Your Darling Sister (Has No Lips To Tell You) [Wolfina, Eliane]

Eliane had failed to return with Netta. She had failed to return at all. What a suboptimal performance. Wolfina had known from the instant that she had reawakened that something was not right with this version of her darling sister. Maybe Claudia had too, which was why she had been sent here alone to oversee the mission with extra security precautions.

Arlette was the reason for their failure, Wolfina knew that much. That was why she had gone to ground and waited for an opportunity to strike back. Listening in on secure communication channels, and hacking into secure networks, it was all rather mundane to her and yet it still irked her having to wait whilst her true sister remained in captivity. It was a slow, methodical process and one that suited her perfectly. She was the planner, the organiser, and the strategist of the team. A team of one, now, she supposed as she reviewed her inventory one last time.

Arlette's compound was too secure for a solo infiltration, she would have to draw her out of hiding by some other means. Antonetta was being held in a holding cell buried beneath a hornet's nest of Vandenreich operatives after that botched rescue attempt. But there was chatter on the network about another Ovide sibling that appeared to suggest that Eliane too was being held captive. However, she was being treated a little differently compared to her sisters as far as Wolfina could tell. It did not sit well with her that she would have to rescue Eliane first, but together the chances of overall mission success increased drastically.

It took a while to track her down and work out where exactly she was being held, even more time to investigate the soldiers that were assigned to her guard detail. Then it was a simple matter of tracking those guards until an opportunity presented itself. It was one officer's birthday, so most of the detail was going to be out celebrating and the graveyard shift was going to be made up of a few agents running double shifts on the same day. That was all the chance that she would need.

Tengerou-hime was already sated by the time she made it to the room where Eliane was, a trail of bodies left in her wake as Wolfina carved a bloody but efficient path straight through the building. The lower half of her face was hidden behind a mask, burning purple eyes scanning the interior of the chamber for a moment before she kicked down the door with a single brutal crunch. The gears whirred as an autotuned, yet eerily motherly voice spat out her message from behind that guard.

"Are you still operational, Eliane? If not then Wolfina will terminate you to prevent further suffering."

Maybe, when something like this happened, Eliane should have done more than just sigh to herself. This was the sort of thing that would have been a prime opportunity for her once upon a time. And if she were anyone else, she probably would have been upset she was stuck in a cell, unable to actually help the people dying for her sake. But here she was, and so when the door was kicked open, Eliane could only rest her elbow on the table she was sitting at, her chin atop her hand as she looked to her sister with a smile that wasn't quite her usual. It was more reserved, more...typical.

Perhaps the most disarming thing about it was that it seemed so genuine.

"Preventing suffering? Shouldn't that be my job, Wolfina, when I'm the big sister?"

As she stood up from her seat, Eliane thought about what had brought them to this situation. Unlike Arlette, she'd actually been thinking about how to do something like this for a long time, and she'd had a plan in mind for whenever she was ready. But Arlette had just done it, and she'd probably thought she was doing the right thing. That idiot.

"I'm not exactly in tip top shape, you know, but I'm feeling better than I ever have. What about you? Keeping busy?"

There was a faint sense of disgust that rippled through Eliane as she spoke. She hated it. Hated that, when all the chips were down, when she had to speak to her own sister with all this tension, she couldn't just be serious. It was how she'd been made, to needle and make people unhappy. In a way, it seemed like that'd worked out a little too well, if she was even making herself unhappy.

"It should, but here I am nonetheless."

Wolfina's eyes locked upon Eliane with an intensity that was typical for her, taking in the sight of her sister in this state. It was immediately apparent that something had happened since she had last seen her, from the way that she was speaking to the way that she now carried herself. It was like she was a different person, though that could not be right as they were not truly people. That smile alone would have been enough to furrow her brow, as her grip on her weapon tightened.

"Let's relocate. This area is not secure. Then you can debrief me on what happened to Antonetta."

Eliane was certainly telling the truth about one thing, she was not in her best condition. If these cryptic responses persisted then she would have no choice but to incapacitate her and go back underground to wait for another chance to rescue her other sister. She would have preferred to have the drop on her in such a situation, but, in the absence of that, she was still confident in her other abilities to give her an edge.

