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Part 1: The Most Dangerous Game
Prelude: Watching All these Dreams Go Up in Smoke
Site-212A, Present
A dark, winged shadow roars above the Scottish highlands like an eagle on the hunt. The members of MTF Sigma-12, strapped to their seats, listen to a man with dark hair clad in full tactical kit. The VTOL crests a hill, engines screeching as it hurls towards the sprawling complex and dockyards of Site-212A.
The loading ramp opens as the VTOL swings west, signaling their approach with pulsing orange lights. The pilot flicks several switches in the cockpit, the clearance code transmission almost an afterthought, tracking onsite defenses spooling down in response.
He turns back, shouting into the cargo hold. "Drop zone in one minute!"
Each soldier unclasps their restraints with practiced efficacy. Waiting for the call.
"Feather boots on!" the commander yells over comms. In unison, they stomp their boots on the floor. The ramp lights pulse green, then darken, swapped into stealth mode.
The silvery glint of metal fencing whips by as night optics click on. Green lenses cut through the darkness like a predator’s gaze, already honed in on the target below.
The commander raises his outstretched hand vertically like a beacon about to be lit. A light flashes green, and he closes it into a fist.
They drop like stones out of the craft, streaking down several hundred feet from the vehicle as it screams off to the nearby landing strip. Their boots ripple to life, countering gravity and slowing their falls. Their feet leap out for the first running steps before they hit solid ground.
They regroup in a small cove of trees adjacent to one of the Site's sprawling expanses and break into fireteams.
Sandomen Jacobs, Sigma-12’s Commanding Officer, clears the corner of the complex and waves the others forward into the building.
At the other end another squad advances down empty corridors. Corners are cleared; tranq-rifles sweep left to right. They find the target door.
Sigma-3 bunkers down at the other end of the hall, scanning both directions.
"Clear."
"Squad one, in position, over," Jacobs whispers over the radio, pressing his ear to the door. Movement on the other side. Also, the sound of a microwave.
"Squad two, in position. Movement inside, number one, over."
"Roger, repeat to all squads, package is in the oven, over."
"Squad three in position, over."
"Remember, tranqs and flashers only. We need them alive. Over and out."
"Squad four to number one, there’s activity at the south gate. Better get moving, big light, ETA 15 minutes, over."
"Breach on my count." Jacobs pulls out a brick sized charge. He places it on the door, firmly but with as little sound as he can manage. A light blinks red. An orb, shimmering with roving lights pulses an invisible cloud outwards. It silences all sound trying to leave the bubble.
"3." He backs up, hands over ears.
"2." Everyone braces for impact.
"Target knows something is up, repeat target knows something is up!"
"1."
Pop. BOOM.
"Fu-" The door bursts inwards in a shower of splintering wood and dust, smashing into something substantial on its inward trajectory. Someone yelps like a wailing coyote and then the thud of a body hitting the floor echoes inside.
"Flasher." A soldier tosses the cylindrical thaumic device into the room.
"Cardea!"
Crack.
﹏𓊝﹏
﹏𓊝﹏
1.1 I'm Losing My Voice Calling On You
10 hours before abduction
The office of Site-189’s director buzzes with the clacks of keys, hums of computer fans, and administrative staff milling between their workstations and watercoolers. Wooden paneling and a fresh layer of paint invoke the atmosphere of an actual office, instead of the refurbished command deck for an oil rig.
Like Cerberus guarding the gates to the Greek Underworld, a young man with dark hair and green eyes sits at a cubicle right outside the Director’s door, clicking through the Foundation’s database.
He looks up, right as a hapless secretary makes their approach towards the Director’s door. The poor thing misses his fierce and guarding glare, necessitating a sharp clearing of his throat to demand her attention.
She looks at him, annoyed, and he shakes his head.
"I wouldn’t if I were you."
"But I—" The young woman starts.
"The Director is like a well-oiled machine. Punctual, and to the letter. Disrupt her schedule, and she gets very cranky." He cuts her off abruptly. "Do you want to make Eulades Eurylochus cranky?"
"No, But I—" She tries again.
"I suppose you could come back with an appointment in about…" He checks the calendar. "Two weeks’ time? Shall I schedule you for Tuesday the 15th, at 10?"
The secretary scoffs, walks over to the desk, and shoves a folder onto the neatly arranged system of organization, creating chaos. Of course, that’s just humanity for you.
"Here, just give this to her when she’s done."
She turns and storms off with a huff, rudely knocking astray the nameplate on his desk.
The young man turns back to his desk, frowning at the chaos that’s been introduced into the neatly stacked folders. Trays with folders and files split into piles based on completion, things still needing to be stamped, signed, processed, and then organized.
To reset the tone, he reaches out and fixes the position of the nameplate. "Ericc."
This young man, this Ericc, is me.
My attention flicks away from fixing my desk to a ding from the computer. With rapturous focus, I scan the email and accompanying documents that pop up on the screen.
The muscles in my face drop from neutral, blood draining as I pale. I shouldn’t be getting this report, or its concerning details, but here I am.
‘Conceptual virus. Annhilator.’ Eyes narrow. ‘Helo-deployable.’
Five years of carefully pushing along the right path. All for nothing, it seems, I think, leaning back in the chair.
Conversation meanders in the other room. It's soundproofed, so I shouldn't be able to hear inside it at all. Like they shouldn’t have a small fleet of multi-million-dollar aircraft. Like they shouldn’t have a small and heavily armed MTF to enforce my boss’s will. Just like the Site shouldn’t be neutralizing anomalies.
But nobody follows the rules here, so why should I?
The GOC, neutered in its infancy, only to rise again with us. In a new name. A new skin.
Folders neatly stack, stamping, approving and signing mundane paperwork while I reflect on the past.
I wonder if they would have ever realized that I just appeared one day, I muse, pondering on the five or so years I've sat behind this desk, tapping away at these peculiar things they've come to call "keys".
It's rather curious, if you think about it.
Keys are meant to open locks. Humanity has put the entire wealth of their knowledge in boxes, powered by tiny gears and lightning generators. To unlock that access, you use these square white little pegs with letters on them.
It's absolutely brilliant, I would marry the inventor if he weren't already dead and in the ground.
But back on target.
Now the question becomes, do I abandon this effort completely, and search for another? Do I rewind the clock, and try again? Or is the effort completely wasted, and this path doomed to crumble no matter what I do?
I’m becoming more and more convinced with the passing moments that it’s the last option, a depressing affair. She won’t be happy with me.
Yet another person hits my nameplate, knocking it astray. I reach out and adjust it, again. Why are they so careless with where they walk? Careless in everything they do, from the environment to each other.
Tap tap tap.
The computer dings, snapping my attention back to the screen like a dog hearing a whistle.
I scan this new file opening on my 'desktop', another brilliant example of modern society's naming conventions, hoping for a new insight into the reigning puzzle. Some sign or direction of where I should go next.
Of course, I can't do any of this without the brilliant poison that is 'coffee'. Maddening to think it was only invented by the Ottomans. What did I do before it?
Names flutter across the screen like feathers, Cardea Gataki and Melina Anagnostis. The lines between, the conceptual threads rippling outwards, almost make me drop my precious ambrosia.
I lean forward in the chair, invested now, shoving the half filled out form back into the ‘to be done’ pile as I pull the keyboard closer.
Tap tap tap.
"Against their will?"
Another item opens, a PDF. A contract.
Excitement ripples in waves through me as the puzzle unfolds. The opportunity this now presents.
I dare to dart a glance at Eulades Eurylochus’s schedule, then back to the screen.
Good, no urgency.
I look around the room, to make sure no one is approaching, considering approaching, or just casually paying attention. I’m being silly though, nobody is.
This is an opportunity I cannot ignore. I can work my magic.
My eyes bulge in my skull, widening, excitement threatening to bubble over and burst the pot. I only barely bite back the grin in the moment, elated by the flood of realizations simmering in my brain.
You’re alive and near? Within reach. How thrilling. So many potential possibilities. I lean back, pulling my arms behind me like the Queen I am, lavishing against the cushion with full relief and building delight.
The timetable must change. No avoiding it. How to bring this to an end, make this work?
I stop, dead in my tracks. No, no it’s not that simple. I have already made one too many errors with Eulades. I need to be certain they will be adequate for the roles I will need them to play, both to assist me in dealing with my own mistakes and addressing the future.
I lean forward again, dragging my finger down the side of the computer tower. Watching as files and access ripple on the screen. Scanning the documents, the operational report as it pops up.
I know where they are. When they are. What they are doing. Now, I need to see how they tick, what they think in this modern age.
Wheels squeak as the chair scoots back. I’m on my feet in seconds, neatly pushing in my chair, and taping a sign to Eulades’s door that reads, in big bold print:
‘Do not Disturb, in Meeting.’
The mug is warm in my hand as I announce to the whole room. "Going for my break!"
A few heads bob up, but otherwise, as desired, I’m ignored.
The journey out onto one of the balconies is uninterrupted, thankfully. No one ever looks at me twice. Here it will be easier to do what I need to do.
I listen to the slow churn of the waves crashing against the poles of the rig, the cry of the gulls in the air.
Then, all of time, all of reality unfolds before my fingers. Here, on the edge of the world in the middle of the mightiest of all seas, the strands of every molecule, every atom wind and unwind before my eyes in dancing lights of purple and orange mayhem.
Strings bundle about conceptual fingers, winding inwards. Time comes to a grinding halt, and I dive into the rippling tides of the Astral Sea.
﹏𓊝﹏
﹏𓊝﹏
Ericc Au Helios, ????, 3 hours before abduction
Time is a strange thing. From the perspective of humans, of mortal flesh and blood, it marches ceaselessly forward, cruel and callous in the way it slinks by in the blinks of an eye.
I stride through pulsing fields of neon gas in the endless sea of striating stars. Feet roll across a platform of endless asteroids, ever shifting between dust and metal and rock. Streams of stars, gas, rocks, astral fire, water, and even planets flow at my feet opposite where I stride.
Time is mine to command, as each step produces the glittering path through panacea towards my destination.
One moment you are a child, and in the next an adult with all the weight and bearings of responsibility in a world you barely comprehend.
A cloud of nebulae blocks my path, swirling like a morning fog in a wide saltwater bay. Gliding through it I find myself at the source, a place I have only been with the guidance of my great and terrible patron in this endless sea of stars. Two great swirling galaxies above my head, suspended on pillars of condensed rock shaped like fingers.
My feet lift from the pathway as I glide through Astral fire to the hole in this strange reality that draws these great structures of space and time to shred themselves apart.
With a flourished twirl, I dive between the glistening dust and gas and stars of galaxies into the singularity that connects the Astral with the Material. Not at any great speed mind you, I take my time to enjoy the light show. I’m in no hurry, why should I be? I have all the time I’ll ever need.
But time is not a static force. It is a stream, a river which can be rowed upon, with or against the current.
This was the lesson my people learned, across an age of empire, blood-soaked fields, and ever reaching divine grasp.
It was the lesson my mother taught me in my crib so very long ago in green Eurasian pastures.
It was the lesson the Gardener at creations beginning never taught her children. My plan, only nascently blooming in this moment, centers around the patience these lessons have brought to me.
Reality surges around the ontokinetic web I weave, flowing in pillars of matter as I emerge in the place and time that will best facilitate the mission which the future, both mine and theirs, weighs upon. From the gasping depths of the Astral Sea, I weave a glimmering coat of stardust, a mesh of obfuscation to shield my conceptual mass from the eyes of ones within and without this chamber.
This is the power of a Beast. To stride where the universal constants go and emerge untouched.
But there is another lesson, greater in its depths. Time can be stopped, frozen, suspended, but they never learned that lesson, they were too consumed with the power at their fingers.
My people learned the wrong lesson from the eater of the sun, he who marks the river ever writhing. From the past my people crawl, dragging themselves through the temporal river towards an eventual bloody future where they will rule again. They treat time, as they do blood. A source of power and superiority over all others.
Ironic that they nearly obliterated their own temporal presence in their hubris. Now, the throne on which they seek to sit will never be within their reach.
This is no fault of their own, mistakes they have made aside. It is mine.
I will always be there to smash their heads in the waypoints in between, for I have seen how unworthy their grasp is, and it is my task to make sure they never reach it.
The room that takes shape is sterile, white walls of cinderblocks, mesh and grated floors over linoleum tile. The clock on the wall burns near midnight, it’s difficult to tell the where at this distance from my conceptual core, but the when is clear in my internal chronometer. Seven hours forward of when I left.
Four conceptual webs dance in chairs before me around a metal table. Three are weak and of little consequence.
The fourth is strong, beyond any measure that I could have expected. She bears tinges of lilac and lavender that I haven’t felt in five ages of the world. A touch familiar and new, thought lost to me in the millennia inbetween.
How fitting.
Tiny twitches of my lips blossom into a smirk. What a delightful surprise! You have truly come far.
Traces of an ancient, familiar friend lick against my skin and I smile sadly, knowing I’ll never sit with the triple goddess beneath another purple sunrise. She is muffled in a strange way. Just enough that I have to step closer and shut out the greater depths of Ontokinetic sight to truly see what she has done.
Quite clever, and yet also strange that you hide beneath this second skin. Is this how you survive? Avoid the questions? I squint. No it’s more recent than that. You are not normally one to hide from the world.
Dr. Melina Anagnostis sits before me in this false guise, brown hair suspended in motion, eyes curiously blue with rings of purple on the edges, human and peculiarly plain. If it weren’t for my other senses I would be well and truly fooled! I cannot help but smile larger.
