Ryan blinked, and found himself back in the world again, unless retrieving a small child, the trip back from Death’s realm was always a lot quicker than the trip there. He focused on the body, which was still silent, still unmoving. She wasn’t back yet…if she made it back.
If she made it back.
He’d faltered, he’d given into emotion, again. It was no wonder that the agents that considered themselves the best looked down at those that let themselves be ruled by emotion, those that made the right choice, not the logical choice.
It wasn’t the logical choice to let her come back – not that it was really his decision, but he could have done more to dissuade her, more to-
Something caught the light – the mirror – and he watched as the shattered pieces flowed back into the pristine, simple heart shape. As he watched it, he hoped that the shard hidden in his pocket didn’t contain anything important.
She blinked.
‘This is going to hurt,’ he said as he watched Stef’s eyelids flutter – the eyes were always the first thing to move when life came back into a body. It wasn’t some extraneous twitch of finger, it wasn’t lips parting to take a first new breath, it was always the eyes. He sat beside her on the bed and grabbed her hands. ‘It’s going to hurt a lot.’
She screamed again – a scream of pain, not the inhuman scream of a body without a soul in it. She spasmed, every part of her body acting out on its own, nearly twitching her off the bed. A strong tug had her in a sitting position, holding her as the spasms continued. Holding her life this made it easier for him to remind himself that she’d made it back, that she wasn’t a ghost, that she wasn’t some half-life trapped in a human body.
The screaming stopped as suddenly as it had started, and she fell away from him, hands tightly gripping handfuls of the sheet. One hand ripped itself away and pressed itself to her bleeding chest. An even greater level of horror seemed to wash across her face as she managed to look up at him.
‘My heart isn’t beating,’ she whispered. She pounded weakly on her chest, her fist covering itself in her blood. ‘Make it beat! Make it beat! I don’t want to die!’
Forcing his emotions to take a backseat for a moment, he scanned her. Her heart was indeed still, just the unmoving hunk of mirror that it had been for the duration of her suspension…however, blood was flowing where it needed to go, oxygen was reaching her lungs, and colour was returning to her face…what little colour she had anyway.
‘It doesn’t have to,’ he managed to say as he pulled her fist away from her bloody chest. ‘You’re fine.’
She focused on him for a moment, then looked to her hand. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m not.’
‘Fine,’ he conceded, ‘but you will be. Just relax.’ She took a deep breath, gave him a small nod, but her hands remained balled into fists. With a couple of small requirements, he was wiping the blood away from the flesh wound – in time to watch the hole in her chest slowly close, leaving only a faint scar.
He nodded toward her chest, and she slowly ran her bloody hand over the new scar, then looked up at him, the fear still frozen on her face. ‘Something’s wrong,’ she managed as she swooned. ‘I don’t-’
She threw up on him.
He recoiled from the stench and thanked the rational part of his mind, the one part of him with the presence to shut off his olfactory senses. She coughed, then heaved again. He stared down at the rotting ooze on his lap, then up at his coughing recruit.
‘Water,’ she begged as she wiped her mouth with her hand. ‘Water.’
He handed her a glass, and supported her with a hand as she gargled the water and spat it off the side of the bed. She dropped the glass, spilling the rest of the water and fell against him. ‘I feel terrible,’ she moaned. She coughed wetly again, then grabbed a handful of his shirt. ‘Please don’t sell Frankie.’
He required a towel and wiped her face. ‘I- What?’
‘Please don’t sell Frankie,’ she whispered again. ‘Or Alexandria. Or-’
He stood and pushed her back against the pillows, requiring new sheets and new clothes. ‘Why would I?’ he asked as he handed her another glass of water. She took a sip and spat it onto the towel. He then required a wet washcloth and began to wipe the blood from her hands.
She ran a newly-clean hand through her hair and let it fall over her face. ‘I threw up on my dad once, so he sold my pony.’
‘Well, I’m not your father.’ He said looked down at himself and required a new uniform, and after a moment, new carpet. The smell of rotting food mostly disappeared, and another thought opened the windows – there was no longer any reason to fear the howlers – they rarely attacked living targets.
