Chapter Text
The game of cat and mouse is a story everyone believes they’re familiar with. Here, the cat must assume the role of the vicious predator, and the mouse; a scampering target.
What fewer realize is that the mouse can bite back, and the cat may want to be bit.
What none can predict is that the cat can be the mouse and the mouse can be the cat.
He chuckles. "You're good at dodging," Jabber admits. "But it's getting fuckin' boring, start fighting back!" He shouts, immediately lunging towards you again, metal claws aimed directly forward.
Your eyes widen in split fear- he’s going to get me this time! You jump to the side, nearly knocking yourself into a giant stalagmite. He snarls in frustration at you jumping out of his way- a millisecond before his sharp claws broke skin. ‘Too close, way too close.’ You think. He could have seriously gotten you, you would have been paralyzed, it would have been over-
He cackles. “Come on, miss cleaner, send over some of your cards!” Jabber exclaims.
You refuse to respond to his provocations, keeping your eyes focused on his next movement. Remember what happened last time, you remind yourself. Trying to converse with the enemy had only wasted your energy. Leading to your loss. But damn, this didn’t feel fair at all. Divina, your tarot cards, didn’t feel like an equal match to the poisonous talons.
Both of you stand a couple meters apart, heaving in exhaustion. How long had this sparring been going on? Felt like hours. Might be hours.
Jabber cocks his head, observing your expression. You hadn’t lacked words the last time he’d met you, so what was different about this time? He didn’t understand. He‘d been looking forward to seeing you again, and getting another chance to witness your power.
“Hey, miss dodger, why so quiet today?” he drawls out with an annoyingly belittling tone that echoed in the damp cavern. “Don’t tell me the last fight scared you silent.”
You glare as furiously as you can manage. “Fuck you,” You spit out. The response you get back is his insulting, belittling laugh.
“Not mute, I see. Thanks for letting me know.”
It seemed like nothing you did really affected him, it was like he was invincible. At least, when it came to him against you. He was this bigger, stronger, animal and you were the weaker prey.
He steps a couple feet closer to you, and you have to grit your teeth and fight everything screaming inside you to not step back. Your leg muscles twitch, wanting to maintain enough space to avoid his inevitable clawing.
He, although lanky in build, still stood intimidatingly tall in comparison to you. He smirks, noticing your hesitating stance. “Go ahead, take a couple steps back. I can tell you wanna.”
“I thought you liked strength,” you scowl, taking a couple of strides towards him out of spite. “But you refuse to pick on someone your size.”
“Hey, hey, hey," Jabber mockingly pouts at you in faux sympathy. "I'm not letting you talk down on yourself like that."
“You could have chosen to go up against Riyo, or even Enjin, but you chose the amateur.”
He flashes a confused- or better, a bemused perplexity at your words.
You’re not quite sure he registers what you just said, as you see him fiddling with the hem of his sleeve. He silently rolls up the tattered sleeve of his left arm, and points to his forearm. "You’re not as weak as you say you are,” he begins, raising an eyebrow. “Look at what you left me last time."
You follow the direction to where his pointing finger lands. Focusing your pupils in spite of the low light, you make out a deep, nasty-looking scar that stretches across the whole length of his forearm..
You had done that?
You hadn’t realized your tarot cards had sliced him that permanently. A sense of pride bloomed inside you. He wasn’t invincible after all.
When you don’t audibly respond to his comment, he speaks up again. “Aren’t you gonna ask me how I still have your mark when everywhere else on my body is fine?”
“What?” you respond, equally baffled and annoyed with his casual attitude while your heart was practically pounding at your ribs in combat adrenaline. “My mark?” It wasn’t some sick, purposeful signature of yours that you’d left him, so why was he implying it was?
But he did raise a good question, one you hadn’t bothered to think of in your glee of accomplishment. Why hadn’t a cut as superficial as one from a card not healed? You knew the raiders had some type of medical support.
He’s impatient to answer his rhetorical question himself, practically jittering in eagerness.
Freak, you think. Admittedly, you weren’t yet experienced in combats, just a couple other enemies before him, but this was the only person you had ever been forced to fight that left you feeling…. Nauseated? Repulsed? It was difficult to put into words, every negative synonym had to be used. It was the way he acted, like fighting was some type of foreplay.
Jabber had forever known that he wasn’t a very patient person, and right now he was becoming very impatient. He had lots of things to say to you, words and thoughts and maybe even feelings.