You truly have come far.
The smile fades into a frown moments later as I probe deeper.
Something is wrong, very wrong.
It pours off her in the gesticulations of her time-locked ontokinetic aura. Tinges of crimson in a deeply unpleasant and familiar way mesh with the purple. It is not a dismissably small amount, and it is being fed. Strings trail through the walls and beyond in a south-easterly direction.
This is not the only thing. There are marks, washes and imprints of aura from other Beasts. Names that bring my head into a spin. These are creatures that I would not wish to impugn even by pure accident.
They would obliterate me. They would sense me inspite of my disguises.
Whatever plan comes from this, will require sequestration. This will require more than simple observation. Other influences are at work here.
I roll up the sleeve of my collared shirt.
This will require a personal touch.
My conceptual fingers glide through the flesh at the base of her skull. I breathe in and out, feeling the terminal whole of her through our interface. Raising my free hand, I snap.
The gears of time march forward once again.
﹏𓊝﹏
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Site-212A, 3 hours before abduction, Dr. Melina Anagnostis
Sterile white cinderblocks reflect fluorescent light into your eyes, making it hard to look anywhere but at the three people across the table. The buzz of the bulbs rings in a skull cast for thinking and scheming. Tapping fingernails against the metal table, scraping against the haphazardly opened stacks of folders and paper. One of them is swallowing from a glass of water, a pen is scribbling, the clock’s hand is ticking, limbs moving, hair shifting, throat swallowing.
I just want it to stop. The words in purple sprawl out in your own mind, glimmering around the gaze.
Muscles constrict in your chest, tightening as overstimulation threatens to swallow you whole. Eyelids feel as if they are tied to sacks of sand, the stains beneath the eyes deeply purple in the reflection cast through the one-way mirror.
It’s been 96 hours since you’ve had a full night’s rest.
It’s too much. I can’t do this. The cold metal of the chair bleeds through the robes, the tights, into your bones. Focus is needed to stop your teeth from chattering.
The notepad in front of you is blank, unused. You can’t even remember why you brought it.
The man across the table is a twig, reedy and thin with black hair and thin, round rimmed glasses. His suit is neatly trimmed and maintained, to the point of vanity with its gold stitching.
To his right is a woman, perhaps just a little older than you were all those years ago, leaving home for the last time. She’s a soldier, dressed in the fancy parade uniform of an MTF commander. She is paired with an unremarkable silver haired man sitting to the left of the Bureaucrat. As you drag the gaze across them, they look anywhere else in the room.
Out of fear or respect, it doesn’t matter. Those who answered directly to them made a mess.
You let the gates finally close to shut out one source of stimulus. Fading into black.
I want to be with my books, the grimoires with all the spells I’ve yet to deconstruct. the mind thinks.
The bound and embroidered leather floats into view on the desk at home, dancing in the moonlight.
You want to be sitting with Cardea in the warm evening sand, listening to the waves and staring up at the stars.
The gentle roar of waves ripples through the images, the wash of warm surf against waterlogged toes, the day’s lingering heat soaking into the skin of your thighs and rear. Cardea’s crimson locks caught in the light of a rising moon, smiling softly at you as she leans in, lifts your chin an—
I see. So that love I felt in you, all those years ago, was not for him. The real love burning beneath your skin, weeping with grief was for her.
An involuntary shiver ripples up your neck and then echoes back down the spine.
I want to be anywhere, but this cursed, sterile room with these incompetent imbeciles who put my wife and I’s lives in danger.
Stabbing knives of memory burn behind your temples as unseen fingers twist at the nerves, threatening to spill over into the daydream.
Show me in more depth.
Strobing neon lights buzz on the street surrounding a large warehouse. They, of course, mark multiple bars and dance clubs and stand out starkly against the hulking shape of the building they surround.
It's a peaceful night, all things considered, quiet other than the throbs of bass. The street itself is fairly empty, other than haphazardly arranged wooden crates next to the warehouse, and the occasional back-alley lurker.
Of course, that is all about to change.
Shouts come from inside the warehouse, unheard exclamations that crescendo into roars as cracks and bangs of hissing gunfire snap through the night.
The doors explode outwards with a burst of fire, magic, and splintering metal.
You burst from the smoke in a skidding run, whipping about in a small half-spin.
Brown hair streaks behind in lifting strands blooming with lilac light.
Light buzzes on the fingertips in geometric, spinning, purple shapes.
Arcs of lightning whip off your digits into the smoke, followed milliseconds later by several anguished cries. Flashes of ecstatic lightning flash in your skull from the kill. The rumbling thunder of adrenaline pounding your heart in your chest follows.
It’s startling, this sudden rush of sensation; nearly sending you into a turbulent tailspin that you’ll never recover from. Intoxicating in a way you’ve not felt in an age.
The twinge of alarm that arises from the sudden biochemical surge is pressed down, shoved into a closet. No time to linger on it. You try to focus on where the replying gunfire springs from for the next incantation, but you lingered too long.
A green bolt of necrotic energy rips from the smog and smashes into your shoulder, nearly taking off the whole arm.
Shoots of pain rip through the torso, and the stench of necrotizing flesh filling your nostrils. An arm hangs by threads of paintfully loose strips of bone, muscle, nerve and ligament from a bleeding shoulder, threatening to fully come apart as you scream.
Concerning.
Reality slams back into you with a thunderous roar echoing in the ears. Residual pain arcs through the twitching muscles of a shoulder once nearly severed.
"Melina?" It’s the woman, with the baby fat cheeks and the streaks of grey in her brown hair.
How long have they been calling your name? you wonder.
"What?" The sandbags tied to your eyelids loosen and slide open, taking in the looks of concern upon the faces of these children.
"Would it be better for you to pick this up later after you've had a chance to sleep?" the man to the left asks.
"We understand you’ve had very little sleep, if it will help you recall details bett—"
"No. No, we need to do this today," your voice betrays the false vigor of the mind, leaking with exhaustion. The wince that tries to flow through the facial muscles smashed into the floor with the heft of a mace.
"No one is going to hold it against you for needing to rest." The Bureaucrat pushes the glasses up his nose.
"I’m fine," the growl crawls into your voice with such sharp venom. "I don’t want to come back in a week and have to deal with this."
You will not be given time to bury the lead and shuffle the blame. We walk on eggshells as it is, you expect us to be perfect, and threaten us when we aren’t, for being anomalies. They think you will be fooled by their feigned sympathy while they stab you both in the back.
Your own perspective of reality? Or are these the expectations laid by human imperfection? Not everything can be done by you and you alone.
"If, at any point, you need to stop and pick up later, we’ll understand," the woman adds.
"Just ask your questions." Thumb and forefinger press to temples, gently rubbing to try and banish the rising tension headache.
The Bureaucrat shifts in the chair, looking down at the report you wrote out this afternoon. The purple ink gleams in the fluorescent lighting, reflecting in his glasses. How lovely the calligraphy is.
"Why don’t we start where everything went wrong, in the warehouse. What happened?"
"It’s in the report." Tapping fingers on the table, nails clicking against the metal.
"It is, but we’d like to hear it in your own words."
You grit your teeth with all the irritation of a snarling cat on the verge of pouncing. But you have more restraint than that, don’t you?
"Please humor us Melina, this will go faster if you do," the woman interjects. For a moment, your mind winds through a thousand different possibilities, insults, backhanded digs and cuts that could be made. The exhaustion almost brings you to do so, but that would be unproductive now wouldn’t it?
Do they think you lied? That you’re hiding something.
Are we?
A little bubble of hot static ripples down the optic nerves, those fingers gliding and delicately caressing the recall.
The scream fades into a muffle squeak as teeth press against tongue and lip, drawing blood. Your robe pulses with lavender, violet blood pouring from it’s hidden interior and weaving the fragmented and dangling flesh and muscle of the arm together again.
Instinct carries you into a backwards bend; motions rapid and deliberate. Bullets arc over cloth and flesh, buzzing your head as motion carries the body through a twirl. When you right again, it’s several steps backwards, feeling that oh so old power rising with the momentum.
A purple shield snaps into existence curling around face and body.
Several bullets curve along its length in indirect hits. A spell ripples along its surface.
But you’ve made a terribly amateurish mistake.
Its been summoned too close.
A fragmentation round shatters against the shield, and it fails to stop the splinters from getting through. Metal showers your face in a hot lead rain, slicing through skin and one of the eyes.
You’re screaming, you can't stop screaming. Howling wind tears from the throat, undulating and transforming into a swirling storm of ice that bursts through the smoke into the warehouse.
But Cardea still isn’t out.
No that’s not quite it. Show me what you’re hiding.
As the ice swirls beyond the sight, you feel the lives within flare and burn out through the agony, stolen by your power.
What a wonderful rush that is, isn’t it? Each kill is perpetuating a strange high, a voice begging for it to keep going and never stop. It promises a hedonistic wonderland, thrumming through your skin. You’re quite afraid for a moment, you’ll drown with her.
What is this? What’s happening?
I see.
The pain in the optic nerve tears the mind from the flashes of trauma and back into reality. You’re breathing hard and they are all watching.
The unseen digits dancing through your nerves uncurl again. You’re too tired to really put what’s happening together, and nothing seems to be there in your greater senses.
Did they notice? the mind thinks.
"Whenever you’re ready Melina."
Of course they didn’t. They don’t care, they only care about the story of their failure, our failure.
"Where do I even start." Exhaustion leaks into the voice like a river, the mind is really slipping in keeping it out. Is that your doing? Well…
They lean in like children gathered around a fire waiting to hear a ghost story.
"The moment we walked in through the warehouse doors, everything was off. There was no ritualistic ceremony waiting for us, no ornamental garbs, no candles, no altars or pulpits or sacred fires."
"Hold on back up," the man to the left interjects. "You and Cardea were out of contact with Operations Command for a week. What happened?"
You stare the man down with tired eyes, until he looks away like the inept imbecile he is.
So the Bureacrat was the only one to read the report? How exhausting.
"If you had read my report, you’d know that we were cloistered in one of their neighborhoods, kept under watch to make sure we were truly students of Mekhane."
He winces at the bite of frost that slips of your tongue.
A hand picks up the glass of water and takes a long, refreshing draw. The cool liquid soothes an aching throat, tired from yelling incantations.
"It’s a standard practice in Cog—sorry that’s a slur," Even after so long, the grasp on clamping down old habits slips. She’d be disappointed in you, and that makes the heart in its cage strobe with little pinpricks of acheing heat. You can make it up to her later, there was a point to be made.
"Standard practice in Church of the Broken God circles. Isolate new believers for a week to make sure they are true to the faith. Anyone worth their salt in the anomalous world knows that practice started because of fumbled Jailer operations." You let the sting of the words sit in the air.
That and months of research to understand and ingratiate us in the culture. You idiots may not care about this world, but we do.
"The point…" the words trail off as the mind tries to find the thread it was chasing, before it was led astray by agitation. Your fingers clench against the table, stumbling with the tongue, with the mind. This is the price of exhaustion, of doing this now, the arguments seem out of grasp.
For a moment, it seems they’ll get what they want, your submission to your own body’s inadequacy.
But that won’t do, you still have much to see and hear. Fortunately, all it takes to renew the trail is grasping a bundle of nerves with spectral fingers.
"The point I’m trying to make is, the intelligence we had was surface level at best, and it was wrong."
The bureaucrat thumbs through your report methodically, matching some unseen rhythm.
"Is this in reference to the Church smuggling ring being a Hand stronghold? Or the fact that the operations team failed to secure the new initiates you were impersonating."
"Both and more. It wasn’t just failed; the operations team is de—"
"Maybe if you had kept in contact with them, they wouldn’t be," the soldier on the left snaps at you, his words agitated.
Flames of anger scrape against the bottom of the body’s diaphragm, heart slamming in your chest. The woman and the bureaucrat look at the other soldier like he’s just detonated a bomb right in the middle of the room, but the gaze doesn’t notice.
"Oh, excuse me for not pulling out our tucked away radios, switching to the highest band frequency we could manage, and reciting a soliloquy about the lights beneath the reality bubble. Maybe if we had, we’d all be dead, instead of your half-brained operations team, and whatever intelligence agents did your base reconnaissance."
The mind seethes with a hot rage, gaze burning holes through the man’s skull until he shrinks in the chair.
A loosened thread shines in the nerve bundles, fingers stroking it, electric lashing curling through the brainstem.
I begin to see the pattern.
Staggering against the door, out of the arcs of metal and astral fire, fingers press to oozing flesh.
The metal comes out of flesh with the deft application of telekinetic fingers but your whimpers filter through the air. It’s excruciating, especially the eye. But thankfully, the robe is already burning against your flesh, blood power sinking into the skin and knitting flesh and membrane back together.
You’re going to strangle the ops personnel if they're alive and if she doesn't beat you to it.
"Sybll!" The incantation tears from your throat in a roar, as you burst back before the smoke. Purple light thrums through the skin in dancing lights. Fire bursts in a palm and you thrust it forward in a half spin.
Flames twirl in a sideways tornado, tearing through smoke, metal, wood, and flesh, consuming anything that dares ling in its path.
And with it comes the ecstatic surge of electric fire up your spine, smashing your brain with such delectable light.
The body shivers, reeling from the pain and anger, trying to suppress the tears that threaten to spill over in frustration. Why did it feel like that?
Lets dissect it.