She took a small sip of water, then placed the glass on the bedside table with a shaky hand before looking up at him. ‘Hi.’
‘Welcome back.’
‘Thank you,’ she whispered, ‘thank you, thank you, thank you.’
‘You did the hard work yourself,’ he said. ‘Trust me, there’s no need to thank me.’
‘But you-’
‘You walked through death yourself. You made the decision on your own. There’s no need to thank me.’
‘But you wanted me to-’ She balled her hands into fists and rested them on her legs. ‘It’s all right that I came back, right?’
‘You don’t know what you’ve given up by doing so.’
‘Yeah, I do. Nothing.’
‘Stef, you-’
‘You didn’t want me to come back, did you?’ she asked in a small voice. ‘You could have said that, I would have accepted that.’
‘No, it wasn’t that.’
‘Then what is it?’
He retreated to his chair, and looked across at her. ‘This isn’t the first time I’ve done this.’ The memories were hard to think about, and speaking about it was even harder. ‘The woman I loved was killed, but when she tried to come back, it didn’t work, and I lost her again. I convinced her to make the journey, it was my fault. With you…it had to be your decision, I didn’t want to be responsible for another ghost.’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘I never told you.’
She seemed to consider this for a moment, then looked back up at him. ‘I don’t really know what happened, it was kind of like…boom, then brain-in-a-jarness.’
‘You shot the mirror.’
‘That was the boom part.’
He allowed himself a small smile. ‘It returned the favour, it-’
She winced, so he stopped. She and looked around for a moment. He lifted Alexandria from the floor and silently handed it to her. She wrapped her arms around the doll, then stared at him through the doll’s red curls.
‘I found you on the roof. I told the mirror what to do, then brought you back here.’
‘And I’ve just been…lying here since then?’ She let go of Alexandria, and brushed her fingers over her heart. ‘What are these?’ she asked as she brushed her hand over the scars from the howler’s attack.
‘A fae tried to steal your heart.’
She gave vague nod. ‘Did I talk in my sleep?’ He shook his head – this wasn’t the time to talk about the aspects, that he’d been privy to her memories. ‘Wow, easiest babysitting job ever.’
‘We managed to recover and destroy a large portion of the mirror. The leech’s body was recovered. Enid though-’
Stef weakly waved a hand. ‘Shot her in the chest.’
‘Next time,’ he chided, ‘aim for the head.’
She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, then opened them and stared at him. ‘Huh?’
‘When you left her, she wasn’t dead. There was enough of a spark left to let a goblin save her.’
‘Oh, fscking wonderful. Don’t worry, I’ll get her next time. I’m gonna need like a week off. Full pay, of course.’
‘There won’t be a next time,’ he said without thinking.
‘Huh?’
He looked at her for a moment, the unrevealed facts about the current situation on the tip of his tongue. ‘She has sanctuary with Madchester,’ he said to cover himself. ‘Agency rules dictate that no one is allowed to touch her while she is within their territories.’
He called up the time – only a few minutes of real time had passed since Emma had left, but he wanted to deal with her as soon as he could, just so build a buffer of time before he had to act. Enough time to explain everything. Enough time to find her sanctuary. Enough time to say a real goodbye.
Enough time to hide the evidence that she had come back.
‘Wonderful,’ Stef muttered. She yawned. ‘I shouldn’t be tired. I shouldn’t be tired, I’ve been sleeping all this time.’
‘Your body has been in suspension. You’d rightfully be as tired as the night you-’
‘I know it’s childish,’ she interrupted, ‘but could we avoid the d-word when possible?’
‘The use of it doesn’t change what has happened.’
She folded her arms across her chest. ‘I know that, I’m not a child.’
‘Says the girl holding the doll.’
She made a face. ‘You’re um,’ she said pointing a shaking finger. ‘You’re bleeding.’
He reached a hand to his face and felt the open cut. ‘It’s nothing. Just a little fallout from everything that’s happened.’
