Title: σπίτι
Rating: M for language
Pairing/Character/s:Vase, Lucian, Elena
Summary:Vase and Lucian find a little girl of their own.
Prompt: 38. Abandoned
A/N: The summary is a lie.

Vase stops just inside the bullet-riddled door of the home, clearly picking up the sharp tang of blood, the soles of her boots already covered in it.

It is a massacre inside the house.

You've seen worse, she reminds herself as she forces her feet to move inside. She looks around at what presumably had been the lounge room, and counts three bodies – one an adult male, and the other two females.

From what she can tell of the females' corpses, they don't look older than fifteen, tops.

She starts to head towards the bedrooms, but then Lucian appears at her side out of thin air. He is wearing his usual outfit – black leather, a loose button-up white shirt , boots that look like it would hurt painfully if he decided to kick someone's ass – Vase has no doubt that he had teleported from his nightclub straight to where she is. He doesn't look at her as he strides past her.

"Go home."

It isn't a suggestion. The tone of his voice makes Vase's hackles rise defensively. Go home, he says, like she is a little girl who can't handle a bit of blood and gore. Fuck going home, Vase isn't planning on going anywhere until she gets to the bottom of the massacre.

She has an idea what happened, of course, but she wants it confirmed.

She ignores Lucian and continues on towards the bedrooms, and Lucian spins around to glare at her, a look of exasperation on his face.

"Don't make me send you home," he threatens. "I can do it in just a snap of my fingers."

And he isn't lying, either, Vase knows. One of the damn perks of being a god – literally – are the various fun powers that come with it, and one of Lucian's many abilities is teleportation.

She also knows, though, that if she pulls the right card at the right time, Lucian is likely to give in to her.

"Try that and I'll fucking castrate your horny ass," Vase growls, deciding to go for the 'aggressive bitch' card first. Lucian stiffens and his gorgeous mouth sets in a deep frown.

Damn, but only Lucian could look so severely disapproving and sexy at the same time.

"This isn't something you should see."

Ah, so he really is trying to 'protect' her. Vase scoffs; there is very little she hasn't seen, at least not in terms of carnage and death. "Don't make the mistake of thinking I'm stupid enough to not realize what this house was used for." Now it is her mouth that sets into a thin line, and Lucian wonders if his wife realizes that her hand has unconsciously strayed to the butt of her little Larceny gun in her thigh holster. "Those bastards were running a child slavery ring with a dash of prostitution on the side, weren't they?"

She'd known, the moment she'd stepped through the door and seen the state of the lounge room. It had brought back an awful rush of memories, of being beaten and locked in dark rooms for misbehaving. For a moment, she had been so overtaken by rage that all she wanted to do was pump another few rounds of lead into the man's dead body.

Lucian notices the cold, furious look in Vase's eyes and prudently decides not to push the matter further. He watches as Vase all but stomps towards the bedrooms, sighing and following her closely. If he can't send her home, then he is going to keep an eye on her at the very least.

Vase kicks open the door to the first bedroom without so much as a 'if you'd please'. Both of her guns are drawn and held steadily as her gaze flicks around the room.

The only bodies are the girls, thrown around the room carelessly.

"Goddamn bastards must have come through shooting anyone they couldn't drag away," Vase murmurs, tearing her eyes away from the bodies. "What sort of heartless jerk does this? Steal little girls from good homes and use them for profit, then discard them once they become a burden. They'd better hope I don't catch them, or I'll dissolve their balls in acid." She pauses before kicking in the next bedroom door. This room, too, holds no hope for the occupants who once stayed there. "And then I'll make them drink their dissolved balls and watch as the acid eats away at them from the inside."

Lucian winces. Vase is pissed, he can tell this much from the way she is speaking slowly and carefully, something she always does when she becomes really, truly livid.

There are four bedrooms, and when Vase turns away from the last one, her deep blue eyes are flat and cold. "I'm going to check the basement," she calls over her shoulder. "Lucian, be a dear and clean up the mess."

Lucian would, she knows, treat the poor dead girls with an amount of care. Before he can protest, she heads down the stairs, hunting for the door to the basement. By this time, her boots are caked with blood and soaked into the leather, possibly ruining any chance of salvation. By the time she gets home, she is sure that Lucian will toss it right into the trash.

When she finds the door to the basement, she notices that it is ever so slightly ajar.

Bingo.

Instead of kicking open the door this time, she nudges it open slowly and carefully. Wide, stone steps descend into darkness, and even with the light spilling into the basement from the room behind her, she can barely see more than a few feet ahead of her.

"You'll never get out of here, you know," she says conversationally, "so it'll be much easier on everyone if you'd just give yourself up."

She conveniently does not add the fact that she is just going to shoot them on sight because there is no way in hell that she will let these sick bastards get a chance at life again, not after she has seen just what cruelty they are capable of.