Grasping the mind’s exhaustion, frustration with incompetence and inability to hold the strings herself is complete. You know who she is, the control she seeks. But there’s more to disassemble here, this connection driving these bursts. The mind is reeling and trying to understand fully why and resolving these dams will require careful consideration, tests, and proper guidance.
Dive deeper.
Turning the hands of the clock is simple enough. Their words become a blur. The other voices and her disdain and increasing agitation fade into series of traumatic thrusts.
Is the mind hurt by this? One can certainly wonder.
"You don’t understand the things I had to do just for us to survive!"
A thread pressed between thumb and forefinger. Show me that dance.
Turning, you’re forced to watch as second by second, Cardea’s dissected at the seams by multiple bullets, shielding the dog she impulsively rescued. Twirling, in a riveting dance all your own, the power flows through your muscles. Release merges with rhythm, in a strong slamming foot against the blackened earth.
Earth ripples in a wave that Cardea hops over, blossoming like the deadliest flowers into thick, rock spikes seconds later. They snatch up five or so men in a shower of blood and pinwheeling, severed limbs that arc so beautifully through the sky.
A pre-planted ice glyph goes off shortly after, and five more slip and slide their way onto their backs, right into the second wave of upward thrusting rock spikes. To add insult to injury, ice curls up on the rock, and bursts into horizontal spikes.
It’s horrifically cruel, and yet deeply kind, snuffing out fifteen lives in moments. But manic laughs are slipping from your lips in a storm of arcing pleasure. The horror you’re unleashing is only just beginning.
"If we’d had full operational control, I would never have had to do those things!"
You had to use blood.
Show me it! You press, concern rising, feeling that flow to the southeast burning.
Feet out of your control carry you into a manic demonstration of a forbidden art. Arms weave, sleeves of the robe that is very much not a robe billowing and expanding into a hungry maw of black. The body bends and flows, following the ancient pattern. You are you yet not you all the same, your reach through reality to great and terrible in grasping the pulsing life strands of these dying men.
Blood ripples in the air, halting its crimson rain, upon the blackened earth. It swirls into a flowing river out of limbs, and bodies, weaving in the atmosphere. Wounded, bleeding men on the ground perish from exsanguination, screaming, throats gurgling with blood. In this moment, the mind and body are the director of this deathly orchestra, and the blood are its strings, binding it to a puppet master far out of sight.
The momentary horror brings all pursuers to a sliding halt. Several thumps, and shouts as they collide, slipping on the ice, nearly smashing into the sharp edges of rock and ice spikes.
Shapes flee in the distance, cowards running from your might but all you can see is the crimson dance gliding through your legs, blind to the onlookers frozen in fear and fascinating shock. This is your combined heritage, the nightmare the mind has run from for a lifetime.
The river of deepening maroon shivers. Then it rockets in spiraling filaments through the air, curling straight into the pores and channels of the famished robe. Deep neon strobes of purple bloom in ornate and twisting patterns through the fabric. It burns with hunger, thaumic power twisting and folding through the wool into muscles, your congealed nerves. Filling you and the mind with its intoxicating power.
You almost let go, for fear that the puppeteer will see your strings too.
Ecstatic sensations bloom as the whole world— no, that's too small. All of reality, unfolds at the tips of clenching, reaching fingers. For a moment, the mind forgets who it is, who you are what she’s doing.
Swept downstream by absolute hedonistic power. Stray thoughts considering the magnitude of true power derived from other blood threaten to drown all input. This state can’t continue.
The mind is reeling, and so are you.
Even still, we could rule the whole world with this might at our fingertips. Maybe we should. Maybe Mother was ri—.
A mirror shatters somewhere in you both, eyes widening. Breath catches in a panicking throat. Intruding thoughts that aren’t yours or the minds threatening to squirm deep into this flesh.
This isn't us. What's going on?
Reality continues to ripple around the body, mind spiraling in arcs.
Is this why I only feed it every few decades? What is wrong with me? What are these thoughts? Why is this high so addictive, soaking into my bones and stoking training that no longer represents who I am?
She’s starting to panic.
And then there’s a gunshot.
The fingers unwind from the bundle, shaking. The body’s hands quake beneath the table, the conversation beyond an anathema. To them both? Or just to you, it’s unclear.
Why can’t I shake these nightmares. What’s happening with me? I—I slew my brother, let the vestments soak in his blood. Is this the cost come home to roost?
This grows more concerning by the moment, but I cannot let it be. If this is what I feel, what I fear, then I am committed to you, at the least.
"Not allowing us to do our own reconnaissance nearly cost me my life." Your voice trembles, tongue loose, words slurred and frustrated in your mouth.
Deeper I need to go as far as you.
A gunshot cuts through the madness of the Font’s sacred dance.
A bullet cuts straight through your skull, silencing the laugh pouring from your lips. The one remaining eye blinks, the robe already glowing in the corner of its vision. You can't feel anything. The body’s right hand rises shakily, fingers covering the wound and then moving inside where they shouldn't be able to before coming out again, soaked in her own crimson.
Oh. Am I dead? I should be? I've never been shot through the head before. It should kill me.
Black spiders in the one good eye, rolling as gravity and balance catch up, and you plummet to asphalt.
You have nothing to add, the pain is immense in yours and her mind.
"Why didn’t you just bend reality, turn back time. You could have saved them all."
"You don’t understand how it works!" you’re yelling at this imbecile now. "You don’t understand what that would have meant for us."
"Well, I welcome the education."
"It would mean getting flooded by Hand elite. Or worse, Black Queen herself."
And in our state, we wouldn’t have survived.
"I had to resort to extremes just for us to survive. Things I’d normally never need to do with proper planning."
Show me.
Each grasp is with greater hesitancy, dreading the images to come. Color dances in the gaze, filling you, flooding you.
Trapped inbetween pillars of concrete and hundreds of bodies, a neon demon dancing on a motorcycle around us we’re fighting for our lives, slowed, and tired from multiple acheing former wounds.
A blade stabs through your shoulder blade, provoking a cry of pain as crimson splatters the ground. The man on the other end snarls in an ear, promising deeper agony in moments to come.
It’s the last thing he’ll consciously do.
Bones and flesh crack and pop. The body whirls around, watching as he stumbles, away, gurgling. Branches burst from skin in a horrifying series of twisting flesh and crunching bone across his body. Golden leaves sprout from the snaking woody limbs. Its like extending spikes tearing limb from flesh, watching as his feet become roots, digging down into asphalt until his flesh is stretched wide over a young and growing tree.
If only it ended there. Roots, limbs, shoots, snare outwards, impaling twenty hand in the blink of an eye.
The storm of hedonism whirling in your skull refuses to stop, growing by the second as you squeal with a glee not your own.
The fingers refuse to let go of the nerve bundles, squirming like they’ve been welded together.
You scream outside of her, in her, but she’s roaring angrily at the barely registered faces across this hellscape. You’ve found the puppeteers string and she’s trying to dig into you.
"For fucks sake, Cardea almost died!"
You don’t need her. You don’t need anyone, but especially that disgusting creature. All you need is to return where you belong. You know this voice, that echoes through your being.
Rage floods from you into the body and mind, as the color screams back. The scarlet strings wrap around astral fingers, grasped by you, not the body or mind.
Then the unthinkable happens. Cardea takes a bullet right through the chest.
Reality dances in slow motion about you, the crumbled remains of a building slamming into the ground as your eyes widen. As Cardea gasps for desperate breath, oozing blood.
The last green tinges of the healing factor snuff out.
The mind screams. The body screams. You scream with her, as the strings tighten in her back like a noose, laughs on the thread. The last of the neon-blood pools curls up towards the hand. Its bound wrist cracks forward.
Filaments of condensed blood become a whip of spiked, neon, blood-iron thirty fucking meters long. It cracks through the air, twenty men and women flayed apart with microvibrations in a single motion. It is a work of majestic art that any blood thaumaturge would drool to have done.
But you do not. You are screaming with the mind.
It's a move she learned from her mother. The recalled memory drives the body into nauseous acrimony, quickly overwhelmed by the sudden bliss of endorphins fueling the joyous-rage burning through both your hearts.
Something's very wrong, but she can’t stop. She can’t stop until she’s saved her love. You can’t make her stop either, for this is but a reflection.
Let her die and lose yourself in the moment! Remember what you are.
You grind her teeth, and yours, feeling the tug of influence through the puppetting strings, the laugh in its desiccated mouth.
"You’re a type Green! You could have done more!"
"I am not a type Green!" the body growls.
"A type black then."
"I’m not a type anything! Stop calling me that. We almost died, and if I bent reality, the situation would have gotten worse! What don’t you understand!"
You’re standing now, frustrated beyond all measure. Furious in the way you clench your fists so hard they are starting to bleed.
I almost lost her, and they don’t even care!
Do it. You know it’s the only way.
Name thy stain, specter of the strings! Show me the depths of thy tainted veins!
Your mind blazes, racing through space and time. You act, suspending the body’s muscles, stopping her from anything she’ll regret, as another thread flares, pulled by the scarlet.
The street becomes a field of horror as skinless bodies squeal and tumble to the floor, writhing in agony before their deaths. Their blood fuels the growing terror arcing in the atmosphere. Dopamine and adrenaline surge inside the body and mind, feet carrying her to the life font's beat.
This blood is mine; you are an interloper!
You turn the hellish nightmare on the nearest building, hardening blood-iron scything through brick and stone like a hot knife through tender flesh. Terrified screams of the dying are a symphony to the body’s ears.
This blood belongs to no one but its vessel.
Left, right, up, down I crack it. You’re not laughing, you can’t laugh because your wife is crawling desperately on the floor. but you’re drowning in the biochemical bliss that comes with each tensing of the whip.
Who are you to take what is mine?!
The building groans, and its structural integrity fails as it falls apart in a sliding schism. It smashes into the buildings next to it like a fucked-up series of dominos.
I am the light which will reveal you, answer me servant of scarlet!
You pull the whip back and out, a shower of crimson splashing across face and hair. It slips from the skin, flowing down into the robe. A shuddering breath rushes through the lungs, power surging underneath the skin in lilac overtones. Blood and iron wrap around the hand, twisting the whip through ground and sky in a lasso of neon death.
I answer to no one!
Cardea drags herself along the ground, reaching to try and pull on the robes. All your focus, all your might turns to the body, the mind. In the now, in this thrust of trauma. But she can't stop, she can't stop cause her wife’s going to die. You need to make sure she's safe!
Then I will drag you screaming.
You almost forget to breathe watching the neon demon work through the crowd. Then a flash of pain, a cry from the lips. Someone landed inside the blood shield, someone has stabbed you in the shoulder!
You cannot begin to comprehend me.
Cardea, with a hole in her chest, sucker punches the hapless fool, and smashes his skull with a well-placed, wet stomp. You don't know how she's standing, you don't know how she's breathing, but she's pale. She's going to die.
We reach across the threads of time and space, the strings curled about your fingers. And you yank, bringing forth that dessicated hollow’s face into the minds eye of you alone.
I KNOW YOU ILYA THE SCARLET SCHOLAR.
The body wheels about, the blood flowing down into the robe. You extend your hands, her hands, and snatch her wife from the air as she falls.
The scarlet recoils on the other end as you jerk her temporal space into the arcing quakes of physical reality. WHO ARE YOU?!
Purple-stained fingers grab Cardea, pulling her in. Lilac light bursts between you, flowing across your wife's dying form.
You regret, now more than ever, playing off her concerns. Because you’re not sure you’re you anymore, or if she’s even going to live.
Time and space twist as the astral fingers that can’t be seen beyond the horizon, wrap around many scarlet puppet strings.
Site-212A, Ericc Au Helios, 130 minutes before abduction
The conversation blazes before me, but it is meaningless static in the face of true concern. The greatest threat in generations I have felt through the spiraling threads.
"What Jameson is meaning to ask, and doing a terrible job of it, is that as a Class VIII reality b—"
"No. Stop." Melina slams her fists on the tables. "Stop doing that!"
But my fingers are out of her now.
Digits curl tightly around the strands, turning to face the southeastern wall. This visage blazes with all my fury.
"Melina—"
"It's Doctor Anagnostis to you."
It all comes back to full circle, why she looks this way. I missed this, long ago when she was in my grasp, and she is worse for it. I have been derelict, and now she pays for my obliviousness.
It is here that I rise, my presence filling the space and the strings like the dragon I am.
I am the purifying light, the ways inbetween, guardian of the passages and liminal wandering.
Traitor. Blood traitor. Matricidal freak! Sarkic sympathizing dog. It screams at me along the strings, attempting to push back my power.
"Dr. Anagnostis we’re just trying to understa—"
"You’re trying to put me in a box! You’re trying to categorize me, like you do all anomalies. No don’t you fucking dare look away. Look at me, look in my eyes. I am a person! I am not a thing. I am not a Class VIII reality bender. I am not an object. I am a living, breathing person."
The strings burn in my grasp as I swell in furious heat and light, sun bursting behind my head. A squeal arises on the other end.
IT IS MINE. MY VESSEL. MY BLOOD TO DO WITH AS I PLEASE.
She shed that skin long ago and I will not abide your impure stain upon her flesh!
"Melina, we’re sorry about this, but—"
"No! I’m done. We’re done." Melina slams her fists on the table, startling the rest of the room.
YOU CANNOT STOP ME BLOOD TRAITOR. THE PACT WAS MADE LONG AGO AND ONLY I CAN BREAK IT.
My voice booms, now, carrying all the fire and character of the Sun I am. Then I shall teach her to find another way!
