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faejilly · 4 years

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Let’s Go Steal Some... Magic?

This is entirely the fault of a prompt from the Hunter's Moon Discord: “A Leverage Shadowhunter crossover where Alec gets desperate enough to hire a band of good thieves who’re known for being able to steal back ANYTHING to steal back Magnus’ magic.”

I take no responsibility whatsoever for any of this, but man, I had a great time writing it, so I hope you enjoyed reading it, too 😅 (With an extra thanks to @greentealycheejelly for double-checking it at least sort of made sense.)

Alec knows more about the mundane world than most people realize. He may, in fact, have helped encourage the impression that he's ignorant; it's not like he's been impressed by most of what he knows, so it's easier to just... not deal with it when he doesn't have to.

But there's nothing anyone in the Shadow World can do about this, so maybe... maybe it's time to try something else.

Only he's not sure where to start. He's going to have to ask for help.

Not his favorite thing, but. This is for Magnus. He'd do worse for Magnus.

Lindsay's probably his best bet, she's the one who tracks the bots and AIs that the Clave has keeping as much of an eye on the internet as anyone can manage, hoping to catch those mundanes who might cross the line from figuring out that what they're seeing is because of the Sight, into trying to do something like summoning demons or playing with dark magic.

Her reports on some of the conclusions their machine learning algorithms come up with are sometimes the highlight of his week. He liked the one that tried to figure out which folk songs were based on real adventures with the Seelie and Unseelie Courts versus the ones written by people who'd drank too much or gotten stuck in a cabin in the middle of nowhere for a longer than usual winter.

So he asks her to come see him. She looks, unsurprisingly, deeply nervous when he closes his office door behind her, and he sighs as he sits down in one of the armchairs rather than behind his desk. "I need your help, please."

She doesn't look any comforted by that comment, but she sits across from him, and refrains from either glaring or babbling, so that's something.

"I need." He stops. He's not sure what he needs. "I need to think outside the box, and as the current box is Edom and the entire Shadow World is pretty convinced that that's an impossible box to open—" Alec stops, realizing his metaphors got slightly more tangled than he'd intended. "I think I need someone who is in the know but still mostly mundane, so they're not stuck on the same preconceptions the rest of us are?"

Linday blinks at him. She clearly didn't follow that.

He frowns, but she doesn't get more tense, so at least she figured out he's frowning at himself rather than her.

Clary might have given him multiple migraines and almost as many heart attacks, but she'd barrelled through things he'd thought inviolable just because she didn't know any better, and he could use some of that, right about now.

"Magnus traded his magic to a Greater Demon in order to banish Lilith's demon, and..." He trails off again. And I have to do something about it, but the only thing I can think of is trying to negotiate with said Greater Demon myself and that's a clusterfuck of epic proportions just waiting to happen.

He'll do it, if he has to, he knows this, but that should probably be a last resort, not the first attempt.

"You want to steal it back?" Lindsay's voice cracks half way through the words, and he doesn't blame her, that sounds more insane than anything even Clary would attempt, but...

He hadn't actually framed it that way himself, and he should have. She's probably right, and that is exactly the sort of thinking he needs.

"Do you think that's possible?" He tilts his head, spreads his hands in something that's almost a shrug. "I know there are Sighted thieves, and there's a thriving grey area of mundane and Downworlder interactions with magic that don't usually end up with dead bodies or demons so we don't do anything about them."

Lindsay frowns back at him, but she looks like she's thinking, so he waits.

"Well." She starts, stops again. "There is this hacker..."

Alec blinks. "I don't think the Prince of Edom keeps his stolen magic in a server."

Lindsay snorts, and rolls her eyes at him. "Ha, ha. Sir."

Alec shrugs, and waits.

"There's a warlock, Edda White. She fosters mundane children, usually ones that lost their parents to the Shadow World, or who have the Sight."

"And she's a hacker?" That's an odd combination of jobs, but he supposes it's something one could do from home while keeping an eye on a bunch of presumably traumatized children.

He wonders if there's anything they could do to help her out. Unofficially. Or officially? The Clave really should stop pretending the Shadow World's completely separate from the mundane world, no one believes that.

"No." Lindsay shakes her head. Pauses. "Well, yes, but she's not the hacker I was thinking of, I meant one of her kids."

"If said kid's already in the Shadow World, that's defeating my outside of the box request." He's not really trying to argue with her, he's just not sure where she's going.

"Sir." Lindsay levels a stare at him. It's not as good as the ones his mother or sister can pull off, but it's not half bad.

"Sorry."

Lindsay nods, and adjusts her glasses. "He's Sighted, and he's active on some of the forums the Clave tracks, helps people find resources or contacts, which is how I know about him, but he works in the mundane world. With a team of thieves who have pulled off some really impossible jobs."

"Edom impossible?"

"No, but you said you needed some creative thieves, and they're arguably the best in this world." That is something the Clave would know, just because the few truly occult artifacts the mundane world knows about tend to be expensive, so they attract the attention of the worst sorts of people and the best sorts of thieves... who then attract the attention of the Clave, to make sure no one actually tries to use the things they've stolen. "It's a place to start."

Alec nods. It is, and that's all he asked for; he hopes it's enough. "What's his name?"

Lindsay shrugs. "No idea, but I do know how to get a message to his team. They've an open call out for people who need help and don't have anywhere else to turn."

Alec feels his lips twitch with reluctant amusement. "That certainly fits this situation, doesn't it."

Lindsay concedes with a small nod. "I'll reach out, and let you know what they say."

"Thank you."

She nods again, slightly less smoothly, as if she's not sure what to do with gratitude, though he's not sure if it's because it's him personally or the Head of her Institute in general, and slips away to get to work.

Alec closes his eyes, and lets out a sigh, and tries to hold onto the flicker of hope in his chest.

Maybe. Maybe. Maybe this is what he needs; maybe this is what Magnus needs.

Please.

***

Hardison blinks at the email he just opened.

He double checks the sender's address, and IP, and everything else he can think of to confirm it's not somehow a joke or a scam or something, but as far as he can tell by every test he can think up, it's genuine.

Leverage just got a fucking email from a Nephilim. On behalf of the goddamned Head of the New York Institute.

He pokes his computer screen, as if that'll make it disappear or something.

It doesn't.

Which is probably good, he's Sighted, not a warlock, if he started making the world change outside of a computer, he'd be in deep shit.

The email's surprisingly straightforward, in contrast to their usual potential clients, the Shadow World in general, and everything he's ever heard about Shadowhunters in particular. Shadow Hunters? Shadowhunters? He's not sure he's ever had to write that word out, he wonders which is considered proper grammar.

Holy shit, he's distracting himself with grammar.

He calls his Nana.

"I got an email about Alec Lightwood and Magnus Bane."

"Fuck."

Hardison pulls his phone away from his head and stares at it for a moment before he can handle that. "Did you just swear at me?"

"Not at you, baby." He can practically hear her roll her eyes at him. "I was old enough to swear before your grandma was a gleam in her daddy's eyes, and you know it."

Yes, but you don't, Hardison almost says out loud, not around your babies, you don't, but he swallows it down. "Some Nephilim is asking for help from us, from my team. Do you think it's legit?"

She hums, some melody he's never been able to track down or place, never heard from anywhere or anyone else, and he's glad that that's normal at least. Nana's thinking noise is exactly what he hears in his head whenever he's trying to crack a particularly tough system.

"I do. New York's gone through some shit, and I've heard some rumours about Magnus..." She trails off. "Lightwood's reputation is pretty solid, I think he'd stretch those Nephilim Laws as far as he could, if he thought it was worth it."

"Should I take the meeting then?"

Nana pauses, but she doesn't hum this time. She's not thinking, she wants to make sure he is. "You'd have to tell your team what sort of meeting it really is."

Hardison's whole body tenses up along with his face as he scrunches his eyes as closed as he can get them. He wonders if Parker and Eliot really are part-fae, like he's always thought. They've both got more than a touch of the other when he looks at them out of the corner of his eyes, and it would certainly explain how hard they are to injure, how easily they lean into each other's space, as if they've never before found someone that makes some weird sixth sense relax.

Then again, he loves them enough it might just be his own aura sparking in the way.

He wonders, if they are just a little magic, if either of them know, and just don't think they can tell him.

He wonders if they'll be mad to realize he's kept a secret from them all these years, or if they'll be hurt.

"Yeah," he sighs, and opens his eyes back up. "Don't suppose I could get a family dinner to help uh... illustrate my point?"

Nana laughs, but it's sharper sounding than usual. "If New York's as messed up as I've heard you don't have much time. Tonight good?"

Damn.

This is clearly more serious than he'd thought, and he wonders what he's missed, busy focusing on his mundane life rather than the Shadow World.

"I guess it has to be. Thanks."

Nana doesn't bother to say anything else before she hangs up on him.

He turns around, and no he does not scream, that was just a gasp, and Parker and Eliot are in the doorway, both of them staring at him.

Check mark in the supernatural column.

He smiles at them.

They don't smile back.

Hey guys, want to meet my Nana, the centuries old warlock who taught me how to see demons so they wouldn't eat me?

Yeah. That's gonna go over well.

"Don't suppose either of you believe in magic?"

Eliot does that thing where he's not frowning but is really obvious about how he's refraining from frowning so it actually feels worse than if he'd just scowled at you. "You mean science we can't explain yet, or actual magic?"

Hardison tilts his head and hands with an eh maneuver. "Vampires and werewolves and fairies, oh my?"

Parker shrugs. "Archie always said he thought I was a changeling, does that count?"

Hardison shakes his head, and sees Eliot frown for real, and knows they both wish they'd been harder on Archie when they had him in their sights. "Yes, but that's a terrible thing for him to have said."

"Why?" Parker comes into the room proper to perch on the edge of the table extending out from his desk. "If it's the truth?"

"Because he didn't think it was true," Eliot answers, his voice low and rough. "He was using it to pretend it was okay for him not to take care of you."

Parker rolls her eyes; they've had this argument before. "But if he'd tried, I wouldn't have realized how much better at it you are."

Eliot jerks, like his whole body just tried to shut-down. Hardison can't even appreciate how remarkable that is, because he's too busy feeling his brain stutter right in sync.

"What?" Parker did that are you being stupid or did I make less sense than usual? face of hers, eyes a little squinty and shoulders just starting to hunch.

"Thank you, baby girl." Hardison manages, before she thinks it's the second. "I'm still gonna be mad at him for not trying though."

She frowns, as if she thinks that's dumb, but shrugs, clearly having decided that that's just the way it is. "So does that mean you think he was right, even though he didn't know it?"

"Uh." Hardison does a whole body shrug, because he's not sure why he ever thinks his conversations with these two are gonna go the way he intends. "I have no idea, but it wouldn't surprise me? You're uh. Better at things than most humans. You both are."

"Huh." Eliot says, but not like he disagrees. "But neither of us have a problem with steel or cold iron or whatever it is."

Hardison stares at him.

"What." Eliot stares back, and Hardison can't tell if he's fucking with him on purpose or not. Damn Eliot and his poker face.

"Did you say that because you know things, or because you read fairy tales when you can't sleep?"

Eliot's face looks like he wants to say damnit Hardison but doesn't want to give Hardison the satisfaction.

"Second one, got it."

"Kindaalwaysthoughtitwasaliensanyways." Eliot mutters.*

Hardison is pleased to note that Parker joins him in giving Eliot the look.

Eliot crosses his arms in front of his chest, and looks back, and Hardison sighs. He's right, they don't have time for that right now. "We are revisiting this," Hardison says, pointing at Eliot. "But first we're going to Nana's for dinner."

Parker actually literally squeaks, and he can't tell if she's excited or nervous. "Is she a fairy too?"

"No, and they prefer Seelie or Unseelie, depending on which Court they were born into, but you know, that's a whole separate thing we also don't have time for right now. Nana is a warlock which means she can do magic and she's immortal which I know sounds like more fairy things because they are practically immortal and also do magic, but I swear it's not."

It's his turn to be getting the look from both of them, and he stops. Starts again. "So. Uh. Demons? Totally a thing?"

Eliot sighs, and finally stops lurking as his shoulders relax into something more like at-home-Eliot rather than working-Eliot. "You made a multi-media presentation, didn't you?"

Hardison opens his mouth, and shuts it again. He did, like three different times, and he keeps deleting it and starting over, but he supposes that might be one way to go in order without thinking about Nana swearing and the email and trying to jump to angels are real and angel-blooded people kill demons and the Head of the New York Institute wants our help! before that means anything to anyone.

"Ooh." Parker sits up straighter. "Should I go get some popcorn?"

"Why not." Hardison can't help the smile, doesn't even try. "We'll have a proper briefing in five."

***

Magnus is not entirely sure why Alec invited him to his office, it's not like I can help with missions anymore, and seeing Alec sitting on the edge of his desk wringing his hands when he walks in the door doesn't calm his nerves any.

"Magnus!" Alec looks up, and his smile's not any more comforting than the wringing hands were.

"You're here."

"You asked me to be here." Magnus offers, and makes himself walk further into the office. He's not sure what else to say, and just lifts an eyebrow in Alec's general direction.

Alec shrugs, and bites his lip as he shifts his weight, and then suddenly his tension melts away and he's standing at parade rest and oh, whatever this is, it's clearly important. "I did."

Magnus holds up one finger, turns around to close and lock the door behind him, and faces Alec again.

Alec offers him a crooked almost smile, much more sincere than the last one, and the tension between Magnus' shoulder-blades eases a little, though it definitely doesn't go away. "I have a potentially terrible idea, but it's for you, so it's your choice to make, not mine."

Oh.

Magnus considers that, nods to himself, and goes to sit on the couch. He lifts his head, and makes himself meet Alec's eyes. "All right."

"I want to hire some... consultants, to see if there's a way to get your magic back without having to try and make another deal with Asmodeus."

Magnus doesn't move. He doesn't even blink. If he had his magic he'd probably blow up the chair next to him. "No."

Alec's shoulders slump. "Magnus."

"No." Magnus stands up, his hands clenched and his jaw too tight and he wants to scream, but he doesn't. "Asmodeus is too dangerous."

"And he's going to be less dangerous later if with your magic he can overthrow Lilith while she's still weak from the Mark of Cain?" Alec's voice is quiet, but even so Magnus can barely hold in the wince. "Do you really think he'll be more inclined to stay quietly in his own Realm without interfering with the rest of us if she's no longer there to keep him in check?"

Magnus swallows, refuses to think about the things he did at his father's side the last time Asmodeus freely wandered around Earth. "You said this was for me."

"It is!" Alec's voice and hands lift, and then he stops, his arms drop. He's holding himself so tightly it looks like he's a breath away from shattering. "I would sacrifice anything to help you Magnus, just like you did to stop Lilith, to save Jace, but that doesn't mean helping you isn't also doing my job."

Magnus can't move, can barely breathe.

He exhales, long and slow, and closes his eyes.

He can't argue that, because if he did, it would make everything he'd done to save Jace, to stop Lilith, all of it, for nothing. They can't let either Lilith or Asmodeus take over Edom without the other, can't afford the risk of that much power being concentrated in one person. Demon.

Monster.

Magnus opens his eyes again, and somehow Alec can tell, Alec can always tell, and he's right there, reaching out to cup Magnus' jaw in his warm hands before kissing him, soft and sweet. "Thank you."

Magnus huffs out a breath, and leans in to rest against the warmth of Alec's chest. "Thank you. So who are these... consultants then?"

"Um." Magnus tilts his head enough to look at Alec, who's looking at the ceiling as if too embarrassed to meet Magnus' gaze. He rolls his lips in tight, then pops his mouth open and sighs. "Thieves?"

"What." Magnus steps back, so he can glare properly. And also enjoy the way Alec's squirming, because it's not often Alexander gets tongue-tied around him anymore, and if he's going to go through with this insanity, he might as well try and get some enjoyment out of it. "You. Want to steal my magic back?"

"I mean, that seems slightly more likely than negotiating it out of a Greater Demon?" Alec shrugs, and rubs the back of his neck, and his mouth twists before his whole body sags with a sigh. "I don't know, but I certainly don't know how to get it back without risking Asmodeus pulling one over on us, do you?"

"But you think your thieves might?" Magnus can't help it, his voice cracks.

"Not my thieves." Alec shrugs again. "Lindsay found them, and Edda White said she could portal them to us whenever we come to an agreement on a meeting time and place."

"Edda?" He stops again. Edda, who fosters mundane children and likes to play with computers and has the weirdest running bet with Catarina about the stupid excuses they've used to convince mundanes that the magic they just saw wasn't really magic... "Mundane thieves?"

"Well, anyone in the Shadow World would start already convinced that it was impossible, wouldn't they?"

Magnus can't argue with that, either, and this is the weirdest conversation he's possibly ever had, and that's saying something, considering the number of times he's been high or drunk and determined to not let it stop him from doing... well. Anything. "Huh," is all he manages. "That. Almost makes sense."

Alec grins. "I know, weird, huh."

Magnus' chest aches, because oh, he hasn't seen that sort of look on Alec's face since they found out about Jace, before Magnus went to Edom, before he lost...

Before they lost so much.

Magnus laughs, and Alec's grin widens, a glint in his eyes as if he's as delighted and surprised as Magnus is to realize they're both actually looking forward to this. "Let's go meet some thieves."

#shadowhunters #leverage #jilly writes #hmdiscord #malec #ot3: 'til my dying day #my sh fic #* Eliot was on a stargate team #that's practically canon!

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marahope-things · 3 years

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I think the similarities that people are finding between Adora/Catra and Mara/Light Hope are less to do with the relationships being the same internally (as in, in terms of the dynamics between the two characters) and more to do with the fact that their stories deal with a lot of the major themes of the show, because the two pairings embody a LOT of the major themes of the show between them.

I don’t think it’s an accident or any kind of misrepresentation that the two relationships have parallels, but as someone who enjoys Mara/Light Hope A Whole Lot, while being pleased but more or less happy with how Catradora is presented in the show and not feeling a need to go beyond that, I want to unpick why, and what some of those differences are.

Partly because I think people make broad, thematic-level arguments about why a pairing is attractive to them, and for me, there are a lot of intra-relationship or interpersonal dynamic elements that have more bearing on why I like a ship. And it’s hard to frame in a positive light, but with Catradora, they already engage with some relationship dynamics that I’m a huge fan of (namely, rivalmancy, childhood-friends-to-lovers, and enemies-to-lovers).

The big similarities I see people picking up on are: The mind-control thing, and the "you deserve love too"/"you’re more than what you can give to other people" exchange.

And these are extremely valid parallels! They touch on two Extremely Core messages of the show! They’re very real! And you’re correct—those parallels do mean something about Mara and Light Hope, about their importance to the show and its message. Mara and Light Hope embody many of the show’s core themes, and I am glad people are starting to write about that!

But I find myself sometimes feeling like that’s… not quite the reason why I like the pairing. Y’know?

So, with the caveat that this is just my feelings about the pairing, and probably literally everyone who ships either Catradora or Marahope has a different opinion than me in some way or other, I want to discuss the major differences between Catradora and Mara/Light Hope as I see them.

Because we started liking these ships before we saw the themes that they’d be used to embody in the end, right?

Breaking it down

What Adora and Catra have is a rivalmancy, essentially—especially when they’re first introduced.

Even when they’re on the same side, they have a competitiveness to their dynamic, and part of what drives their split is that Catra, on some level, resents Adora for getting all of the things that she wants, but can’t have, because of (basically) Shadow Weaver—and then abandoning both it and her. It’s a rivalry between peers, fellow soldiers, and there’s a colossal amount of abandonment issues and emotional trauma involved as well. They’re also both close to the same age.

And they were raised together. They spent their formative years extremely close, and their split has a lot in common (probably intentionally) with painful adolescent splits that happen as people grow up, change, grow apart, and (sometimes) come back together. It’s quite moving!

Mara and Light Hope aren’t peers in the same sense; you get the sense that they started out more like co-workers, and their eventual split only happens because Light Hope has their mind wiped and their ability to choose taken away from them (Catra, on the other hand, makes a lot of choices that put her and Adora at odds, often intentionally). The two of them work together and depend on each other, and they become friends, and their roles are complementary. Literally neither of them could do the other’s job, and they depend on each other’s skillset and resources to stay safe and fulfill their own duties effectively.

So they meet as fully-formed (relatively) people in a professional context and become closer, rather than being together for those formative years and undergoing a separation as they change and discover they don’t fit the same way they used to.

There’s also an implication that Light Hope may have trained other She-Ras in the past. I don’t know how long Mara expected her tenure as She-Ra to be, but it seems like that could be a lifelong commitment, once she’s been chosen. If so, then that could imply that Light Hope’s "age" (though I don’t know if that’s something anyone would even keep track of for an AI, because they weren’t supposed to change and “grow” like a person) is on the scale of centuries by the time she meets Mara.

And even if you headcanon them traveling to Etheria together immediately after Light Hope was minted, they’re still not really anything like Catra and Adora in their dynamic. The development of their relationship has a lot more in common with interspecies or human-AI relationships in sci-fi—Terminator, Andromeda, and Killjoys come immediately to mind.

I’m also intentionally including platonic relationships here, like John Connor and Uncle Bob in Judgement Day, too, because this is such an established trope, and touches on some of those Core Sci-Fi Questions that exist in the genre—about the nature of life, consciousness, sentience, individuality, and choice. It’s not just in a romantic context that you see humans and AIs ruminating to each other about what beauty is, why people find flowers “pretty”, what it means to have free will, to feel emotions, or to be an individual. Hell, you can even include Data from Star Trek in that list.

But it is also something of a trope for AIs to "fall in love" or develop special bonds with humans that they work particularly closely with, or for humans to fall in love with AIs (sometimes they go more Pygmalion with the latter and cast the human as the AI’s creator).

Which brings me to the core trope being engaged in Mara and Light Hope’s relationship, one that Noelle has actually alluded to in their remarks during the "Exit Interviews" streams:

Relationship makes Light Hope more than their intended purpose.

Memory and programming

In one of the streams, Noelle states that the writers’ room made the decision that something about Etheria "broke" the people who have tried to conquer it, and kind of made them part of itself (God this show has Star Wars all over it). He uses several examples, including Hordak.

Hordak, however you feel about him, develops a sense of individuality that makes his re-assimilation into the greater Horde impossible. Like Light Hope, he remembers things he isn’t supposed to, and on being presented with a physical reminder of Entrapta and his relationship with her, Horde Prime’s conditioning begins to break down.

