks like she wants to sink through the floor. Only I am focused on the Head. Only I actually care. That’s sad.

  “I am proud of you," she says, changing her tune suddenly.

  “Oh shut up. You are not.”

  “I am. It’s right that you should take my life.”

  I didn’t expect her to beg for mercy, but I also didn’t expect her not to care at all.

  “I didn’t want you to be born. That wasn’t a choice that I was given,” she says. “It was one taken from me. I know you’re angry. I know you always will be. You are what you are. I am what I am.”

  “You’re corrupt and old.”

  “I am what I need to be,” she says quite calmly. “I have been shaped by the forces of my life the same way you have. I wanted better forces for you. That is why I chose Doctor Ares for you.”

  “But you interfered. You tortured us both for some stupid defiance. You could have just left us alone and we would have been happy. So I don’t believe you. I don’t think you do anything for good reasons.”

  “I need power, Electra,” she says bluntly. “Obedience isn’t a convenience, it is a necessity. We cannot do what we do here in this facility if I do not have the absolute obedience of every agent. That includes you, and the doctor.”

  “You could have talked to us. Explained this.”

  “Perhaps. But talking has never resulted in anything useful in my life,” she says. “I have learned to take power, to crush those who resist, and to enforce my will without exception. I do not expect you to like me for that. Your loathing is natural. But I do what I must.”

  That train of thought stops me in my tracks, not because I don’t understand it, but because it makes perfect sense to me. This woman. The Head. She is what I was on my way to becoming before she gave me to Tom.

  “Holy fuck. Maybe I am like you,” I curse.

  “It is too late for me, Electra,” she says. “I cannot be rehabilitated. If you wish to kill me, you may. It makes very little difference if I am to be honest. You are the fruit of my loins, however reluctantly you were made, and you share more in common with me than you may think…”

  “Yes. I get it. We’re both evil bitches,” I hiss, hot tears starting to stream down my cheeks all over again as Tom comes over to me and wraps me in a warm hug. This holding people hostage thing is harder than I thought it would be.

  “Let’s start over,” he suggests. “Nobody has to be perfect, but let’s say nobody is kept captive. Head, if you want to make a real difference, let us go. I’ll take Electra to my home. We’ll live a domesticated life. Part of you will have escaped this endless cycle of death and blood.”

  “That’s not an option,” the Head refuses immediately.

  “Why not?”

  “Because this is where I have control. This is where I know you will be safe.”

  “Safe being lied to, kept in boxes…?”

  “You’re all alive, and you’re all unharmed,” the Head says. “I have been cruel, I admit that. But there is not a one of you who is not safer for being part of this organization.”

  She’s right. It’s not pleasant to hear, but she is right. I was not made for domestic life. Tom has educated me to understand it somewhat, but it will never be a part of me the way it is for him. That dinner we had together, I was not comfortable. I saw weapons everywhere. Potential assailants. It actually… I can barely admit this… reassured me to see the Head there, to be reminded of her control.

  “Electra, you are the best part of me,” the Head says, her eyes misting, or perhaps, merely fogging over because of ambient moisture. I’m still not convinced she has real feelings. “And I cannot set you free, because this world is not free. There are just various kinds of prison.”

  I look at Tom, to see if he thinks that is true. He gives a little shrug.

  “I suppose, philosophically, one could see the world that way,” he admits with no small amount of reluctance.

  “Do you think Electra would function in the world at large?”

  I don’t need to hear Tom answer. I already know I would not. Not only would I not, I don’t want to. The real world, the world where all the people are? That’s not for me. I’m not a civilian. I am something else, human adjacent, but not quite human all the way through.

  “I just wanted to be with him. You tried to use my love to your advantage. You treated us like animals, or pawns, or anything but people.”

  “I know,” the Head agrees. “I’m not going to lie to you and pretend that what was done was fair or kind. It was neither. It was my attempt to re-break you to my will.”

  It’s hard to maintain outrage when the person being accused of terrible things just admits them directly to you. It’s even harder to process what she is saying, that I am joined to her by a genetic legacy, and that killing her would be more than destroying my captor. It would be matricide.

  I look at Tom with a what now look. He holds me closer and begins to negotiate.

  “We will stay here,” he says. “Recent events aside, this has worked well for our family.”

  Fuck, I love hearing him say family.

  “We want down time,” he continues. “Real down time. We will live on site, but surveillance will not be allowed in our home, which you will provide. Electra will perform missions with Ken and Mary only. She will never be imprisoned again, unless she does something which I agree truly warrants it, and you will not treat us as your slaves. We’re more than that,” Tom says. “We’re family. You. Electra. Ken. Mary, and I. We are bound in ways I’m sure were never intended, but we cannot pretend they do not exist.”

  “Family,” the Head smirks darkly. “What a nonsense.”