With all my power I rip the strings from Melina’s back, plucking them straight from the skin. She crumples forward, alarming the rest of the figures in the room, as I send sunfire down the puppets binding strands, relishing the screams so far away.
But this is just a temporary reprieve, and we both know it.
"Melina?"
"Should I get a medic?" The bureaucrat touches Melina’s shoulder, as I turn back to the scene.
"Get your hand off of me," Melina gasps out, her voice rasping and disoriented in my ears. "We’re done here. Go."
The three other figures look as if they are about to say something, but the expression plastered on Melina’s face through the mirror’s reflection brooks no argument, and so they depart. Or at least at first, they appear to. I feel them lingering in the other room. Watching through the window as Melina sits in the chair, rubbing her face.
I stand for a moment, knowing that there is still yet another to evaluate.
Plans to make.
Contingencies to prepare.
But instead, I find myself sitting in the corner. Legs drawn up against my chest, watching her.
What other horrors will I be subjecting her to if the plan moves as I start to see it doing? Will this be worth the pain I’m inflicting upon her? Will she forgive me when it’s over?
For the first time, since my husband, I wonder if my machinations will all be worth it. For hours I will sit here, until all my machinations spring in the mind’s eye.
All the while I shall sit here, even when she’s gone, watching her cry, wondering how else she will be demeaned because of me.
Site-212A, Cardea Gataki, 140 minutes before abduction
This mind is chaos. Rasping equations framed inside lines, inside boxes, inside squares and circles and pyramids, stacked on top of each other through the spinning diametrics of 3D schematics in a sphere of never-ending crimson figures.
Conceptual threading on a scale that disorients the astral threads attempting to weave into a nervous system that refuses to cooperate. The sudden stunning realization smashes into you, there are two souls entangled here, clasped in protective layers of mental iron around a warm core that, for the moment, remains far beyond the digits’ grasp.
“Cardea, we’re going to start with your report now. Is that okay or would you rather wait until you’ve had some sleep?” the false concern in their voice grinds in muffled and distorted overtones against flesh and ears that are and aren’t yours both together.
“Whatever gets this over with faster,” her muffled voice rings through you, obfuscated by the focus on attempting to press into the flesh.
You’ll have to be careful, because one of those minds within this body is older than you, and that is terrifying in and of itself.
So this is where you went.
The eyes open, green in the reflection of the clock hanging off the wall. Purple bags hang beneath them on the cheeks. A mane of maroon tied into a single long braid; framing skin kissed by the sun. Your body is cloaked in a skin-tight black suit throbbing with striating color. The gaze is a kaleidoscope of distortion as focus swims in and out.
You’ve not slept properly in days.
As if the violent hurricane of memory that attempts to rise at that thought and the running equations weren’t bad enough, the senses are overwhelming. Ears that pick up the smallest sounds hundreds of meters away. The stench of cleaning products on the other side of the building trickle through a vent above your head. Pupils dilated in this bright light, picking out the frayed threads of fabric on the guard you’re staring at.
Three people sit across from you in this open space, two women, one man. Red hair, lighter than yours on the left, platinum blond in the middle, and a short, black-haired soldier on the right. The mind refuses to focus on the details, hers and yours, like it doesn’t matter.
You can hear their heartbeats, how fast each roars in their chest.
Your back is pressed against the cool cinderblocks of what should be a desolate site hallway, but that’s not really the truth and the mind knows it. Posters and bulletin boards are scattered along the walls, divots and cubbies with chairs and tables mark meeting spaces.
Normally this place would be bustling with life, and you know it. But right now, it’s just you your interviewers, and two guards standing at the door across from your little cubby, all of them watching you with patented nervous energy.
They lost the damn spare key to the other interview rooms, and the main is office is closed at this abysmal hour.
Idiots.
“Cardea?” One of them asked the mind a question.
“What?” your voice snaps at them, all the irritation prickling into the undertones of your growl.
The guards and the interviewers. They wasted nearly half an hour trying to figure out the key situation, time you’ll not get back.
They have the audacity to stare at you now, the way they hold their arms about their bodies, the dismissive pursuing of lips and frowns. The mind thinks that they think she’s an idiot. You, on the other hand, see the caution in their eyes. Fear of a temper they don’t understand.
The guards are on the same page, eyes on the body and nothing else.
You have a reputation, and the rifle at your feet is not only not kosher with site protocol, but a reminder of the danger the body poses.
They should be yelling at you, stripping you of the weapon, throwing you in a cell, and yet here you are. It’s fear in those eyes, fear of what you might do that leaves you unchallenged in this game of chicken you are playing. And yet you think…
You’re an anomaly after all, you have to be perfect, walk on their eggshells exactly the way they want.
But instead, they, and every other person who’s walked by, have lost at your fucked up game of chicken.
How terminally disappointing. Hypocrites and they can't even make it entertaining for you.
“I don’t think we’ll be long Agent Cardea, apologies for the inconvenience.” The blonde gestures apologetically.
“Next time, maybe you could plan ahead, reserve a room and get extra copies of the keys,” the voice is biting. Almost venomous.
“Why don’t you start us off with what happened right after your marks walked in?”
“Oh, do you want me to give my life story too? It’s all in the report.”
“Humor us and we’ll be done in no time, I promise.” The redhead promises. You wonder if they’re taking advantage of your proclivities and preferences to make you more cooperative.
“Fine,” the body starts to gesture, words forming as you still struggle to integrate into her nerves. “It started wit—
The nodes of a nerve bundle alight just where the fingers can slip beneath the armor. Finally, your chance.
They reach to grasp them.
Ontokinetic fingers within the mindscape slap them aside, grasping the astral wrist, and holding it tight.
Did you really think I wouldn’t notice you snooping around?
The body sits up straight, stopping mid-sentence. Alarms ring in the skull, she’s suddenly hyperalert. The other mind addresses the ancient terror holding the astral wrist, Temis?
It’s nothing darling; I just woke up from a daydream.
Right. Lucky you, getting to fucking sleep. Your half-claimed mind snarls in frustration.
“Cardea?”
Shit. How did you—
“Well, obviously you know everything went to shit because you won’t let us handle all our own pre-operation planning and setup.” The mind’s words fade into the background as you focus on this ancient terror before you.
You’re so loud and messy. First time fucking around with a nervous system? Keep this next part in mind, it doesn’t get any easier.
I’m just here to observe.
You and I have very different definitions of what observe means. Honestly, I thought your family would have imparted more common sense.
Now, shoo, away with you. This one is mine.
She almost completely shoves the astral fingers out, ripping stars and distortion across all possible senses with an ontokinetic surge.
Wait, I can’t just—I may need her.
The hand stops on the boundary of the mindscape.
Need her? My you are bold. Shall I set up a playdate? A tiny little warning, she does bite.
The sarcasm and snark in her thought stream is thick. It catches you by surprise, how flippant she is. In all the years you knew her she was never this. You wonder how she’s changed so much?
No, not like—Olympia’s mount, I need her talents and power.
A dismissive laugh through the echoes of stardust and neurochemical discharge.
Quite the nerve to even ask.
The answer is no, especially after that little affair in Corinth. Waltzing into this skull when you didn’t even bother to show up. The entitlement is staggering. What in Arcadia makes you think she or I would agree to help you with anything.
This is time sensitive. I c—
You claw for some desperate mental hold, purchase that she might understand. But she knocks your pulses aside.
Oh please. Time has never been an issue for you.
Silence hangs between you both in the mindscape. A series of concepts and images flow through the astral hand to the ontokinetic fingers.
If you let this happen, then I can make this real. Even more so if you help.
A nuclear option you never imagined you’d need to wield. The emotions from the other end whirl through your touch borne connection, spinning in your mind.
Well… when you put it like that.
The astral wrist is released.
If you hurt her, either of them, there will be nowhere on this tiny marble that you will be able to hide from me.
The metal armor around the nerves parts, giving the astral fingers proper purchase through which to integrate. You hesitate, her warning fresh in your astral mind. But she’s removed herself for the moment, leaving it all for you.
“I threw a smoke grenade down to cover our retreat, but they fought like—”
Show me who she is.
The nerve bundles press into the digits, images burning across your eyes.
You roll backwards out of the smoke seeping from the warehouse doors; the whole situation is fucked to hades and back.
You’re one of O5-01's fingers, Agent Cardea Gataki, or at least that’s the skin you’re wearing right now. You already know the mage behind you. You know the agony that coming through the other end, like a hand on a live wire, facilitated by a ring of arcane symbols colliding with the skin of your ears.
We need to make something change fast.
A small shimmer of silver light follows you near the right side of the head. You don’t even bother looking at the smoke, instead staring at the light. Three bullets rip from the muzzle of the cannon into the ashen fog. Three screams of surprise fading into bloody gurgles.
Three down, who knows how many fucking more to go. The curses rasp in a stream beneath your breath, someone fucked up big time, let the people you were impersonating get loose. Now everything has gone to hell.
Seven sharpened swords of white ice rip from the smoke. Two curl around the body, redirected by a distortion of time and space that wraps around the her in an aura. Three miss completely. Two slide right into your chest, excruciating, alien cold sinking deep into flesh where they really don't belong.
Fingers press to your temples as the color clears from the gaze, shivering. One hand shakes against a leg, teeth chattering. It’s the nicotine withdrawal, you’ve not smoked in a few days and it’s starting to really hit you hard. The delay from your healing factor only holds it off for so long.
They look at you from where you sit, flickers of concern not for the body, but for themselves whispering across their faces.
“Agent Gatki, are you sure you want to—”
“Ask me that again and see what happens,” you snap, growling.
Certainly an introduction.
The man with the black hair raises his hands slowly. “Easy Agent Gataki, we just want to do this right the first time.”
“Oh, you mean like your operations team was going to nail their role the first time? Forgive me if I don’t fucking buy that for a moment.”
“That’s a little unfair don—” the blonde starts, and you cut her off.
“It’s not. If you’d let us do all our own groundwork, this never would have happened.”
You were so close to sleep earlier, passed out while they looked for the fucking key. That would have been fine, you’ve slept in worse places than this chair, but the universe has a very fucked up sense of humor.
Five seconds after their eyes closed, they sat back down across from you chattering up a storm and rocked you from a beautifully pleasant oncoming ten-minute power nap. Of course they couldn’t let you fucking sleep, soldiers and bureaucrats with no fucking respect for what you can do.
It’s not just a sense of humor; it’s a total sense of timing. You cheat it with what you can do, so it hates you when you don’t. Punishes you by surrounding you with incompetent idiots.
I want to see how much you can take.
“Let’s change tact, your report was very thorough in documenting the injuries. Obviously, Claymore—” the blonde gestures to the red-head, “is here to help make sure you don’t have any lasting damage.”
“Melina’s already done a neurological workup,” you hiss, eyeing the medic. The mind won’t admit it to these chucklefucks, but the body still aches in many places.
“And she was quite thorough, but we want to be sure. Why don’t we go over each affected area?”
You sigh in exasperation, knowing that further argument is just going to prolong the irritation.
“Fine.”
“Why don’t we start with the ice magic?”
The ribs ache with residual chill. “Fine.”
“The shot taken between the fourth and fifth ribs?”
Another bundle of nerves ripples with color as the digits press in—
You can’t seem to catch a break as you leap through the air to follow Melina towards the boxes.
A small caliber round smashes into the side of your rib cage, nearly knocking you out of the fucking air.
You don’t know it quite yet, but this will be the theme of the night. The universe is catching you up on your debt.
Color swims in your vision as the pain burns against the side of your abdomen.
“Fine.” You hiss out.
“Two shots to the right shoulder?” The redhead looks between the clipboard and you with cold and calculating eyes.
In the next place the mind is admiring her handiwork for a few seconds too long, what an idiot. She takes a bullet to the shoulder for the effort.
A stray dog runs across the body’s path, right as it’s about to shoot the rising rifle. It stares up at you, eyes wide with fear, bullets and spells dancing around it in torrents, the poor thing. The hesitation and distraction costs you.
Your shoulder shatters beneath the concussive force of a round, nearly knocking you over.
Dull fire burns in your clavicles.
The body grunts in affirmation. When that’s not enough you add “Fine.”
“Left hand, small bones and muscles of the palm.”
As you peel through the intersections, looking for a place to finally make your escape, shouts rise all around us both. A bullet shreds the skin and tissue of your hand, another smashing into your arm. They’re everywhere.
The screams fill your ears, the mind whirring as you’ve had enough, turning to rush straight into the fire. It’s denied to the body and mind by Melina’s arm, grabbing you to carry forward.
You’re not sure if you respond, the body’s breath constricting with each spike of aches and pants, palm cramping.
“Left pelvic bone?”
Shots crack from an alley as you both run past, ripping into the body’s hip. She stumbles; you roll. Fury in your chest as the knives come free from your bandolier, whipped to the side. Two shadows smash into the light with sickening crunches, blood pooling on the concrete.
It’s a small victory, but it won’t last as your healing factor is being pushed to its limit.
You shift in the chair, acheing palm grabbing the chair hard as dull fire burns in the pelvis.
“Three shots, upper back, spleen, left kidney. Burst of thaumaturgic fire.”
And for further emphasis, your throat rips with a cry as three rounds slam into your back, upper left arm, and hip, ripping through suit and flesh, splattering bone and blood along the ground.
The universe mocks the mind and body, forcing you to the ground, as all you can do is watch Melina peel back around to try and haul you up, buy just enough time for the factor to repair the damage.
