Chapter Text
The first time Ava meets the Butcher, she is twenty five.
It's been a week of fighting. A week of trying to hold off the Eden invaders, of catching sleep in short bursts whenever she could, of running and hiding and not knowing where the next knife might come from or when, whether the shadow behind the next corner is friend or foe.
A week of whispers in barricaded rooms and ransacked corridors that Eden brought the Butcher.
No one knows what he looks like, and yet everyone knows what he looks like. Tall, with eyes and hair as dark and cold as the empty sky. He wears a knife at his shoulder, and who knows how many more hidden in the strange loose layered clothes all the Edenites have. Nobody's ever gotten close enough for a good look at his face and come out alive. The type of things you try to scare rookies with, without admitting that you're scared, too.
She wasn't even supposed to be here. She was stationed on the new blood moon they'd found, helping out and providing security for the research crew there. Why a research team on an empty moon needed security was anyone's guess, but she wasn't going to be going around asking questions. The only reason she was on Filament was their resupply shuttle—she'd gotten picked to go along, and an hour after they'd arrived all hell broke loose and the station went into lockdown.
At the sound of voices around the corner she freezes—this section was supposed to be locked down, they couldn't have gotten in here-
"Seems the Butcher lost his nerve." There's something cold in the voice, and colder in her chest.
Fuck.
"This wasn't the plan." A quieter, deeper, angrier voice. Not what she would've expected for the specter that haunted everyone's imaginations, but-
"You want to stop this, you'll have to kill your own brothers to do it." The soft rasp of a knife being freed from a sheath, a single step on steel flooring, before the horrible choking, gurgled scream of a man whose throat has just been cut fills the air.
The entire station shudders like some massive irritated beast, the awful screeching groan of twisting metal covering the sound of her being knocked to the ground, but it does nothing to hide her from view.
To hide her from the Butcher, who'd just slit another Edenite's throat like it was no more effort than doing a flip in zero G.
She sees him wipe the blood off his knife onto the dying man's shirt, ignoring the wet gasps and twitching hands as he slides it back into its place at his shoulder, before turning to look directly at her. Horrible black eyes framed by equally dark, wavy hair stare clear down to her soul, a spray of blood on his face that he doesn't wipe off, and she's dead, she's dead and he's just deciding how to go about it-
But he just blinks, gaze flicking to the hall she'd come from before he gestures that way with his head. And then-
He turns and walks away.
By the time she's back on her feet he's vanished completely, leaving her alone save for the cooling corpse of an Edenite who'd been nearly decapitated with a single stroke.