  I can’t help but laugh at her response. It echoes my own thoughts. How can we be family? We’re secret agents working for a bloodthirsty shadow agency with its own agenda. There are only the thinnest of genetic ties linking the Head and me. Ken and Tom are brothers, but is that enough? Two points of genetic connection and a madwoman at the helm?

  I look over at the Head and I see that none of this is truly touching her. I suddenly understand the tragedy of her existence. In her fucked up way, she has been trying to save me, even though every instinct she has tells her to destroy happiness. She has been trying to set me free, though all she knows how to do is keep captives. She gives with one hand and takes away with the other, because she is a broken woman. She was shattered long ago, too long ago to be put back together.

  “You’ve been very brave,” Tom says. He’s not talking to me. He’s talking to her. “I know saying this is not easy. Being here for this must be almost impossible.”

  “Thank you, Doctor Ares, but commiserating is unnecessary,” the Head says. “I find attempts at empathy rather tedious, bordering on nauseating.”

  “Do we have an agreement?” Ken speaks up. He has been hanging back, watching proceedings with his bicolor gaze.

  “None of us will kill the other today,” the Head says. “I will allow some increased autonomy within this facility, but I will never, ever tolerate outright insubordination.”

  “And I won’t tolerate what you did to us either,” I say. “I’ll fight you with every breath I have. I won’t let this happen again. If you trick Tom into thinking he lives in the Arctic again…”

  Mary lets out a snort.

  “If you imprison me in a box again,” I say. “I’m going to take piano wire and I’m going to turn your facility into a headless ghost town.”

  “Enough with the threats, Electra,” the Head says. “I agree to a working truce. Now, untie me, before I send you all to Siberia.�
�� She looks at me and her expression softens just a fraction. “I know you will never see me as a mother, never love me as one either, just as I may never know how to love you as a daughter. But I want the best for you, in my own, very flawed way. And I am…” she pauses, as if she cannot quite process the word she wants to say. “… sorry.”

  So this is what they call a happy ending. A laying down of weapons. An admission of guilt. An attempt at love. It is not enough, but it is more than I could ever have asked for in the days when my world was nothing more than a cell. Now I am held in the arms of a man who loves me beyond all understanding, whose care has freed me from the miserable purgatory the Head lives in.

  She gave me all she could. Her gifts were flawed and delivered with alternating cruelty and care, but what I do with it now, is up to me and Tom, the man who offers me real connection and love. He is my present, my future, my everything. In his arms, I feel the walls of the emotional prison I was living in unfolding like the petals of a lotus flower.

  We may die tomorrow, but he is my happily ever after.

  Epilogue

  Tom

  It’s another day in Paradise.

  I stand on the barrier overlooking the pit, watching Electra train. I am not alone. The Head is standing by my side. She is much shorter than I am, but her presence is far larger. This, I suppose, is the closest thing we’re going to get to family time.

  “Look, mom!” Electra calls out. “No teeth!”

  The agent she’s just facially decimated drools blood as he is carried away to the medical bay. I’d be more concerned about his physical state if I didn’t know why he’d been put in the ring. Apparently, he thought it was acceptable to pick on female agents and take sexual advantage. Electra is being used as a form of natural justice in this case. She doesn’t mind one bit.

  “Your daughter is a handful.”

  The Head smiles at me, her steel eyes glittering. From time to time, I wonder if she truly was testing me when she propositioned me in her false Arctic, or if there is some desire in that woman’s indomitable loins for a man of her own. If there is, all sign of lust has been wiped from her being. She is back to being the self-contained ice queen.

  “She is,” the Head agrees.

  Sometimes this feels so natural I almost expect her to ask me to call her mom. Then I remember that she still hasn’t graced us with her first name. This is as formal an arrangement as is humanly possible, so formal it is effectively inhuman, but I am beginning to become comfortable with it. Or maybe it is just that I accept the lies, the danger, the very real chance of losing the woman I love more than anything, as well as the presence of the Head, who is still as unpredictable and untrustworthy as ever.

  She continues to use Electra in ways which are utterly incompatible with her becoming more civilized. But I keep bringing Electra closer to the world beyond, even if she doesn’t know it.

  She’s learned to read. She no longer cowers away from television. She likes cooking shows, and, inexplicably, home renovation shows, which just goes to show that having an opinion on putting in new granite counter tops is some kind of universal human urge.

  The Head works her work, and I work mine. Much as we might try to form her in our respective images, Electra is ultimately, absolutely and unashamedly herself, and for that I love and adore her.

  “So, do we get that leave? Twenty four hours on the mean streets of the city?” Electra asks, her smile broad and a little bloody.

  “Streets which only get meaner when you’re there? Yes,” the Head says. “I’ll not send any extraction squads to bring you back until tomorrow twelve o’clock.”