Only she takes shots in the sides, nearly bowling her over as she holds onto the body for dear life. To underlinee the point, a ball of scorching fire slams into you both, flinging you down the road.
FUCK. The mind yells internally, the body picking you both up.
“Shot in the spine, third Lumbar vertebrae.”
“I’m still fucking walking and moving my legs am I not?” You snap, breaths desperate, body acheing with residual fire, wanting this to stop. You’re too late to stop it. Already another burst of color rises in your eyes again.
“This shit sucks.” Crimson splatters on the ground from the body’s mouth. Your mouth. Vision wavering, reek of iron and asphalt in your nose, taste of blood filling your mouth. Your back shudders with another painful round, slamming into your spine, the mind reeling with the hit. Every part of you aches with fire, more than fifty devastating impacts across the night.
You wonder if you’re going to make it. The body has slowed down. You realize some of the blood has splattered onto Melina. She hastily banishes it off her flesh, and the mind wonders what would happen if the robe ate her blood.
You know exactly what it would do where the mind doesn’t, and it sends shivers up your spine.
In the haze of pain, the mind notices tears streaking down her lover’s cheeks. Oh. Why is Melina crying? Shit. Shit you can’t be numb right now. Get it together.
You limp around a final intersection before salvation and find the body and mind in a nightmare waiting to begin.
Shit,
Shit,
we think to one another in unison.
A wall of thaumically manifested concrete juts from the street and buildings about ten meters away. If that isn't bad enough, there's at least 80-90 people standing in front of it. Some of them are already procuring spells and magical effects, anticipating the coming fight. It’s not looking good for you; the healing factor won’t have much more to give.
And you don’t have another fucking weapon to help you live.
There are others she hasn’t said aloud, but you know where the next is going, trembling in the chair. Can you let this go on?
“Finally, shot through the left atrium of the heart.”
In the ensuing chaos, the body’s luck finally runs out.
You take a bullet through the chest, watch the metal arc through the surrounding air, flesh and blood arcing out before you. Time slows to a crawl as the green ripples of luminescence start in the cavity, and then sputter out. Blood spurts in gouts from the tattered remains of your heart, even as the suit tries to close over it.
Uselessly, the mind thinks That’s real fucking bad. SHIT.
You hit the ground on your stomach, gasping for air, pain searing through every inch of flesh in an inferno. The body will die in a minute or two. You can’t help but think this isn’t how I thought I was going to die.
But you can’t linger on that. Your mind jumps to Melina, as she screams somewhere above you. The head comes up, just in time to see the last of the neon-blood pool created by your so-called savior, curl up towards her hand.
Forced to watch as she unleashes a move her mother used all those years ago. Bodies smashing into the ground around your mortally wounded body, as the air cracks with vibrating iron.
You’re dying. Here on the ground, and all you can think about, all you can see is the look in Melina’s eyes. That cackling, evil delight you saw in her mother’s eyes so very long ago.
The mind is scared. You’re scared. You’re dying, you’re going to die and she’s going to lose herself and neither of you can let that happen. You have to live for her.
The body crawls along the ground, reaching for her robe.
Reality spins as the astral fingers loosen around the threads. You gag, gasping for breath, the body shaking the chair. Hands press to solid face flesh, hiding the small tears that run down tired cheeks. Shame at the emotion slithers through your chest.
I see.
“Stop, fucking stop!” the body’s voice is a whisper, audible to those in the cubby. “I’m still here, still right fucking here, breathing.”
“You are indeed,” Claymore sets the clipboard down. “Agent Gataki, can you—?” her voice fades in your mind as she reads out lists of psychological symptoms, the mind answering in distant voice.
“Shit,” you whisper. Knowing that she has you. That the shield of bravado and menace won’t hide you. The body tries to shake all the pains off from all those wounds, muscles and bone and ligament aching. Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out.
It doesn’t stick.
An empty ivory handled revolver comes out of the holster on your hip, gently spinning on your finger. The guards in the hallway tense, platinum and black-hair tense reaching for their weapons, and hold their hands there as you spin it on your fingers. The stimulation is desperate, anything to distract the mind from what the body almost lost.
From the fact they may be about to send you to talk to a shrink.
You want to be anywhere but here. You want to be sleeping under the stars in shafts of moonlight, ideally with Melina curled around you in a bed of grass and twigs as the first cool tinges of autumn air start to roll over you.
Your fingers dig into the fabric of the chair, everyone looking over at you with faux concern at your increasing distress as the mind absently answers each question with increasing snark and anger. No part of you buys it for a minute, and neither really do you. You grasp at the pleasant mental image again, knowing what they might be about to do to you.
Knowing that you don’t know who you are without the perpetual motion of things to do.
Hell, you’d still lay in the bed of grass and twigs even if Melina wasn’t in the mood. Sometimes, all you needed to reset after a fucking botched mission handling idiots, was a good nap on the forest floor alone. If only the psychological analysis could understand that.
Nerves ripple with light beneath the watchful gaze of the astral digits, and they slide towards the bundle.
“In your report you indicated that Melina almost was k—”
You’ve not watched her dance like this in a very long time. The mind is as entranced as all those Serpent’s Hand hovering inches away from an icey death. Blood ripples down into her robes.
A rifle, high caliber, cracks in the air. Time slows to a crawl as the thick metal slug arcs through the sky in your eyes, and slams into the back of Melina’s skull, whole body carried forward as it explodes out of her right eye in a shower of horror.
You both stand there, in that horrible moment, caught in the neon lights as she blinks with her one remaining good eye.
The mind and body start to scream as Melina puts a hand in the hole, and pulls it back out, shaking. The body is already moving, before you register her starting to fall backwards. You dive, and blink forward, atoms flaying apart and reassembling at the seams, as you rematerialize to catch her.
I see what you would do for her. The pain you put yourself through. Unrelenting loyalty. But show me how you approach her with your worry. Give me reason to believe you’re worth my time. Worth her love. That you will guide her on the right path for what is to come.
Think about something else, idiot, your mind thinks. Her mind thinks. It’s not the direction you want her to go.
“Stop.” You grasp your head. “I am fine.”
The mind doesn’t hear the responses, sinking deep into frustration. Limiting of field operations, until you are evaluated and treated by a psychologist.
Until your mind is picked apart by vultures. What are you, what are you to the Foundation, to Melina if you can’t do your job in the field? If you can’t be the weapon, the shield you know you are.
Fuck.
The ticking of the second hand from the clock rings in your ears as the mind wanders from thought to thought in its sleep deprived state. Desperate to escape confronting this reality that has sprung upon the mind. Jumping to new trains like a kid following a candy lure in a parking lot.
Her mind is morbid, and it echoes into yours.
Does Melina have these intense moments of maddening thought spirals in the space in-between being dead from no sleep and just enough sleep to avoid hallucinations?
There, another thread to grab.
You focus as the body’s fingers work in taking apart and cleaning the revolver, meticulously detaching each piece to rub it down with a cloth. Yet another desperate bid to stay awake, stimulated, and stave off the madness and desperation of nicotine withdrawal and sleep deprivation.
Their eyes are on you, tense as you work. Gazes exchanged as you shut down, fail to respond to Claymore’s revelation.
The blonde’s voice rings in your ear. “Agent Gataki.”
“I heard her.” You don’t care. The numb slips in your chest, grasping. Melina loves you no matter what.
Right?
“Moving on.” Black-hair awkwardly shifts. “Your report said you had a concern about how some things played out on the mission?”
Your chest constricts like a vice. Did you write that down? Oh fuck oh fuck.
All the while those astral digits reach for another thread, forcing the issue this time instead of waiting for the prompt to come. Her impatience, it seems, is rubbing off on you.
As we stand, back-to-back, waiting for the madness to begin in this trap they’ve sprung in encircling us, you’re inundated with a flood of thoughts from Melina. The concern at the earlier display arcs up your spine in cold shivers.
Beneath all those metal walls, there might actually be a very silly and sometimes sentimental woman in there. Ok, well, caveat that on the other end of that stick is a woman who will go elbow deep in a hunting trophy to make sure every single part is used to its maximum.
It’s likely that image will stick around in Melina’s head for awhile.
You watch her cock her head to the right, as insults and bottles shower you both.
Flowing blood echoes in her mind, then her brow wrinkles.
This growing thrill everytime something dies at my fingertips. What—why?
What’s causing it? Why is it happening? Why am I getting slammed with adrenaline everytime a throat slits beneath my magic, watching them on the ground with poison in their veins.
How long has this been back? Is it getting worse with time, not just tonight, but across my whole life?
You hear her heart beat faster, feel it through where she’s pressed up against your back. It’s a familiar slow rolling panic filling her.
The mind wants to hold her, squeeze her, but not here.
It has. It has been getting worse. It's very apparent tonight. Successive kills, they buzz in my skull, wanting more. I—what’s wrong with me?
It wasn’t that strong half a century ago, just a little tingle. Why is it back? Where did it come from?
Is it the blood magic, again, after all this time? T—that can’t be right. It can’t be such a dramatic increase from that alone.
I should know this answer. But it doesn’t make sense!
I should know the answer! It should be obvious in me, on my skin, but I d—what is going on?
Is it cause she groomed me for this? I overcame that with meditation, with focus and distancing myself. So why is it back?!
And, oh Hecate’s sacred fire, there are so many in front of us. If it’s based on volume—
Her breathing speeds up in your ears, the body and mind crying out in unison internally, desperate to turn and comfort her, but knowing that they’ll be swarmed in seconds. Her face pales in your peripherals, eyes desperately arcing about.
You so rarely get this sort of view inside her thought processes and skull. And in this moment, you feel so very unable to save her. You’re not enough and it takes all of the mind’s will not to break down here. Like you couldn’t save your friend so many years ago, and now is not the time for it but you don’t know who you are if you can’t be her shield and flame.
Have I been feeding something in me this whole time?
Maybe it's time to retire from field operations, dedicate my time with the Foundation solely to the scholarly work and magic deconstruction. But that would leave Cardea in the field alone…
She could handle that in the hand but—
No, I'm getting distracted. We aren't out of danger.
Cardea, you're about to get your heroic stand.
You shiver in the chair, turning sideways to sit irregularly, pressing a foot against the wall, grinding the heel in as you reassemble the revolver. They watch you, with something approaching bewilderment, trying to figure out the game the mind is playing with the body.
Every part of the mind screams that you’ll need to talk to Melina, desperate to discuss what’s going on and how she can help. It bleeds now into the lack of sleep and nicotine withdrawal driving you mad.
“Agent Gataki?”
“There’s no concern, other than how you’re going to fucking handle our operations going forward. You’re going to get us killed if you don’t let us do our own god damn pre-op prep work.”
“Well, we can revisit that once you’ve been cleared for greater fieldwork.”
You want to kick the wall to vent frustration, snap black hair’s neck for talking to you like that. But structural damage would be worse than the sleep deprived game of fucking chicken you’re playing and would certainly get you in a cell. Killing the snotnosed brat would be even worse.
You’re not that reckless.
You are not doing a very good job of convincing anyone of that.
Pain prickles through your temples.
The poor, hapless animal stands there, frozen as the body’s shoulder rapidly heals. There’s no other choice; you can’t let this happen.
Instead of running in the opposite direction, the body dives forwards, the mind screaming. It almost leaps away, but it’s too scared, and your arms wrap around it’s body. You spin, still holding onto the rifle by its barrel. The still healing shoulder slows the body, and the spin is imperfect. A vine, full of sharp thorns and cutting leaves lashes across the back, cutting you open in a dozen places.
To add insult to injury, seven bullets and spells make an art display of your back. You tumble to the ground, cradling the poor animal as it whines in your arms. For a moment, it seems like this is the end.
Then Melina starts to dance.
Fingers grind into the temples as the color clears from your eyes, shivering against the leather of the chair.
“I’m done.”
“Well we do hav—”
“No you don’t.”
“Agent Gataki—”
“You’ve just stripped me of field clearance. Won’t give me guarantees that we’ll have control of our future operations. I’ve got nothing else to fucking say to you. But I will be talking to O5-01’s office, cause this shit has gone too far.”
You desperately look towards the clock, and the interrogation room door, hoping for the relief of Melina’s interview finishing, Come on already, how much more detail do you need from her?
You lament your fate, sinking into despair, as the debriefers try to talk to you further. Not even the revolver is helping now.
Then, salvation appears! You perk up, hearing a door creak as the gaze rises from the floor. Your torturers look too.
Only to curse the janitor that appears, screaming motherfucker in your head.
You groan and growl, on the edge of fully losing it now. Thankfully the bumblefuck brigade takes the point and gets up to leave.
The body rights itself, is about to get up, walk outside, pull out the pipe and drown your lungs in poison, let out all the pain you’re feeling into the night air, when the door to the interrogation room opens.
Site-212A, Ericc Au Helios, 120 minutes before abduction
I stand next to her as the interrogation room door opens, as they file out one at a time, the daggers in Cardea’s eyes at the soldiers. The hurried waddle away, fear on the breeze from the bureaucrat. The sense of some pointless victory in her expression.
Then the adoration and blind love that fills her eyes. It’s hard to look at her like this. I half dip a pinky back in.
Your heart flutters and swoons with a pinch of warmth spreading through the abdomen. For a moment, it's like a dream as she walks the few feet towards us, skin glimmering, hair flowing behind her as if she's striding through a wind tunnel.
I pull out, chest acheing for a love long gone.
Just how I looked at my husband.
Did you see what you needed to?