‘Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to run with scissors?’
‘Didn’t yours teach you not to shoot a mirror?’
She managed a smile. ‘I wish.’ She looked away for a moment. ‘What now?’
Now was the time to get rid of her. Now was the time for her to beg sanctuary with a court. Now was the time to disappear, start a new life – one that hopefully wouldn’t end prematurely as her first had. She yawned, and logic returned to its backseat.
‘You should get some sleep.’
She shook her head.
‘Stef, you’ve just been through something…traumatic, and you’re exhausted. The sleep will do you good.’ She shook her head and seemed to shrink in on herself even more. ‘You need to rest,’ he said. ‘Please, trust the opinion of someone far older than yourself.’
Her shoulders drooped. ‘Well, I’m sorry I’m not a thousand years old, like you.’
‘Only a few parts of me are that old,’ he said.
‘Which parts?’
‘That’s a conversation for another time.’
‘I’m not going to sleep,’ she said with a shaking voice.
He watched her run her fingers through the doll’s hair. ‘You’re afraid of not waking up, aren’t you?’
She was completely still for a few moments, then gave a small nod.
‘You’ve got nothing to worry about. You’re here, and so far as I can tell, you’re fine-’
‘I’m not fine.’
She said it, and he knew it was true. It was impossible to to adjust to life again this quickly – especially after having been gone for so long – there were very few he knew of that had suffered through such a long suspension, most of the time it was quick – there wasn’t so much time for reflections or…Or aspects.
He rose from the chair and left the room.
She called after him, but only once. He quickly retrieved the book her youngest aspect had been reading, and walked back into the bedroom. In the few seconds he’d been gone, she’d risen and was halfway to her wardrobe. He placed the book on the bed and gave her the sternest look he could muster. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I was gonna go buy some coffee, fresh air and caffeine can keep me awake for amazing long periods of time.’
‘You’ve got five seconds to get back into bed or I will drug you where you stand.’
She raised tiny fists, the too-large sleeves of the pajama top making them seem even smaller. ‘Won’t let you.’
‘It’s for your own good.’
She made no move toward the bed. ‘Heard that before. Not from you, but heard that before.’
‘I thought you trusted me.’
Wordlessly, she begrudgingly crawled back into her bed, her doll cradled in the crook of her arm. She watched him warily as he sat beside her, the book in his hands.‘This is the alternate to drugging me?’
‘It works remarkably well on small children.’
‘I’m not-’
He opened the book. ‘Are you really going to argue that point?’
She pouted, and pulled the blanket up, trying to bury herself in the soft fabric. ‘I’ve been…gone for a month, I’m here for five minutes and you want me gone again. Asleep again, whatever. It’s too close, I’m too close, I can’t go back there.’
‘You can, because I’m here.’
‘Why do you want me to sleep?’
‘It’s the easiest way to deal with what you’ve been through, case after case has shown this, there have been too many times where people have…made themselves a denizen of Madchester by thinking about it too much. Everything will be easier if you just get some rest. There’s no reason to lose yourself so soon after coming back.’
She relented a little, some of the harsher emotions slipping from her face, leaving her looking more and more like what she was – a fragile little girl. He opened the book and began to read. By the end of the first paragraph, her eyes were drooping, by the end of the second, she was asleep.
The much-needed rest kicked in, and the tension fled her body, leaving her slumped awkwardly on the pillow. He made a move to adjust her, so that she didn’t wake up in pain, but only managed to make her slide on the pillows more, until she was resting up against him. Even asleep, she sensed the warm body and cuddled up against him – evidently he made a better pillow than the ones on her bed. Another moment passed, and then she began to drool on him.
He smiled, smoothed the hair back from her face and said a silent prayer of thanks. For once, something had gone right, and there was no better feeling than that.
Holding her life this made it easier…
‘She has sanctuary with Madchester,’ he said to cover himself.
tsss… already lying to her… or rather obscuring the truth.