The only way they're leaving this house, she thinks, would be in a motherfucking body bag.

She takes a step down, and all of a sudden, there is the sound of a gun being fired, and a bullet pings off the step just by her foot. "Whoa, hang on there, you little bitch. Take one step down and we'll riddle you with new breathing airholes, got that?"

Vase's face lights up with a ferocious grin.

"My my, I didn't know we still had rats running around," she remarks casually. "Or is it just one rat left?" She takes another step down and a second warning bullet pings near her arm.

She doesn't even blink.

"Drop both your guns and put your hands where we can see them."

"Or what, you'll shoot at me with your little toy gun?" Vase scoffs. "Sorry, but you've missed me twice already, that didn't give me a very good impression of your sniping prowess."

Another step down.

"I'm serious!" The voice sounds shrill and panicky now. "I-If you come any closer, I'll shoot the girl too!"

Vase pauses, wishing that there is enough light for her to more accurately pinpoint the direction the slimeball is in. In that one heartbeat of silence, she hears a very faint sound, as if someone is trying their best not to cry, but isn't quite succeeding.

"Let the girl go," she demands. Her grip on her guns tighten. Just one chance…all she needs is one clear shot, and she can take down this sorry piece of shit and send him on a one-way street to hell.

There is a pause; the atmosphere in the basement changes abruptly, becoming chillier and edgier. It is almost as if the air around them is gaining an almost tangible form of menace.

Vase sighs.

With a pop of displaced air, Lucian materializes in the basement, looking extremely pissed off. Gathering up the bodies of the innocent victims for a proper burial had probably upset him a little, Vase thinks, and an upset god isn't someone to be crossed with. He throws out an arm in front of him and an invisible barrier of compressed energy blasts outwards, causing prickles of pain all over Vase's body even though she is behind Lucian and well away from the compressed energy.

"Jesus Christ, what if you kill the girl too?" Vase yells at him, but her voice is lost in a resounding crash as the far wall of the basement crumbles from the force. She starts forward.

"I'm not exactly stupid," Lucian scowls. "I threw up a shield around her when I vaporized the slimeball. She's fine."

True to his word, when the dust settles, Vase can see a small figure huddled in the middle of what was once the basement, now largely reduced to dust and broken brick. She checks around anyway – there is no sign of anyone else, so it looked like Lucian had indeed vaporized the bastard completely. Perhaps it was better that way, she considers as she puts her guns away. Once Lucian vaporized someone with those powers of his, they didn't even get the chance to go to hell and aim for resurrection into immortality – it was straight to oblivion.

"You're safe now," Vase says after a while, not really knowing how to soften her voice so she sounds less scary. "What's your name? We're gonna get you home to your parents, okay?"

"My parents are dead," the girl says after a while. "They were killed when…"

Her voice cracks at this point, and Vase gives Lucian a frantic gesture, to which the god simply shrugs in reply. He doesn't handle crying females well (neither does his wife, he smirks, but better her than him). Vase glares at him in response, then drops to her knees next to the girl, wondering how she should go about trying to calm someone. Give them a hug? Something to eat?

She rules out feeding the girl, as she doesn't have anything edible on her person, so she settles instead for awkwardly patting the girl on her head. "W-Well, how about you start by telling us your name?" She says encouragingly. "I'm Vase, and that man over there - " she jerks a thumb behind her at Lucian, " – is Lucian Serapaeus."

"Her husband," Lucian supplies helpfully, and Vase shoots him a positively venomous look.

He has to suppress an urge to chuckle.

"We're going to take care of everything now, so why don't you come home with us?" Until we figure out what to do with you, Vase continues without saying a word. If the girl's parents are dead, they might have to contact her next-of-kin. She is about let out an irritated huff when she checks herself, not wanting the girl to think that she is irritated at her.

"I'm Elena," the girl says finally. She looks up at Vase, her pale face thin, her dark eyes wide and scared. "You're not going to abandon me here, are you? I don't want to stay here. I hate it here."

"Of course not, sweetie," Vase says comfortingly. She draws the girl into a hug almost instinctively, despite usually being growly about any sort of contact with someone else other than Lucian (punching people in their faces or other bodily features doesn't count). "We're going to bring you to our home, clean you up, and give you something yummy to eat. How does that sound?"

Elena hesitates. Her eyes dart to the guns that Vase has holstered on her person.

"I won't use these to hurt you," Vase says, noticing where Elena is staring. "They're not toys, though, so you'd better not play with them, okay?"

After what seems like ages, Elena's hand slips into hers, clutching at her as if she is afraid they'll simply vanish into thin air and leave her alone in the ruined basement. Vase looks up and nods at Lucian, who turns and says, "I'll just go and call a car then, shall I?"

"You're going to be safe with us, Elena," Vase brushes the girl's hair out of her eyes and gives her hand a reassuring squeeze. "I promise you that."