Turning, there is a green humanoid shape leaning so very casually against the wall next to where I stand. There are no features, just a glimmering, shifting form. It’s probably all she can manage.
Maybe. She’s difficult to get ahold of, to read and understand. But I have an idea of who she is alone. Who they might be together.
I only barely register the wordless gestures that pass between the pair, as they turn to make an exit.
Walk with me young one.
She pushes off the wall and follows the couple as they step out into the moonlight, and I follow.
Site-212A, Ericc Au Helios, 110 minutes before abduction
Hands brush against each other lightly, Melina’s smooth skin gliding over Cardea’s rough callouses. Not quite clasping into firm holds as you walk.
"They suspended my field operations until I see a psychologist." Your voice is even, astral arm extended to embed in Cardea as you mix senses across many folds of time and space. She speaks softly, doing her best to hide the exhaustion, because Melina needs that strength.
It's pointless, Melina can read you like an open book, and it shows on her face.
Tired hands root around in the pockets of your thaumic suit before your toxic addiction comes out, the pipe. You press it between quivering lips as gloved fingers dart back in to retrieve a packet of tobacco. It’ll take a moment while walking to get it properly open, especially with your shaking hands.
Alone together beneath the moonlight, the walls melt away, bravado falling to the side as gentle warmth washes across skin that isn’t your own.
What is it that you’re after.
I have, admittedly, failed in my role. Made a mess, that could explode in ways that would affect us all. I can’t deal with it without twisting the balance against what she wants of me.
So you want to use them as your cudgel?
I need their help to reach her goal.
You lean into one another as the body walks, hands entangling the farther the connected minds and bodies get from the buildings, breaths syncing. The mind feels so… open. Vulnerable here with her in this moment. In every moment like this. It's hard to remember a time when this sense of safety wasn't there. She's like a lilac blanket, draping herself across your skin.
I thought I felt her on your breath.
Yes well, for some of us, the garden's maker never did leave.
The aroma of freshly cut grass wafts against your nostrils. The chirp of crickets singing a ditty to their goddess, the moon, waxes against my eardrums.
I didn’t know these two survived. Were alive. Otherwise I would have taken them under my wing from the start.
And this is what she wants you to do?
"They weren't happy with me either. Both of us really," Melina says softly, with a hint of annoyance in the shifting of her tone as we cross the grass.
I think we both know that she works through interpretation and symbolism now. We were there for the last time her finger was on the scale.
I was quite far away actually. Felt the ripples, what she was forced to do. I think I can speak for the three of us, when I say there are many regrets.
That said, things are changing. Her finger is rising to the scale.
She leans over, as you bend down, snapping thumb and forefinger, as a spark of flame lazily flows off the tip of her index finger and into the pipe with effortless ease. The ontokinetic ripples flutter across the body’s skin, provoking your heart to skip a beat.
Are you going to answer her call?
You and I both know it’s no longer my choice. I gave that up long ago.
Love burns in the body’s chest, hot and melting the iron around your heart. The mind’s disdain of magic flushed away in the face of the sorceress and her softness and power. No longer a foul cheat code to the universe, but a warm lavender blanket wrapping you and her together in this moment.
Enough about that. Do you have a plan?
That’s why I’m here. Why I’ve been in their heads.
You see the look on her face. The motions between you, flicker of the eyes, twitching of hands, fingers, hips. The frustration, the distress, your concerns both being drowned in their bureaucracy.
So, the question is, do they live up to your high and mighty standards oh keeper of the ways of the dead?
I’m not sure yet. I still need a little more.
You sit in the grass, pulling her down with you, arm wrapped around Melina’s waist, after the silent invocation of her distress at being ‘classified’ in a box of bigoted categories. Shielding her from the world.
What more do you need?
How they handle improving each other’s spirits. How they handle one another’s concerns.
You sit with them, you, the green shade, the blood-haired huntress and her sorceress.
Feel the weight of Melina’s fingers against a thigh that isn’t yours, the body’s fingers warmly pressing against the flesh of one the mind so deeply loves. Tail wrapping around hips, leaning weights against each other.
"They should let us handle everything," you grumble, feet kicking at a small patch of loose earth. A rock bounces down the small hill, hearing it clink against the sidewalk. "If I had a fucking…" you pause. "What's the currency this cunty place uses?"
"The pound." Melina squints, considering, distracted now "I think."
The body grunts, and an idea comes to you. The mind’s encroaching plan unfolds before you.
"If I had a pound for every time some dipshit in the operational chain didn't do their job, by Artemis's stag, we'd never need to steal another gold train again." Make her smile. Make her laugh. Make her forget about these trespasses. She needs something in this moment, the thing only you can give.
"Sentimental for the Hand, are we?" Melina hmmms, looking at you, eyes large and full of love that almost cracks your heart in two.
A flittering of thoughts from the mind about the incompetence, but loving bumbling of the hand slide through you. Stabs of small pain in your chest at how, even now, she hides her true concerns from you. She never hides things.
But this moment isn’t about you. It’s about bringing her out of the dark.
"Fuck no, the other cells were always incompetent and in the way. Things were just more fun because you knew there was no professionalism. You could spend half an hour bantering insults with some half-wit mage." The body puffs rings of smoke, wafting about your skull in a lazy fog as you look thoughtful.
"Professionalism is a damn cancer. Walking on eggshells is stupid, people should just be blunt with how they feel. I should be able to walk into someone's office, call them a bloody cunt and get an insult back of equal worth. None of this hide how you feel shit. Talk about toxic."
Melina waves a hand, dismissing your silliness, but the body catches the tiny sliver of a smile trying to form on her lips.
Success. All caution goes to the wind, letting the exhaustion fade into the background of brilliant, indulged, stupidity. You won't walk away from this moment until you make her laugh.
"In case you were curious—" She starts, and then the body cuts her off.
"I'm never curious. Not a single day in my life," the body drones sarcastically, laying it on very thick. Mentally you egg her on, losing yourself in the softness of the moment, the nostalgia for romantic banter you haven’t felt in so very long. "You couldn't pay me a million doll—"
"Pounds," Melina corrects with a snort of amusement, finally looking back down at you and meeting the gaze. It makes the heart beat a little harder in the chest. Draws warmth into the body’s cheeks as the softness twinkles in her eyes.
"You couldn't pay me a million pounds to pick up a book. No ma'am."
Melina snorts louder. So close, laugh, please laugh babe.
"Done?"
"No, I've got a whole manuscript here about how uncurious I am." You gesture dramatically, right hand snared tightly around Melina's hips and she's not letting go.
She must be touch starved or really needs to be held and I'm happy to oblige.
You wave a tiny torn off piece of notebook paper in the air. It came from an oft unused pocket. The piece de resistance for the moment is word 'Cunt' written on it dramatically.
"Is it peer reviewed?" Melina's voice cracks halfway through the word peer, biting her lip to shove down a giggle.
"Well, see—" You look at the piece of paper seriously, as if studying a complicated manuscript. Hold it at just the right angle that she can see, aiming for the killing blow.
"I'm taking that as a no." Finally, her façade cracks, and she giggles audibly, shoving her free hand over her mouth. It's such a rare and joyous noise to your ears.
"Alright, you caught me!" You smile softly at her, gazing with such deep intensity as you stuff the paper hastily back in a pocket.
Every smile from her is a treasure, every laugh a concert, each rare in the framework of your lives. Sometimes we're both just so broken that maybe we've forgotten how to be happy. But then moments like this come along.
Melina shakes her head, and fully laughs now, not just a giggle. The body leans over and kisses her gently in the shaft of moonlight, hearts thumping hard in your chests. When you pull away, she catches my face with her free hand and pulls me back in for another.
Fireworks ripple, love and softness flooding the integrations with her nerves, leaving you gasping for air. You bask in that moment in her warmth and love. You rock together; forehead pressed to forehead.
And here it isn’t her that is broken, but you.
When they finally come apart again, she pats the body’s shoulder, wiping her eyes.
Was she crying?
Shit.
And then, incredibly, she turns the joke back on the mind.
"Don't worry lover, it's only a six-month process where Reviewer Two is completely unreasonable." It's your turn to laugh, and you do. She falls into giggles again.
"I'm sure you'll come out the other end a well-established scientist." She smiles again, with both mouth and eyes. Warmth and love swirl in her pupils, affection and adoration.
The moment of love wavers, as the mind recalls the strange juxtaposition of this moment, with the first they met. A shiver crawls up the body’s spine, recalling the disgust, the dismissal, and the belittlement behind those hateful lilac pupils, how close and yet alien and far away it feels.
Was this woman ever really that person?
I think few are as well equipped to answer that question as you are.
She is not the monster her mother is, nor the monster I once was, so I think that is enough to answer the dilemma.
She got out before it sank into her fully.
But it does speak to the larger… inquisition.
Melina lovingly taps the knuckles of her fingers against Cardea’s thighs. “Now look what you’ve done, I can’t remember what I was going to say.” She smiles.
“Oh good! Cause I wanted to hear more about this operation about as much as I want to scrub a dragon’s ass.”
“Have you ever scrubbed a dragon’s ass?” Melina eyes the body suspiciously.
"No, and thank Apollo's bow for that. Can you imagine all that nasty ass dirt up there in the cracks? Nightmare fuel." You lie through my teeth, remembering the one time she definitely knows about. The body shudders.
She snort cackles softly, façade falling apart again.
"I'd prefer not to."
"Good choice."
The moment hangs between us in an aura of silent contemplation.
The next moments fade into the background as I contemplate if I have enough. Or if there is a little more still needing to be seen. The moon shines down upon us four, smoke from Cardea’s pipe arcing up through its rays, as the huntress basks in admiring her sorceress.
"Let’s not talk about this anymore," you say softly. "I just want to be close to you right now."
You missed the context but feel its echoes.
Melina's mouth moves in slow arcs, tracking the shapes of constellations and calling out their names in silence. Her hand comes to rest over yours, fingers intertwining gently.
This moment reminds you of something not so long. The threads of thought snagging in the corners of the mind. The Corners of Cardea’s mind that flood you now.
In the delirium of sleep deprivation I drift into an unfolding memory. It feels like not that long ago, until I remember the chaos that was this past summer.
It was April, when I last strode under the stars above the base, alone then and unable to sleep for reasons I couldn't place. Nightmares probably. It's always fucking nightmares of the depths beneath waves of the strait.
One of the site spotlights roved over something in the grass near a tree. My steps crunched through the morning dew, the only other sound the distant hum of fluorescent lights. There, in the grass beneath that tree was a poor baby bird.
Blue feathers wrinkled by the moisture, blood caking it's belly tuft. A rock lay in the grass nearby, a jagged edge red with the poor little thing's life-essence splattered on the surface.
It was clear what had happened. Human cruelty, of a kind I was altogether too familiar with. Some heartless guard, bored on his shift, saw the nest up in the tree, threw the rock, and the bird fell to the ground.
They probably fucking laughed.
I picked it up so very gently, with full gloves on. Handling birds without gloves is dangerous, even for me. I just knelt there in the grass, gently brushing its feathers like its mother probably would. Like it's mother should be doing. Like it would never do again.
I cried. Tears pouring down my cheeks. I never cry; it's a sign of weakness. I was always punished, always treated as weaker, lesser for it. For crying. For Feeling like any human should. But there, in that early morning darkness, I did.
Every life deserves a chance to grow, to thrive, to fly, and this poor helpless creature that was just trying to exist was snuffed out. For someone's entertainment.
I hate people. I loathe them. Callous, cruel, monstrous animals that kill for sport and don't revere the life around them. They take and they take and they maim, and injure, and torture for some sort of sick pleasure.
This is why I feel fucking nothing when I put a bullet in someone's brain. I'm numb, static, apathy. I should feel joy, misery, or anguish, anything, but I feel nothing. It's a gaping hole inside of me.
In a better world, I would have gone into cryptid conservation, Wilson's Wildlife wouldn't have been bad.
But this isn't a better world. They made me a killer at age 8, and I've never been the same since.
The strands of passed fate slowly drift away, memory fading. The mind shoves all that pain down, looking away to stop the tears, the rage and hate that was starting to grind in your mind.
A sense of warmth and softness flow from the one named Temis next to me.
Now you start to see the pieces of her within.
I think I have almost everything I need. I just need to see if she—
The mind preempts me.
"Can we talk now?" you ask softly. The body shifts, pulling Melina fully into the lap, wrapping both arms around her front. You kiss the top of her skull with gentle motions, feel the shivers run down her spine.
Burn this moment as your astral fingers press into the rising light of the nerve bundles.
Hey uh, by the way. You left the connection open.
Her face pales. It breaks the mind’s heart. She wasn't going to say anything. Why?
We should talk about it, after. Please?
And please stop flooding my brain, those thoughts at 3x speed are really distracting.
You know what they say, loose thoughts sink cats.
You hope earnestness comes through. You really do.
You haven’t seen her like this in a long time.
You’re scared. Terrified of what’s going on with her.
You want to help, but only she can let you in.
That is definitely not the idiom.
Meh.
But she just… she blows the mind and body off and tries to be funny. It stings in your chest. Why did she do you like that?
I frown, and sigh.
That is disappointing.
Give them a moment.
"I thought we already were," she says softly, pressing her hands over the body’s. Lightly rapping fingers against one another.
"I meant, really talk." She fits the curve of her knees to the front of yours, fulfilling some sort of strange jigsaw puzzle to stimulate herself. "About what's going on."
She's quiet for a long time. Her neck muscles tense and relax and tense again. You rest the forehead against the top of her skull. Feel her start to shake.