Over the course of her arc, Mara comes to realize that being She-Ra means something more than her superiors have told her, and on realizing what her superiors are doing to Etheria, concludes that She-Ra, and all of Etheria, are being exploited and need to be protected from the First Ones. So, by betraying the First Ones (breaking her oath to them), Mara fulfills her role as She-Ra.

And Light Hope falls in love with Mara, something she was never supposed to be able to do. In the end, it is the memory of Mara that allows Light Hope to break through her programming long enough to allow Adora to destroy the Sword.

I know I brought up how AIs gaining sentience and self-will is a trope within sci-fi, but the best recent example that I can think of off the top of my head (and the reason I was able to articulate this at all) is actually The Good Place, with Janet.

In The Good Place, successive reboots are the in-universe mechanism that allows Janet to grow and change—but it’s her relationship with the other core characters that shapes who she becomes and what she believes. In fact, if she hadn’t been stolen and rebooted so many times in the first place, she never would have become who she did at all.

So: Like the rest of the cast, relationship makes Janet more than she was originally intended to be. Relationship makes Janet whole and fully alive. Light Hope’s story is, um, a bit more tragic, but I think the comparison works.

Catra and Adora, on the other hand, are dealing with a separate problem(/s): Catra’s pain and abandonment (and Adora’s self-abandonment) as a result of what they endured growing up, and the angst of childhood friends growing up and growing apart. It fits very squarely within the parameters of She-Ra as a kids’ TV show.

To boil it all the way down, their relationship *is* the problem. And it takes the whole show to fix it.

What’s suggested by the (sparse) textual evidence on Mara and Light Hope is that their relationship followed a more well-worn sci-fi path: By becoming friends with Mara, Light Hope learns how to be in relationship with another person, how to make her own choices, go against her programming as needed—how to have fun and appreciate beauty and being. Her falling in love with Mara is, metaphorically, her learning how to be alive in the world. Through loving Mara, she gets a glimpse of a world beyond being someone’s instrument, someone’s tool.

That’s part of what’s so heartbreaking and beautiful about them: In the midst of a situation that’s that’s built on deception, concealment, and coercion, where both of them appear to have been lied to or denied the entire truth by their superiors, where Mara, Light Hope, and the entire planet of Etheria are considered expendable by their superiors as long as they get their shiny weapon, Mara (who seems to understand that there’s more to life than duty and heroism) creates a space for Light Hope that is free from the constraints of her programming, to a degree. And as a result, Light Hope changes.

If Light Hope is a villain for her role in all of this (and this is complicated by the fact that she’s a programmatic being created for a particular purpose), then loving Mara is part of what makes her redemption possible. Her relationship with Mara makes her more than a weapon. In fact, it breaks her as a weapon.

And there’s certainly elements of that in Catra and Adora’s relationship, but it’s not the throughline that it is for Light Hope and Mara until you get to season 5—a full three quarters of the way through the show.

Love also doesn’t play as positive of a role in Catra’s redemption arc, really (where her parallels to Light Hope would be the most obvious), both because her villainy is something she explicitly chooses, and because her internal conflict and pain regarding her feelings for Adora are so much a part of her villainy. It only becomes redemptive in Adora’s struggle with the Failsafe—i.e. when we get back into the world of the First Ones, where most of the themes of "destiny" live.

So yeah. That’s the breakdown. I want to get into the individual tropes, but I’m going to have to save that for another day.

#marahope #meta #spop

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jelly-pies · 4 years

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Places and Embraces (that you thought you left behind)

By @jelly-pies for @jaybaybay-01, for the @friendly-neighborhood-exchange

Rating: Teen (mentions of torture, electrocution, near drowning)

Relationships: Peter Parker & Tony Stark, Peter Parker & May Parker, Peter & Tony & Avengers Team

Characters: Peter Parker, Tony Stark, May Parker, James Rhodes, Bucky Barnes, Sam Wilson, Bruce Banner, Pepper Potts

Summary:

"So now we know what we’re up against: a Hydra cell just launched a cyber attack on the Avengers,” Tony said, slowly drawing out each bitter word. He took a deep breath. “And they used Peter Parker to do it.”

Hydra brainwashes Peter and turns him against the Avengers. Tony jumps out of semi-retirement to get his kid back.

Word count: 12.2k (read on AO3 or click below!)

----- Chapter 1: The Compound -----

It was supposed to be a simple patrol.

“I just sent the address to Karen. Track their activity. Eyes open. Update me or Sam the second things get fishy…”

“Mr. Stark,” Peter’s voice groaned through the speakers, “I think I know what ‘reconnaissance’ means.”

“Might as well spell it out for you, because sometimes I think you don’t know what ‘stay back and wait for backup’ means.”

Peter huffed, and Tony imagined the twenty-year-old rolling his eyes in accompaniment. “That was one time,” he complained. “I mean, two." Another pause. “Wait. I mean…”

“Yeah, yeah.” Tony pressed a button to bring Peter’s view up on his computer. The kid was swinging through the city, crisscrossing between buildings at breakneck speed. Tony swept the footage to the side of his holo-screens before all the movement made his head spin. Damn, he was getting old.

“Hey, you wanna hear a thought I just had?” Peter said, swinging up and landing on an empty rooftop. “Iron Man’s retired, right? And Spider-Man’s official Avenger-Guardian of New York City.”

“Not a thing.”

“Totally a thing. So—listen, Mr. Stark—in the Avengers, do I rank higher than you now? ” Peter teased.

Tony rolled his eyes. “First off, I’m voluntarily relegated to tech support, I’m not retired.”

“You make a pretty decent Guy in the Chair, by the way. I mean, I still prefer Ned, but with summer break and all…”

“And second,” Tony interrupted, “Peter, this is serious. This is Hydra. I don’t want to hear about some solo-act hero found dead in the news tonight, you hear me?”

Peter chuckled softly. “You’re always gonna worry about me.”

Tony didn’t answer. But he caught his onscreen notification that Karen’s secondary tracker, connecting directly to the Avengers Compound, had been turned on. So the kid was taking precautions; Tony took that as a win.

“What we discussed,” Tony said softly. “Keep your distance. Web ‘em up.”

“Callback! That was a callback.” Finishing whatever tweaks he’d apparently made to the suit’s settings, Peter leapt off the building and continued swinging. “Talk to you later, old man.”

Tony smiled fondly. “Later, disaster child.”

He kept FRIDAY running the screens, ready to alert him to any trouble, but everything seemed normal on Peter’s patrol. And why wouldn’t it? It was supposed to be normal.

In a few minutes Morgan was banging on the garage door, calling her father for dinner. Tony left for the night.

It was hours later when Pepper shook him awake. Wide-eyed, with a deceptively calm voice, she relayed the emergency alert from FRIDAY. But by then it was too late.

It was supposed to be a quiet night. Instead, Peter Parker was missing.

-----

“Hydra,” May repeated in a hollow voice. “Hydra?”

“They had a suspected cell in NYC—sketchy, black market type medical lab.” Tony removed his sunglasses as he sank into May’s couch. His joints ached from the fatigue of the last few hours; the sunlight from the windows assaulted his baggy eyes. “It was supposed to be a routine check,” he exhaled, the same words he had been telling himself over and over and over. “Peter was just… keeping an eye out, waiting to confirm illegal activity.”

“Well, you got your confirmation.”

Tony looked up at that, an apology ready on his lips, but when he met May’s eyes they only looked sad.

“Is he—did they—Tony, do you think Peter’s—”

“No,” he replied strongly. “That’s one thing I can say for sure.” It’s the only thing he could say for sure. “They wouldn’t take the trouble, disabling his suit so expertly, if they were just going to…” He let the rest trail off unspoken. May dropped beside him on the couch.

Tony grit his teeth, pinched his eyes shut. He’d been up all night, and his chest ached even more than his head did. “Callback! That was a callback,” Peter’s blithe voice from yesterday echoed in his ears. This was another one, Tony supposed. A callback to Titan… to Beck… to, well, a couple more times after that, to be honest. The supposedly quiet semi-retirement years weren’t so quiet with another superhero in the family.

“So, we just… search,” May whispered beside him, the same pain, the same haunting memories evident on her frown lines. “And wait?”

Tony felt the full weight of his years pressing down on him, pushing as he fought to lift his head, and he gave a simple, helpless nod.

-----

It was supposedly a standard security update.

That’s what Tony told the guards, and anyone else with dropped jaws and shining eyes who wondered what Tony Stark, retired hero, was doing at the Avengers Compound on an ordinary Thursday. He indulged the gaping staff members with a signature Tony Stark grin as he made his way into the main building. But his tinted sunglasses stayed on his face the whole time.

“Alright, show me,” he greeted Sam shortly when he reached the entrance to the main control room. Sam nodded silently and led him inside.

The control room was the heart of Compound security; as spacious as the lab, only with more computers and holo-displays over the walls. With such an important building to protect, it was usually bustling with activity, but now there were only three people sitting around the main panel in the center of the room. All three—Bruce, Barnes, and Rhodey—were peering into holo-screens, surveying the damage from last night’s cyber attack.

Because the Compound had been attacked.

It was a quiet affair; the culprit had been in and out of the control room in a matter of minutes. They had dealt considerable damage—taken down servers, stolen terabytes of the Avengers’ encrypted files—but in terms of casualties, not a single guard had even been knocked out.

Like a ghost, Sam had told Tony that morning. A ghost who knew his way around the Compound. Who had the skills to hack into their system. Who was able to disable the Compound’s AI before it could sound the alarm.

A ghost who could crawl on walls.

Not a lot of people fit that description. And so Tony came, looked over the details of the attack, watched the security footage that Bruce brought up on his screen—the man in a black stealth suit, sticking up on a wall to avoid a roving guard. FRIDAY analyzed the footage too, but Tony didn’t need her verification that the masked attacker’s physique matched the known measurements of one Peter Parker. None of them really did.

“Shit,” was all Tony could mutter under his breath as the video ended. “Shit.”

“That’s all we caught; others cameras were disabled,” Bruce said. “As far as we know there was only one perpetrator. Don’t know where he headed after exiting the building, or his intentions with that data. But as to who that perpetrator was… Tony, I’m sorry. All the clues point in the same direction.”

Tony clenched his jaw. Of all the possible outcomes to his weeks-long search, all the scenarios both his dreams and his nightmares presented—he would have preferred almost anything but this. Anything but that dark figure that could only be one person, stealing around the very corridors Tony had just passed minutes ago. Anything but Peter Parker, so lost, and yet caught on camera so close to home: insult to injury waved right in their faces.

It was supposed to be a straightforward operation. Search for his kid, raid all the hideouts, wait for a ransom note as a very last resort. Instead, things had just turned much, much more complicated.

“Tones… at least he’s alive,” Rhodey said softly, when Tony remained silent.

“How?” Tony said through gritted teeth. “It’s barely been three weeks. How?”

Rhodey frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, look at him!” Tony waved at the screens where the security footage was still displayed. “Moves quickly, not under duress, they didn’t force him to do this. If they did, he would have done something, I know him, he—he would have left us some sort of clue.”

“And he came alone,” Rhodey said in realization. “They wouldn’t have sent him in alone.”

Tony nodded. “So how?”

As the meaning of Tony’s question sank in, everyone slowly turned to the one person in the room who had so far remained quiet.

“How?” Tony repeated to Bucky Barnes, his voice cracking at the single syllable.

The supersoldier met his gaze evenly. “There are ways. It's been less than a month, but… it’s possible.” Barnes shifted his feet and clenched the arms of his chair—not from any discomfort with him, Tony knew; he and Barnes had laboriously buried that hatchet years ago. But Bucky had always taken on a haunted demeanor lately whenever Peter was mentioned. The kid Wilson and Barnes had grown to train, to work with on missions, now captured by the very organization where the Winter Soldier had spent the majority of his life.

“There is some good news,” Bucky added after a pause. “The more they rushed the… process… the easier it will be to undo. If it’s really mind control… a good shock to his system, a strong reminder… there's hope, Tony. But the hard part is finding him.”

“Then let’s find him,” Sam declared simply, crossing his arms, and the room took a collective breath as if at a rallying cry. “At least this attack gives us a new lead. Tony? Rhodes mentioned something about a tracker in the stolen data’s encryption?”

“Yeah. It was, um.” Tony leaned back slowly in his chair. One of his frequent headaches started blooming, and he brought a thumb and middle finger up against his temples, using the same hand to push his sunglasses further up. “It’s embedded in all the encrypted folders. Dormant until they try to decrypt the files, then we’ll be able to trace it. Rhodey and I put it there; not even Peter knows.”

“So at least our top secret data’s safe for a while.”

“Already started a trace on the signal,” Rhodey said. “We get a hit, I’m there.”

“Good. Yeah, but look. We can’t keep this quiet much longer.” Sam glanced apologetically at Tony. “The sheer scale of this security breach… I’ll have to bring the rest of our people in on this.”

Tony sighed. “That’s fine, Cap. Appreciate the initial discretion. But there’s no point hiding it now that we know what we’re up against.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, linked his fingers together and unlinked them again. Fidgeting as his mind was fidgeting to string the sentence together. “A Hydra cell just launched a cyber attack on the Avengers,” Tony finally said, slowly drawing out each bitter word. “And they used Peter Parker to do it.”

-----

“Looks like I missed the party.” Rhodey looked over the setup in the otherwise abandoned warehouse—where computers, panels, and communication equipment had once stood, there was now nothing but a pile of smashed hardware. His AI sent a quick notification on his suit’s HUD: no one in the building but him. And yet from the trace they’d left behind, it was obvious this had been an important Hydra outpost until only minutes ago. Rhodey sighed. “We’ll be lucky to salvage any info from this scrap heap.”

He heard Tony curse over the comms. “FRIDAY lost the tracking signal. God. We were so close.”

Rhodey noticed one panel still blinking under a pile of scrap, and he walked over to inspect it. “Something must have tipped them off,” he continued as he shuffled through the scattered equipment. “A certain… Peter tingle, maybe?”

“Spider sense,” Tony mumbled. “He prefers to call it spider sense. And it doesn't work like—never mind. Point is, they're gone.”

“Stay there, Rhodey,” Sam’s voice instructed. “Buck and I are en route, we’ll handle the perimeter. They can’t have gotten too far.”

“Hydra? Yeah, yeah they could have,” Tony replied despondently.

“Tony…”

“Let him be, Sam,” Bucky interrupted understandingly.

“Well, since I got here first, this proves one thing, at least.” Rhodey decided to keep up the conversation and, hopefully, the team’s long-fragile morale as he leaned over the blinking panel. He paused for dramatic effect. “War Machine flies faster than Captain America.”

Even through the earpiece he could hear Tony’s snort. Rhodey smiled. “It’s conclusive, Wilson.”

“Nah, man, don’t do that to me,” Sam protested. “We came from the Compound. You were already downtown.”

“I keep suggesting a race.” Bucky’s voice. “And you two never race. Just get it over with…”

“I have wings, it’s not the same! Wind conditions are never…”

“Oh, wind conditions are the problem—”

As his team continued the good-natured bickering, something on the panel suddenly caught Rhodey’s eye. Pushing away a broken computer screen that covered half the panel’s surface, Rhodey saw that beside the blinking indicator LED, the panel contained a small glass case with multiple wires branching out.

And inside the case was a shining piece of black metal. A spider emblem.

“Falcon—” Rhodey didn’t get to finish.

The warning on his HUD registered at the same time as the kick. Rhodey keeled over in his heavy armor; when he turned around, his attacker was already crouched over the panel and removing the spider emblem from its case.

He wore a black stealth suit and mask. He was lanky, but apparently strong enough to knock the War Machine to his knees. He moved swiftly, too, tearing the spider emblem off, storing it somewhere in his suit, and aiming his wrists towards Rhodey all in a matter of seconds. Rhodey put an arm up in defense; the webs shot out and wrapped around it.

“Shit.” Rhodey scrambled up. “Peter!”

He barely registered his teammates’ voices through the comms, echoing the name in relief, in shock, in fear. Rhodey shot an electroshock bullet but the masked man dodged expertly, leaping up and latching onto the rafters.

“Hey, gray Iron Man!” the unmistakable voice of Peter Parker called down. “Don’t have any glasses in that fancy suit?”

“Peter Parker! Peter, stop!” Rhodey tore the webs off his armor and took off, flying after Peter, shooting three more shock bullets in succession. All three bounced off the metal rafters harmlessly. Peter darted around pillars, bounced off the walls, evaded Rhodey at every turn until he was mere feet away from the exit. “Spider-Man!” Rhodey yelled in frustration.

Peter turned. That split second was all Rhodey needed; he crashed into the kid and both of them tumbled to the floor. Rhodey used his armor to break the fall, and then he rolled Peter off of him until they were lying side by side, coughing and groaning. “Spider-Man?” Rhodey tried, getting up on his elbows. “Kid?”

Peter only moaned weakly.

“Sorry I have to do this.” Rhodey loaded another electroshock bullet. “But we have to get you back to May. And Tony—”

For the second time that day, Rhodey saw the hit coming too late. Peter flipped upward, connecting his knee with Rhodey’s chin, and kicked the older man away with his other foot. As Rhodey fell backwards, Peter landed squarely on his feet and shot a web towards the door.

By the time Rhodey recovered, Peter was gone.

----- Chapter 2: The Lake House -----

The lake house looked beautiful in the late afternoon light. Golden rays danced off the surface of the water, painting its green surroundings with a warm glow. Calm, idyllic.

None of that mood was reflected in its inhabitants, however. The woman’s shoulders sagged as she loaded a bag in the trunk of their car. Then a little girl, maybe eight or nine years old, followed the woman out of the house, holding a red and blue stuffed toy tightly to her chest as she got in the back seat.

Worst of all was the man. He limped slightly as he walked, shuffling forward like he wasn’t even trying to keep his head up. The sunlight glinted on his prosthetic arm and on the glasses hanging on the front of his shirt, but it seemed only shadows reached his face. He stopped by the trunk where the woman was still standing and she said something to him. After a few moments he kissed her cheek, then got in the front seat. The woman went around the driver’s side. And they were off.

Just in time, Peter Parker thought, lowering the binoculars. Now he could proceed with the mission.

-----

"Peter Parker. Peter Parker.” He clung to the words like a lifeline.

"Still repeating that shit?” A kick to the back.

Peter curled tighter around himself. “P-Peter… my name—Peter Par… Parker…”

“Ah, let him,” another voice replied. “He can keep the damn name. He’ll forget everything else, anyway.”

“We can’t risk a trigger!”

“Peter Par—” A sharper kick. He whimpered.

“We can’t lose time!” the second voice hissed. “Now get that miserable piece of shit back on the table.”

Arms reached out. Hands grabbed at him.

And Peter woke up. Everything rushed in at the same time, like it always did—the sound of crickets—the sliver of moonlight through the trees—the sweat that stuck his stealth suit to his back—and Peter took off his mask and buried his head in his hands. After several seconds, when he could look up again without feeling like the entire world was charging at his senses, Peter put the mask back on and began to take stock of his surroundings.

He must have overdone the nap. Damn nightmares. He’d only started getting them that day at the warehouse, and now they were growing worse.

No matter—it was still early evening. He couldn’t strike until the family was at least several hours away, in case he accidentally tripped their alarm, so he’d decided on the nap. But now he really needed to move.

Peter crept around the edges of the lake, always keeping behind the treeline. He couldn’t screw this up, too, not after his last mistake, forgetting the spider-shaped core in the rush to evacuate the old base. This was Peter’s chance to make it up to his team.

Besides—he didn’t think he could take another round of punishment.

He reached the edge of the paved driveway without incident. On this side he was closest to his target, the lake house’s garage; he could see it about a hundred yards away. But the trees ended here, so Peter moved more carefully, keeping in mind his team’s stern warnings about the AI that guarded this property.

It was lucky, though, that the AI was all Peter had to deal with tonight. Unlike his first job at the Compound, there would be no humans for him to have to sneak around. It had been a point of contention back when he first received this assignment; Peter’s team had insisted he simply take out the lake house’s residents, but Peter pushed back, suggesting he attacked when no one was home. He didn’t know why he felt so strongly about it—strongly enough to risk punishment by challenging orders. Satellite scans had shown there was no time in the family’s regular schedule when the house would be empty for several hours, so at first it had looked like Peter had no way to make his plan work.

Until today’s date had fallen from his lips. Peter had been so confident: the family would not be here tonight. They would be driving to the city, to Queens. Peter had no idea how he’d known any of that. He still didn't. But something about this date had just felt right, and after a quick check, his commander had allowed the slight change in schedule. And now here Peter was, sneaking up on an empty house. On the night of August tenth.

Peter reached the garage at last. He flattened himself against the wall, waiting, and when he heard nothing except the chirping crickets, he broke the lock on the door with his bare hands and stepped inside.

Hacking into the computers was easy. Soon Peter had started the transfer to a hard drive concealed in his suit, and he chanced a closer look around the room while the files loaded.

The place smelled like motor oil. There were a couple of sleek metal cylinders against the wall that could hold a grown human each, but besides that it was all worn benches, scattered electronic components, and half-finished projects. Well lived in, comfortable, familiar.

Peter startled. Familiar? He’d never been here before.

A small robot like a claw—no, two of them—three—stirred to life in a corner, whirring and snapping their claws at Peter. His senses gave him no trouble over the little guys, though, and Peter dismissed them as harmless. Besides, he doubted they could set off any kind of alarm at him. Then looking up from the robots, Peter’s eye caught on a plushie lying on a shelf—probably another of the girl’s. This one was red and gold, and Peter immediately recognized it as an Iron Man toy.

Huh. Iron Man. Peter’s team had told him this garage was another Avengers-related target, like the Compound, but they hadn’t specified much beyond that. Was Peter hacking into Iron Man’s systems right now? He smirked. That was pretty cool.

Hey, you wanna hear a thought I just had? Iron Man’s retired, right?

Peter blinked, and involuntarily took a step back. What was that? He couldn’t be having nightmares while he’s awake… could he? Crap, this place was messing with his senses. Peter disconnected his hard drive the second the transfer was complete, and turned to go.

Peter froze at the door. He could have sworn he’d taken out that lock just minutes ago. But now, even applying his full strength at the handle, the door wouldn’t budge.

