Saying Goodbye, Part I
Posted on Mon Jan 9th, 2023 @ 5:54am by First Lieutenant Bethany Harrison
Mission:
The Mutant Underground
Location: Underground Base
Timeline: Present Day
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Dedicated to my dear friend, Matthew Popkes. Fractal is lost without her Rook. Thank you for the years that you shared with me, and the stories that we told together. Those memories are more precious to me than you could ever know.
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Content Warning! Some Adult Themes.
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I’m so tired of being here.
Suppressed by all my childish fears
And if you have to leave
I wish that you would just leave
Your presence still lingers here
And it won’t leave me alone
These wounds won’t seem to heal, this pain is just too real
There’s just too much that time cannot erase
~Evanescence, My Immortal
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The nightmares always came before the blessed release of the dream world, and this path was little different for the soul weary light bearer. The scenes that she was forced to walk through were her memories of Jon, rather than nightmares, but the pain and fear tore at her heart as the strange realm seemed to twist time and space.
Those eyes. Sharp, wary...predatory. He had nearly gotten himself killed trying to save her from the trafficker that she had managed to blunder her way into a fight with on the streets of Reno. Her injuries had taken their toll during the fight, and she now found herself in a weakening standoff.
The blue-eyed soldier in the fancy suit had a gun pointed at his head by the short, fat, greasy little slimeball that had managed to step in while she was distracted by the other goons. Those eyes met hers and she simply flicked her own gaze towards the ground. If he didn’t catch it, well, maybe she had misjudged him. Luckily for both of them, she hadn’t.
For her, it had been cold and methodical. A state of mind that still persisted during combat situations. The unknown soldier in the suit dropped like a sack of stones, which gave her the split second that she needed to adjust her aim. Two shots rang out in rapid succession. The first slammed into the decorative handle of the .45 that was ridiculously oversized for the mafia boss’ small grip, shattering it into a glittering spray of dangerous shards.
The second slammed into the magazine, punching through the already damaged mechanism, causing the rounds to ignite and explode in his hand. She heard sirens, then everything went black.
She had no idea who that man was that night, other than the manly fool that had tried to step in and save the damsel in distress. He had, in a way, she had to admit that. He had created enough of a distraction to allow her to regain what little she could in a fight that she was losing.
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Everything seemed impossibly bright, even with her eyes closed. She could hear men talking about her, though exactly what they were saying she wasn’t sure. She felt off, foggy, and it took her very little time to realize that she’d been drugged.
“There’s some child welfare guy coming to take over the case,” one of the men said. The response from the other man seemed distant and far off. Then she heard them shuffle away and the sound of a door closing.
She opened her eyes slowly and tried to take in her surroundings. It was a sterile looking room, with strange, rhythmic sounds that seemed to drive her more towards panic, while she wasn’t quite able to reach that stage. Plastic tubing was attached to her right arm, and she could feel that one of her ankles was attached to the bed that she was laying on.
There was pain, but it was distant, whatever drugs that they had her on was keeping that at bay. Still, the young brawler couldn’t stand not being in control of her own thoughts. She slowly reached over and pulled the IV from her arm, then stuck it into the mattress beside her.
Just as she was about to attempt to sit up, she heard voices at the door. She went still, closing her eyes again. It was best they didn’t know she was awake, her befuddled mind reasoned. After a few minutes the door opened and closed, and she could hear the clicking of dress shoes on the tiled floor.
“I’m here to get you out of here. There are some pretty bad men coming for you,” a strong, but even voice said, a soothing British baritone.
Apparently he had noticed the blood on the thin blanket over her, something she hadn’t thought about in her drugged haze. She opened one eye slowly, then the other, blinking a bit until her vision cleared for a moment. She couldn’t help but giggle at the sight of the man standing over her.
His hair was a bit disheveled, as though he’d run his hands through it more than a few times. The glasses sitting on his face were almost comically out of place for the man’s handsome features. The old tan suit that he was wearing looked worn and ill-fitting. But it was the eyes. She remembered them from somewhere. The fight. How long had she been here?
“I convinced them to take a break since I had to be here until you woke up anyway, but we need to move before the real guy shows up,” the man said, cutting straight to the mission. He moved quickly, using a tool to pick the lock on the handcuffs that she now realized were keeping her leg pinned to the bed. “Can you stand?”
“Stand,” she muttered, then giggled again. She cleared her throat and shook her head, trying to clear it.
“I’m guessing that’s a no,” the man said, chuckling slightly. He wasted no time in scooping the loopy young woman into his strong arms and depositing her into a wheelchair before she could even object.
The rest of that memory was hazy at best as they moved through the hospital, trying to get to the parking lot before they got caught. She had spent most of the time trying to get her head to cooperate, but all she was really managing was incoherent muttering and broken tactical scenarios. She remembered having to force herself not to punch her rescuer in the head when he suddenly hefted her out of the chair and into his arms when the alarms started going off before they could reach the ground floor.
There had been a guard on the stairs on the way to the parking garage, and then there wasn’t, but then she wasn’t sure if there had even been someone in the stairs at all. He had deposited her in the backseat of a car and covered her with blankets. Everything went dark once again.