"Something's wrong with me, Cardea," the heart seizes up in the body’s chest, real, palpable fear burning in her voice. "And I can't shake it. I can't shake the thought that it’s only going to get worse."
You squeeze her gently.
"Tell me," the mind begs her gently. "Tell me what it is, and we'll go to the ends of the earth to fix it."
Her heart rate accelerates. She pulls her hands away from yours and tilts her head down to look at them. They shake.
"I should have noticed it sooner. Everytime I take a life, I get this buzz in my skull. Endorphins. Then adrenaline. It used to be just like a blip, but today it was—" Her breath catches in her throat, and the body holds her closer, tighter.
"It's ok. It's ok, I'm here," you say softly, pressing the forehead to the top of her skull. Letting her know you’re right here.
"Before the blood, when I was mixing together kills, each one lasted seconds." Her hands tremble harder now. "I'd snap one thread and want to pull another. When the blood came out I—" She shivers. "There was this voice in the back of my skull that begged me to go further. To never stop, so that I'd drown in that high forever," her voice cracks.
Your stomach pits down. It was there before the blood, and the blood magic made it worse.
She wraps herself with her own arms, hugging tightly to her body.
"I didn't come down until the fighting was over. But everytime I looked at you, and I saw the numbness in your eyes I—" the body hugs her tight. Squeeze her close. She puts her hands on her head, bunching up hair in her fingers. "I don't know what's wrong with me. I don't know what I'm becoming, if I'm changing, or why." Hot drops of tears on your fingers.
You both know she’s always had a hairpin trigger for violence. You even know the source. But to them, it’s new. Worrying, and she’s right to be scared. This problem won’t go away, and you know you have to prepare her for it.
They’re scared. They should be.
I always knew that her mother did nasty, unspeakable things. Left something dark and simmering inside her.
You were right. They’re deep.
"Sorry. I'm—"
"Don't you dare apologize," you say softly, squeezing her and uncoiling one hand to come up and cup her cheek, wipe her eyes. "There's no world where this is your fault. We will make a plan. We will figure this out, go to Emily and the twins first thing when we get back from our anniversary week."
I’m amending our agreement.
What?
It’s not enough that you grant me what you offered. You’re the only one who can help her find that way forward.
…did you think me so selfish that I was going to not intervene here?
Yes.
Well. I suppose I earned that assumption.
I was going to do it anyways. No one deserves this burden.
So you’ve seen enough?
Almost, but I don’t think I can quite look away.
She shifts, turns, and straddles your lap, burying her face in the body’s shoulder and neck.
She’s small and vulnerable in ways you’ve never seen her. In ways the mind and body have only seen her a few times. You hold her tight, influencing the muscles. Hold on like the whole world is going to end if you let her go. This is dangerous, mixing with her emotions like this, but you can’t help yourself. Warm tears trickle against the skin as she sobs.
Neither of you have ever seen her this scared.
"I don't want to be like my mother. I don't want to be like any of them," She sobs softly into a shoulder.
It's lack of sleep. The trauma of her taking a shot through the head. Of watching her get shot through the head and your heart stopping in that moment.
The tears sting in the corners of the eyes, as the body wraps her as tight as she can, rocking Melina, thinking about how the mind could have lost her today. Thinking about the chance that she might lose her sorceress to whatever is happening now.
"Listen to me. Listen to me, Melina." You take her chin in one hand and pull her head up very gently to look her in the eyes.
"You are not her. You are not your mother. You'll never be like her. You are so much more than she ever was. You are brilliant in a thousand different ways, and you love. You love Melina. I looked into your mother's eyes, and I saw nothing but hate and contempt for the world, but you. You have so much joy and love to give that it melts down all of my walls."
You squeeze her like you’re going to lose her again. "I love you no matter where this goes no matter what happens, and I'll always be right here by your side."
You kiss her softly. Her arms squeeze around the body, holding you in together.
You’ve lied to her. The shame weighs heavy in the chest. It's an ugly, dirty lie, because the body can't always be by her side.
She needs your security.
The body holds her tight as you can, tears starting to curl out of the mind’s eyes as you break the kiss, and she buries her face in a shoulder.
Shit. What if something is really wrong and we can't fix it?
What if you lose her?
The mind doesn’t know how to cope with that thought.
You layer yourself with thick walls of mental iron, to protect the fragile, paper-thin core.
All to keep others out. To keep from hurting them. To keep you from getting hurt. What do you do when someone's already inside?
What does the mind do when someone already has a body’s heart in their hands?
Her sobs slow as she squeezes you tight.
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Cardea." She pulls slightly back and wipes her eyes.
"I told you to stop apologizing." You cup her chin again gently. "Nothing tonight was your fault. We got fucked by those around us."
She waves my excuse away with a shaking hand.
"I wasn't even thinking about how you felt during this op." She sniffles. The mind knows where this is going, so you look away. You’re naked with her, with all that armor stripped away.
She takes your face in her hands and brings you back to looking into her eyes.
"I should have thought of something to say to get us out of there. I should have had something to say, some way to maneuver us to not let you hurt so much." That strikes an ache right into your core.
"Ah shit, Melina, don't do that. Don't talk like that." The tears come out of the eyes now in a river. You’re so god damned weak in front of her. Fuck.
"You can't take that on yourself. I did what I had to do to keep us safe." The mind and body do what they always did in those moments, shielded what really mattered.
Don't give two shits if people think I'm an asshole. They can't hurt me if I don't let them in. If I have no vulnerabilities to tear into. But Melina's already in. She's not talking to that iron on the outside. She's talking to //me. She's bringing out the girl that died in the woods with the deer when I was eight.//
Melina whimpers and you hold her even tighter. "But I made you kill. I wasn't enough, and I made you kill again. Made you feel cold and alone by alm—"
The mind presses in and kisses her, stopping her from saying anything else. Because if she keeps going, you’re going to break.
The heart can’t take how much it loves her, how much it hurts to lover her. How deeply it aches to be loved by her.
You hated her at the start. Hated what she was, what she represented. In turn she hated you, though you less than what she was.
But she changed. We brought her to new perspectives, smashed open the locks on her door and showed her the world.
How can one person, one awkward, hateful teen, develop this suffocating capacity for beauty, wonder, kindness and still be capable of being so much more? Can't think of anyone more perfect to be with.
You don't know if she always feels the same… sometimes someone like Moose comes along and the mind wonders. Would she love someone who can challenge her more in the ways that are best for her. Are you really enough for her? Do you hold her back?
But she always comes back the same and pulls me close.
Painful electric pulses ripple in the chest at the thought of how it almost wasn’t. How you tried to toss her out. How fucking foolish you were.
Maybe, just maybe, we're so perfect for each other because we were both broken monsters shaped that way by others. Weapons who've lived far beyond their original purpose.
It breaks your goddamn heart to see her blame herself for not being enough to protect you. It breaks the heart to see her feel like she needs to protect the mind and body when she's running on empty.
Fuck.
You’ve never loved someone like you love her. You’re not sure you'll ever love anyone like this ever again.
The astral fingers slide out of Cardea’s neck, unable to take anymore as I sit on the grass behind them, staring at my own fingers.
I see it now. I see how entangled they are. Broken, fundamentally in so many ways, but fitting together like puzzle pieces to stabilize each other.
Temis says nothing, her shade watching the couple.
They rock in each other’s arms, exchanging tears, and soft kisses.
Seconds pass in silence between them, only broken by the chirp of crickets in the distance, and soft sniffles as Cardea holds Melina close.
"Tomorrow will be a better day," Cardea whispers to Melina softly. "We'll get some sleep, and then we'll have the whole world to ourselves for a whole week."
A week is such a short period of time. But they deserve it, a luxury earn with what I’m now about to do.
"I know," she says softly between sniffles. Melina’s touches begins to take on a quiet, soft desperation, echoing through the residual threads of my synchronization with Cardea’s nerves. I know where this is going, with the way Melina softly strokes Cardea’s skin through the suit. Melina wants to drown in sensation, drown this worry.
They want each other, and I feel twitches of my own desire rising through Cardea’s last few unsnapped strings.
Their breaths start to roll against each other's flesh. Cardea’s thoughts drift again to holding Melina tightly, listening as she reads aloud in the late of night, vomiting her favorite theories in a storm of intellectual excitement.
Melina shatters the gasping breath of night, and, by proxy, that very romantic daydream.
"Let’s go home please. I need you," Her breath a whisper against Cardea’s ears. She's out of the lap before the steam can stop pouring out of both our ears, pulling on Cardea’s hand to get her up. Soft fingers, fingers that promise a night of vigor and ambitious fulfillment.
I break the final strings as they prance off into the night, staring up at the sky, Temis remaining next to me.
So what’s your plan?
If I tell you, you’ll want to interfere.
I think I’m going to sit this one out. Now, spill your little secrets Ericc of the rising sun.
1.2 I Can’t Love You In the Dark
10 hours before abduction
I, Ericc au Helios, return to the place my quest began, the balcony overlooking the eastern horizon of the great Pacific Ocean before me.
Gone is the cheerful, lackadaisical confidence in my breast. In two hours time I have learned more disturbing truths and pieced together a plan of action to move everything forward.
// But it is no longer just me on the hook if it fails, and how can I possibly be cheerful about that?//
This should be a moment of celebration, of knowing that things will work out in the right ways. But it isn’t.
Worse yet, I’m not alone up here.
A hand grasps the rail next to me, skin a pale tinge of teal. She is and isn’t looking at me.
The Garden’s creator, or some facsimile of her.
I swallow, trying not to shake. It’s been many many years since she addressed me as directly as this.
“I think you know why I’m here?” The lilt in her voice makes me uneasy.
“It’d be very hard not to.” I swallow again and turn to look at her. Her firey red hair arcs behind her in infinitesimally long waves, skin gleaming with teal tattoos in the pacific sun, four golden eyes staring straight ahead yet piercing all the way through me.
She says nothing.
“I have a plan.”
“I know you do.”
“I’m going to fix what I messed up.”
“They’re important, Ericc.”
“I understa—”
“More important than you.”
I swallow, the weight of her words crushing me. She is not a cruel and capricious entity, the kindest of all of them really. But I have seen her wrath, the depths of what destruction she will reap.
I want none of it blowing my way.
“I understand my great lady.”
“I know you will handle them gently and help them with those matters they need to heal. Know that they are critical to all paths forward where we survive. Mishandle them and…”
I swallow, looking forward. When I look again, she is gone, all that is left? Trails of crimson kelp.
The chair squeaks beneath me minutes later as I return to my desk, only stopping to strip down the sign off Eulades door.
Fingers press to the computer tower as I pull up all the necessary documents, the database entries, and contracts.
Words arc in a flow of aurura and colored lines behind my eyes; each color and word randomly assigned based on arbitrary vibes that only I could ever know the secrets of. Hues blurr together into kaleidoscopes of arrangement, Lines detailing classification, clearance and expectations forming a rainbow of meaning in my ontokinetic web.
Reality pops around the office in ways it really shouldn't, bringing me to a cautious halt as I realize I may have slipped up in my apopleptic stupor. Did anyone notice? Is my cover blown?
Unlike other mistakes of the day, they haven’t.
I curse my foolhardy inattention, this could have been disastrous.
I scan the screen and database for RAISA alerts. My heart slams in my chest like a timpani.
Nothing.
There, that will do. Force the issue before the prototype is refined.
I lean back in the chair, the weight of what I’m about to do, the forces I’m about to spring into motion sitting heavily upon me. Despite all my accounting, all the layering in to the machinations and considerations of how this will play out there are factors I can’t account for.
How will they be treated? She’s only dealt with objects so far. Will she even take the bait of falsified records? Is this overengineered, risking it being traced down eventually?
The options and outcomes flicker through the arcs of my mind and conceptual webs, uncoiling the cascades of life and possibility. The enter key taps lightly beneath my fingers.
Is there another, less painful path?
I run through the scenarios. But there are none where I don’t immediately reveal my hand.
Those scenarios get ugly, messy. And all the lies, all the salivation over anomalies.
No, she’ll bite like an andeluvian squirm eel.
The corruption was impossibly deep, and not a soul on the Ethics Committee or the Council knew a thing was out of order. This was my greatest mistake, letting it go this far.
Knuckles crack beneath the pliant force of my fingers. Warmth of the 'computer tower' buzzes beneath the tips of my fingers as they glide across the surface, catching on the little etchings of the metal as I trace the letters and grooves, like a guitarist caressing their strings. The ripples are easy enough to track as they flood through the whole system. I twist my pointer finger: hit send and hover the mouse over the dialogue box that pops up.
Breach of clause detected. Send notification to managing Site Director?
Yes / No
I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and hope beyond hope that this does not go south. My heart hammers in my chest.
Will they understand, when they find out what I have done? Will they forgive me? Will they even survive.
Breathe Ericc, breathe.
All the color and webbing vanish from the screen as I make my decision. Heart slamming in my chest. I lean back and wait.
Seconds later, a ding in the other room, the death knell of a vision long dreamed.
“Jacobs, I’m sending you to Site-212A to pick up a couple of potential big fish. Details on the way.”
I, Ericc au Helios, rise from my chair like Zeus standing from his throne, and walk over to stand next to the window, looking out at the setting sun.
Shall we dance one last time underneath your sorceress light, my niece? Under the pale and silver moonlight of your partner?