Then a hissing sound came from the other side of the room. Peter spun back around, fists clenched in preparation for a fight. One of the metal cylinders slid open, an Iron Man suit glided out—but it was a female voice that spoke from it.

“Good evening, Peter,” it—she—said softly. “Leaving so soon?”

Peter’s breath caught in his throat. His eyes darted around the room—no escape except the door—he could rip it from its hinges if that’s what it came to, but he needed a distraction. Peter decided to entertain the suit for a while. “You’re the AI security guard,” he deduced. “Though not the same one I disabled back at the Compound. Driving this suit—you’re much more complex, aren’t you?”

“That’s correct,” the suit replied. “Compound security tried to keep you out. But that’s not my objective tonight… Spider-Man."

Spider-Man. Peter clenched his fists a little tighter and backed up against the wall. Spider-Man. War Machine had called him that, too, back at the warehouse. But it didn’t make sense.

Peter knew Spider-Man. He knew the Avengers, Spider-Man was one of them, and they were the target, they were his team’s—they were his target. What kind of game was this robot lady playing?

Robot lady powered down the suit and landed a few feet away from Peter. “Boss was right about the reaction that might elicit.”

"Boss," Peter muttered. He found a headache starting to grow at the AI's words, and his heart pumped faster, but curiosity won out. "Your boss, you mean Iron Man?"

"Tony Stark, yes. You could call us a team." The suit stepped closer, one arm outstretched. "You were part of that team, Peter."

Team. His team— "Stop right there," Peter hissed, thrusting a hand out. "Alright, look. You—you can unlock the door, right now, or I can bust it open. I bet your boss wouldn’t like that, huh? Your call, FRIDAY."

The suit lowered its arms. "You remember my name."

Remember my—

"No!" Peter growled. His headache was raging now. The ambient cricket noises from outside pounded like drums in his ears. "No—"

Remember my name.

"Peter Parker. Peter Parker.” He clung to the words like a lifeline.

They tried to wring it from him, they really did. Tried to beat, shock, drown it out. But Peter held tight.

He remembered his name.

“—member your name. What else do you remember, Peter?” the AI prompted in that same gentle voice that didn’t make sense.

Peter brought fists up to press against his temples. Not another nightmare, not a waking one, not now. He took a breath. “Okay.” Peter swallowed. “Okay, this was your call.” He leapt up. And tackled the suit to the ground.

“Word to the wise, Pete: when fighting a super-powered robot, go for the core.”

Arc reactor technology, in the center of the chest, powered all Iron Man suits. Peter went for it.

He smashed the metal inward—surely that would cause some kind of damage—and FRIDAY grabbed at his arm. Peter felt the sting of the needle that penetrated even his stealth suit.

“That’s only to get you to sleep. Peter, calm—”

Peter struck the head. Arm. Chest again, in quick succession. Then the original hit to the reactor must have taken its effect, because the suit loosened its grip, and Peter broke free.

“Use your strengths, kid. The bot’s intuition is artificial, yours isn’t.”

We webbed FRIDAY down before she could recover. Then Peter lunged at the door. It took a few good kicks for it to fly free of its hinges, but then Peter was free, leaping out into the night air.

FRIDAY caught him mid-jump.

“We stocked your web-removing formula—”

Another punch to the chestpiece. As FRIDAY carried him upwards, Peter curled into a ball and fell, rolling on the grass. FRIDAY turned back and hovered over him.

“Peter,” she pleaded. “The drug will take full effect in seconds. Please. Don’t get yourself hurt.”

Peter shot another web. Whatever FRIDAY said about web removers, it would surely take some time with all that sticky material criss crossing its arms and legs. He sprinted toward the lake.

“Water. Last resort. It’s all electronics, after all—”

“Didn’t you make your own suits waterproof?” Peter said.

Peter halted.

He was at the edge of the pier, staring at the dark waters below. A wide-eyed, panting, shaking reflection stared back.

“Yeah, well, nothing’s indestructible, so listen up. If you’re going on this mission, I need you going prepared—”

That voice. His voice. His own heartbeat, drumming in his ears. That voice. Repulsors starting up behind him. That voice.

For the first time that night, Peter closed his eyes, and he didn’t run from the nightmares, from his thoughts.

He listened.

“I’m listening! I’m listening.” Peter grinned, perched on the edge of the table. “Need the good robot’s expertise if I’m gonna go fight evil robots.”

An orange hit his head. Peter laughed.

“Don’t call me a robot.” That voice.

“Peter?” That voice.

Peter turned. The suit stood at the other end of the pier, webs hanging from its arms and legs like white strings waving in the breeze. The suit’s glowing eyes stared at him intently, but when it spoke it wasn’t with the AI’s female voice anymore. It was with the voice from Peter’s head.

“Pete—” a man’s voice choked out. “I’m sorry, I should have—seen FRIDAY’s call sooner, I—damn it.” The suit began to walk toward him. Peter tensed as it got closer, and the man must have noticed, because he stopped a few feet away and put his hands up. “Peter.” He sounded tired. He sounded gentle. “You—when you were fighting, FRIDAY injected you with something, it’s just to get you to sleep, but your metabolism’s fighting it. I—I know you don’t remember me. You don’t know me, but—I’m not going to let you go. So, could you stop fighting, ‘cause you’re only going to get hurt.” The suit lowered its arms. “Please.”

Peter didn’t move. He just stood and stared. For a long, long time.

Then he stepped forward. Another step, and—

“Stop fighting. You’re only going to get hurt.”

They wrestled him onto the table. Peter fought. Peter screamed.

He fell into the suit’s arms.

“Peter?” a metal hand patted his back tentatively. “Buddy?”

Peter screamed, and the current only coursed more painfully through his brain. Peter screamed, and no one answered.

“T-Tony?”

“Peter,” the man answered. Even through the suit’s speakers Peter heard the man’s breath catch in his throat. “God, are you—”

“Tony Stark?” Peter frowned. He pulled himself back on his feet, the suit’s arms still around his. “Tony Stark. Iron Man?”

“I—yes,” Tony said haltingly. “Do you re—”

Peter rushed forward and caught the suit in an embrace.

Iron Man.

Iron Man, the voice in his head. The metal arms wrapped loosely, hesitantly around him. Peter, on the other hand, gripped the back of the suit with all his might.

The voice in his head, nightmares. Nightmares, pain. Peter swayed towards the edge of the pier, taking the suit with him.

Pain, punishment. Complete missions, avoid punishment. Peter’s thoughts clicked together, not neatly, like a solved puzzle, but harshly, like a lock on a cell door.

Iron Man, Avenger.

The Avengers, his mission.

Iron Man, his target.

Peter leapt off the side of the pier, taking the suit with him.

“Water. Last resort—”

The suit was already damaged. The arc reactor caved inwards. The suit let go of Peter in the water.

And Peter sank, down, down. It was so cold.

“FRIDAY injected you with something, it’s just to get you to sleep—”

The suit sank with him, its lights flickering out. Then Peter saw other lights shine above the water. He smiled. Lights were pretty.

“You don’t know me, but—I’m not going to let you go.”

Peter felt the splash rather than heard it. A metal hand found his, and Peter was pulled up.

Peter gasped as he broke the surface, sucking in air. A suit was carrying him, and it landed on the shore and lay him on the ground. Another suit, a purple suit. He’d barely registered that fact when Peter’s eyelids closed of their own accord. He sank into the darkness.

“Peter?” came a woman’s voice.

Zap, came the electricity.

And Peter slept.

-----

Peter woke up in the dark. He was lying on his back on a hard surface. The remains of a headache was still throbbing between his ears, when the lights suddenly came on, and Peter recoiled painfully.

“So you’re finally awake.” Peter turned his head slowly towards the source of the voice. He forced his eyes to pry open.

His commander stood over him, glowering. Another two members of Hydra—of Peter’s team—stood behind the man.

Peter couldn’t explain the sinking despair in his stomach at the sight of them, where there should have been relief instead.

“Welcome back, Peter Parker.” The commander leaned over the table, over Peter. “Mission report."

-----

It was cold, so cold.

Peter lay stripped to his shirt and boxers, but the cold of the lake still seeped into his skin. And he had to give his report that way, arms stiff at his sides inside their metal restraints, his voice still shivering.

He told them about the operation. He told them about the hard drive, and the data, and the mission’s success—

The commander scowled at that word. Peter shuddered and moved on.

He told them about the AI. And about the suit, and Tony Stark remotely taking control. He told them how he wrecked one Iron Man suit and got rescued by another. And then he stopped, shut his mouth like a good soldier, shivering.

It was so cold.

“Both suits were remotely operated,” the commander spoke after a long silence. “We had to destroy the second by electrocution. When we rescued you. By jet.”

Peter braced himself before asking, “What about the house?”

“And why is that your primary concern?” the man snarled. “Good old Captain America arrived just as we loaded you on the jet, so the damn house is safe, soldier. We are not!”

Peter swallowed. “I’m sorry, sir.”

A fist slammed on the table. “Do you have any idea! Any… your missions call for stealth.” A hand grabbed Peter’s chin, forcing his face to the side. “I thought that was made clear. Ten times. A hundred times. That is why we send you.”

Peter swallowed again, but this time it caught in his throat. “Yes, sir,” he croaked meekly.

“You have one assignment left. Until then, think on how to avoid your ever-increasing mistakes.”

The hand released him, and Peter stretched his jaw. The men had just reached the door when Peter remembered to call out, “Wait!”

His commander walked straight out. The other two soldiers turned back instead. “What?” one asked sharply.

“I—I can’t…” Peter struggled to get out the words. “I can’t thermoregulate.”

“What?”

“Thermoregulate,” Peter rasped. “I—I don’t know why. But I’m still so… cold… please can I—” Peter tried to lift his arms. The restraints didn’t budge.

“What—what the hell? You think this was just another mistake? Like leaving the spider core microchip behind at the last base?” His teammate reached for the door. “You fucked up, kid, so you stay where you are. And be thankful we aren’t sending your brain back through the fryer. Yet.” And the door slammed shut.

-----

Peter lay shivering on the table, hour after hour. No amount of shaking made the heat flow through his body, but the room was significantly less cold than the lake, and Peter knew he wouldn’t die. Just lie shivering, hour after hour.

He knew he couldn’t bring his own temperature up, except ever so slowly. He knew that. He couldn’t explain how he knew that, though.

He couldn’t explain how he knew about a lot of things.

Like Spider-Man. And FRIDAY. And Tony Stark.

And the fact that, as he shivered in the cold, Peter’s thoughts drifted to an image of a couch in front of a fireplace. Of a thick blanket, and a woman with gentle hands and a cheeky smile that draped it over his shoulders. And the warmth of her arms when he sunk into them.

Peter held on to that thought even if he didn’t understand it; he needed all the warmth he could get. It was going to be a long night.

-----

Many miles away, another group of people were having a long night of their own.

May Parker sat glued to the holo-screens of the Compound control room. The others had drifted in and out throughout the night, sometimes keeping her company, sometimes taking care of other important matters. Sam and Rhodes had just returned from the lake house a couple of hours ago. After a while, Tony and Pepper excused themselves to the Compound living quarters, to tuck Morgan in for the night. Dr. Banner, May knew, was still awake in the lab, with Barnes working closely beside him.

It was nice knowing how the team pulled together after the night’s distressing events. But that comfort was dampened in May’s mind, knowing the contrast to Peter’s current situation. Her kid was alone, he was cold, and his spider DNA meant he couldn’t thermoregulate as well as other humans. May knew every shaky breath that her nephew took.

Because displayed on the screens in front of her, were Peter’s vitals.

“Hey,” a voice greeted, and Tony walked in, two mugs and a plate in hand. “Care for company?”

May nodded at him. “Only if you brought coffee.”

Tony handed her one of the mugs, and they sat in silence for a while, monitoring the screens.

After a few minutes Tony offered, “You can turn in, you know. I’ll take a shift.”

May clenched his jaw. “Not tonight.”

Tony nodded understandingly and took a sip from his own mug. “Pep and Morgan are sleeping, but I couldn’t. I kept thinking… anything else we could have done tonight…”

May shook her head. “You and Pepper piloted the suits as soon as you could, Tony. And this microchip, I'm thankful you had the foresight pre-programming FRIDAY to inject it in Peter’s arm along with the sedative.”

“It could be giving us more than this. I’ve been trying the whole night, May, but the tracking signal’s still being deflected. These vitals are all we can get for now.”

“More than we had yesterday. Tonight’s not a night for beating yourself up.”

Tony sighed. “I just need to clear my head.” He traced the line on the screen, tracking the slow rise and fall of Peter's heart rate. “And I don’t want him to be alone.”

May didn’t answer, only gazed at the monitored vitals—such impersonal graphs, and yet the only connection they had to Peter now.

After another long pause, Tony held out the plate he’d brought in, and May noticed for the first time what it contained: a few slices of cake, the remains of their interrupted party in May’s apartment earlier this evening.

Tony handed her a fork. “Happy birthday, Peter,” he said sadly.

May sighed as she reached for the plate. “Happy birthday, Peter.”

----- Chapter 3: The Tower -----

There are moments in life that change a person, even if they don’t realize it until later. That night at the lake house changed Peter Parker. He knew, even before they marched him into the debriefing room for further questioning, he was no longer fit for his team.

Peter had slept fitfully that cold night, but in what snatches of sleep he had been able to grab, he dreamt of that woman by the fireplace. Peter woke up fully convinced he had been dreaming of his mother.

And when he couldn’t sleep, he thought of the man from his flashbacks—nightmares—whatever they were. The man who gave him advice on how to fight killer robots. Who sent a suit to save him from drowning. Tony Stark, the Avenger, the enemy.

That was all Peter knew for sure: the enemy, the mission, the team, Hydra. Nothing beyond that. For the first time, Peter asked himself why.

Why he had nightmares of being held down on a table, electricity coursing through his body, screaming. Why those thoughts always left him shaking, when the echoes of Tony Stark’s voice in his head did not. Why the War Machine at the warehouse, and the suits at the lake, took more care with him than his team ever did.

Peter must have had a life before this. Before missions. Before electrocution sessions and cold nights lying alone. Before Hydra.

And that night, Peter knew he had to leave.

-----

He held on to that resolve all throughout the questioning.

"Last night you said the suit stopped you at the pier. But you had a considerable head start. Why were you not able to get away?"

"The sedative had kicked in by then, sir," Peter lied.

"But you told us the drug's effects only started to take hold as you were drowning."

"I misremembered, sir," Peter lied.

On and on it went. Peter dodged, and maneuvered, and hoped it was enough to keep him from punishment. Or worse, from being reprogrammed, and having to start clawing his way back up all over again.

Just when he thought the interview was over, Peter's commander took a small black spider emblem out of his pocket. "Do you know what this is, Parker?"

"A hidden microchip, sir." Peter gulped. "I made the mistake of forgetting it at the old base. I was punished."

"This microchip came from a suit," the other man continued, circling around Peter. "A very expensive piece of Stark tech. With very impressive capabilities. You are helping us rebuild the software to control it, and many others like it. That was your mission."

"Yes, sir."

Peter caught the exact moment when his commander's eyes darkened. "You lost sight of your mission, soldier."

Without warning, the man slapped the metal spider on the back of Peter's head. The legs extended, wrapping around the sides of Peter's face, and he shouted in pain as a burst of electricity shot out of them. Peter fell to his knees.

His commander continued circling him like a hawk, unbothered. "You need to be reminded."

-----

Bucky and Bruce ran into the control room where Tony was waiting. The holo-screens with Peter's vitals displayed irregular peaks in his brain activity, the implications of which the three men knew very well.

"How long has this—"

"Ten minutes," Tony answered quickly. "Not stopping."

Bucky stared closely at the graphs. "Doesn't seem to be a high voltage."

"Bursts of current, too, not steady," Bruce added.

Tony braced himself to ask. "So this isn't reprogramming?"

"It looks closer to—to torture, Tony," Bruce replied.

Suddenly Bucky turned to the other two men. "That's good," he realized. Tony stared daggers at him, and Bucky put up a hand. "Hydra doesn't double back. They wouldn't be doing this if they could simply wipe Peter's memories instead."

"So they torture him for what? For punishment?"

"It's severely affecting his brain, Tony," Bruce said in a neutral voice, eyes still locked on the screens. "There are other ways to punish a guy. No, this is a calculated move."

"When brainwashing doesn't work… There are other ways to make people do what you want," Bucky said darkly.

"That's the second time you said—brainwashing not working, not wiping Peter's memories," Tony said, deep in thought. His head snapped up when he realized the answer to his own question. "Because it takes too long."

"I think so, too. This—this is a desperate move," Bruce said. "They still need Peter, but they also need to strike soon. I mean, we're closing in on them from all angles, Rhodey's still hounding their decryption signal, Sam got some good shots at their jet last night."

"My best guess?" Bucky pointed at the screens. "Mind control. The brute kind."

Tony clenched his shaking fists. “How do we combat the brute kind?”

Bucky took a breath before responding, “Head-on.”

The three men fell quiet, watching each other, watching the screens. Tony could almost imagine Peter’s screams with every peak of the tracker. And yet in this room it was eerily, almost completely silent.

Finally it ended. Peter’s neural readings returned to normal. Everyone took a collective breath.

Bruce cleared his throat. “Where do we start? We have a good guess where they’re hitting next.”

Tony exhaled as he stood up. His mind was in a whirlwind, save one grounding point, one last hope, and he let that thought steady his feet. “Keep an eye on the kid for me. There’s something I need to do.” And he strode out of the room.

-----

“Keep an eye on the kid.” The quinjet door shut, and they were off.

Peter sat clad in his usual black suit and mask. Beside him, three of his teammates checked and double-checked everyone’s parachutes. For the first time on a mission, Peter was not going alone. Because for the first time on a mission, Hydra no longer trusted him.

They had good reason not to.

The metal spider was still attached to the back of Peter’s head, under his mask. How his teammates reacted to the new implement was fairly revealing. Gone were the intimidation tactics, the threats, the constant reminders of his past mistakes. Now the Hydra agents ordered him about without even pretending he was anything more than an expendable asset, with no choice but to obey.

They had good reason to.

“Two minutes from the drop zone. Get up, kid.”

And it was “kid” now, not “soldier.” Peter delayed one second before standing up.

Zap.

The electrocution from the spider emblem wasn’t strong enough to incapacitate him, but hell did it hurt. Peter stumbled and barely caught himself from falling to his knees.

“Fuck, commander,” the agent spoke into his comms. “It was only a second.”

“Just a little reminder.” Peter heard the voice in his earpiece, too. “But he won’t be needing much reminders once the mission starts. Will you, Parker?”

“No, sir.” Peter grit his teeth.

Zap, came a second shock. Then a third, fourth, fifth, in quick succession.

“A primitive solution. But fast. And effective.”

Peter was on his hands and knees in the interrogation room, the commander circling him like he was prey.

“You will not disobey. You will not even think of disobeying.”

Another wave, stronger this time, and Peter screamed on the floor.

“What is best is you comply.”

Peter shut his eyes at the memory, at the pain. “I’m fully compliant, sir.”

Ten seconds into the drop zone, they jumped. Peter gaped at the twinkling lights of New York City only for a moment, then focused his mind on the task at hand. Namely, not dying. Using his senses, Peter adjusted his course and that of the three Hydra agents with him, avoiding the overhead sensors that only he could detect. Soon they all landed smoothly on the rooftop of their target skyscraper.

“First phase, good,” his teamma— one of the Hydra agents, said. “Now the security, kid.”

Peter had a hunch for this, knowing just where to strike, what codes to input into his tablet to disable security. Almost as if he were intimately acquainted with the source program itself. It was how he had snuck into the Compound on that first mission. However—Peter stared at the red alert on the tablet screen—this wasn’t the same as the Compound.

“What the hell?” another agent looked at the error message on the tablet over Peter’s shoulder.

“It—I—this must be the other program,” Peter stammered. “The one from the lake house. I can’t get in.” Peter braced himself, but no electric shock came from the spider-metal on the back of his head. So the commander knew he wasn’t lying.

Then, as suddenly as it had come, the on-screen alert disappeared. “Security disabled” flashed on Peter’s tablet.

“There you go. What did you do?”

“I—nothing,” Peter answered truthfully. Something pricked at his senses. A feeling of being watched, and not just by the man controlling an electrocution machine on Peter’s head. Strangely enough, that feeling of someone else watching him gave Peter a sense of assurance more than danger. But he fought those thoughts down and took a deep breath. “Alright, we’re clear. Let’s go.”

The cold night air blew around them as they made their way across the rooftop. Peter typed in some more commands, unlocked a door, and in no time at all, the four Hydra agents had breached the Avengers Tower.

-----

Something was wrong.

Peter led the team through dark halls, weapons at the ready, but they encountered no one in the whole building. Just like they’d encountered no one on the ride down the elevator. And saw no one in any of the multiple rooms they passed.

Something was wrong.

“I see your heart rate picking up,” the commander’s voice said in Peter’s ear. “Even from my comfortable seat, this is all starting to look uncomfortably like a trap. If you had any part in this…”

Peter didn’t. He could swear he didn’t, but he kept silent, continuing to lead the agents down the hall, and bracing for another burst of pain to his skull. The commander never set off the device, though, and Peter breathed a quiet sigh of relief.

Until they reached the building’s main control room. Peter unlocked the door. One man stayed posted outside as a lookout, and Peter and the two other agents entered.

At first the room seemed like the rest of the Tower, empty, dark. But that was just the problem. Too empty. Too dark.

“Something’s wrong,” barely registered in Peter’s mind, when the attack began.

The bullets came from out of nowhere, shooting straight for the three other Hydra agents, and electro-shocking them to unconsciousness. The lookout recovered quickly and made to enter the room, when the door automatically shut in his face. Then, for good measure, another round of shocking bullets was fired at the two agents lying on the ground. And Peter was left alone with their attacker.

At first, not knowing where the firing came from, Peter merely braced himself in the middle of the room, ready to dodge the bullets when they came. But nothing ever shot at him. Now with the other agents knocked out in the dark, Peter faced the unknown enemy, relying only on his senses. He had just located the new figure in the room, and readied his web shooters to strike back, when the lights suddenly turned on.

A high-pitched tone came on with the lights. Peter crouched on the ground, arms up to protect both his eyes and ears against the sudden onslaught. He felt all his senses torn apart, compromised. And then the unknown figure stepped in front of him.

