Nicholas: NEEDED to get this out! NEEDED IT!! Just ask Becki how much I needed to. Anyway, this is the prologue. If you read my Lj (which you probably don't) You'd know the story behind this...story. I started it two years ago (when my writing was worse shit than it is now) and recently I got a butt load of good ideas for it, so I decided to pick it up again. I rewrote this part because the original was both written on notebook paper and really horrible writing. Then I sort of took off. The title took a lot of consideration, but in the end, I got what I wanted (courtesy of Becki, of course). So here his my most recent brain child. Love it! Because I do... And guess what? It's straight! Haha, it's been a while, hasn't it?

Disclaimer: Is there a magic spell that disclaims? "This story is hereby DISCLAIMED!!" Not mine, and I don't say it is.

Rating: T...for now...cursing...asshole-ism...some testy violence...later it will go up for MORE violence and SEX!! yay for sex.

Angela Farrell deeply regretted having such idiot friends. Sure it was better than having no friends at all, but as she walked along down by the docks on her way home, she couldn't help but let her blood boil. Those pricks! she screamed inside her head. She furiously adjusted her long, black, skintight skirt that Jonathan had hiked up her legs at that damned club. That was the last time—and she promised herself this—the last time she would ever stay out past ten with potential alcoholics. Her usually very pretty, silky, brown hair—which has been done up all nice in pins at the beginning of the night—was now down, frizzed and all of her natural curls tangled. She had to remember: she'd be home soon. That's what kept her sane and walking. Her bare feet (because there was no way she'd walk in the heels she'd originally worn) ached, but she remembered: she'd be home soon.

Something that Rick had said before she'd left was ringing in her head for some reason. "'Careful out there, sweetcakes. Don't get caught up with them Deuces." She remembered flipping him off, but until now she hadn't taken into consideration what he meant by the warning. Sure, she wasn't with the Deuces (dating Philly Bates' cousin, Archie, was enough proof of that), but since she'd become single again, she didn't really consider herself a Viper girl. She'd found it all too silly and dangerous to stick with a relationship that involved that shit. Too many rumbles and fights and stupid meaningless bouts of violence. Oh that's right.

It wasn't until after she'd come across the aftermath that she remembered Jimmy Pockets had told her about the rumble tonight. By the looks of it, things didn't go too well. There she stood on the edge of the carnage, the terrors and bullshit of Brooklyn laid out before her eyes, and she couldn't move. Suddenly, she just couldn't make her feet go and the rest of her body felt like it was falling. Four—no five—dead bodies were scattered across the pavement, and countless more bloody imprints where the wounded had been. If not for the dark (it was after midnight by now) and the way it played tricks on her eyes, she wouldn't have been so utterly terrified. She'd been in an orphanage for most of her life before the entire house was slaughtered by an unknown perpetrator, leaving only her alive because she'd thought to hide in a box in the pantry.

A nauseous, nagging, gnawing feeling flared in Angela's gut as she looked at all of this. Fallen weapons, articles of clothing that may have been lost in the heat of battle, everything was left so haphazardly, it almost seemed like the people who had left—no doubt hours ago—were still lingering around somewhere waiting for her to leave so that they could continue.

Taking a deep breath, she gathered herself enough to look past the bodies at the street beyond, the one she needed to take to get home. There was only a moment that she took in indecision as she wanted to make sure she wasn't up for traveling around all of this gore—the long way around. She wasn't. She wanted nothing more than to get home and if that meant stepping over five—or wait, six—corpses, so be it. She'd seen worse and she wasn't afraid of the dead, so she continued on her set course, the chill air the only cause of the goose bumps on her bare arms. Ewww crossed her mind a few times, though.

She was halfway across the graveyard, jumping over, skipping over and all over avoiding the semi-wet puddles of that telltale dark, red liquid that should probably have been in some shmuck's body instead of giving the dock a new coat of paint, when she suddenly wondered if one of these guys might not be dead. She wasn't quite sure what had triggered the feeling other than she thought something moved. Any other young woman her age would have registered that as something like a zombie or worth screaming about. Forgive Angela for not squealing at signs of life. Still, she wasn't stupid enough 

to think that maybe this was a good thing. She stopped again and looked around, assessing this once more from a different standpoint. It wasn't any different. She went on walking. Or…tried to, but then something snagged her shirt and blast it if she didn't let out a sharp, quick, high-pitched scream.

Her face turned red in an instant at her own ridiculousness—thinking immediately that it couldn't be a person that had grabbed her—but then she turned around and saw a large, bloody hand locked in a tight grip on the stretchy fabric her shirt was made from. Red went white as a sheet and she couldn't even scream that time. Deep breaths, deep breaths, she told herself. Though the trauma from the orphanage when she was younger had given her a bit of immunity to seeing dead people in mass numbers, seeing one come back to life was another story entirely. The hand was attached by a wrist to an arm, and the arm to a body. Of course, everybody that has the intelligence to move has a head to go with it and this head also had a face. It was hard to tell if his was contorted in pain out how bad he felt right now, or just really fucked up from being hit too many times. Either way the image of it made her wince.

"My god," she muttered, pulling her skirt away and squatting down beside him to get a better look, "you're alive." His hand, once it lost its former occupation, started to move around his head, seeming like he didn't know what to do with it. Angie couldn't make heads or tails of his face besides the cut up, bloody lips of his mouth and his swollen eye. "Can you say something? Tell me your name?"

The stained, dirty appendage that on a better day probably more resemble a hand finally reached his own face about the same took his lungs decided to push a hurt groan out of his chest. Fingers snaked over his wounds for a second—gashed forehead, broken nose, punctured lips—before his good eye opened. "I…" All he could smell was dirt and blood and his scratchy throat made it hard to talk. His chest erupted beneath the crusty, brown dress shirt he wore in a coughing fit and he spat out just a bit more of that wonderful red stuff on the ground beside him. "Who the…th'fuck're you?"

Slightly taken aback—but only slightly—Angie came to the conclusion that he was a Viper because of his wonderfully polite manner of speaking to a lady. "If you want me to help you, you better clean up your language."