Things he wanted to tell you had all accumulated into a messy pile during your guys’ no-contact period. Well, he called it no-contact, due to the unfortunate circumstances that had prevented the two of you to meet again. You would probably disagree.
Jabber swallows in excited anticipation of your reaction. He really wanted to tell you, and invoke that look of utter disgust you wore on your face whenever he opened his mouth. Like he was human trash- “Okay, tell me.” You crossly demand, interrupting his string of thoughts.
“I asked the healer not to fix it,” he says, grinning at you with his sharp canines. “-Told them to leave my left arm alone so I could keep your mark.”
“Freak.” you respond, incredulous at his unabashed distortion of reality. “It’s not my mark like you keep trying to say.”
He’s trying to play with my mind, you think. Some type of strange mind game.
He closes the gap between you and him a bit more, practically wetting his pants at your insults. You’re too disturbed to notice his presence inching closer.
“Can I tell you a secret about the scar?” He asks with a gleeful smile.
You furrow your brows at his cryptic question. Was this a trick to keep you distracted? Well you wouldn’t fall for it. You spread your feet apart in warrior stance to prepare yourself to dodge his poisonous attacks before responding to his question.
“What is it.” You find yourself demanding again. Curiosity killed the cat.. You suppose. What type of bullshit was he going to tell you next?
He shakes his head at the ground in a knowing way, letting out a string of low laughs before responding.
“I’ve been cutting it open every night so I don’t lose your gift to me.”
It wasn’t that you were pretending not to understand him. It wasn’t that you were attempting to feign confusion. It was as if you had genuinely lost all semblance of language comprehension in that moment. You understood those words individually, but those words in that order wasn’t registering properly in your brain.
“W-what?” You ask, your voice is staggered in repulsion and fear. You had seen violence, yes- and you had experienced some first-hand. Blood, murder, loss. You had believed you’d become kind of desensitized to it.
Here you were though, on the verge of being ill.
“So you see why I need this,” Jabber says breathily, taking in your repulsion to him. “I need you to do more to me this time. Way more.” He shamelessly adjusts his pants in front of you, and you’re no fool to be oblivious to what he’s getting out of this.
“I’ve been waiting to see you,” He adds. “I’ve missed you.”
What the fuck kind of psychological trick was this? You couldn’t stand it. You were fighting to survive here, but for him, he saw it as a game? A jerk-off session?
Jabber wasn’t playing a higher-level trick. Those weeks he didn’t see you, he would stroke the cut you gave him adoringly, tracing the raised skin on his arm with a gentle finger as he thought about you.
It was the most exciting part of his day, where every night, in his cot, he would tear open the healing wound again.
Imagining it was your hands, and not his, he closed his eyes. He leaned his bare back against the wall of his small lay-space and spread his legs in a comfortable position. He lightly traced his forearm up and down with his blade, teasing himself. He wasn’t great at visualizing, but he would attempt to conjure up images of your face, and the words you’d spoken to him the first time he met you.
‘Who the fuck are you?’
‘You’re disgusting.’
‘Fuck you!’
This was the one, brief moment, asides from fighting that made him feel something. He wished you were with him in the room, and you were the one teasing him with your cards. It was just him and his mankira, though. It was a shame, that the cut you gave him was on his other arm, because that meant he couldn’t give attention to your mark and simultaneously touch himself. If you were to be with him, he’d fuck you while making you hurt him at the same time.
He took turns, edging his dick, then threatening himself with the claw on his forearm, then stroking again- until he reached the point of climax. Which was always disappointingly fast, even with Jabber’s attempt to prolong the session as best as he could. When he felt that he was on the edge of coming, he’d finally allow himself to slash open your mark on his body again, imagining your hatred-filled face- he always came so hard.
“Oh. But don’t think I’ll make it easy for you just cus I like to get beat up,” Jabber warns, grinning. “It wouldn't be fun then.”
It was all some fun game for him, and that turned your disgust to rage. Was an insignificant toy all he saw you as?
In your angered distraction, you nearly don’t see his right claw coming towards you. He aims for your left, and you manage to pull out a random card from your deck- eight of wands in reverse- the opposite of fast movement and change.
Thank you, Divina, you think. This’ll slow him down, as long as you’re able to make contact with his body and your card.