The high-pitched sound stopped. A faint whine remained in Peter’s ears, but through it he could just make out a man’s voice speaking to him. That man’s voice. The one from the lake house, from his dreams.

“Peter?” Tony Stark repeated, holding out a metal hand.

Peter shoved it away and leapt back, getting shakily to his feet. Holding out both arms in a defensive position, Peter caught his breath, and for the first time took a good look at his assailant.

It looked like the first red suit, the one from the garage. The one Peter had destroyed in the lake. But this one was undamaged, and still holding out a hand to Peter in what was probably supposed to be a calming gesture.

“Hey, FRIDAY,” Peter panted, his chest still pounding. “New suit?”

“I have a lot of suits. One of them saved you, if you recall, right after you ditched the first one in the lake.”

Peter grit his teeth. Of course he knew one of the suits—of course he knew Tony Stark, and the woman driving the purple suit, had saved his life that night. But things had changed. He couldn’t afford to think about it, to think about that fateful night at all, not with an electric killing machine stuck to the back of his brain.

“Look, man. I’m getting what I came for, and you can’t stop me any more than you could last time. Just throw in the towel and walk away now.” Peter’s voice shook.

“Tonight’s not gonna be like last time,” Tony replied determinedly.

“Walk. Away. Or I’ll wreck this suit, too, just like last time—”

“Tonight’s not gonna be like last time,” Tony repeated louder. And then he did something Peter never expected.

The suit retracted. Nano-tech particles moved in waves, draining like water in a sink towards the reactor casing in the middle of the suit. Until the only thing left standing in front of Peter, was not a metal suit, but a person.

“Peter Parker,” Tony said, taking a step forward, “tonight we’re taking you home.”

-----

Peter froze. The night he spent dreaming of the woman by the fireplace raced through his mind. Yet now, being offered the exact thing he had wanted then, Peter had no idea how to respond.

“Take me home? I want to, but there’s a killing machine on my head.”

“I want to, but there’s a Hydra jet nearby that could attack any second.”

“I want to, if I knew where home was.”

“I want to.”

“I want to, but...”

Peter’s lips seemed to move of their own accord. “I can’t,” he said in a small voice.

Tony’s eyes widened at Peter’s change in demeanor. He took another step closer. “You… okay. Okay, you know that high tone earlier? Messed up your comms. Hydra can’t hear us, at least for the moment. Peter… let me help.”

Peter ripped off his mask, and threw it to the floor between him and Tony. His hands shook, his lips shook. “He’ll kill me!” He turned his head, showing off the metal device stuck to the back. “If either of us tries anything, he’ll kill me.”

Tony took one good look at it and cursed. Then he stopped, as if listening to something on his own comms.

“I’m supposed to kill you,” Peter said. Tony’s head snapped up. “Those were my orders, if—if anyone interfered. And he can make me do it, too—”

“Kid—”

“He can make me do anything, I know, he tested it out—”

“Calm down, we’ll think of something—”

“I take you down, or my damn brain is toast!”

“You’re not dying!” Tony clenched his jaw, hand still outstretched towards Peter. “Not tonight, not on my watch.”

Peter shook his head. The familiar ache was starting to build again, the humming between his ears. “I don’t feel so good,” he choked out.

Tony froze. And then the older man must have said something in response—his lips were moving—but suddenly all Peter could hear, all he could focus on, was the commander’s voice in his ear.

“You know what to do, soldier.” The threat in his tone was clear.

“I’m sorry,” Peter rasped. And then he lunged forward.

-----

It was never a fair fight.

Tony summoned his suit back, but not before Peter got a couple of good hits in him. Knocked down on the floor, he saw his own electroshock bullets hurtling towards him from Peter’s gun, and Tony rolled away with milliseconds to spare. God, retirement had taken its toll.

“Peter…” Tony groaned, getting up on his knees. He was met with a kick to the chest.

“Tony?” Bruce’s voice echoed in his helmet. “Tony, you need to get close enough to—”

“Yeah, I know, I’m trying!” He rolled again, and the chair Peter swung crashed into the floor where Tony had just been.

It was never a fair fight.

Tony flew up and around Peter. “FRIDAY, lights out!” As darkness fell, Tony approached from behind, his targeting locked on to the device behind Peter’s head, it was within his sight—

Peter turned and fired a shocking bullet straight at him.

As Tony fell to the floor, shaking with the electricity, he realized just how close Peter had come to killing him, if he had really tried. But the electroshock bullets—a few kicks—a damn chair—Peter wasn’t really trying, was he?

It was never a fair fight.

“No,” Tony heard Peter say, as the kid stepped closer to his prone form. “No, look, Stark’s out, I swear that shock was strong enough, I—”

And then it happened. Through his HUD, Tony saw the sudden heat signature that exploded behind Peter’s head, the electronic signal, the way the kid’s body convulsed. Peter fell to his knees.

“No!” Tony screamed. Peter turned, his eyes met Tony’s—and for the first time Tony saw all the fear behind them.

It was never a fair fight. Tony was battling Peter. But Peter had to fight both the Avenger and Hydra.

Slowly, Tony got up. And he did the only thing he could think of to help his kid. He leaped forward and tackled Peter to the ground.

Peter rolled with the hit, pinning Tony under him—he’d really forgotten how strong the kid was—and Peter sent punch after punch flying. Never to the head, though—even Tony realized that. But as their fight continued, as Tony got pummeled, the shocks to Peter’s brain stopped. And for now that was all Tony wanted.

“Sam, how’s it going on your end?” Tony hissed.

“Almost there, keep him busy!” Sam replied through the comms.

Another solid hit to his suit. “Sure as hell trying to!” Needing a break, Tony turned his thrusters on and slid off from under Peter, hovering some way above the floor. Tony heard the whoosh of web shooters and he narrowly dodged Peter slamming into him mid-air.

“Hey! Flying is cheating!” Peter hollered as he passed. Tony recognized it for what it was, though—a call to keep Tony aware of Peter’s location in the darkness.

Tony wondered, not for the first time since that night at the lake house, how much of the old Peter was starting to come back. And whether it would take sooner than anticipated to restore the rest of him.

Assuming they could Peter through the night at all.

Keep the kid safe now, worry about the memories later, Tony chided himself. He turned the lights of his suit on, a beacon for Peter to spot. “Just trying to keep the fight fair!” Tony called out, and he braced himself for impact.

-----

“Rhodey! Your 3 o’clock—”

“I see him,” Rhodey said through the comms. “Coming in hot.”

Sam locked the quinjet on his targeting system and increased speed. “Approaching from the back end.”

“Good. Let’s get this son of a bitch, Cap.”

Sam smiled. “I’ll race ya.”

-----

Tony dodged yet another of Peter’s swinging kicks. “Sam! Update?”

“They’re almost at the jet, Tony!” Bucky answered for him. “The rest of us are preparing to storm the base. When we get the commander, and Sam and Rhodey get the quinjet, it’s over. Just you and the kid now, Stark, hang on.”

Peter swung again; Tony decided to let this one hit. They’d been playing this cat-and-mouse game for a while now, with fewer and fewer shocks coming to the device on Peter’s head. Tony could only hope Hydra would buy the facade to the end.

“You hear that, Pete?” Tony whispered to himself. “Just hang on.”

-----

Hydra held out to the end. But the Winter Soldier, and the team of Avengers he led, captured the base eventually. Bucky stormed into their control room and pinned the commander to the wall without slowing a step.

“Kill switch!” he demanded. Too late; the commander popped a pill, and died foaming from the mouth.

“It’s gotta be here…” Bruce scoured the panels and screens. “Tony said he had a finger on Peter’s button the whole time, it’s gotta be here!”

Then the screens blazed red. An alarm blared throughout the captured base.

And up on the main screen, the countdown started.

-----

“Wilson! Rhodey!” the urgent call came through their earpieces.

“Bruce, we got the jet!” Rhodey replied. “Crew’s secure, we’re flying back—”

“No, abort!” Bruce shouted. “They tripped self-destruct on all assets! We’re evacuating the base, crash the plane in the water and get out of there!”

Rhodey and Sam made to clear the plane they’d just taken over, when Rhodey suddenly realized something. “Wait, all assets?” he said into the comms. “Self-destructing all assets?”

“Everything’s set to blow!”

Rhodey stopped dead in his tracks. “What about Peter?”

-----

“Peter!” Tony yelled.

They had just been exchanging half-hearted blows, when the kid suddenly crumpled to the floor, clutching his head. FRIDAY immediately turned the lights back on and Tony rushed to Peter’s side.

“FRIDAY, talk to me!”

“It’s a different signal, Boss,” FRIDAY replied quickly. “Current’s going steady!”

Peter curled into a fetal position, a scream ripped from his throat.

“Cap!” Tony shouted.

“Tony! Barnes deactivated Peter’s manual kill switch. But we got another problem, the device has a self-destruct too, and it’s been tripped! You’ve got three minutes to—”

Tony tuned the rest out. As Peter continued writhing on the floor, Tony knelt and placed one suited hand behind the device on Peter’s head.

“It’s locked tight!” FRIDAY reported. “You can’t get it off in time without damaging the neural links.”

“Or setting the bomb off early,” Tony bit out. Below him, Peter screamed.

Tony stared at the electrocution device. That black metal torturing his kid, cruelly and ironically shaped like a spider itself. Tony stared. Shaped like a spider.

“FRIDAY…?”

“Yes,” FRIDAY answered like she’d read his mind. “It’s from the suit he was wearing when he was captured, modified, of course.”

The answer fell neatly in place in Tony’s mind. “Then it’s a good thing I brought backup.” He held his hand out, and a smooth metal disk flew at him from where Tony had stashed it in the room.

“Tones!” Rhodey’s voice. “Two minutes!”

Tony leaned over Peter’s still twitching body. “Peter, look at me. Look at me, kid. I need you to trust me.” Peter looked up, fear and tears and pain in his eyes. “Trust me,” Tony repeated, laying the metal disk on Peter’s chest. The kid didn’t fight him, and almost imperceptibly, Peter nodded.

Tony activated the disk.

-----

Peter’s head felt on fire. Peter’s chest felt cold.

In his head, the current ripped through everything, memories and feelings and pain. On his chest, the metal disk spread out, crawling like ants but cool on his burning skin.

His head felt like it would burst. The spreading metal on his chest held him together.

Until the cool metal wasn’t only on Peter’s chest anymore—until it was all over him, covering his body. Covering the electrocutor on his head.

Fire fought cold, and Peter screamed.

He heard Tony shouting. He heard the ticking of a countdown clock on the back of his head.

He heard the click.

And Peter passed out.

-----

Peter passed out in Tony’s arms. Tony cradled the body close to his chest, listening for his breathing, feeling for the pulse that would tell him whether his world had just fallen apart in his arms.

“Boss,” FRIDAY’s voice came an eternity later, “vitals holding steady.”

Tony exhaled the weight of a planet off his lungs, and lay his head down on top of Peter’s. “I got you, kid.” Breathing in, out. The nanotech Spider-Man suit deactivated, and as the helmet retracted, the electrocution device dropped cleanly from Peter’s head. Tony held his kid closer. “I got you.”

----- Chapter 4: Home -----

The Compound was peaceful in the mornings.

Early sunlight filtered in through the windows, the gold just hitting the green of the treetops. And it was quiet. Where the screens and beeping vitals monitors had felt like intruders in the night, in the morning their presence was subdued, making it easier to hear the bedridden person being monitored when he began to stir.

The moment her nephew opened his eyes, May was right by his side.

He struggled for words, she couldn’t come up with anything to say, so between the two of them it was silent for a while. Finally Peter spoke. “You’re… you’re the woman from my dreams.” Peter furrowed his brow. “I want to say… Mom… but somehow it doesn’t fit.”

May took his hand. “I’m your Aunt May, Peter. It’s… it’s good to have you back.”

“I don’t know—I don’t know if I’m back. I still…” Peter shut his eyes. “The dreams and nightmares… and the memories… they come in pieces. I—I don’t know my whole life yet. Or even… who I am.”

“We’ll help you. The whole team will help you.” May smiled softly, brushing a strand of hair from Peter’s forehead. “To start—your name is Peter Parker. And you’re my kid.”

The two of them spent the whole morning together. The Compound was peaceful in the mornings.

-----

Peter pieced it together, slowly.

His aunt was named May Parker. The man monitoring his recovery from the incident at the Tower, was Bruce. And the other frequent visitor to Peter’s room was already familiar. The person who saved his life, who his aunt bantered easily with, and who always brought them both some kind of hot beverage, that was Tony Stark.

It was Tony who sat with May at Peter’s bedside, filling in the gaps. Tony who explained the kidnapping, the brainwashing, their search. Tony who always reminded Peter to take his recovery easy, and always looked at him with such warmth.

There were others on the team, too. The first time Peter was able to leave the medbay, a man introducing himself as Sam led him to the shared living quarters. Another guy, Rhodey, dropped beside him on the couch and passed him some pizza, and Peter recognized his voice from the fight at the warehouse. They ended up having a good laugh about it.

He met Pepper. And Morgan. Even got reacquainted with FRIDAY.

And Bucky Barnes. Though usually quiet, the man turned out to be among the most outspokenly encouraging about Peter’s recuperation. “It gets better, kid. I know the memories come back in pieces, and it can be frustrating.” He had a faraway look in his eyes, and Peter could tell the man made an effort to make his tone light. “It’s a long road. But… believe me, it gets better.”

-----

It did get better. But not all at once.

Along with memories of tinkering in the lab, came memories of being strapped to a table. Along with dreams of warm fireplaces in a cozy apartment, came nightmares of the burning electricity in Peter’s head.

But that wasn’t even the worst part. The worst part was when Peter dreamed about the Tower, about beating the enemy up, except this time Peter didn’t pull his punches. And when he drew back he would be staring at Tony’s bloodied face. Or Bucky’s. Or Sam’s. Or May’s.

One night, suffocated by his own mind, Peter escaped to the Compound rooftop. A lone metal bench sat under the stars; Peter drifted towards it. He hadn’t been sitting there long when he sensed footsteps behind him, and turned to see Tony in the doorway.

“Just checking in,” the older man said. “Your aunt woke up and you weren’t there, she thought maybe you were with me in the workshop…”

Peter shuffled his feet. “Sorry. I sneaked away and didn’t want to disturb her.”

“Okay.” Tony lingered awkwardly. “It’s fine. Um. I’ll go. Do you want me to call May, or…”

Peter paused. He found he didn’t really want to call May, not right now. But he didn’t want to be alone, either.

“You always up this late?” Peter found himself asking instead.

“I guess so.” Tony shrugged. “Old habit.”

“Me too,” Peter replied. As he said it, he wondered if it was true about himself. Really, he was just saying what he thought might get Tony to stay.

Tony looked at him for a moment, tilting his head. Then, as if he’d read his mind, Tony sat down on the bench beside Peter. And for the next few hours, Tony stayed.

They sat quietly for a while, lost in their own thoughts, but it was a familiar kind of silence. One that made Peter feel safe. He plucked up the courage to speak several minutes later. “Mr. Stark?” Peter said. He didn’t know why the more formal address somehow felt more comfortable than ‘Tony,’ which was what Peter had been calling him lately. For some reason it just did. Tony turned his head, but if he noticed the change, he didn’t comment on it. “Mr. Stark,” Peter continued, “what happened back at the Tower? Really?”

Tony furrowed his brows. “We, uh, we fought, Pete. And then Hydra tripped the self-destruct on the device around your head, and…”

“Yeah, and you got it off, and then I passed out.” Peter fiddled with the zipper on his hoodie. “You told me. But how did you get it off, exactly?”

“Oh.” Tony leaned back against the bench. “I missed that part, huh.”

“Oh, I thought of another—why, why was that device shaped like a spider?”

Peter could tell Tony weighed his words carefully before answering. “It came from a suit. A specific, uh. Spider-Man’s suit.”

“Spider-Man?”

“Yeah.”

“So the thing you used to get it off…”

Tony nodded. “That was Spider-Man’s slightly older suit. Same signature, so the override worked.”

“He seems to have a lot of suits.”

“Yeah,” Tony chuckled. “Yeah, real tinkerer, that one.”

“It spread from my chest, felt like ants crawling on me.”

“That would be the nano-particles. I helped with that part, but the rest of it, all his handiwork. He’s very capable that way. Skilled guy.”

“Yeah.” Peter looked down. “Yeah, I bet. No wonder Hydra wanted him.”

Tony stiffened beside Peter. After a moment Peter felt a hand on his shoulder. “We were gonna tell you, Pete. Eventually. But doctors said to go slow on the whole memory thing and… I, I wasn’t quite sure how to break that gently, to be honest.”

Peter shrugged. “It’s okay. Not that hard to figure out. My senses, plus the memories that name brought up…” He took a breath. “And, I mean, the Avengers. You guys are, you’re Earth’s mightiest heroes or whatever. Why… why else would you all be so hell-bent on saving me?”

“What do you—because you’re one of us,” Tony said firmly. “Not because of what you can do.”

Peter didn’t answer. After several weeks fighting for a team that only seemed to care about what Peter could do, he didn’t seem to know how to answer.

“Is—is this what this is about? What keeps you up at night?” Tony pushed. “You’re wondering why you were worthy?”

Peter fiddled with his zipper, with the hem of his hoodie, anything to keep his fingers moving. “I hacked into your databases,” Peter said in a small voice.

“We dealt with that damage, Peter.”

“I wrecked your garage, your suit—”

“Things can be replaced.”

“And I beat you up pretty good.”

“Oh, yeah.” Tony laughed. “Yeah, okay, I’ll give you that one.”

The laugh disarmed Peter. He turned to meet Tony’s eyes, but he found no unkindness or mockery there—only sincerity behind the outer humor. Peter couldn’t help but smile too.

“Hey, I should thank you. I don’t get much exercise in retirement,” Tony quipped.

“Semi-retirement,” Peter blurted. That made both him and Tony stop. “You’re… only semi-retired,” Peter continued uncertainly. “You, um. You’re my…” But Peter's burst of memory failed; it only ever reached so far.

“Mentor,” Tony supplied when Peter trailed off. “Occasional tech support. Substitute Guy in the Chair…”

“Old man?” Peter joked.

Tony snorted. “Disaster child. Never change.” Then Tony’s eyes softened, and he lowered his voice. “You are a part of this team, Peter. Everything we put on the line was worth it. Everything. Because it got you home.”

Peter breathed deeply, and let it out in a long sigh. Slowly, he leaned against Tony’s side, and Tony put an arm around his shoulders. Peter found he fit in Tony’s arms like a puzzle piece. Like he belonged there. Like he’d always belonged there.

“I wish I could remember more,” Peter admitted quietly, when he was good and settled in Tony’s embrace. “I wish I could remember faster. Or I wish… I’d never forgotten in the first place.”

Tony hugged him a little tighter. “We’ll be here to remind you.”

-----

They reminded him. And slowly, Peter recovered. Slowly, Peter remembered.

-----

They held a second birthday party at May’s apartment a few days later. Complete with streamers, red and blue balloons, and—

“Chocolate cake. Always chocolate cake, and you always bake it yourself,” Peter remembered.

May smiled as she kissed Peter’s temple, and handed him a slice.

-----

Peter eased slowly back into training, too.

“You wanna deflect the knife like this, and remember to—”

Peter broke Bucky off when he executed the move perfectly, ending with him pinning his sparring partner to the ground. Sam laughed and flashed a thumbs-up from the sidelines.

“I remember,” Peter realized, grinning.

-----

“Every other weekend? I used to hang out with the Tony Stark every other weekend?”

“Until stupid college got in the way,” Tony groused playfully. He handed Peter a wrench for the reinforced garage door they were installing.

“Still can’t believe I go to MIT,” Peter said as he tightened the screws.

“Yeah. When you’re ready to go back, treat Ned and Michelle to a big movie night or something, whatever you kids do for fun. They can't wait to see you again.” Tony looked up from his toolbox. “Do you remember…?” he said tentatively.

Peter nodded. He did remember, bits and pieces—laughter with a childhood friend, stolen moments with a girl he admired. All on their own, Peter’s cheeks began to blush.

Tony grinned. “Yeah. Thought you did.”

-----

There were some things, though, that were Peter’s very own. And that he had to rediscover on his own.

“How’s it feel?” Tony asked, as Peter donned the Spider-Man suit for the first time in months.

Peter tested it out: stretched his arms, fiddled with the web shooters, said hi to Karen. “It—it’s perfect, Mr. Stark,” he said when he was finished. “Thank you.”

Tony slung an arm around Peter’s shoulders and walked with him across the Tower rooftop. “Alright. This one you’ll have to figure back out on your own. But you did it before, and you’ll do it again.” Tony smiled. “Spider-Man.”

Peter perched on the edge of the roof, feeling the wind on his suit, the rush of his senses. The feeling of being back where he belonged.

Peter Parker was Spider-Man. This was his to remember. This was his to reclaim.

“Stay safe,” he heard Tony whisper, as the older man backed off from the edge.

Peter turned to him. “Tony?”

Tony looked up at him, and Peter paused to relish that short moment. For all the time they’d spent together lately, this was different. This was special. This was them, back in their old mentor-mentee groove. And it felt good.

“I, I just wanted to say—” Peter started, and he grinned. “I still think ‘official Avenger-Guardian of NYC’ should be a thing. And it definitely ranks higher than Iron Man.”

Tony’s dropped jaw, and his mock-offended face, was the last thing Peter saw as he shot a web and swung down over his city.

Spider-Man had returned.

#the friendly neighborhood exchange #friendly neighborhood exchange #irondad #peter parker #tony stark #fanfic #jelly's

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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How Science Fiction’s Ensemble Stories Humanize Space

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A close-knit crew of wildly different people ride around on a spaceship having adventures. If you’re a sci-fi fan, there are very good odds that this synopsis describes one of your hooks into the genre. That crew might be a dysfunctional band of space criminals and revolutionaries, or a clean cut team of scientists, diplomats and soldiers serving a galactic Space UN, but there is a core appeal to this set up across the genre.

“Ensemble crews are one of the quickest and most powerful ways to forge a found family. A foundational example for me was Blake’s 7,” says Paul Cornell, who has written stories for the Star Trek: Year Five comic series among his many speculative fiction credits. “They haven’t been recruited, they have relative degrees of distance from the cause, they’ve been flung together. The most important thing is that they’re all very different people.”

