Success?

The late Tara Claire Fitzpatrick had, in life, been a quiet, polite young woman with a soft smile and a generous heart.

Currently, she remained more silent than ever, her lips forming less of a smile and more a slack-jawed gape, and her once generous heart was lying, discarded, on the floor as small hands worked to clamp arteries on to metallic valves.

Her brother Donegal was right. It hadn’t been safe for an unmarried woman to live alone in the city. Though it’s doubtful even he would have suspected the pigtailed girl with the shy smile of being a miniature murderess. He, like Tara, would have been charmed by her eagerness to please and her interest in learning the sign language they’d both grown up with, having been raised by their teaching parents, one hearing, one not, in a school for the deaf. He also would have been touched by the smoked spectacles she wore, assuming her to be of diminished sight, and would have answered with the same patience and kindness shown by his sister when little Wren asked question after question about the hand gestures they made when translating for a deaf patron. He would have felt the same desire to comfort the seemingly lonely girl who had few friends her own age to be seen. No, Donegal Fitzpatrick might have warned his sister against handsome cads and beggars on the streets, but he would never have discouraged a bond with the well mannered little girl who seemed to want only to learn and to please.

The well mannered girl, who was busy learning how to replace a cardio pulmonary system with a gas powered heart and pump, and to disable an oxygen deprived hypothalamus in favor of an adjustable thermostat attached to said pump.

Tara lied on the laboratory table with the same patience she’d always shown with the little girl, helped along by the timeless quality of death, as little Wren lit her pilot light, and adjusted the lever which would begin her gaslamp heart whirring. She stared, unseeing, to the ceiling as Wren neatly sewed up her gaping chest, and the largish hole drilled into the back of her head, which would blessedly, be covered by her hair and hats.

It wasn’t until Wren had her neatly closed and cleaned that the child, with a grimace and a gulp, pushed a syringe into her own little arm, drew out the glowing green fluid which filled her veins, and injected it into the woman’s. That was when all the patient waiting came to an abrupt, and very loud end.

The formerly late Miss Fitzpatrick lurched into a sit with an animalistic rasp as she drew her first reanimated breath. She howled with the pain of cells reawakening and synapses sparking to life. With an awkward lunge she tried to move toward the little girl with the shining scalpel, but her deadened limbs were little under her control and the result of her efforts was a graceless crash to the floor, where she managed to awkwardly push herself into a corner.

She cowered in that corner for hours as the pain slowly faded to a background ache in her dulled mind. There was no recognition for the child who hovered anxiously by with tearful apologies and protestations of love. After a time, the feral woman turned from the weeping child, to stare into the warming fire. She remained there, still as stone, and still as stone she would remain until someone came along to move here.. and then she would attack.