Final Truth

Chapter 72: The Death of a Beast

Peter's point of view:

I can see Julia coming through the wall before she's even truly appeared, the air on the far side of the room shimmering and obscuring the surrounding shapes and colors before she fully materializes, alive and solid before me.

Well, alive in the physical sense, I suppose. Her face, however, looks haunted and hollow, and her vulnerabilities are on full display for me expose.

"Come to try to convince me to be good again?" I begin, my first strike against her feeble strength.

She's no better than glass, and if I can keep landing verbal blows, she'll likely shatter without even putting up a fight.

"Because that worked out so well the last hundred times I tried?" She asks, and I think she's going for sarcasm, but her crippled posture and empty voice would only suggest that of defeat.

It's a stark shift in character from the last few times when she saw me like this, when she was marred more by anger than sadness, when she was ready to force the old Peter out of me at any cost.

Now, however, she just stands against the wall, the only defining thing about her is that she refuses to meet my eyes.

People only do that when they have something to hide.

I walk toward Julia, wary of her steely silence and unwillingness to do anything to stop me, for as much as I loathe to admit it, she's infinitely more powerful than I am. She could kill me where I stand in a nanosecond, nothing and no one to stop her. The question is in whether she has the will to do so.

"Why so quiet?" I push, almost daring her to strike out as I stitch malice into my tone.

She still won't look at me, and it's becoming infuriating as well as confusing. I'm only a few feet away from her at this point and she still hasn't moved.

"Do something, say something, you imbecilic weakling," I hiss at her.

"You don't have to make your voice sound like that. I'm not afraid of you," Julia responds.

"You should be," I retort, so close to her now that I can feel that urge to cause her hurt grow into something painful to suppress. And it would be easy to do it here, for it's clear now that she has no intention of doing anything, of trying to stop me, of-

"No, it's you who should be afraid of me," Julia says, and she finally looks up at me, eye to eye, nothing to hide now, before she quickly vanishes again.

I let out a growl of vehement frustration and strike the wall where she stood, causing the bones in my hand to crack and the skin above them to weep rivulets of scarlet.

Julia reappears behind me a good distance away, and I have to physically restrain myself from going after her in a furious rampage with the knowledge that she would just disappear again.

I won't be played with like that.

At least she's now given me access to her thoughts, her memories, and I watch them all flash before my eyes like films: her horrific tests, her triumph over them, her friends' return, and Henley's death.

An odd sort of weight leaves my shoulders at Julia's memory of Henley lifelessly sprawled on the ground, a relief at knowing my torturer has dueled out her own punishment.

"So she's gone?" I ask, surprising myself with the quietness of my voice.

"Yes. Henley won't cause you pain any longer," she responds, talking to me as if I were a rescued animal.