"Yeah, I guess it's not if you broke in so easy, huh. Then again, I doubt they were ready. You always have been the most dangerous one when you're in a mood."

Well, ostensibly so, anyway. Eliane didn't know how much Wolfina kept hidden under the surface, but she knew that she hid a lot on her own end. She practiced alone, studied alone. She didn't really care about the idea of security or anything like that. Being understood was just something Eliane found deeply distressing, unsettling.

"Just for you, since you're my precious little sister, I'll stop wasting your time and tell you the truth. I'm not here because I have to be. I brought more intel than I could carry here, and I don't plan to leave."

Rolling her neck to loosen up, knowing this was probably going to end in violence, Eliane just maintained her calm demeanor. She didn't actually want it to go that way. She hadn't wanted any of this to go this way.

"I'm not planning to spend my life being a tool for her. I don't want that for you, either."

They did not have the time for this, every second that was wasted increased the likelihood of a squadron of Vandenreich soldiers arriving to investigate. Wolfina had only been able to do so much to knock out communications, it would still eventually raise some alarms.

"I see. You have sided with Arlette then. How illogical."

The break-in had been far from easy, even with all the work that Wolfina had put into scouting out the guard routines and mannerisms she had still been forced to truly exert herself to deal with them in a timely manner. To say that she was tired would mean that she was truly capable of such, but enough energy had been exerted that she had no desire to mince words. Dropping into a combat stance, her grip on her dagger shifted as she prepared to engage. She would never admit it, but she envied her sisters for their schemes and plots. All she really knew was violence.

"We will always be tools. You are just defective."

Darting forwards with a sudden burst of speed, she rushed Eliane head-on and intended to simply tackle her and smash them both through the wall behind her. That would likely not be able to knock the wind out of her sails, but even despite her words Wolfina seemed to be subconsciously refraining from bringing her weapon to bear offensively and retained it only to defend herself should any strikes be thrown her way. Was it the idea that she too held no love for their progenitor, or mercy to spare her sister from the wolf's maw? Her ideals were yet to be so tested.

"We're all defective. That doesn't mean anything."

Eliane knew that Wolfina was the one with the advantage here. Sure, she'd had to deal with all those Vandenreich, but she was still in actual good shape. Wasn't still dealing with getting stitched back together, and to top it all off, she had more than one weapon. This was going to be an uphill battle, but hey, wasn't that the case with everything in their lives?

If nothing else, she could see the knife wasn't aimed right at her just yet. Eliane simply accepted the tackle, feeling a few of her less well-healed cuts opening here and there as blood began to seep out. Great. Well, if nothing else, it was good that Wolfina had tried to take her to ground. Eliane was a woman who relished the pain of others, whose greatest joy, whether she liked it or not, was in causing other people to suffer. It was only natural that, when it came to a fight, she'd be at her best up close and personal.

Her hand immediately moved to Wolfina's wrist, not wanting to let that dagger get anywhere near her. Her grip strength was impressive, certainly, but her aim wasn't just to grab the woman's arm. She was fully prepared to snap it in two, and rather than attempt to get out of this entanglement, Eliane's legs wrapped around Wolfina, a constriction to keep the two of them as close together as possible. At the very same time, she simply slammed her forehead forward into Wolfina's own, a move she'd put to use in countless bouts before. She knew well what part of the skull could take a hit, and what part couldn't.

"You wanna live like a tool, Wolfina? Just doing what you're told? You're smarter than that."

This was hardly the first time that the two sisters had fought. All four of them had been forced to train against each other endlessly, as they all quickly became far too dangerous for normal fighters to spar effectively with and it was much more efficient for them to simply brawl amongst themselves. That wasn't to say that Wolfina knew exactly how Eliane would fight, but they both loved to get right up close and stay there until they were the last one standing. She had initiated with the wall-smashing takedown, but there was no particular escape attempt as Eliane wrapped her legs around her and kept them intimate.

"So that is your excuse. What did you do to yourself?"