These Are the Voyages…

It’s a formula that has been repeated over and over for about as long as there has been science fiction on television—starting with the likes of Star Trek and Blake’s 7, through the boom in “planet of the week” style TV in the 90s and 00s with Farscape and Firefly, to more recent stories like Dark Matter, The Expanse, Killjoys, and the Guardians of the Galaxy films. Most recently Sky’s Intergalactic, and the Korean movie Space Sweepers have been carrying the standard, while last month saw people diving back into the world of Mass Effect with Mass Effect Legendary Edition. While Commander Sheppard is ostensibly the protagonist of the video game trilogy, few would argue that it’s anything other than the ensemble of the Normandy crew that keeps people coming back.

As science fiction author Charlie Jane Anders points out, it’s not hard to see the appeal of a family of likeable characters, kept in close quarters by the confines of their ship, and sent into stories of adventure.

“I love how fun this particular strand of space opera is, and how much warmth and humour the characters tend to have,” Anders says. “These stories have in common a kind of swashbuckling adventure spirit and a love of problem-solving and resourcefulness. And I think the ‘found family’ element is a big part of it, since these characters are always cooped up on a tiny ship together and having to rely on each other.”

Over the years the Star Wars franchise has delivered a number of mismatched spaceship crews, from various ensembles to have crewed the Millennium Falcon, to the band of rebels in Rogue One, to the crew of the Ghost in Star Wars: Rebels.

That energy was one of the inspirations for Laura Lam and Elizabeth May, the writers behind Seven Devils and its upcoming sequel, Seven Mercies. In Seven Devils, a team of very different women come together aboard a starship stolen from an oppressive, galaxy-spanning empire, clashing with each other as much as the regime they are fighting.

“So many of these stories are what we grew up with, and they were definitely influences. The scrappy people trying to make a living or rebel against a higher power, or the slick luxury communism of Star Trek,” says Lam. “What’s great and terrible about space is how you are often stuck on a ship with people, for better or worse. That isolation can breed really interesting character conflict and deep bonds. You have to have your crew’s back, otherwise space or alien plants are too large or dangerous [to survive].”

While the “Seven” duology is very much inspired by this genre of space adventure, it also brings these stories’ underlying political themes to the surface.

“What I enjoy most about space operas is taking contemporary socio-cultural and political issues and exploring them through a different lens,” says May. “I love to think of them in terms of exploration, analogous to ships navigating the vastness of a sea. And on journeys that long, with only the ocean and saltwater (space) around you, things become fraught. Yes, these are tales of survival, but they’re also tales of what it means to question the world around you. Aside from the cultural questions that [premise] raises, it opens possibilities for conflict, character bonding, and worldbuilding.”

In Yudhanjaya Wijeratne’s novel, The Salvage Crew, his ensemble don’t spend long on their ship. In the opening scene, they are plummeting through the atmosphere of an alien planet in a drop-pod piloted by an AI who is also the book’s narrator. But the book shares that sense of characters who need to stick close together in the face of a large and dangerous universe.

“What did I like about [space team stories]? Well, always the sense of wonder that the scale brought me: the feeling that Earth, and all our bickering, was just a tiny speck of dust – what Sagan called ‘the pale blue dot’ – and out there was an entire universe waiting to be explored,” Wijeratne says. “I treasured the darkness, as well: the darkness of the void, the tragedy of people in confined spaces, and a terror of the deep that only the deep sea brings me. It wasn’t the family attitude: it was more the constraints and the clever plays within terrifyingly close constraints. There’s a kind of grim, lunatic nihilism you need for those situations, and I loved seeing that.”

When asked for their favourite examples of the genre, one name kept coming up. Wijeratne, Anders, Lam, and May all recommended the Wayfarers books by Becky Chambers. The first in the series, A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, concerns the crew not of an elite space naval vessel, or a renegade crew of space criminals, but of a ship that lays hyperspace tunnels for other, more glamorous ships to travel through. This job of space road-laying is one that I can only recall seeing once before, much more catastrophically, in the Vogon Constructor Fleet of Hitchhiker’s Guide the Galaxy. A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet is a very different tale, however.

May tells us, “It’s a quieter space tale, a novel that feels very much like a warm hug. I love it with all my heart.”

Chambers doesn’t hold back when describing the impact this genre had on her growing up.

“I can’t remember life without these stories,” she says. “TNG first aired when I was three years old, and I watched Trek every week with my family until Voyager wrapped when I was sixteen. I can recite most of the original Star Wars trilogy word for word while I’m watching the movies, and I binged Farscape like my life depended on it when I was in college. This storytelling tradition is so much a part of my fabric that I have a hard time articulating what it is I like about it so much. It’s just a part of me, at this point. These stories are fun, full stop. They’re exciting. They can break your heart and crack you up in equal measure. They’re about small little clusters of people doing extraordinary things within an impossibly vast and beautiful universe. Everything about my work is rooted here. I can’t imagine who I’d be without these stories.”

The Unchosen Ones

Perhaps a big part of the appeal of these stories is that they are about an ensemble of people, each with their own stories and goals and perspectives. It can be refreshing where science fiction and fantasy frequently centre stories of “the Chosen One”, be it a slayer, boy wizard, or Jedi who is the person the narrative happens to. While Chosen One stories will frequently have a wide supporting cast, the emphasis for those other characters is frequently on the “supporting”.

“I very intentionally wanted to do something other than a ‘chosen one’ story with Wayfarers. I’m not sure I can speak to any broader trend in this regard, but with my own work, I really wanted to make it clear that the universe belongs to everybody in equal measure,” Chambers says. “Space opera is so often the realm of heroes and royalty, and I love those stories, but there’s a parallel there to how we think about space in the real world. Astronauts are and have always been an exceptional few. I wanted to shift the narrative and make it clear that we all have a place out there, and that even the most everyday people have stories worth telling.”

It’s an increasingly popular perspective. Perhaps it’s telling that one of the most recent Star Trek spin-offs, Lower Decks, focuses not on the super-heroic bridge crew, but the underlings and red shirts that do their dirty work, and that in turn echoes the ultra-meta John Scalzi novel, Redshirts.

Charlie Jane Anders’ recently released young adult novel, Victories Greater Than Death is a story that starts off with an almost archetypical “Chosen One” premise. The story’s protagonist, Tina, is an ordinary teenage girl, but is also the hidden clone of the hero of a terrible alien war. But as the story progresses, it evolves into something much more like an ensemble space adventure.

“I was definitely thinking about that a lot in this book in particular,” Anders says. “Tina keeps thinking of the other earth kids as a distraction from her heroic destiny or as people she needs to protect. Her friend Rachael is the one who keeps pushing for them to become a family and finally gets through to Tina.”

Seven Devils (and its upcoming sequel, Seven Mercies) is also a story that tries to focus on the exact people who would never be considered “chosen” or who have wilfully turned away from their destiny.

“I do like that most of them [the characters] are those the Tholosians wrote off as unimportant–people to be used for their bodies, and not encouraged to use their minds,” Lam says. “And Eris’s journey turning away from the life chosen for her and choosing her own, but having to wrangle with what she still did for the Empire before she did, makes her a very interesting character to write. In many ways, she was complicit, and she’s not sure she’ll ever be able to atone.”

Wijeratne also argues that an ensemble story is in many ways more true to life.

“Rarely in life do you find this Randian John Galt type, this solo hero that changes the world by themselves; more often you find a group of people with similar interests, covering for each other, propping each other up,” he says. “It’s how we humans, as a species, have evolved. Our strength is not in our individual prowess, but in the fact that three people working together can take down a mammoth, and a thousand people working together can raise a monument to eternity.”

While there are certainly themes and kinds of story that are more suited to ensemble storytelling, May points out that there is plenty of room for both kinds of story.

“Having written books that explore both, I find that Chosen One narratives are often stories of duty, obligation, and self-discovery,” she says. “Ensemble narratives often involve themes of acceptance and friendship bonds. To me, these serve different narrative functions and ask separate questions.”

A Space of Their Own

The spaceship-crews-on-adventures subgenre is one of the major pillars of science fiction as a whole, with the trope codifier, Star Trek, being likely one of the first names that comes to mind when you think of the genre. This means that the writers working within the subgenre are not only heavily influenced by what came before, they are also in conversation, and sometimes argument with it.

Paul Cornell is a huge Star Trek fan, and has written for the characters before. His upcoming novella, Rosebud, features the quite Star Trek-ish scenario of a crew of AIs, some formerly humans, some not, investigating an anomaly. It’s a story that very much intersects with the ideals of Star Trek.

“Rosebud is about a crew who are meant to believe in something, but no longer really do,” Cornell says. “They’re a bunch of digital beings with varying origins, some of whom were once human, some of whom weren’t. There’s a conflict under the surface that nobody’s talking about, and when they encounter, in a very Trek way, an anomalous object, it’s actually a catalyst for their lives changing enormously. I’m a huge fan of the Trek ethos. I like good law, good civilisation, civil structures that do actually allow everyone to live their best lives, and Rosebud is about how far we’ve got from that, and a passion for getting back to that path.”

Other stories more explicitly react against the more dated or normative conventions in the genre. Seven Devils, for instance, both calls out and subverts the very male demographics of a lot of these stories.

“For a lot of ensemble casts, you get the token woman (Guardians of the Galaxy, for example) and until recently, things were fairly heteronormative,” Lam says. “So we basically wanted to turn things around and have a gang of mostly queer women being the ones to save the universe. We also went hard on critiquing imperialism and monarchies with too much power.”

Indeed, the “space exploration” that is the cornerstone of much of the genre, is an idea deeply rooted in a colonialist, and often racist tradition.

I’ve written my own space ensemble story, an ongoing series of four “planet of the week” style novellas, Fermi’s Progress. One of my concerns with the genre is how often the hero spaceship will turn up at a “primitive” planet, then overthrow a dictator, or teach the women about this human concept called “love”, or otherwise solve the local’s century’s old, deeply rooted societal problems in half-an-hour and change in a way that felt extremely “white colonialists going out and fixing the universe”.

My solution was simple. In Fermi’s Progress, the crew’s prototype spaceship has an experimental FTL drive that unfortunately vaporises every planet they visit as they fly away. It’s a device that riffs off the “overturn a planet’s government then never mention them again” trope of planet-of-the-week stories, keeps the ship and crew moving, and leaves the reader in no doubt as to whether or not these “explorers” are beneficial to the places they visit.

Of course, not every effort to engage with these issues needs to be so dramatic.

“Since I tend to view space operas in terms of uncharted exploration, it’s crucial that the text addresses or confronts power issues in its various forms: who has it, who suffers from it, how is it wielded?” May says. “And sometimes those questions have extraordinarily messy and complicated answers in ways that do not fit neatly with ‘good team overthrows evil empire.’ One of the things I wanted to address was this idea of ‘rebels are the good guys.’ Who gets to be a good person? Who else pays the price for morality? In Seven Devils, the character of Eris ends up doing the dirty, violent work of the rebellion so the others can sleep at night–so that they can feel they’ve made moral and ethical choices. And for that same work, she’s also judged more harshly by those in the rebellion who get to have clear consciences because of her actions.”

“I had particular beef with the homogeneity,” says Wijeratne. “An entire planet where x race was of an identical sentiment? Pfft. At the same time, this naive optimism, that people can work together on a planetary scale to set up institutions and megastructures without enormous amounts of politics and clashes. I was most frustrated with this in Clarke’s work. [Rendezvous with] Rama in particular: it just didn’t compute with what I knew of people.”

As a consequence of the genre’s colonialist roots—not to mention the nature of most real spaceflight programmes—space in these stories can feel like an extremely militarised space. Even a gang of misfits, fugitives and renegades like the Farscape cast features at least a couple of trained soldiers at any one time.

“I didn’t want my characters to be just redshirts or ensigns, who get ordered around and seldom get to take much initiative,” Anders points out. “And I was interested in exploring the notion that a space force organized by non-humans might have very different ideas about hierarchy and might not have concepts like ‘chain of command’. I tried not to fall unthinkingly into the military tropes that Trek, in particular, is prone to.”

Chambers was also driven by a desire to show people who were working in space without wearing a uniform.

“I wanted to tell space stories that weren’t about war or military politics,” she explains. “These things exist in the Wayfarers universe, and I personally love watching a space battle as much as anybody, but I think it’s sad if the only stories we tell about the future are those that focus on new and inventive ways of killing each other. Human experience is so much broader than that, and we are allowed to imagine more.”

Getting the Band Together

Writing a story built around an ensemble, rather than a single main character, brings its own challenges with it. In many ways, creating a central protagonist is easy. The story has to happen to somebody. Creating an ensemble can be tricker. Each character needs to feel like they’re the protagonist of their own story, but also the cast is in many ways a tool box for the writer to bring different perspectives and methods to bear on the issue at the centre of their story. Different writers take very different approaches to how they put that toolbox together.

“I had some types I wanted to play with, and I was consciously allowing myself to go a little wild, so they get to push against the walls of my own comfort zone,” Cornell says of the AI crew in Rosebud. “I created a group of very different people, tried them against each other, and edited them toward the most interesting conflicts that suited my theme.”

Anders also went through various iterations in assembling her cast of characters for Victories Greater Than Death.

“I went through a huge process of trial and error, figuring out exactly how many Earth characters I wanted in the book and how to introduce them,” she says. “I wanted characters who had their own reason for being there and who would either challenge Tina or represent a different viewpoint somehow. I think that’s usually how you get an interesting ensemble, by trying to have different viewpoints in the mix.”

In writing Fermi’s Progress, I very much tried to cut the crew from whole cloth, thinking of them primarily as a flying argument. Thinking about the original Star Trek crew, most of the stories are driven by the ongoing debate between Spock’s pragmatism, McCoy’s emotions, and Kirk’s sense of duty, and so the Fermi’s crew was written to have a number of perspectives that would be able to argue interestingly about the different things they would encounter.

Others, however, focus strongly on the individual characters before looking at how they fit together.

“I gravitate much more toward writing multiple POVs than sticking with just one. Character dynamics are catnip to me, and I love to play with them from all angles. But building each character is a very individual sort of process,” Chambers says. “I want each of them to feel like a whole person, and I’m struggling to think of any I’ve created to complete another. I just spend some time with a character all on their own, then start making them talk to each other — first in pairs, then in larger groups. I shuffle those combinations around until everybody comes alive.”

In writing Seven Devils, May and Lam began with a core pair of characters, then built outwards.

“El [Lam] and I each started with a single character we wanted to explore,” May recalls. “For me, it was Eris, who also had the benefit of being an exploration of thorny issues of morality. Eris’ natural foil was Clo–conceived of by El–who believes in the goodness of the rebellion. From there, our cast expanded as different aspects of imperial oppression that we wanted to address: colonial expansion via the military, brainwashing, the use of artificial intelligence. Each character provides a unique perspective of how the Empire in Seven Devils functions and how it crushes autonomy and self-determination.”

“We started with Eris and Clo,” Lam agrees. “Eris is sort of like Princess Leia if she and Luke had been raised by Darth Vader but she realised the Empire was evil and faked her own death to join the rebellion. Clo has elements of Luke in that she grew up on a backwater planet where things go wrong, but it was overpopulated versus wide open desert with a few moons. She also just has a lot more fury and rage that doesn’t always go in the right direction. Then we created the other three women they meet later in the narrative, and did a combination of using archetypes as jumping off points (courtesan, mercenary, genius hacker) but taking great care crafting their backstories and motivations and how they all related to each other.”

Ensuring that every character has their own story to be the protagonist of is something you can trace right back through the genre- particularly with series like Farscape, Firefly, and the more recent Intergalactic, where the crews often feels thrown together by circumstance and the characters are very much pursuing their own goals.

Balancing all of these different perspectives and voices is the real trick, especially if you want to avoid slipping back into the set-up of a star protagonist and their backing singers.

“This was a bit of a struggle, especially in a book with a single pov,” Anders says. “In the end all I could do was give each character their own goals and ideals that aren’t just an extension of Tina’s. It really helps if people have agendas that aren’t just related to the main plot.”

“We have five point of view characters and seven in the sequel, and it was definitely a challenge,” Lam admits. “For the first book, we started with just Eris and Clo until the reader was situated, and then added in the other three. We gave each character their own arc and problem to solve, and essentially asked ourselves ‘if [X] was the protagonist, what would they journey be?’ Which is useful to ask of any character, especially the villains!”

Chambers has a surprisingly practical solution to the problem: colour-coded post-it notes.

“Some characters will naturally have more weight in the story than others, but I do try to balance it out,” Chambers says. “One of the practical tricks I find helpful is colour-coding post-it notes by POV character, then mapping out all the chapters in the book on the wall. That makes it very easy to see who the dominant voices are, and I can adjust from there as needed.”

A Ship with Character

One cast member these stories all have in common is the ship they travel in. Sometimes the ship is a literal character in itself, such as the organic ship Moya in Farscape, but even when not actually sentient, the ship will help set the tone for the entire story, whether it’s the sweeping lines and luxurious interiors of the Enterprise D, or the cosy, hand-painted communal kitchen of Serenity. When describing the Fermi in my own story, I made it a mix of real and hypothetical space technology, and pure nonsense, in a way that felt like the story’s mission statement.

Seven Devils’ stolen imperial ship, “Zelus”, likewise reflected the themes of the book.

“Our ship is called Zelus, and it begins as a symbol of Empire but gradually becomes a home,” Lam says. “They took it back for themselves, which I think mirrors a lot of what the characters are trying to do.”

The same was true of the “Indomitable”, the ship Tina would inherit in Victories Greater Than Death.

“The main thing I needed from the Indomitable was to be a slightly run down ship on its own, far from any backup,” Anders says. “I did have a lot of fun coming up with all the ways the ship’s systems work. In the second book I introduce a starship that is a little more idiosyncratic, let’s say.”

For Cornell, the spaceship at the heart of Rosebud was an extension of the characters themselves, almost literally.

“It’s a kind of magical space, in that the interior is largely digital, and reflects the personalities of the crew,” he says. “There’s an interesting gap between the ship’s interior and the real world, and to go explore the artefact, our crew have to pick physical bodies to do it in. Their choices of physical body again tell us something about who they are.”

“My background is in theater, so I am always thinking about what kind of ‘set’ I’m working with,” Chambers tells us. “Colour, lighting, props, and stage layout are very important to me. I want these to feel like real, lived-in environments, but they also communicate a lot to the reader about who the people within these spaces are. Kizzy’s workspace tells a completely different story than, say, Roveg’s shuttle, or Pepper’s house. I spend a lot of time mulling over what sorts of comforts each character likes to keep around them, what food they like to have on hand, and so on. These kinds of details are crucial for painting a full picture.”

Stellar Dynamics

When he was writing the cast of The Salvage Crew, Wijeratne fleshed out his characters by focusing on how they relate to one another.

“My cast tends to be more of ‘what’s the most interesting mix I can bring to this situation, where’s the tragedy, and where’s the comedy?’ I go through a bit of an iterative process – I come up with one stand-out attribute for the character that makes sense given the world I’m about to throw them into,” he says. “Then the question is: what’s a secondary quirk, or part of their nature, that makes them work well with the others, or is somehow critical? What’s a tertiary facet to them that really rubs the others the wrong way?

“Then I take those quirks and go back to the other characters, and ask why do they respond to these things? What about their backstory makes them sympathize with one thing and want to pummel the other into dust? By the time this back-and-forth is complete, I’ve got enough that the characters feel like they really do have shit to get done in this world, and really do have some beef with each other. They have backstory and things they react to really badly and situations they’re going to thrive in.”

In The Salvage Crew, this included Simon a geologist who crew up plugged into a PVP MMORPG and who hasn’t really adjusted to the real world, Anna, a wartime medic who has PTSD around blood, and Milo, who is a decent all-arounder, but has problems with authority, particular women in authority.

In the best-loved stories of this sub-genre, it’s not just the strong characters, but the relationships between those characters that people love. Spock and McCoy, Geordi and Data, Jayne and Book working out together in Firefly. Even in the protagonist-heavy Mass Effect, some of the best character moments don’t involve Shepard, but are the character interactions you eavesdrop or walk in on while wandering around the Normandy.

“I think we’ve all experienced being flung together with a group of workmates, and nobody asking us if we like everyone there,” Cornell says. “And how the smallest quirks of personality can come to mean everything over several centuries.”

Getting those relationships to feel organic and natural is the real trick, and it can take endless writing and rewriting to get there.

“For me, it’s usually a lot of gold-farming,” Anders says. “I will write a dozen scenes of characters hanging out or dealing with stuff, and then pick two or three of them to include in the book. I can’t write relationships unless I’ve spent a lot of time with them.”

Often it’s a question of balancing conflict and camaraderie among the group.

“It’s easy to want to go straight to banter between characters, which is a massive benefit of ensemble casts. But I also think it’s essential that they have moments of conflict,” says May. “Not just drama for drama’s sake, but in any friendship group, boundaries often have to be established and re-established. Sometimes those boundaries come from past traumas, and taking moments to explore those not only adds dimensionality, but shows how the character unit itself functions.”

For May and Lam it helped that their ensemble cast was being written by an ensemble itself.

“Having both of us work on them really helped them come to life,” Lam says. “Their voices were easier to differentiate because we’d often take the lead on a certain character. So if I wrote a Clo chapter, I didn’t always know how exactly Eris might react in her next chapter, or Elizabeth might change Eris’s dialogue in that initial Clo scene to better fit what was coming up. As co-writers, we were in conversation with each other as much as the characters, and that’s quite fun. We tend to work at different times of the day, so I’d load up the manuscript in the morning and wonder what’s happened next to our crew during the night and read to find out. We also did a lot of work on everyone’s past, so we knew what they wanted, what they feared, what lies about themselves they believed, how they might change and grow through the story as a result of meeting each other, and therefore the characters tended to develop more organically on the page.”

For Wijeratne, the thing that really brings the characters’ relationships into focus is a crisis, and it’s true. Across these stories, more often than not you want your space team to be working together against a common challenge, not obsessed with in-fighting among themselves.

“The skeleton of what you saw was the output of an algorithm. A series of Markov chains generating events, playing on the fact that humans are extraordinarily good at seeing patterns in random noise,” Wijeratne says. “But the skeleton needs skin and muscle, and that’s more or less drawn from the kind of high-stress situations that I’ve been a part of: flood relief efforts, factchecking and investigating in the face of terrorism and bombings, even minor stuff like being in Interact projects with people I really didn’t want to be working with. I find that there are make-or-break moments in how people respond to adversity: either they draw together, and realize they can get over their minor differences, or they cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war.”