  Electra beams at me with excitement. She considers a day pass the ultimate freedom. She doesn’t have any idea what it means to be truly free, to never have to answer to anybody besides, occasionally, the state when they want their taxes. Her freedom is my prison. I never thought I could conduct a relationship in this environment, but for Electra, I make it work.

  “You need a shower,” I tell her when we get back to our apartment, which is still located on the fourth floor. “You’ve got blood all over you.”

  She shrugs, but she does as she’s told, stripping her training clothes off and leaving them for me to pick up. Apparently, that’s one element of civilization she isn’t quite able to grasp - or doesn’t want to. I do the honors instead, dropping her discarded clothing into the laundry hamper next to what I now also call the watching machine.

  Electra allows herself to be strange with me in private, letting all her little institutionalized oddities show, but later, we’ll walk hand and hand down by the canal. I’ll buy her flowers, and stop her from pushing a passerby into the water. We’ll laugh, drink wine, and make love, and for a little while, things will almost feel normal.

  “Tom!” Electra pokes her head out of the shower. Water drains from her curls and pools on the floor where she has not put a bath mat down.

  “What is it?” I inquire.

  “Do you still love me?”

  She asks me that question every day. And every day, my answer is the same.

  “I love you always.”

  Her smile lights up my heart. “I think you’re going to say no, one day.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Because, Mary told me that you have a house, like, in the suburbs.”

  “I used to. I sold it.”

  There’s no need for me to keep ties with the civilian world. The Head hasn’t managed to take me to the Arctic, but my love for Electra has moved me outside the realm of the common man and woman forever.

  “Did you have to sell it because of me?” Her question is shrewd.

  “I sold it because I don’t need it anymore.”

  She wrinkles her nose as the puddle outside the shower becomes a full grown pool. “I never got to see it.”

  “I guess you didn’t.”

  Electra gives me a sad look and retreats back into the shower. I know better than to let her go. I know sometimes she forgets what it is to be loved, and needs to be reminded.

  Sure enough, when I pull the curtain back, she is curled up on the floor of the shower, giving into the swings of mood which are the natural result of so much change happening in such a short period.

  Electra was not designed to love or be loved, but she craves both those things. I have learned a lot from her, discovered what is truly essentially human, what can never be removed no matter the harshness of the treatment, or the alienation of the soul.

  “Sweetheart, what’s wrong?”

  “I’ve ruined your life,” she sobs into her hands.

  I step into the shower and crouch down next to her, drawing her into a warm, wet embrace. It doesn’t matter that my clothes are soaked, or that the floor is going to be sodden. Nothing matters other than the woman in my arms.

  “You,” I say firmly. “Have not ruined a thing,”

  “You used to have a nice house. Now you live here, with me.”

  “I came to this place of my own accord before I met you,” I tell her. “I chose to work with you. I chose to sell my house. I’ve chosen you, Electra. And I always will.”

  “Why is this so hard?” She looks up at me, her eyes filled with hope and misery at the same time.

  “Love is hard,” I tell her. “Believing in love isn’t easy. But you don’t have to worry. I’m going to be right here, every day, telling you so you don’t have to remember.”

  “Promise?”

  I pull her into my arms and kiss her so thoroughly neither one of us can breathe before replying in a deep, passionate growl which leaves no room for misinterpretation. “I promise.”

  Why Thank You

  Thanks for reading!

  Did you know Ken and Mary have their own story? It’s called SCAR, and you can read it right now, free in KU.

  SCAR: A Dark Military Romance

  Or keep reading and enjoy the first chapter of their story right now :)

  Scar

  KE
N

  The first line of defense is a receptionist. Blonde. Pretty. Vacant behind the eyes.

  “Get out of here. Go home.”

  Her smile wavers. Her hand moves toward the phone.

  “No. Seriously. Get your bag. Go home.”

  She looks at me, her soft civilian brain struggling to comprehend what’s happening. A tall man in a nice suit is telling her to leave her place of work in the middle of the morning and go home. She knows she should stay, but her hand is already reaching for her purse.

  She’s conditioned to stay at work until 5 pm, but she’s also programmed with a deeper instinct, and that’s to avoid angering unknown males in their prime. We’re all animals. I’m more animal than most.

  “Good girl.”

  She gives me a nervous smile as she leaves the building. She’s probably as complicit as the rest of them, but I don’t like killing women if I don’t have to.

  They don't have security on the lower floors. Security down here would imply that there’s something to guard. The resistance will come once I get up the first set of stairs.

  She is up there. Waiting for me.

  The moment they gave me her details, I folded her picture and put it in the pocket closest to my heart. I’m going to get her back from these monsters if it kills me.

  I walk through the lobby and into the hospital proper. Down here it feels like a nice place, the perfect spot to come if you want to do a bit of plastic surgery tourism.

  “Guten morgen,” a blond man greets me from a desk inside the door. I can see other staff moving around the place. They’re all blonde. If not by genetics, by bleach.