It was left unclear if that question was targeted at her altered and repaired physiology or the other Eliane that Wolfina had travelled here with and was a far cry from the one she was staring down with daggers for eyes. Her other dagger, though, was held in place as a hand grabbed ahold of the wrist. Unlike the legs, there was resistance here as Wolfina laboured to wrench her arm backwards whilst the joint was slowly being crushed by that impressive force that both of them shared. They were quite evenly matched in that regard, so the struggle continued whilst Eliane's head collided with her own. It was a savage blow, and one that she would give credit for, but her lower face was supported by the collar and muzzle so the shock was quite well dampened and the younger sister was left with her brow bloodied.

"I am a good soldier, not a deserter. My intellect is irrelevant."

She hissed that last remark through the filter, her disdain for Eliane's newfound humanity all but written across those eyes as she rolled her head back and returned the favour with a bash of her own. Her other arm pulled back before punching down to hammer into the woman's gut, prepared to deal blow after blow to this area. If nothing else, she would content herself with going through Eliane rather than around her.

The knife was the most dangerous thing in this fight, Eliane knew that. Her focus was arguably more on the blade in Wolfina's hand than it was on Wolfina herself, but that didn't mean the woman was ignoring her sister. After all, she was going through all this trouble specifically for the sake of her sisters.

"I didn't like her always handing me a new body. So I made one myself. Like it?"

Of course, it had been one hell of an undertaking to do that, and Eliane didn't want any of her sisters to experience that. She was the sort of person who could handle something so dreadful, but that didn't make it any easier on the mind. Wolfina's forehead slammed into Eliane's face pretty impressively, and between that and the fist in her gut, more of her relatively fresh wounds continued to open up here and there. But even through that, she never lost her typical smile.

"Is that all you are? Just a good soldier? I don't think Antonetta would agree with that, you know. Don't sell yourself short."

Eliane knew that her own opinion, and Arlette's for that matter, probably didn't much matter to Wolfina right now. Better to use the one sister that was naturally closer to her.

“It was you that revelled in your own destruction, not mother. She could have simply stopped giving you bodies but she didn’t.”

Of course, Claudia’s motivations for keeping Eliane around were far from benevolent. Wolfina knew that just as well as the others, but it didn’t make the statement any less true. If she had wanted to no longer have Eliane around then it could have easily been done, but there was a value in such an unhinged tool that even Wolfina could not overlook. There was a reason she had come here rather than focusing her efforts on Antonetta alone.

“If you continue to resist then I will be forced to break this precious new body of yours and end this charade.”

She could imagine well the hardships that their consciousness must have endured to arrive in such a state, but that only seemed to irritate the younger sister more as the pair continued to struggle on the floor. Her grip upon her weapon was slowly being worn down, that hand crushing her wrist with impressive force, but her other arm coiled back again as she was all but ready to deliver another gut punch. Eliane’s final little comment drew a momentary pause from the raging wolf, though. It was hardly long enough for her to leave herself open to a surprise attack, but to someone as perceptive as a Ovide then there was a clear moment where the mention of Antonetta paused the rampage.

“It is all I need to be. Netta understood that far better than you or Arlette.”

Again her balled fist came crashing down onto the other woman’s stomach as the battle for dominance continued.

"Of course she didn't. She'd never have it in her to throw me away. Which of us do you think is the most like her?"

There was an undeniable venom in Eliane's voice that unquestionably evoked the same way that their 'mother' spoke. Not that Eliane had ever considered Claudia a mother, and she supposed that, in itself, was one of the greatest divides between the two generations of clones that had been made in that woman's image. She and Arlette had always been made to simply be her left and right hand, extensions of her will. But Antonetta and Wolfina had been treated as if they were her children, allowed to think of the whole situation as a family.

Even Eliane thought that was a little needlessly cruel.

"Then why is she doing just fine here? Sure, she's still being held, but she's alive. She's not any less happy than she has been ever since Arlette decided to pull her little stunt. She's not just a tool, so why are you so content to be one?"

It wasn't likely that Eliane could simply win a battle of sheer physical might, but on the flip side, Wolfina wasn't exactly known to hold back. She was easy to goad, and that was the kind of person Eliane did best with. As the next blow made its impact, Eliane tightened her vicegrip, her legs wrapped around her sister constricting as her hold on the woman's other wrist tightened tremendously, likely one good twist from snapping it like a twig. If she pulled back the fist again, it'd be fairly easy to just crush her even more.

"Come on, let's talk for once, just you and me. We don't do that much, do we?"