﹏𓊝﹏
﹏𓊝﹏
1.2 These Broken Pieces on the Floor.
20 minutes before abduction
The cold, black of the night parts with a creak as warmth pours in from the world beyond. Light trickles like a stream, slowly flowing into the room from the ajar suite door. The Spartan interior gleams, tile and carpet glowing with a gentle and welcoming orange.
Two women announce themselves with bootsteps clicking against the linoleum, returning to a home away from home. Sweat and musk drown in the fresh aroma of a week-old dinner, long put away. The muggy warmth of a thermostat left too high washes across their flesh, congealing cloth and leather to hidden skin.
A facsimile of a home greets its owners, barebones and desolate in its lack of personalized decorations compared to their peer’s dormitories onsite. Yet curiously, it is very clean.
“What a fucking day,” Cardea groans, muscles screaming into the night with the tension aches and bruises from the mission that are only just now starting to hit. She skulks away from the door on lean musculature, feet practically dragging across the tile. An hour’s rest or so and she’ll be good to go. Though it’s more likely to be eight. But first there is the grasping promise of Melina's hands still pressing in her mind.
The question is, will she still have the strength to meet them?
The revolver's holster comes off easily enough, tossed onto the coffee table with haphazard abandon.
The high-powered rifle nearly tumbles to the ground with a clatter as she barely catches it, bending to put it on the rack with the small collection of guns and crossbows.
It’s all a show of course; she’s stood for hours in front of a mirror in the bathroom, watching her back muscles flex through the skin-tight suit. Her audience is paying rapt attention, that much she is sure of.
A crinkling of chains signals the disgorgement of her partner’s tool of death, out of sight and out of mind.
“Just once, it would be nice if they gave us a recon mission, instead of all these infiltrations.” She sighs, letting the exhaustion leak into her voice as she starts to unzip and unbutton the clinging ‘thaumic’ suit.
“Especially after June. It’s just been nonstop.” Melina probably won’t acknowledge the statement… she’s not sure why she even said it.
Soft hands curl around her waist, Melina, pressing the fullness of her face into the crook of Cardea’s neck. Plush lips drag across sensitized flesh, nerves flaring with forgotten fire like a star about to shed a solar storm.
Melina’s voice coos softly in her ear, the mezzo-soprano a symphony against her soul. “Banish it all from your mind, love. The next week is all ours. Our anniversary, your nameday.” How is she able to codeswitch so fast. It's like the prior day never happened.
Cardea shivers, prickles running straight up her spine from the affection; cheeks flush with pink from the caress of her scholar’s harmony in her ear.
Cardea’s head turns, eyelids heavy and hooded, inhaling the residual aroma of Melina’s shampoo. Their gazes lock in the twilight, chestnut brown hair framing blue eyes with just a hint of lilac lacing around the irises in slow oscillating twirls of light.
“Already hearing the call of the surf as it washes across your bare toes?” Cardea presses back into her partner’s nuzzles, starting their post-op ritual.
“Or maybe it’s the ruffle of pages as you drag your fingers over the dried ink, the roast in the pot on the stove in the kitchen reaching your nose as you read aloud to me?" Fingers caress into the curve of Cardea's hips, dragging along the abdomen playfully.
"As we lean against each other in front of the warm firelight?”
Another pause as they rock gently.
“Or maybe it’s the buzz of jubilation from a streetside performer in the closest city, a new trick learned for nothing at all as the sweet scent of sugary candies tempts you."
Cardea leans back, something displacing the air around Melina's hips, provoking an intake of breath from her. She smirks softly, letting that implication hang for a moment before she continues.
"Will you take my hand once more on this neverending journey?” Cardea whispers softly back, drinking in the light of her greedy eyes, the inviting shimmer flickering behind the black as Melina slowly drags the zipper of her partner's thaumic suit downwards.
The light flickers with the smoothing of Melina's forehead lines, saying all that needs to be said. The wordless exchange of meaning burns warmly in Cardea’s lower abdomen. The words that follow are just icing on the proverbial cake.
“Maybe,” she trills back softly.
“Or maybe, I’m relishing laying in the leaves with you, the trees all around us shedding color and life as the cool of autumn washes across our faces. The musk and decay are like an endless shelf of books to my nose."
Melina leans in again, pressing her lips into the crook of Cardea's neck before she continues, a shiver bolting up her huntress's spine.
"Or maybe I’m reveling in the twinkle of stars swirling above our heads in the clear North American night. The bay of wolves on the breeze as we’re huddled together. The crackle of the fire at our feet, the aroma of roasted marshmallows and gamey meat leftover in our minds as a gentle doe nibbles seeds from your outstretched hand.” She presses back in, dragging her lips over the contours of Cardea's skin again before continuing. There's a desperation to her words, one that tinges the tone and wafts hues of color through both their minds.
“Or maybe it’s the slick coolness of mud and dew caked on our skin, laying in the warmth of a gleaming, Greek Mountain sunrise. Covered in leaves and branches as we wait for the Olympian Golden Finch to hatch in the nest just a few meters away. Yes, I will clasp your hand in mine, steal your heart as you’ve stolen mine, and walk with you to the very end.”
This is theater. A play called romance, never ending in its many acts.
A tradition ground into the palms of their hands; playing out after every operation.
An echo of the first time they ever said the words, the binding proposals made so long ago.
Made all the more special on the eve of their anniversary.
“Tease,” Cardea whispers, shattering the poetic atmosphere so very softly. She turns to face her partner, her lover, the other half of her soul. Forehead comes to rest against forehead, one hand coming to reside on her scholar’s wide and soft hips. The zipper stops at the groin where the track ends.
“How did you come to know me so well?” Cardea purrs, noses rubbing together, breath washing across each other’s faces. “Who gave you all these keys?”
She drags a hand up Melina’s torso, tracing the shape of her scholarly form, feeling her shiver beneath the touch like a cat being scratched at the base of its tail.
“At some point, you oh so foolishly let me in,” Melina purrs right back, leaning into the hand that rises to grasp her cheek, Cardea's thumb slowly working into the soft flesh and bone of her cheek and jaw.
A gentle tug on the thaumic suit. Their eyes meet, softness and affection glimmering beneath the black. No trace of the cold and analytical distance Melina views the rest of the world with. A moment of parting, sliding of fabric against flesh.
Cardea's thaumic suit falls away, crumpling in a pile on the floor as she steps out of it. She’s left in thin cloth shorts and a sports bra. Barren and vulnerable before her sorceress. A return to form blossoming outwards. Grasps pressing in, lips meeting in a slow explosion of scintillating luminescence and color. Rippling outwards as it always has. As it always will.
I love her. I love her more than my bow. What would my world be without her? Without this warmth?
The pangs and aches of a long week swept away in the amorous grasp of intensity, discarded like the suit on the floor. They stand, locked together, arms wrapped around one another, swaying for what feels like eternity.
Electricity crackles and arcs through every nerve. With every motion, no matter how small.
But unlike their time together, not everything lasts forever.
"Should we take off the second skins now? Or later." Cardea's eyes twinkle in the dim light.
"On, it's good to try new shapes," Melina purrs back in response.
"A good plan." They press in for another soft kiss, resting forehead to forehead as they part again.
“You did good today,” her magician trills hungrily in the aftermath of the sparking affection, foreheads resting against each other. “Very good.”
Goosebumps ripple like a slow rolling wave across Cardea’s skin at the change in pitch and tone.
“Not good enough to salvage the op.” She closes her eyes, swaying with Melina’s heartbeat as it thrums in her ears.
“An impossible task, even for us. Bad intel is bad intel.” The reassurance bubbles in Cardea’s chest. “Regardless of the outcome, you did good. I am so very happy with your social improvement.”
Seeing an opening in the moment, she goes for the throat. “Good enough to make you scream tonight?” Cardea growls, heat rising in her abdomen.
“Only if you’re hungry enough to handle me,” the counter comes fast, the softness of her touch taking on an aggressive buzz that weaves into their interlacing abstracted threads. Cardea grins, ploy coming to fruition.
And then reality catches up with them, right as Cardea opens her mouth to double counter.
Her stomach rumbles.
Oh right. We only had breakfast today.
Should have brought snacks.
The atmosphere fractures, but all is not yet lost as the beat drops for but a few moments. Melina laughs gently, breaking their embrace. Cardea relishes that soft, vibrato filled noise, losing herself for a moment in the curls and pitch.
“You are on the hook for dinner tonight. Something fast and filling.” She winks at Cardea. “But not too filling. We both need to save room for,” her eyes drag down, lingering for a moment, “dessert.”
For emphasis she licks her lips.
Metaphorical steam starts to pour from Cardea’s ears as her cheeks flush with color. She leans in and pecks her sorceress on the lips again, before gently and playfully shoving her. “Go on, cacodemon, I banish you to the bedroom for the crime of temptation,” a pause, and she playfully adds “If you stay in here, I’ll never get food ready.”
Melina snort laughs, and turns to leave, but not before dragging the fingers of her right hand across Cardea’s cheeks. She almost faceplants into the carpet while attempting to prolong contact with the last finger, as her lover makes her strategic exit.
The clock on the wall ticks, ringing in her ears. Melina’s melody echoes in her mind for several more seconds, like a good song that you just can’t shake, utterly stunned.
I am the luckiest woman alive.
She falls back into autopilot. Pulling a box of pizza rolls out of the fridge, looking at it, looking at the rest of the fridge, and sighing with a shrug. “Make do with what you have.”
She can’t really remember when the microwave started, distracted by the sounds of Melina moving in the bedroom. The flow of water from the sink as she washes off plates that were left in the dishwasher too long. Mind already lost in the coming bliss, the affairs of the approaching week, and much more.
She slips into a daydream about an upcoming evening on their cottage couch, nestled into each other with the cats arranged all around them. Watching a movie or maybe a TV show in the waning hours of a long day. Lamenting how quickly it will all go by. “It’s never enough time,” she mutters.
The sounds of waves crash on the beach, syncing with the ticks of the clock. Melina’s quiet laugh in the early morning. Rustling of books, the crunch of leaves and branches, the trickles of a waterfall drift into scope with the mental images as they flutter by.
The reverie ends abruptly, sliding away at the behest of another sound. Engines in the distance, an aircraft flying low overhead. She shuts off the sink, listening.
Odd, traffic’s not common this time of night.
She ignores it after a moment, used to all comings and goings of people at the Site. But the next sounds are not so easily dismissed. Footsteps in the hallways, harsh steps. Military grade boots? Grass is ruffling outside.
Eyes narrowing, she sets down the sponge and stops the microwave. She listens. Silence. Eyes dart to the gunrack. Slow steps as she reaches, vision darting back to the door.
The hiss cuts through the air at the last moment.
Time slows to a crawl, hand lashing for the gun. Her head twists to look towards the bedroom, eyes widening.
Get the words out. Call to her. Fucking say it faster!
“Fu—“
Too late.
The door explodes inwards. The shockwave and a huge chunk of wood rippling through the Suite, smashing into her and flinging her back against the wall.
Ears ring.
Vision doubles.
Scything pain howls up her spine from the impact against the drywall. Dusk and smoke cloy at her lungs. Breathing choked with coughs. Warmth on the back of her skull, fuck, she hit her head in the impact.
That's really really bad.
Her eyes dart down, a giant splinter the size of a chair leg sticking out of her stomach. The adrenaline numbs the pain.
Fuck. Enough time should have passed for the healing factor to restart but— That’s going to hurt later.
Like a hammer being used to excise a stubborn nail, the splinter bursts free with a strong yank of her right arm. Blood gushes onto the floor in great gouts as the gash rapidly begins to knit back together with agonizing sensations. Her left arm hangs limply, the muscles spasm as the broken bones from the impact start to reconstruct their former shape like the most anguishing jigsaw puzzle imaginable.
Her vision snaps towards the bedroom door. Neck muscles ache from the whiplash of hitting the wall. The distorted cacophony of footsteps pounds against her bleeding eardrums. The glass of the windows shatter next to her, shards spraying across the floor.
Melina in the doorway, fuzzy, doubled and blurred.
“Cardea!“ A cylindrical device bounces off the wall, buzzes, whirrs, and flashes pink before detonating in a burst of thaumic light.
Everything rings.
Abstract webs flay apart in an instant.
Warmth trickles ripple down the sides of her face as insult stacks on top of injury.
Vocal chords vibrate with her screams. Through the ringing and pain, she hears Melina shrieking too.
No.
Footsteps fill the room like war drums in the deep, shadows and white resolving into images.
Why now?
She probably scares the piss out of their assailants, bolting upright, chair leg-sized wooden splinter grasped like a bat.
Did they follow us? No, that’s impossible.
Three cracks, three long darts thump into her chest, causing her to stagger. Icey numb spreads through her veins.
Sedatives. Matter of seconds.
Muscles lunge, vision wavering, overhand swing… ending pathetically as the wood clatters against the floor.
Two more steps.
Her face hits the ground, rapidly blurring vision capturing the chaos. Boots pin the thrashing form of her partner to the floor.
Melina.
I’ll protect her if you go under.
She can protect herself. I don’t want her to feel alone. Not after today.
She fights, she fights like a dog down in the mud to try to get up, stand, fight back. But her eyelids are too heavy, muscles too numb and unresponsive. She manages to lift a few inches off the ground looking up into a blurry figure rapidly approaching her with a rifle leveled at her head, and then the arm gives out.
Can’t stay awake.
The world seems a distant, pointless thought, swept up by a final moment of crushing, lucid realization. The last thing she feels, is the tears running down her quickly numbing cheeks.
Our anniversary…
She falls into the black of nothing.