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As the haze of the morphine began to fade, she could hear voices, unclearly, at first. They were low and sounded distant, almost as if they were in the same room, but not. She could feel a weight next to her, which was startling for her. She could smell his cologne, hear his rhythmic breathing as he slept.
When she was certain that the strange person beside her was actually asleep, she opened her eyes, slowly, warding against the unfamiliar flickering light of the television. That had been where the voices had been coming from and why they only sounded so real. She watched for a bit as her vision adjusted, then she froze when she saw a picture of the man that had helped her, twice, by that point. The strange, almost plastic looking TV people said that he was a wanted human trafficker that had killed his wife. What in the world had she fallen into?
A wave of panic swept over her, followed by another when she realized that she was tied down at all four points. She could move somewhat, but her left leg had been tied down at two points, keeping her from moving the leg that she had shredded when she fell in the desert. The swimming of her head made her stomach turn over uncomfortably and she cursed the doctor that had robbed her of her mind.
And what in the fiery pits of hell was she barely wearing? It looked like nothing more than a pair of green satin handkerchiefs, held together by string. That’s when she slid into that survival state that had been beaten into her since childhood. It was a cold, calculating frame of mind that accompanied her descent into a state of combat readiness.
The man awoke the instant that she began to move. He rolled smoothly off of the bed and turned to face her. “You’re finally awake,” he said, sounding relieved. Then the smile fell from his lips as he realized that she was staring at him coldly enough to freeze the air between them. He glanced towards the television, sighed, then pushed his hand through his hair. “This probably looks pretty bad, doesn’t it?”
She didn’t answer, simply silently studied the man as he spoke to her. He was tall, older, roughly thirty years old. He was muscular and fit, revealed by the white wife-beater that he was wearing with his black slacks, perfectly pressed, save for the slight rumple in them from his nap. His hair was graying at the sides, but the rest was thick and black, and neatly kept, his face clean shaven. It was an oddity for her to see such a hygienic man, neatly shorn, but also looking like he was more than comfortable in a fight.
She didn’t really know what to believe, and the world kept spinning around on her. She also only understood a fraction of what was coming out of his mouth as he walked around the bed, gingerly untying her binds, since reality seemed to twist and turn at unexpected moments. The young brawler had simply been biding her time, reciting a prayer in a strange jumble of Hebrew, Latin, and Greek.
As soon as her last hand was released, she rolled across the bed and grabbed the gun that was in the shoulder holster hanging from the bedpost. She lost her footing, stumbling across the room, shaking her head, trying to clear the fog. She racked the slide back and spun, raising it up at him as he slowly walked towards her.
“Please just let me go. I don’t want to have to kill you,” she slurred, trying to get her vision to condense the three shimmering images of the man into one.
“I’m not going to hurt you, luv,” he said softly, his hands in the air as he moved towards her ever so slowly, carefully. “You’ve had surgery, you’re coming off of the morphine. Just give me the gun, luv.”
“Do not make me kill you,” the young woman said, her voice cold, her emerald gaze even colder.
He hadn’t paid any attention to her protests, watching her shake as she tried to hold her aim. Then he was standing right in front of her, his chest to the barrel. “You’d be doing me a favor.”
When she pulled the trigger, she immediately realized that she had forgotten all about guns having safety mechanisms, in her drugged haze. Before she could react, he had stripped her of the gun, disarmed it, and threw it one way, while tossing the ammunition in the other direction.
They had fought, and wound up back on the bed, the man on top of her, trying to keep her squirrely arms under control, his face just over hers. “Please just stop this. You’re going to tear your leg open again,” he pleaded.
There was a shocking moment when she considered kissing the handsome, blue-eyed man, but instead she just panicked. She managed to wrench her arms free from his grasp and dragged her fingernails down his face, leaving jagged, bloody scratches.
He screamed, pushing up off of her and grabbing his face. All that she could manage to do at that point was to scramble up onto the bed and curl up with her back to the headboard, dragging the bedclothes up to cover herself, her skin crimson with effort and embarrassment.
They had spent weeks at Destiny’s gentleman’s club after clearing that incident up, hiding out while Bethany healed. The former SAS officer had begun helping with her training, refining the roughness of the brawler’s style that she had pulled together for herself during her difficult life. She had never trusted a man before, but Jon had quickly begun to earn her trust.
He seemed to understand her on a level that she appreciated. He was the calm to her chaos, the cool to counter the fire. And it was kind of funny when she had put on, what she found out later to be, a school girl outfit that one of the girls had left for her, and it had been a bit risque to say the least. It had been the first time that she’d felt some inkling that she was an attractive young woman, and she found that she kind of liked the fact that he had been so flustered by the whole thing.
It hadn’t been long after that when they found her. Some guy had been beating up on one of the girls and Beth had stepped in. Shortly after that, a crew of Morty’s men had cornered her in the courtyard. Jon had killed a man for her that day, ending him for threatening to do awful things to her. That was when the war started.
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TBC
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