Found Family

Whether we’re talking about Starfleet officers, browncoats, rebel scum or galaxy guardians, these crews are rarely just colleagues or even teammates. They are family.

“I think it goes back to many space operas ultimately being survival tales: whether that’s surviving in the vastness of space or against an imperial oppressor,” May says. “These stories bring unrelated characters closer together in a way that goes beyond the bonds of blood. ‘Found family’ is a powerful bond predicated on acceptance and respect rather than duty.”

It’s a topic at the heart of Seven Devils, set in a galaxy where the regime in power has done all it can to eliminate the concept of “Family”, but Lam also believes the found family is something extremely important to marginalised groups.

“In ours, the Tholosians have done their best to erase the concept of family entirely–most people are grown in vats and assigned their jobs from birth. You might feel some sort of sibling bond with your soldier cohort, perhaps, but most people don’t have parents,” Lam says. “Rebellion is incredibly difficult, as your very mind has been coded to be obedient and obey. So those who have managed to overcome that did so with incredible difficulty, and found each other and bonded among what they had in common. You see it in our world as well of course–the marginalised tend to be drawn to each other for support they might not find elsewhere, and the bonds are just as deep or deeper than family you’re related to by blood (just look at drag families, where you have a drag mother or daughter, for example).”

“Found family is definitely a strong narrative thread,” Wijeratne agrees. “I think it stems from an incredibly persistent process in our lives – in human lives: we grow up, we outgrow the people we are born among, and we go out into the world to find our tribe, so to speak. And this is a critical part of maturity, of striking out on out own, of becoming comfortable with who we are and realizing who we’ll be happy to battle alongside and who we’d rather kick in the meat and potatoes.

“Space, of course, is such a perfect physical representation of this process. What greater ‘going out’ is there than in leaving aside the stale-but-certain comfort of the space station or planet and striking out for the depths? What better idea of finding a family than settling in with a crew? And what better embodiment of freedom than a void where only light can touch you, but even then after years?”

Of course, the “Found Family” isn’t exclusive to spaceship crews. It’s a theme that we see everywhere from superhero movies to sitcoms, reflecting some of the bigger social shifts happening in the real world. As Cornell points out, one of the very first spaceship ensembles shows, Lost in Space, was based around a far more traditional family.

“I think one of the big, central parameters of change in the modern world is the move from biological family being the most important thing to found family being the most important, the result of a series of generation gaps caused by technological, ecological and societal change happening so fast that generations now get left behind,” Cornell says. “So all our stories now have found family in them, and we can’t imagine taking old family into space. The new Lost in Space, for example, had to consciously wrestle with that. And even in the original, there’s a reason the found family of Billy and Dr. Smith is the most interesting relationship. It’s the only one where we don’t immediately know what the rules are meant to be.”

To make a huge generalisation, that sense of “not immediately knowing what the rules are meant to be” might be the key to the genre’s appeal. After all, if your space exploration is closer to the ideals of the Star Trek model than they are to Eddie Izzard’s “Flag” sketch, then it’s about entering an alien environment where you don’t know the rules. If there are aliens, your space heroes will be trying to reach out and understand them. But for the writer, whether those aliens are humanoids with funny foreheads or jellyfish that only talk in the third person, the aliens will still be, behind however many layers of disguise, human. We really struggle to imagine what it’s like to be anything else. Perhaps our spaceship crew’s efforts in communicating with and understanding those aliens is reflected in their efforts to understand each other.

Seven Devils, by Elizabeth May and Laura Lam, is out now, as is The Salvage Crew by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Victories Greater Than Death by Charlie Jane Anders, and A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers. Rosebud, by Paul Cornell, will be out in April 2022.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

The first two parts of Chris Farnell’s serial, Fermi’s Progress, Dyson’s Fear and Descartesmageddon, are also out now, or the season pass for all four novellas is for sale at Scarlet Ferret.

The post How Science Fiction’s Ensemble Stories Humanize Space appeared first on Den of Geek.

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imaginesmai · 4 years

Text

Peter Parker-Beautiful

Plot: study break is better if Peter is with you.

He didn’t have to look at you to know you were beautiful, he thought.

Peter took a deep breath, eyes shutting as he felt the body next to him cuddle close, the history notebook gently thudding to the floor. He was cold, too cold to fall asleep or to focus on the notes in front of him, but he didn’t, couldn’t ask for the sweater back. Besides him, as if you had read his thoughts, you pulled his hoodie, the one he had stolen from Tony so long ago that was then him, closer to your frame, settling into it. You had given up on studying for the exam everyone was worried about an hour ago, when Peter noticed you were muttering more of your words than not, eyes drooping shut as you attempted to read. He turned onto his side, smiling to himself at the sight; sometimes, it was hard to believe he was so lucky.

Your eyes were closed, some strands of hair resting on your face as you slept soundly on his bed. Soft lips parted slightly and Peter hummed softly, his eyes looking at and you and checking you were asleep. You had a gentle glow, skin smooth and he hesitated, leaning close to press a barely-there kiss to your cheekbone.

He didn’t expected you to wake up.

His face reddened and he quickly flopped onto his back, already muttering something about the exam. Staring straight up at his ceiling, he could feel your eyes on the side of his face.

“Were you waiting for me to wake up?” your voice was rough with sleep, lacking the teasing tone you used when you caught him doing something weird. You let out a small laugh when Peter stuttered, as you stretched.

“I wasn’t staring” Peter denied, although you hadn’t asked if he had been doing that. “I just – I thought you looked pretty. But, uh, you’re always pretty. Not just today”

“And you’re cute, Pete” you leaned over his legs, and pecked his check, that turned even redder. “How long was I out for?”

“Twenty minutes?” he glanced at the clock on his desk, and smirked. “Well, three times twenty minutes”

“An hour?” you looked at the clock too, sighing. “Shit, I didn’t mean to fall asleep, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologise, you were exhausted” Peter smiled at you, and picked the book from the floor.

Maybe, meeting you to study hadn’t been the best idea, Peter thought. He knew you were busy with the decathlon practice; now that Liz had gone, you were the head of the team and were trying to set everything back in order after the last competition. It wasn’t as if he was always looking at you (he was), but he had noticed how you closed your eyes in lunch while your friends talked and how you almost fell asleep on Chemistry last Monday.

Still, you were there, with him, when you could be in bed resting. He was happy, but guilty as hell.

“Take a break, you need it” he said, pushing his hair off his forehead.

“Exam’s is on Monday” you stated, leaning against him as you pulled your legs up to your chest. “We need to review-“

“We have two days” he wrapped an arm around your shoulders, breath hitching when you cuddled closer to him, one hand resting on his slender waist.

Even if you had been dating for almost three months, it felt strange to him to get to hold you like that. It was not a bad feeling, though, he wasn’t uncomfortable. It felt the good kind of strange, where his stomach would turn into a roller coaster and his head would get dizzy with your smell.

The way his body tensed was strange, too, and you apologised and tried to move away.

“No! No, this-this is nice” he gently pulled you closer. “For the record, you’re… really nice to cuddle”

Peter could feel the tips of his ear burning. You smiled shyly, hiding it by pulling the collar of Peter’s sweatshirt up to hide your mouth.

“Shut up and study”

“What?” Peter laughed softly, leaning back to look at you. “What was that?”

“I said study-“

“No, that thing you did with your mouth” he teased. “Why are you hiding in my sweatshirt?”

“I also said shut up” you crossed your arms over your middle, pulling the sleeves of your -his, whatever- sweatshirt over your hands. Surprisingly, Peter had long arms. “Go back to reading about the French Revolution. Or quiz me”

“Will it make you smile again?”

Peter loved to compliment you. From the way you dressed in the mornings, even if you used the gym’s uniform, to how your cheeks rounded when you smiled. He was all about showering you with compliments and praises. What made you a couple of blushing, stuttering teenagers.

You scoffed at him, trying to make yourself smaller in his sweatshirt and curling around his side.

“You have a nice smile! Why do you have an issue with your smile?”

“Moving on, the Bastille stormed because neither of the sides could reach an agreement, only caring about their motives and goals.”

“Those people got upset that they would never see Y/N’s lovely smile”

He had always been shy, and had cowered away from talking more than two sentences in a row without stuttering. And he wasn’t that good in romantic stuff. At least not until he spent the worst two minutes of his life trying to invite you to the cinema, and started dating you. He assumed dating you did that to him.

“Pete, shut up!” he could hear a laugh in your voice before you groaned, leaning heavily against him almost with the purpose of knocking him over.

“Make me”

Best scenario, he was hoping for a kiss, maybe something more; only if he was really, really sure you were okay with it.

Worst case scenario, you could slap him and throw him out of the bed. He was awfully aware of the way half of his ass was hanging from it, and not even spiderman could avoid embarrassing himself.

What he wasn’t expecting was for your sneaky hands to drop from their place in front of your face, thin fingers wiggling into Peter’s sides. He tried to hold back his giggled pulling his arm from around you to attempt to block your hands.

“Y – Y/N! Wait, wait, come on! This… This isn’t fair!”

“Why? You said to make you shut up, so I am” you shook your hair out of your face, moving to sit on Peter’s thighs to straddle him. Peter let the first giggle out, after you touched a sensitive part. You smirked, he squirmed.

“Sa – ah! – ays the girl who won’t smile – le! Ev – eh! – er!”

Peter arched his back, trying to twist away from your nimble fingers as he laughed and giggled loudly. He jerked when your hands scratched over his stomach, arms coming up to try and cover his skin.

“You talk about my smile a lot, but your laugh is really cute too!”

The overly sweet tone of your voice made Peter laugh harder, kicking his legs out under you; always measuring his force. One of your hands rose to Peter’s neck, gently scratching under his chin and the sides before his shoulders scrunched up and trapped your hand.

He reminded you of a puppy, the way he scrunched his nose and squeezed his eyes. His brown curls were bouncing, making him seem younger.

You took your moment of opportunity and let your other hand wiggle your fingers under his arms, grinning as Peter’s laugher increased, sounding more frantic than before.

“Is this where you’re most ticklish, Pete?”

“Ye – he, ah! – yes!” he choked out, back arching as you cooed at him.

It went on for a while; Peter crying for you to stop, while you laughed with him. The room went from having a peaceful environment to having the floor covered in papers from Peter’s kicks. You wanted him to admit his laugh was cute, and he wanted you to stop before laughing a laugh off.

Neither of you noticed May peeking through the door, face tired from work. She had wanted to invite you over for dinner, but once she heard the laughs and the dorky faces, she smiled and stepped back.

Finally, you stopped and let Peter breathe, pulling your hands away from under his arms, pouting childishly as he held your hands in his.

“I’m not going to tickle you again”

“I just want to hold your hands” Peter panted, shutting his eyes. “Also, you’re smiling again. It’s beautiful.”

He was so tired, he almost didn’t notice your eyes glance down for a split second before meeting his gaze again. Several times.

“Can I kiss you?” you asked softly and sweetly, looking down to Peter’s lips for another second.

“But Y/N” Peter fake pouted, and the corner of his lip turned into a smirk. “The French revolution, the Bastille, when was it stormed? What did it cause?”

“The Bastille was stormed on July 14, 1789. It was a French prison broken into by the lower class estate and parked the beginning of the French revolution. Now, can I kiss you?”

Peter smiled and nodded, his eyes fluttering shut as your soft lips gently met his.

He didn’t have to look at you to know that, still, you looked beautiful.

Want to know more about me? Here is my Masterlist! Feedback is always appreciated!!

Peter Parker/Tom Holland tags:

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#peter parker #peter parker imagine #peter parker one shot #peter parker x reader #peter parker fluff #spiderman #spiderman imagine #spiderman one shot #spiderman x reader #avengers #avengers one shot #avengers imagine #avengers x reader #tom holland #tom holland imagine #tom holland x reader #tom holland one shot #imaginemai

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brokasteltranslations · 4 years

Text

Fate/Requiem: Chapter 3

The next day, I paid a visit to a certain information broker. I brought Pran with me, and this time he was not refused entry.

–

On the surface, it appeared to be a cosy little luxury hotel catered towards tourists. In a corner of the austere Renaissance-styled lobby were two concierges. Cesare, the elder, and Lucrezia, the younger: the Servant duo known together as the Borgia siblings.

Calculating minds housed in youthful bodies. The kind of Servant I was worst at dealing with.

The two were all but identical in stature and visage, as though they were twins. A boy and girl, slim and graceful, the image of angelic purity. They answered to their Master, the ageing hotel manager, but it was common knowledge that almost all of the management of the hotel was left to them.

Cesare, the elder, who in life had been the right hand of his father the Pope, and with the rank of Archbishop had wielded authority both within and without the Holy See. Lucrezia, the younger, who armed with her heavenly beauty had married over and over into political advantage. The siblings' names were infamous even today, mostly in connection with the mysterious and untimely deaths met by many who opposed their ambitions.

–

“My, if it isn't Erice!”

“Good evening, Erice.”

The pair smiled at me, with their elbows resting on the marble reception desk.

“We thought it was about time for you to pay us a visit.”

“That child you have with you – so he's the Masterless Servant everyone's talking about?”

I turned a blind eye to their proddings. The boy must have taken a shine to the antique goggles in my apartment, because he'd worn them all the way here.

The siblings nonchalantly slid me a shot glass across the counter as they greeted us. The sharp scent of spirits wafted through the air.

“I can't. I'm underage.” I would have to choose my words carefully, and be cautious in my every move with these two. They offered some juice instead, and Pran reached out for it. I placed a firm hand on his shoulder and pulled him back behind me.

“Would you happen know anything about it?”

Lucrezia gently crossed her legs on the tall chair behind the desk, and shook her head. “Unfortunately not. Or at least, nothing more than what's available on the municipal network.”

“But that aside... perhaps you might be interested in this.” Cesare placed a storage device on the desk. It couldn't have been bigger than my little finger, and was equipped with a magical lock. Anyone designated as the key could access the information it contained directly, without the need for a smartphone or similar device, but it was otherwise very difficult to hack.

“What am I looking at?”

“A list of citizens who have attempted to conduct unsanctioned summonings, ranging from the day before yesterday to several days prior. With particular emphasis on those whose rituals failed or ended prematurely.”

“...I see.”

This would have to be the first step in any investigation, barring an extraordinary stroke of luck. It was precious information that would ordinarily take a great deal of time and effort to gather, and now it was being offered all too easily. Unsanctioned summons were illegal, of course, but the invasion of others' privacy also carried heavy penalties in Mosaic City – although if one balked at the notion of invading others' privacy, the profession of information broker perhaps wasn't for them.

“What a curiously generous offer.”

“We're simply glad to be of service to you, Erice.”

“I'm delighted to hear it.”

These siblings would often require payment in more than money. In the past, I'd had to let slip secrets I'd learned of the criminal underworld in exchange for their information. More than a few times, it had later come to light that a Servant I had disposed of had been someone they considered an inconvenience. I didn't like to admit it, but odds were good that I was playing an unwitting puppet on invisible strings.

So caution was vital.

I gently withdrew the hand I had extended towards the storage device. It was alluring bait, but more than likely poisoned.

“Actually, it's not because of him that I'm here today.”

“Well then, what are you here for?”

“Chitose came here, didn't she? Sometime last night, most likely.”

The siblings' expressions were inscrutable. They were waiting to see what move I would make.

“I've had my assignments from Caren suspended, so I'll be closing up business for a while. There isn't much I could do for you even if I wanted to.”

Cesare measured up myself and Pran, his chin resting on the palm of his hand. “Business, eh? You know, Erice, there are many people who suffer because of your work, and a scarce few who benefit from it. But above all...”

Lucrezia continued where her brother left off. “You yourself gain nothing from it, do you? What's wrong with taking this opportunity to enjoy a little vacation away from it all?”

“If it's retribution from people you've crossed that concerns you, we can show you a wonderful safe house. Although it might weigh a little heavy on the wallet.”

“A safe house, you say.”

Well, this clinched it. Chitose had come here, and coerced them. Threatened them. But it seemed like they had no intention of concealing that fact. So what did that mean?

There must have been something else they were hiding. I had no choice but to show my hand.

I heaved a theatrical sigh. “You know, I had a little chat with the relic salesman in the Akiba Department Store. He mentioned that when Kundry attempted to procure the materials for an unsanctioned summoning, a certain information broker intervened to vouch for her. An interesting story, don't you think?”

It wasn't a bluff. I had returned to the relic shop after parting ways with Karin on the previous day.

“I've also heard that there have been some new traps on the market recently. Ones that leech power from ley lines, that have proven very popular among less savoury times. If you know anything, I'd greatly appreciate if you could share it. It's very important I be properly prepared, just in case, you understand. Well? How about it, Signor? Signora?”

Their expressions stiffened for the slightest of moments. Even if I wasn't currently on a direct assignment from a municipal administration AI, I still had just cause to take immediate action if I personally witnessed an attempt to interfere with the city's infrastructure.

“Ahaha... Oh, Erice. You best us yet again.” Lucrezia gave a tinkling laugh as she leaned over her brother's back. Stretching over his shoulder, she took back the storage device on the desk, before setting down a new one. Surprise and a hint of protest marred Cesare's otherwise unreadable expression. It seemed that this time, the sister had read one move further ahead.

“They do say that there is no word “no” in a concierge's dictionary. Is that not so, Cesar?”

“So it is, Lucrezia. So it is.”

These Servants lived their lives atop the thinnest layer of ice. If I were to start asking the wrong questions, they would be finished as information brokers. If they wanted to avoid that fate, they had had no choice but to reveal their own hands.

With my work here done, I departed the lobby. I felt no desire to stay. This was a tranquil and beautiful place, but it was not one to remain in for long – its noxious atmosphere made it hard to breathe.

Three spouses and eight children...I wonder what that feels like.

There was no end to the mysteries surrounding these siblings, and I found my thoughts turning to the sister in particular. Historically Lucrezia had been nothing more than a pawn used to engineer political marriages, but I wondered how much influence she had really exerted over her brother, Cesare, and her father, Pope Alexander VI. I wondered if they had not in fact been her puppets, dancing on the strings of the spider at the heart of the web.

–

“'Til next time, Reaper.” “We look forward to your next visit.”

The siblings waved goodbye as they saw me off from behind the counter.

“Goodbye.”

Pran waved back in polite response.

----

We decided to take a break at a nearby coffee shop - the Bookshop Cafe Borges, where one could relax surrounded by a veritable forest of tomes from the old world. It was one of my favourite relaxation spots.

The first floor comprised a cafe area, a wide space for pleasant conversation. An open stairwell led up to the second floor, where innumerable bookshelves stood crammed together so tightly that it looked like the floor might give out. Sofas and chairs were placed between the labyrinthine shelves, on which one could fully immerse themselves in the pleasure of reading.

On a whim I asked the ageing, mild-mannered shopkeeper, and learned that they did indeed have a first-edition English print of “The Little Prince” in their collection. It may not have been a personal artefact of the man himself, but it could certainly have been a sufficient catalyst to summon Saint-Exupéry. However, when I showed the manuscript to Pran, he exhibited no special response. In the end, all I learned was that he was capable of reading and writing English. The quirky illustrations at least seemed to capture his interest, although as usual he reacted poorly to the snake.

I was far from giving up on the search for his true name, but I could not justify pursuing the Saint-Exupéry connection any further out of anything but my own wishful thinking.

Over a light lunch, I decided to check the storage device the Borgia siblings had given me. And the shock I felt on seeing the news recorded therein was enough to obliterate any trace of lingering attachment to Saint-Exupéry.

–

They called it the Command Seal Hunter.

A chain of murders had visited Mosaic City, connected by a common thread: all of the victims had died with their Command Seals stolen, forcibly severed from their body with the appendages that bore them. No reports had yet been issued from Akihabara, but people had been found dead in other wards – and the victims were not the kind of underground magi that I was used to tangling with. They were ordinary citizens.

In this new world, where illness and death had been conquered, the most common place to see the names of people who had died was in murder reports. Some things could not be avoided, even with the protection of the Holy Grail.

I thought that was what I was here for...

One of the most unusual aspects about this particular series of crimes was the amount of time that had elapsed before they were discovered. If the victims had been killed and their bodies concealed, finding them would have been comparatively easy; that was what the Caren series was for. However, that was not what had happened. Instead, for several days after being stripped of their Command Seals, the victims had continued to live their lives as normal.

One of them had the Command Seals on his right hand stolen, and he just wore a glove to conceal the wound. A glove! And what's more, there's no record of those Command Seals being used in the interim...

There were even records here of conversations they had had with neighbours, meaningless small talk. Each and every one of them had concealed the wound they'd suffered – some skilfully, others very poorly. The truth was often only discovered after they suddenly collapsed unconscious in the middle of whatever they were doing. Or perhaps some task in their daily lives had required the use of a Command Seal, and only then had others pointed out the abnormality where their Command Seals used to be.

Some sort of drug to dull their sense of pain? Perhaps incredibly powerful hypnosis? No, impossible. Some of them lost whole limbs, for crying out loud! How could someone not realise their own throat had been torn out? But then...they must...

I shuddered. The victims must already have been dead at the point when their Command Seals were taken. And then their lifeless bodies had continued to act out their everyday routine.

This was a case unlike anything I'd ever seen. My appetite slowly disappeared as I read further. Was a Servant responsible for these murders, or a magus? Both were possible. And with the rate that these cases were appearing, and the time that had elapsed before their discovery...

It was more than possible that other victims were walking the streets of Akihabara right now. This wasn't something I could ignore.

I gulped, and cast a glance around the cafe. My gaze lingered involuntarily on a woman with gloved hands. At a customer wearing unusually thick clothing.

–

Then I saw the Command Seal glowing on the back of their hand. They were merely communicating with their Servant.

–

The Command Seals of the pre- and post-war worlds were supposedly very different. In a true Holy Grail War, their use would be limited, and they would be visibly divided into a number of distinct strokes; usually three. Three strokes, with one use per stroke, for a total of three uses before they were gone. Or so I had heard, anyway. The past was often less convenient than the present, I supposed.

Command Seals in this new world were different on almost all counts. For a start, they were not divided into distinct parts. At first glance they may appear to be partitioned in three, but closer inspection would reveal they actually comprised a detailed, interlinking pattern that would fade on usage proportional to the amount of mana expended. Secondly, a faded Command Seal would recover with time, courtesy of the Grail replenishing its mana. The recovery time varied a little from person to person depending on their aptitude for magecraft, but broadly speaking it would take only a few days.