Your mind is screaming orders at you. ‘Throw the card now, cut him with the card, now!’ You listen to the internal instructions and cast the card swiftly, with no time to aim properly.
You can’t see it making contact with him, but you do see his manically fast speed slow down, and take the chance to leap backwards.
But you escape only by a hair, even with your alert timing. Jabber’s blades still comes away with part of your shirt’s fabric. You look down and see the tear, half of your torso is exposed. Shit, that really could have been your skin if you hadn’t thrust yourself back.
With some distance gained between the two of you again, you can see that the card is laying on the ground. You raise your gaze to him, and see a small red nick on his left cheek.
He has a wide smile stretched on his face and his eyes show the brilliant sclera too clearly. He eagerly touches his face with his hand, and brings his finger into view to check for blood. Nothing- it’s basically dry.
“Bruh, that’s just boring!” Jabber whines. “Am I not enough of a challenge for you right now? Why are you holdin’ back?”
You’re disoriented by his sudden accusation. Holding yourself back? What was he talking about? Couldn’t anyone see that you were clearly outmatched in this combat- both physically, and in experience?
It felt even more like an insult, insinuating your best was so terrible it couldn’t possibly be a truthful representation of your skill.
“I’ll ramp things up a bit too, so don’t disappoint me!”
The attacks were becoming relentless, he was leaping in the air, kicking up immense amounts of sediment dust- which completely obscured your vision- and then out the fog you’d see his fear-inducing shadow hurdling towards you with his whole body weight. Neurotoxins aside, his stature alone would crush you.
Everything was too fast-paced for you to try and do offence, forcing you into corners and only barely recovering by throwing defensive card after defensive card.
Jabber didn’t understand. Why were you still playing nice? Did you have some type of moral code?
You were a self-proclaimed ‘amateur’, but Jabber wanted to believe that wasn’t all there was to you. Because if that was all there was to you- some vulnerable, weak, messy, coward? He had no reason to let you live past today.
In the split moment of his distraction, you run and hide behind a curvature of the cave, to gather your Divina. You rifle through the cards, searching for something that would change the way this fight was going. The ten of swords, plus the eight of swords in combination.
Yes! This would have to work. The eight of swords trapped the victim and he ten of swords would cut. But you would have to throw and hit the target quickly in succession, and Jabber was fast.
His fiery pink eyes glowed like a feline in the dim cave, ravenous to locate where you were hiding. This was a special opportunity for him to be near you, and he didn’t want to put that time to waste.
“Hey, come out!” Jabber shouted with an amused tone. “Are we playing hide-and-seek now? You know-”
You lunge out from your hiding spot, and kick him mid-air with both your feet as hard as you possibly can. He’s pushed forwards, falling over dramatically on his stomach. While he’s wheezing from the hard ground’s impact on his ribs you throw the first card- the one that should paralyze him, like a flat dagger, aiming for the back of his exposed neck.
“I can’t move!” he exclaims in surprise. And you can’t see his face- it’s planted in the ground, but you could envision his deluded smile. Gross masochist.
“Yeah, I’d hope so.” you reply, mirroring his own smug tone moments ago.
Jabber can’t see you but his ears are ringing in pain. His ribs had definitely at broken at impact, he could feel the torturous shards internally stabbing him.
Fuck, if he could just get some poison into himself right now, but he couldn’t- you’d done something new to him. He licked the back of his teeth, and tasted a waterfall of blood pooling in his mouth. There was also something streaming from his nose- blood, he guessed. Unless it was snot.
He wanted to shift the weight off his ruined ribs, but you were keeping him trapped there on the ground like vermin. He had known you were holding back. You’d denied it but he’d known.
You approach him, and accidentally catch a glimpse of his forearm, cringing at the perverted scar.
‘I’ve been cutting it open every night so I don’t lose your gift to me.’ Being visually reminded of that moment made you feel a twisting sensation deep inside your stomach. It was disgust- but also something else.
Stepping on his back- he lets out a thrilling scream- you stand on top him. He shouts in pain, until a few second after, where he seems to tire himself out.
‘Geez, that was a quick give-up,’ you think.
You crouch on his back and pull out your final card- the ten of swords. “Even you’re not gonna be able to enjoy this.” you tell him, and bring the card close to his neck to slash it one final time.
You feel a strange, sharp pain on your own ankle.
Looking down, you see Jabber’s right claw has slashed into your ankle, dripping toxin into you.
Shit.