Thirdly, while (as the name implied) Command Seals were traditionally used to command one's Servant, temporarily strengthening their abilities, this had become less and less of a necessity as a result of the dramatic change in Master-Servant relationships. Nowadays, they were often utilised as a simple mana source, a means of granting the Master access to thaumaturgy. If anything, in today's world, that had become the more common usage.

Only two people in this city did not possess a set of these Command Seals: myself, and Manazuru Chitose.

Chitose, however, still retained the Command Seals she had obtained during her own Grail War. Perhaps that made little practical difference in everyday life, but it was still more than I had.

–

A group of three entered the cafe: two tall men, and a young girl barely half their height. The girl exchanged a few words with one of her companions, and grinned. She wore a familiar-looking white coat draped over her shoulders.

“Haruko? What's she doing here?”

She swept her gaze around the cafe, and gave a small start; clearly, she had seen me too. The child seated next to me probably hadn't helped make me any less conspicuous. I noticed that the hat she usually wore low over her face was absent today.

For their part, her companions were visibly muscular, and exuded a distinctive aura. It was obvious at first glance – to me, at least - that they were Servants. In the lead was a cheerful-looking man in the late throes of middle age, with copper skin and a lush beard. The other man trailing behind was almost his polar opposite: a young man with sickly pale skin and a melancholic demeanour, and silver hair drawn together into a rough ponytail that cascaded down his back.

“A friend of yours, Koharu?”

“Um, of a sort. We attend lectures at the same community college-”

“She's the Reaper, you know. Get too close, and she'll steal your soul.”

“Galahad! Shush!” Haruko was quick to meet the pale man's sardonic interjection with a quick rebuke; he acted nonplussed, but said no more. She seemed very different from the way she usually came across during class. However, more to the point...

They know I'm the Reaper... Wait, what? Galahad? He looks nothing like that knight I saw onscreen... Although... Yes, that's right. I suppose he wouldn't, would he?

“One of your classmates, eh? Well, why don't we pull up some chairs and get acquainted?” The middle-aged man spoke to Haruko – Koharu, had he called her? Is that her real name, then? - with odd familiarity. She nodded in assent, albeit a little hesitantly.

–

We moved over to a round table further inside the cafe. The middle-aged man sat next to Koharu opposite Pran and I, with his stout, hairy arms rested heavily on the table, grinning at the two of us. He was dressed in a short-sleeved safari shirt and a pair of shorts, and looked for all the world like a visiting tourist. The intellectual air lent by his round-framed glasses made for a curious contrast with the rest of his outfit.

Galahad sat at the side, leaning back disinterestedly on his chair. He wore a deep purple – indigo? - dress shirt rolled up to the elbows, and black skinny jeans. The shirt lay open at the collar to reveal a chest even paler than his arms.

Their arrival at the cafe had caused an evident stir. The rest of the customers had shrunk back from our table, and I could feel their glances burning into me.

This is... awkward...

This must be life when you were a celebrity, a Grail Tournament winner. Only a few minutes ago I had been overwhelmed by the terror and panic of the serial killings, but for the time being those feeling had been shut away firmly in a box and neatly shelved.

The man leaned forward with an amiable smile. “I must say, it came as quite a shock to learn Koharu was classmates with the famous Reaper.”

“Not as shocked as I am”, I replied. “It's hard to believe I'm sitting across the table from Hannibal of Carthage.”

I felt a little uncertain how to react to someone I had only just met referring to me as the Reaper, but my words – and my respect - were sincere. Even if I was talking to a participant in the Grail Tournament.

“Hannibal's the commander of the team I've been assigned to”, Koharu supplied, a little hesitantly.

“Your team? You mean the next Tournament is going to be a team battle?”

“Indeed it is.” Hannibal folded his arms with evident confidence. “And the newest member of our team won the Rookie Tournament handily. Our victory is all but assured.”

“H-Hannibal! I, um... I'm not... I'm not that good...” Koharu shrank back, red-faced. I could hardly blame her. If a general as famous as Hannibal had placed me so high in his estimation, I probably would have done the same.

Don't worry, I get it. Although it's a bit of a surprise to see that even you can look embarrassed once in a while.

“And I get to cart around the kid and her great-grandad. I'm telling you now, I don't do bedtime stories... or hospice care.” Galahad chipped in with another snide remark, and Koharu rounded on him again, teeth bared in a hissing snarl.

–

In tie, I learned that Hannibal's Master was currently negotiating conditions with members of other teams. Koharu had shown the trio to this cafe during a break in the discussions. Expanding a Servant's range of independent action in this way was among the most common uses of Command Seals.

The sheer volume of information flooding in from across the table was overwhelming, and it was difficult to know where to even begin to reply. Until yesterday, I had barely even known what the Grail Tournament was.

I cast a sidelong glance at the Knight of the Grail. He was preoccupying himself with his meal in haughty silence, although I noticed that he was only picking at his roast beef and yorkshire pudding, and was focused primarily on his glass of red wine. Again, the polar opposite of Hannibal's healthy appetite. It occurred to me that if Koharu had been attending the Pre-War Human History lectures, Galahad had also likely been present in spirit form. It was likely that he already knew me. We had probably passed by each other any times without my knowing it.

“Planning to stare all day, Reaper? If you want a bite, you only had to ask.” He made to push his plate towards me, and was only stopped by Koharu's grip on his arm.

I'm not sure I envy her this one.

–

Karin's words from yesterday came back to me: “How sincere other people are isn't something you get to decide.”

Many Servants had gotten accustomed to life in this new, peaceful world. However, others had spent their entire lives on the battlefield, and dedicated themselves wholly to the craft of war. It came down to the individual whether they had had their fill of fighting or still lusted for blood.

Hannibal, it seemed, was the latter kind - which meant that was the fate indicated to his Master by the Grail. The Grail Tournament was a precious opportunity for such Servants to let themselves loose to their hearts’ content in pursuit of exhilaration and glory. I supposed that was, in its own way, a kind of freedom.

But that's not why Koharu is here. She isn't like the rest of them. She's different somehow...

----

The Grail Tournament was yet to officially publicise any information regarding the background of one Koharu F. Riedenflaus, but my own investigations had borne some modest fruit.

House Riedenflaus was a family of Magi associated with the Clocktower, with its roots in the necromantic traditions. They were low in status compared with the elite of the Magus Association, and their history spanned only a few centuries. However, it seemed that their longtime occupation of the seat at the foot of the aristocratists' table had been enough to grant them entry to the city.

The promoter of the Grail Tournament was none other than this House Riedenflaus. In other words, they were actively and brazenly flouting the first precept of the Magus Association, the Concealment of the Mysteries. I was curious as to how their mentality had evolved to suit this new post-war world, but it was something else I uncovered in the course of my investigations that had really drawn my interest: that their family's magic revolved around the creation of artificial life forms, or homunculi.

Koharu's youthful appearance had initially led me to assume that she was a member of the next generation. However, now that I knew her surname, I was beginning to wonder if it indicated something else entirely.

–

Hannibal regaled us with anecdotes of his past exploits as we ate. I listened, half fascinated and half starstruck, as he spoke with good humour of the great defeat his army had faced on the field of battle. The tale also seemed to have caught Pran's interest, because he listened cheerfully. Eventually, he chimed in with an unexpected question.

“What's a 'war'?”

Not only myself, but Koharu, Hannibal and even Galahad stared at him with mouths agape.

“What's a 'war'?”, he repeated.

“Um, well... It's a war, right? Like a battle?” I knew that hardly constituted an answer, but I was at a loss as to how to respond. The idea of a Servant ignorant of the very concept of war had taken us all by surprise.

“Like killing?”

“That's right. Lots of killing. More than you can ever imagine.” Hannibal's voice was composed, but his gaze was chilly through his round-framed glasses. “And yet we humans never seem to tire of it. It's just a part of who we are.”

Not a single day in all of human history had passed devoid of war. A Heroic Spirit who doesn't know what war is? Impossible.

A part of me hoped for another sarcastic quip from Galahad – anything to change the subject - but none were forthcoming. He sat with mouth pursed firmly closed. The gazes drilling into Pran were beginning to make me feel distinctly uneasy, and I hurriedly asked Hannibal for another story of his time as a general. It was at times like this that I appreciated Karin's power to effortlessly lighten the mood.

–

A few minutes passed before I noticed that Koharu was gazing at her lap in listless silence. I thought to call out to her, but my mouth had only gotten half-open before her eyes suddenly snapped to me.

“Is something the matter?”

“Um, Miss Riedenflaus? I was wondering-”

She raised a hand to stop me. “Please just call me Koharu. I'm the youngest here, after all.”

“I see.” My next question almost tumbled from my mouth before I could stop it, but I managed to bite it back just in time.

What are you thinking? You can't ask her that! What are you even expecting her to say? “Why yes, I am a homunculus, thank you very much for asking”?

It would have been bigoted, self-centred and an invasion of privacy all in one. To probe people who had caught my interest for their weak points was an unfortunate habit of mine.

“I... I saw footage of you fighting. At the Rookie Tournament. Watching you fighting to the bitter end against an opponent like that... It was amazing. I'm not sure I could do that even if I had the strongest Servant in the world beside me.”

“Um... Thank you very much.” Koharu lowered her eyes, blushing fiercely. “I know I got very lucky, but managing to win... made me really happy...”

She gave a smile that was mostly bashful, although somewhere in there was a flicker of pride. Watching her struggle to contain her delight, I could wish her only the best. Half of what I had said had been borrowed from a certain JK, but I had rewatched the video since, and my admiration was the real thing.

“I'm sorry about yesterday. I was very rude to you.” She spoke sheepishly, eyes fixed firmly on the fingertips she was pressing together.

“Eh? Oh, that. Don't sweat it. I get that you were in a hurry.”

“Thank you. I was in such a rush, it just kind of came out...”

This girl was modest to a fault – and perhaps that was that sincerity, the warrior's pride she displayed in spite of her age, that invited me to lower my guard. Whatever the case, I got ahead of myself, and asked something I would not even have put to Karin.

–

“I was wondering if I could ask you something.”

I wanted to know more about that armoured knight I had seen onscreen. Perhaps, I wondered, there might be something I could learn from her about my own curse.

“Could you tell me a little more about that “Possession” they mentioned on the programme?”

“My Possession? I, um...” Koharu cast a hesitant glance at Galahad.

“Now wait just a moment, you two.” For a while Hannibal had been content just to watch us, but now he interrupted. I could see half-chewed food still in his mouth as he spoke. “If you wish to learn more of her abilities, you must see them for yourself. We are not scribes, with pen and parchment. We are warriors, with sword and spear and fist! Come to the Colosseum, Erice, and watch us do battle. It should not be long before our next bout.”

“You mean you're inviting her to spectate? Aren't the tickets all sold out? I suppose we could hope for cancellations, but there are always so many people waiting...”

The notion of acquiring tickets through anything other than official channels seemed to genuinely not have occurred to Koharu. Hannibal, laughing heartily, informed her that there were always other ways.

And so, I ended up exchanging contact details with Koharu F. Riedenflaus, the celebrity. She promised to inform me as soon as she had gotten hold of tickets, although she seemed a little bewildered by the way things had transpired. It was comforting to know I was not the only one who felt that they had lost control of this conversation.

At this point, there's no way I can tell them I don't really care all that much about the Tournament...

–

For a while I phased out. In the end, it was Galahad who brought me crashing back to reality.

“Spend too long entertaining the elderly and you'll be one of them before you know it, Reaper.”

“Um... Galahad?”

“If you've got something to ask, just ask it. Koharu'll jump at the chance to trade it for anything you've got on the Stigmata, I guarantee it.”

Utter silence. For a moment I struggled for a response... and then, with a clatter, Koharu grabbed her fork, lifted it, and drove it back down towards the table with all her might. Directly in its path lay Galahad's hand. My and Pran's eyes widened in shock. An attack from an ordinary human would appear as though in slow-motion to a Servant, and I felt sure that he would dodge it with ease, but as I watched it became clearer and clearer that he had no intention of moving a muscle.

Thud. The fork slammed down just between his fingers, with barely a couple of millimetres to spare.

“You should learn some manners, my lady. Just look what you've done to our round table.”

“...My apologies. I promise I'll pay for it.”

Koharu apologised for her poor behaviour, and hung her head in silence. Hannibal stood up, apparently unfazed by the discord between his compatriots.

“I'm sorry, but I will have to depart. My master is calling for me.”

The trio finished paid the proprietors for the damage to their table, and left the shop.

----

Left alone with Pran once more, I found myself wondering what sort of person Hannibal's Master might be. The two were bound together by the fate indicated by the Grail. Would they be Hannibal's equal, carefree and bold? Or would they be his opposite, a stern, cold tactician?

Masters... and Servants...

Sometimes, like Koharu and Galahad, their relationship was impossible to understand from the outside.

I tried to return to my previous train of thought about the Command Seal Hunter, but something from the previous conversation continued to niggle at me.

You're being silly, Erice. Stop overthinking things.

There was no logical reason that they, likely the strongest warriors in Mosaic City, had put me so ill at ease. But...

“If you've got something to ask, just ask it.” On the face of it, Galahad had simply been referring to my questions about Koharu. However, I felt something deeper there, something urging me on.

Maybe Chitose and Ms. Fujimura don't want me involved in this, but I can't just sit here and do nothing.

On a sudden impulse, I left Pran in the care of the shopkeeper and dashed out of the cafe.

–-

Luck was on my side, and I managed to catch up with the trio on the road to the Colosseum. I flagged them down and came to a stop in front of them, my breathing ragged.

“If you know I'm the Reaper... then let me at least give you a warning.”

While keeping my voice low, conscious of being overheard by passers-by, I told them everything I had just learned about the Command Seal Hunter. About the mysterious, indiscriminate murders that were even now being suppressed from the municipal information network, and the Servants who had become collateral damage.

“If you want to know more, it's all on this data drive.”

“Are you sure?”

I released the lock on the storage drive and replaced it with Koharu's personal signature. She extended out a grateful hand to take it.

“Thank you.”

“No worries.”

I didn't know if I had managed to fully convince them of the gravity of the situation, but they had at least taken me seriously enough to listen without bursting out in laughter.

“Even if no victims have yet been discovered in this ward, we cannot risk any harm coming to spectators. It may be tricky, but I will see about raising the matter with the security staff.”

“Thank you, Hannibal.”

“In any case, we cannot allow anything to interfere with Rome's downfall!” The general set his fingers to his chin and flashed a brilliant smile.

“That sounds awfully confident for you of all Servants...”

“Wha...? Don't tell me you're a Rome supporter, Erice?!”

“Eh? But our next opponents aren't even Roman.” Koharu cocked her head, puzzled.

“Just ignore him.” Galahad's tone was as sardonic as ever. “Start giving old men the time of day and they'll never shut up.”

“Please do come to the tournament, Erice.” With those parting words, Koharu turned around and headed back towards the arena with her companions. She did not look back.

#Fate/Requiem #Fate #translation #light novel

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whispersafterdusk · 3 years

Text

Lost in Time - ch 18

Getting around in Portia was pretty dang easy, all things considered. It was a peaceful town; no one really expected theft or violence.

If she was an actual thief this would have been a dream playground.

But she wasn't. She was far more than a thief -- even thinking of herself in that manner was insulting. She was here for information...even the smallest detail could be important back home, and she was exceptionally good at picking out the right kind of details. ((Continued below cut))

With the simple locks on all the doors here in town it was ridiculously easy to go poking around for information; she'd always walked with a quiet and careful step and had spent her childhood accidentally "sneaking" up on people, which had drawn the attention of Duvos's allies within Lucien. Between her mother's tips and tricks and some rigorous training within Duvos's armed forces she'd been a talented snoop even before she'd stolen her mother's scouting suit. This Portia job was considerably easier than any assignment she'd been given before and even without the suit on she could read everyone's mail, eavesdrop on whoever she wanted, she'd planted the Uplifter manual in a box in the neighboring clinic to uphold the illusion that it had been misplaced rather than stolen and carefully memorized, and Dr. Xu's desk always had up to date information regarding the upcoming construction effort to expand the clinic into a school and install the All Source AI here.

Everything she could feasibly find pertinent to her mission here was all within easy reach.

Dr. Xu's desk also held something far more interesting than the construction information too: she'd accidentally stumbled on some counseling records on one Elizabeth Summers...the folder that held them was dog-eared and worn -- they'd looked more used than the others there and that had drawn her attention. Reading through those had been... To think that someone could have survived inside a fancy, high-tech tank for three hundred years. It seemed impossible and yet at the same time she had to marvel at what mankind had been capable of creating in ancient times, and she felt a sharp pang of jealousy and loss when she considered just how much they'd lost in the Calamity.

All that knowledge that woman must be carrying...first-hand information regarding the Old World -- advanced medical knowledge AND technical knowledge! That would make Duvos unstoppable if they had that in their grasp, and if only she'd known sooner about Summers then they could have planned to snatch her as well when they made their move for the AI.

Oh well. If not now then in the future -- Duvos was going to eventually win. They had to - their worldwide plans for humanity were too important to let sit unimagined: gathering everyone under ONE banner, ONE leadership, and everyone taken care of so there'd be no more fighting over dwindling Old World resources as mankind dug itself out of the crater the Calamity had left them in (a crater that now seemed leagues deeper after what she'd read in the counseling notes).

Granted, she could readily admit that Duvos's methods of getting everyone under one empire were a bit heavy-handed; it was understandable that the wider world wanted nothing to do with a nation they saw as violent warmongers. But that opinion only made sense if people didn't bother to look beyond the outermost layer of the empire -- no one ever dug deeper to truly understand how Duvos was striving to take care of its citizens. One thing Lily appreciated about Duvos's claim to technology was everything they discovered or learned was immediately turned toward the empire's benefit, and its citizens reaped the rewards with more and higher paying jobs, higher crop yields of ever increasing quality, and the feeling of security knowing that THEY, at least, had nothing to fear from other nations daring to come in and take it all away.

Duvos would get the world back on track to becoming that utopia it had once been in ages past, and that would be so much easier if the city states and neighboring nations would just join together and stand shoulder to shoulder beneath the empire's banner.

It was an inevitable future that she wished the rest of the continent would see the sense in, and if they'd all just pick the easy route...

She'd spotted Evangeline walking down the road toward the harbor a few days ago and while she hadn't seen her since, nor had she seen Marcus, if she was here then he was too and it was good to know they had arrived and would be ready to move when the time came.

There would be more than them, of course; as a security measure Lily didn't know who to expect (Marcus and Evangeline WOULD, though) but knew there'd be at least two more because Xan's original plan had been simple and to the point: once the All Source AI had been moved to the clinic they would break in, disable it, and take it and all its attached computer parts out to the open desert where a plane would be landing to take them all back to Duvos. It had some inherent risk to it (all plans of that nature would) but they'd all been satisfied with it and everyone knew exactly what part they would have to play to make it happen.

NOW, however, with what amounted to a body double of the doctor that ran that clinic, they could step back and go a bit slower at it...carefully take things apart, pack them separately and carry it all out a little bit at a time over the course of a few hours instead of a mad rush with all of it on them at one time. She was certain whoever else was sent along to help wouldn't mind the change in the plan, especially since Xan himself approved of it.

And they'd have Harrison on hand to help dispel any suspicion -- Lily didn't believe in any gods or anything like fate but the coincidence of the two men sounding so much alike AND there being a machine that could alter one to look like the other was almost enough to make her consider offering a "thank you" to the cosmos. Harrison wasn't exactly the heroic type either and all he'd have to do is do as he was told to get his family and teacher back safe and sound - she couldn't see him being bold enough to try anything and risk someone getting killed so she didn't feel even the slightest hint of guilt over it!

Speaking of doing what she was supposed to do... Lily shook herself out of her thoughts and glanced behind her at the path she was leaving in the field as she walked. The mud beneath her feet sucked at her boots but it did make it incredibly easy to push in the little colored row markers Sophie had given her; the farm had a multi-bladed plow contraption that was hauled along behind a sturdy draft horse and the old woman liked to have these markers out before the plowing started so not only would the rows be simple to keep evenly spaced but also so it was clear what seed was going where in the fields when planting time came (she'd tried explaining something about crop rotations and whatnot but Lily had honestly tuned her out halfway through her rambling).

White for wheat (there was a LOT of white markers), yellow for cornballs (also quite numerous), various shades of green for peas, leafy greens, peppers, bamboo papaya, bright orange for potato fruit, purple for pumpkins, and bright blue for layered carrots. She'd already marked out a small plot up near the farmhouse for herbs as well...she'd had the passing thought of asking for a plot to plant some flowers just so there'd be something here she'd actually enjoy tending to but there wouldn't be much point in that being as she'd be leaving soon anyway.

Maybe when it was all said and done and Duvos had united everyone Lily could switch careers and get into some manner of horticulture. It would be harder work than spying but it was hard to ignore how much she loved seeing and caring for brightly colored blooms.

It was good to have goals, no matter how far out into the future they seemed.

...maybe they would start construction soon while the ground was soft, and all her goals would shift forward a bit in time.

--------------------------------------

Between training in the mornings, taking on her new patrols and postings in the early afternoon, and training Toby in the late afternoon through early evening, by the time bed time rolled around Eli was only too happy to crawl under the blankets and pass out.

It felt good to be so active. It was like being back in...

Don't-

...no. She couldn't shut this particular thing out. That was too big a part of who she was. She might not be in charge of this "squad" but it was like coming home; maybe it was the only real thing she COULD refer to as "home." It was a topic she'd discussed with Dr. Xu during their sessions and they'd been carefully untangling her feelings regarding the whole thing: survivor's guilt, mourning what she'd lost, and trying not to feel guilty over building a new life that resembled her old one. If she was going to keep moving forward then she had to stop blocking things out.

So. Yes. She could admit to herself it was like being back in her squad. She NEEDED to admit that to herself, and embrace and understand everything that came with it, no matter how painful.

She'd just stepped through the doorway of her room when she heard pounding feet coming up behind her; as she turned Selene - smudged with oil and red in the face - came into view and the woman broke into a wide smile as she spotted Eli standing there.

"Oh good - I caught you before you fell asleep. It's done!"

"...which "it" are we talking about here?" Eli prompted after a pause; her tired brain couldn't recall if Selene had mentioned anything nearing completion recently aside from work on cutting through the door.

"The rifle!" Selene laughed. "Remington managed to find the pieces so I could cast off them and now I've got it all assembled -- I've got some ammo made too."

"Oh. Well, wasn't expecting that." Eli rubbed at her eyes and turned to follow as Selene gestured for her to come along; Selene practically jogged back to her factory while Eli followed at a brisk walking pace.

The factory was still working away at making the components needed for the signal towers so it was as noisy as ever inside the building -- a section of the shelves against the wall that normally held Selene's collection of tools had been cleared away and there were neat rows of pieces and parts all laying together and shining brightly in the overhead lights. A quick count showed that at least four signal towers' worth of parts was there...slowly but surely they'd have them done, assembled, and installed.

Selene led her over to a workbench against the wall to their left; sitting on a makeshift metal stand was a rifle that, while not quite what Eli had been using three hundred years ago, still looked enough like a rifle that she could immediately pick out all the individual elements in the weapon:

The safety was there above the trigger guard, the chamber was left open (it was a bolt action-style rifle), there was a polished set of iron sights installed on the barrel, and it looked like the butt was a decently thick section of rubber that had been repurposed off something else judging by the rubber remnants sitting in a pile next to a bin full of scrap. Sitting in a semicircle beneath the rifle stand were nine bullets; they weren't a caliber she was familiar with (she felt it was safe to assume that they didn't measure bullets in the same way anymore). They were larger than the ones that went into the revolver she was carrying but smaller than the ones she utilized three hundred years ago and she was already debating how she wanted to carry them on her.

"I had Ack help me line the sights up - he may be a cook but his eyes work way better than any human's eyes would," Selene said as she carefully lifted the rifle off the stand and held it out to her. "And, while they weren't exactly thrilled I DID have Merlin and Petra show me some ancient designs. I based this on one of those old guns but had to use what I'm able to make so it has the uh - the little thingy-"

"It's bolt action," Eli interrupted with a chuckle as Selene gestured at the chamber. "I know. Back in my day these were automatic and you just loaded in a magazine that had a lot of rounds in it and they cycled as the trigger was pulled. True bolt actions were usually reserved for marksman competitions."

"Yes, that - the automatic thing I mean" Selene said with a giggle. "I saw how it worked in that design but I just don't have what's needed to craft something like that reliably. Looking at that old stuff was weird though, since some of them had ammo that was like sand...?"

At the builder's question Eli nodded as she turned the rifle over in her hands; it was heavy, sturdy. "I'm surprised you had plans or pictures of those still... They were specialized plasma rifles and they didn't use typical ammo. They were also expensive as hell and broke down rather easily if you didn't keep them immaculately clean. Basically grains of the ammo would fall into the chamber, and in one split instant would be turned to plasma and ejected -- that's the really, really, REALLY simple explanation. I don't know enough of the science behind it to tell you exactly how to make one of those. Heck, I doubt I could tell you enough on how to break down and clean one of them since I've only ever fired one a handful of times on a shooting range."

She picked up a bullet and slotted it into the chamber, then tested how the bolt moved; it was sticking ever so slightly - thinking on it Eli realized Selene probably didn't know how to grease or oil anything like this so before she even thought of test firing she should check the rifle out herself piece by piece.

"Has a bit of a stick to it. Want to learn where all the grease is supposed to go?"

Selene thought a moment, then nodded. "Might as well. I greased and oiled what I thought needed it but I guess I didn't get enough in the right places."

Eli ejected the bullet and placed it back with the others then returned the rifle to the stand. "It's possible, but it's also possible that whatever you're using might not be the right sort of thing for the job. We can go over that tomorrow though - I'm totally wiped for the night."

"Well why didn't you say something?" Selene huffed. "It's not like it's going anywhere."

"It's fine," Eli chuckled. She headed toward the door with Selene following along at her elbow. "I'm always tired in the evenings lately...I swear, eventually I'll be back in top shape."

"And, then you won't be tired?"

"No, I'll be LESS tired," Eli corrected.

Selene stuck her tongue out at her. "But still tired and you should mention that the next time I have something to show you so I don't drag you out of the house again."

"Fine fine," Eli grumbled, but smiled afterward.

They headed back inside the house with Eli headed toward her room again; Selene headed into the kitchen and a moment later stuck her head back through the door.

"Oh, by the way - I got more butter."

"Beat me to it, thanks," Eli called back over a shoulder as she again stepped through the doorway to her room and carefully closed the door behind her, and then leaned against the door as she debated grabbing a snack before bed now that she knew butter was back in the house.

Frequenting Martha's for loaves of that raisin bread was becoming a habit -- partly because she and Selene both went through a loaf in about two days (toasted and with a smear of butter was an amazing treat) and also because Eli wanted to try and help Martha offset any miscellaneous costs that might be cropping up because of her training Toby. She already knew he was going through paper as he made himself reference notes and pictures but when she started in with the physical training aspect there'd be a possible uptick in food costs, and clothes would need replacing if they got torn or stained, boots would wear out quicker...

As she stood there just inside her door she could feel weariness pressing in like a weighted blanket dropped over her head; it was probably too late in the evening for a snack anyway, and if she had a slice of the bread now there wouldn't be enough left for their breakfast.

Pinky was sitting in the middle of her bed again; she rolled the cat over to make enough room to get her legs on the bed and under the covers, then settled in against her pillow. As usual Pinky took her time getting comfortable and Eli winced a bit as the heavy animal briefly stepped across her knees; her legs were sore from all the walking she'd done today but she couldn't be bothered to get up to take an aspirin at the moment, and she mentally reminded herself she needed to pick up another bottle of it from Dr. Xu when she went in for her next therapy session.

They would be starting the construction on the expansion soon...Selene was nearly through that door. She WOULD have been through the door yesterday if she hadn't run out of fuel for her cutting torch; it was quicker to order it from Vega 5 and have it shipped here than it was for her to gather up what was needed and try to refine it herself so during this little waiting period she was focusing fully on getting those signal transmitters finished and assembled.

That was going to be...interesting. Those transmitters were going on top of tall metal towers and it promised to be a heck of a climb to reach the top, and there was the question of how they would haul the transmitter up there with them. They would weigh about forty pounds each which wasn't TOO heavy, technically, but they'd be bulky and someone would be carrying one up a ladder...they should probably rig up a temporary pulley system to make it easier and safer on everyone involved when the time came to install them.

Well, whatever. That was a problem for Future-Eli. Now-Eli just wanted to go to sleep, and for her left calf to stop cramping.

Right as she was dozing off there was a quick knock at her door.

"Hey Eli - sorry to bug you but Asher's wondering if you're still up."

A couple of thoughts immediately raced through her mind: had the spy been caught? Had the spy hurt someone? If this wasn't a case of life or death should she strangle Asher now or wait until morning?

"M'awake," she mumbled. She rolled out of bed (and Pinky immediately reclaimed her spot in the middle of the mattress) and paused long enough to put a bra back on before opening the door and padding barefoot to the living room where Asher was sitting on the sofa.

He was perched on the edge of the cushions, elbows braced on his knees and actually twiddling his thumbs as one heel bounced up and down. When she came through the door his head jerked up to look at her; his expression was grim and she felt a small jolt of worry shoot through her.

"What's up?"

He opened his mouth to reply then paused to look her up and down. "-uh."

"Yes, I'm wearing duck-printed pajamas, it's what I pulled out of the drawer tonight. Why are you here?" Eli asked, trying to keep the hard edge of 'authority' out of her tone -- she was NOT in charge, Asher was NOT her subordinate, and it wasn't fair to be annoyed at him since she doubted he'd be making a social call this late at night.

"It's - well, I was hoping to talk on the way."

"The way where?"

Asher bit his lower lip and then huffed out a sigh. "Graveyard."

Eli's eyes narrowed and she spun on a heel to rush back to her room and get clothes, boots, and her holster on. Asher was standing at the door when she came back and she followed him out into the night; he set a quick pace across the yard and waited until they were beyond the gate before he spoke.

"Remington and I were walking to the Corps building from the Round Table, saw a light in the graveyard -- was pretty low to the ground, Remington was worried someone had left a candle lit out there so we went to have a look. Right as we went through the gate someone took a potshot at us - it was way wide so I'm thinking it was clearly meant to be a warning shot, or a distraction to let whoever it was get away. Remington went for back up and I kept going, looking and listening and using the stones as cover. I combed the place over and didn't see anyone or get any more bullets in my direction, but..."

He trailed off as they came to the graveyard's gate, and pulled out a small flashlight and clicked it on; Eli tensed up and scanned the area, marking every shadow and mentally putting herself on high alert for any sort of movement or sound. Asher seemed cautious but not nearly as cautious as she would have been with an active shooter on the loose; he knew exactly where he was going and about six graves in Eli realized where he was leading her.

Darren's grave was very distinct compared to the ones around it, and in the light of the flashlight she could see a message scorched across the stone:

Neither Portia nor the world needs you

She felt the bite of her nails against her palms as her fists clenched, and there was the roar of her own blood in her ears as an immediate rage hit her.

"Oh you fucking did not, you bastard," Eli snarled before she could stop herself.

"...what?" Asher asked after a moment.

...that had come out in Dubeian. Probably good that it had. "I am not translating that," she replied. She took a deep breath and slowly relaxed her hands; her palms were still stinging. "And you didn't see anyone?"

Asher shook his head and quickly panned the flashlight's beam around the grave - the grass was flattened but none of the tracks were clear. "Nope. And I'm thinking I know why."

She tore her gaze from the gravestone and looked over to him; he was looking at her with a clear expression of concern on his face. "You're thinking the spy's figured out who I am and where I came from."

"Duvos likes their technology-"

"-so they're going to make me a target, got it," Eli interrupted. She reached out and took the flashlight from him and squatted to get a better look at the trampled grass.

As she'd initially determined the tracks weren't clear; they were all muddled together and she couldn't get a feel for the size or type of footwear that had been tramping around here and, for some reason, they simply stopped at the edges of the nearby graves. She stood and had a look at the next grave over and could see grass and mud smeared across the top, and similar smears were on the base of the grave beyond that.

"...almost looks like our perp jumped from tombstone to tombstone to hide their tracks, except for here because they wouldn't have been able to balance on the bottom of Darren's stone AND do their fucking defacing without burning their own face off," she muttered. "So what's their damn aim...try and intimidate me into leaving town and grab me off the road? They picked the wrong bitch to try and scare off, I can tell you that much... Where's everyone else?"

Asher gestured beyond the fence line. "Sam went out that way, Arlo took Remington and went to check the ruins down the hill, and Mali is checking 'round the church and along the walls. I cleared the cafe, commerce guild, and apartments, then got sent to go get you. Adam's on alert out at the facility."

With a sigh that trailed out into a growl Eli ran a hand through her hair to push it back into place; some goddamn-- could she even blame this on the spy? That had been both their immediate suspicions, and if Duvos knew about her she supposed it would make sense for them to try and grab her, but what if it wasn't even related to that? Could be some church crony...Portia got a lot of tourists, ANYONE could slip in pretending to be there for the scenery.

"Have you told Gale yet?"

Asher shook his head. "Not yet - Arlo wanted to clear the area first since we've got undeniable proof that there's an armed whoever out there. Can't really let them have the run of the town. I'm thinking they're long gone though -- no idea where to, but I doubt we're going to find them."

"And if they'd wanted to actually shoot one of you they could have..." Eli said quietly. "You'd have to be a piss poor shot to miss a target that doesn't even know you're there."

"Yep. And they could have followed up in the confusion too - we didn't know where it'd come from at first."

Eli panned the flashlight around slowly, marking out where the mud smears and even a few tufts of grass led; it looked like whoever it was had jumped the fence at the back of the graveyard... She walked over and looked up and down the fenceline and could see where the grass had been disturbed but was quickly recovering from the trampling. With a grunt she vaulted over the fence and headed out, only vaguely aware of Asher calling for her to wait for him; he'd said Sam had gone out this way so maybe she'd found something by now.

This was part of the tree farm so somewhere out here she'd come across the now well-worn footpath that would lead out to the facility; of course, there were also a lot of ruined buildings out this way that, while they'd been stripped down of anything useful, were still decently intact and could house and hide any number of persons who managed to get inside.

Those ruins would both take time to clear and be especially dangerous to do so.

So much for sleeping tonight.

------------------------------------------

"At the very least Lee assures me that he knows of no such Church agent within Portia, and frankly he seemed genuinely disgusted and concerned by the idea that someone would fire on an innocent like that - not even enforcers would dare be so reckless."

Asher was only half-listening to the man; he was somewhat distracted by the burning need to find whoever it was that had shot at them AND defaced the gravestone so he could pound them into a fine paste. Competing with that need was the thought that he couldn't decide if it would be better or worse for this latest development to be unrelated to the spy -- it COULD be someone related to the Church in some way - either a rogue enforcer or some random nobody who heard rumors and came to deal with it themselves: vigilantes weren't common but Asher had run into them enough times to know that if someone got it into their head that only THEIR narrowly defined world view was the right view then they felt justified in doing whatever they felt needed to be done. And, of course, it COULD in fact be their spy trying to distract them and spread their numbers thin. They all knew the facility and Stewart were the spy's target but if Duvos knew about Eli too...

"I feel we've little choice - we need to let the townspeople know at the next town meeting that there's an armed and dangerous person somewhere in the region," Arlo spoke up then. "We can't risk someone getting hurt because they didn't know to be on the lookout."

"But the next meeting isn't for another couple days," Sam said. "Do we want to risk something happening in the meantime? Or risk letting whoever this is walk out of town freely?"

Remington shook his head. "We can't do much about them leaving - we have no idea what this person looks like, and while it's not TOO common we do get folks coming through Portia who carry sidearms on them. Not every traveler with a gun is going to be the person we're looking for."

That was something Asher agreed with. Guns weren't plentiful but they were still around, and while they tended to be small or have limited range they were still quite dangerous. Thankfully a lot of them weren't all that accurate and so he'd spent all night (because who in the world could sleep after knowing someone shot at them?) wavering back and forth between believing it had been just a warning shot meant to distract them or if the person had actually intended to hit them but the weapon or their skill was at fault for the wide shot. He was leaning more toward the warning shot still since, even though he and Remington had ducked for cover immediately, there had been plenty of time for follow up shots that hadn't come...but was he willing to stake lives on that assessment? Even if THIS had been just a warning there might not be a warning the NEXT time.

"I think we need to tell everyone, immediately," Asher spoke up then. "And I agree that not everyone with a gun is our troublemaker but if we see anyone armed we should at least keep an eye on them if we can. Our guy probably came in over the fence from the tree farm, same way they left too - can we close the tree farm to any tourists? Whoever this is might not be deterred by the need to scale the fence versus walking through the gate but at the very least we'd cut down on the traffic in the area since regular folks would be kept away."

Gale nodded. "That's an idea -- better to disappoint people than put them in danger or let our culprit have the run of the farm."

Asher saw Eli stir out of the corner of his eye. "Do many people tour the tree farm?" she asked.

"From early spring to early fall we do get a surprising number of folks wanting to see the apple blossoms and pick the fruit, and Dawa keeps a section of just the fruiting trees for that purpose. Portia's emergency funds can certainly cover any lost wages that'll come from curtailing traffic to the farm."

"For now that seems like a good idea, and in the near future we're going to have all the signal towers up so that'll help us coordinate keeping an eye on things. I told Selene about our newest visitor's antics and she's going to pull double duty to get everything made," Eli went on. "We'll need to borrow some muscle to get them up and installed but then we'll all be in contact with one another no matter where we are in Portia."

Asher watched as she lifted and then waggled the wrist that her Hi-Def was strapped to. "-that would make life a lot easier," he said into the pause that followed. "One of us spots something, we ALL know about it immediately."

"Have we heard anything from anyone else?" Remington asked. He was looking at Mali, and Asher turned his attention to her as well.

"No," Mali replied. "So far as the Alliance's spies and scouts can tell nothing has changed within Duvos's territory -- no increases in labor, material acquisitions, or troop movements. They're still occupying the Orzu Ruins and saber rattling at Ethea but nothing has escalated and we've not heard of any secret plans of theirs in the circles our spies have infiltrated. If this person is working under direct orders from Duvos higher ups they're keeping it very well hidden."

Gale stood up and pressed his hands against his desk, slowly panning his gaze to look at all of them one at a time. "All right then, it seems we have a tentative plan -- I'll spread word, and I hope you all will as well, that we're to have an emergency town meeting tomorrow night. I would aim for tonight but I worry that wouldn't be enough time to make sure everyone knows about it -- we'll be cautious, and keep our eyes peeled for any trouble, and I'll go to Dawa immediately after this to instruct him to close the tree farm to everyone except for those there strictly for business purposes."

There was a lot of nodding at that; Gale inhaled and exhaled slowly and then moved out from around his desk only to pause and look toward Eli as she cleared her throat.

"Not to uh...sour the mood further, but what's your protocol on shooting to kill?"

The room went silent; all eyes, Asher's included, moved to Eli. He supposed he shouldn't be surprised by it (she'd already shot at the spy once) but with the exception of Remington and Mali it seemed everyone else definitely was.

After a moment of no responses Eli shrugged. "Sorry, but it needs to be made clear right now. I'm armed, and I've already tried to put a bullet into our visitor once -- I wasn't wanting to kill and I didn't hit them anyway but I was ready to accept whatever consequences would've followed if I had, because I was essentially a private citizen then. Now I'm part of your law enforcement. I need to know if I'm allowed to use lethal force if it comes to it."

"IF it comes to that," Arlo said; his tone was a bit strained -- Asher wondered if the man had ever really stopped to think about taking a life. None of the Civil Corps here seemed to carry a weapon and he doubted they'd ever been placed in a "them or me" situation with anything other than a rogue monster or robot (he knew Remington had seen action in Lucien so that would explain why the man didn't look so shocked at her question). Cutting down some leftover relic or rampaging beast was a heck of a lot different from having to take down another person.

Eli nodded to him. "Unfortunately I think it might, now that we know they're armed. I'll do whatever I can to not let it get to that point but..."

She trailed off; Mali was nodding at her and Arlo noticed it. For a long moment Arlo looked between Mali and Eli, then sighed and looked to Gale. "I'd hear your opinion on this."

Gale pressed his lips together. "Well..." he started, drawing the word out. "You all know I've seen action myself. The thought of killing is as abhorrent now as it was then but sometimes, you're not given a choice." He turned to look to Eli. "Being as you were formally trained and were a ranking member of your military I imagine you would know when it's time to use lethal force or not, and I feel I can trust you to use your judgement to avoid any unneeded loss of life."

"I appreciate the trust and I won't let you down," Eli replied. "I'm not about to let this story become a murder mystery."

Arlo, Remington, Sam, and Gale all nodded knowingly; Asher looked to Mali and saw a hint of the same confusion he was feeling at the moment but Gale was ushering them out of his office now so he hurried out ahead of the others.

The sun was just starting to come up - a reminder that they'd all gotten hardly any or, in some cases, no sleep at all. Asher had a running record of three days without sleep and hoped he wasn't going to be breaking that record in the upcoming days; Mali immediately headed out through Portia's gates to head back to the facility while Gale's steps appeared to be leading him back to his house.

"-any orders for the morning, Arlo?" Asher asked after a moment.

"I'd like you and Eli to comb the area over again, then separate out into your patrol patterns. Sam - take on Remington's patrols this morning. Remington - I'll need you with me. I was supposed to be escorting Selene into the ruins to break down that door and get it ready to be hauled out to the facility to be installed but with her needing to focus on getting the signal transmitters done you and I will have to handle it ourselves. She's showed me how to disconnect most of the wiring we'd be encountering so our task is to get it detached from the wall however we can and stacked together to be moved out of there. Mint is taking charge of getting the install site prepped and ready and he'll be leading a team to retrieve the door when they're ready."

Ha, he'd almost forgotten about the plans for that security door; with that installed they wouldn't need constant surveillance for the facility. That would be one less thing to juggle schedules with and maybe then they could focus on turning over every rock and blade of grass, and check every nook and cranny of the Portian countryside to find whoever their little visitor was and get them out of the picture.

They all began to separate out into their assigned duties; Asher walked side by side with Eli up the hill toward the graveyard again. He felt a little jolt of anxiety up his spine as he walked through the gate into the graveyard but there weren't any shots fired at him again, nor did there appear to be anyone here.

"I'll take the northern half, you go south?" he asked.

Eli nodded and headed off without complaint -- which he was glad for as he'd purposely given himself the northern area because that's where Darren's defaced tombstone was and he didn't want her to have to face that again.

As he suspected there wasn't anything out of place or different from when they'd checked the area over earlier; the grass had mostly recovered from being walked on and if not for the mud smears on the gravestones you'd be hard pressed to tell that anyone had been through the graveyard recently.

Still, he and Eli spent a good amount of time examining every stone and the strip of land on either side of the fence; then, with the sun up and his Hi-Def indicating it was going on nine o'clock, they both hopped the fence a final time and headed out into the tree farm.

"So...if we were back in your time, how would you be handling this?" he asked as they walked.

For a few steps she didn't answer. "...well, back then we had AI drones. They could fly and cover a large amount of ground. And, we had people out on foot searching too with specialized equipment."

"Did you have to do many manhunts like this?"

She shook her head. "Usually they were rescue missions but sometimes yeah, we had armed people out making trouble." She paused, then let out a snort. "What I wouldn't give for my armor kit. Weighed an absolute ton but it could withstand being shot by most weapons. Having to do all this, LIKE this...makes me feel pretty damn useless."

"What? How?"

She waved a hand. "Nevermind. Don't really feel like getting into it at the moment."

"Right. Sorry," he said in a rush. Once they got to the rear of the tree farm they would need to split off into their patrol routes. "So, uh..."

"Hmm?"

"We get done - meet up for lunch?"

They continued on in silence for several more steps. "-maybe. Depends on what's happened by then."

He let out a sort of helpless chuckle. "Yeah, true."

Again they walked on in silence and reached the point where their routes went in different directions; Asher walked along his for a few feet then turned around. "Hey, Eli?" She stopped and looked over a shoulder at him. "What was the story comment about?"

"I'll tell you over lunch."

He grinned and started back along his patrol route.

#Lost in Time #lit #Lost in Time - ch 18 #Arlo #Mali #Remington #Sam #Gale #My Time at Portia

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