… and then she began to drool on him.
lol
I’m betting Emma ‘ll find out, and he’ll say something like: “here’s the piece of the mirror” and Emma destroys it. only to hear an ouch from Stef, and the Ryan says goofishly: “She came back on her own…”
They can’t destroy her if Emma destroys the shard and she comes back on her own… maybe she can come back to the agency as a recruit.
Maybe having Stef around will make Emma flee to London? (wishfull thinking)
—
AL13N is my name and head-biting is my game.
But she does have scanctuary, or Ryan could have dragged her out and shot her in the head.
…but he’s still obfuscating the truth somewhat: it isn’t because of the sanctuary that Stef can’t go after Enid, it’s more that “um, well, no-one else knows that I’ve been keeping a dead body here, and everyone thinks you went squish, so you have live here for the rest of forever and never, ever leave…”
>_>
Well, i’d have worded it differently, but that was indeed what i was thinking…
*fixes typo*
And…obscuring the truth isn’t a bad thing, he’s doing it for her own good, she’s only just come back, it isn’t like she can handle everything at once.
Ok these both made me chuckle: ‘Didn’t yours teach you not to shoot a mirror?’ and ‘Says the girl holding the doll.’
That’s it run for cover the crazy is back in the house. And now for a good dose of: Aahh
I’ve been maligning Stef all week by referring to how childish/childlike she is, so I thought I may as well start with the references in canon. (I mean, for cripes sake, we have up with a list of cartoon children who are more competent than she is -_-).
Wow, easiest babysitting job ever.
She has no idea…
‘I know that, I’m not a child.’
‘Says the girl holding the doll.’
Hehe
‘Which parts?’
Very Stef… didn’t take her long to get back to her normal-ish self.
‘You’ve got five seconds to get back into bed or I will drug you where you stand.’
Very dad-ish. except for the drug part. Still, lol-able 😀
Even asleep, she sensed the warm body and cuddled up against him – evidently he made a better pillow than the ones on her bed. Another moment passed, and then she began to drool on him.
That was such an ‘Awww’ moment, and then she started drooling. -_-
Curious (as always) to see what happens next!
She has no idea…
And it’s going to stay that way…he doesn’t feel comfortable enough turning around saying “oh, hey, these multi-coloured apparitions kept jumping out of your chest, and by the by, I watched you try to off yourself”. >_> He thinks that she’d feel violated if she knew that he’d seen some of her private thoughts. (He’s got this real thing about knowing people’s thoughts without their permission, because of the couple of times he’s had to use the scary-ass-angel-mind-powers).
‘Which parts?’
Very Stef… didn’t take her long to get back to her normal-ish self.
This used to be extended…I’m not going to say much because I’m trying to work out how to jam it back into the story somehow, but Stef, in all situations, is Stef.
Very dad-ish. except for the drug part. Still, lol-able 😀
It comes from the dad-ish part of him, he really is doing it for her own good…and he can’t exactly calm her down the way he did with Carol, cause that would be freaky, wrong, and well, with the established dad-ish element, pseudo-incestuous. -_-
That was such an ‘Awww’ moment, and then she started drooling. -_-
I just had to put that in there, cause I kept lol’ing about it every time I thought about it.
He thinks that she’d feel violated if she knew that he’d seen some of her private thoughts.
Still, I’m curious about how she would react.
It comes from the dad-ish part of him, he really is doing it for her own good…and he can’t exactly calm her down the way he did with Carol, cause that would be freaky, wrong, and well, with the established dad-ish element, pseudo-incestuous. -_-
… interesting… AL13N, are you getting any ideas? ^_^
I just had to put that in there, cause I kept lol’ing about it every time I thought about it.
Hey, she’s drooling on him, she’s gotta be fine!
And the moment is truly lol-able 😀
Still, I’m curious about how she would react.
Ok, hmm…I’ll see if I can add in a scene.
… interesting… AL13N, are you getting any ideas? ^_^
Oh dear god, that’s what he was going to write? -_- Fine, man, bring it on! (Guiltily, I wouldn’t mind reading some Stef/Ryan, cause I know at least part of my brain ships it, but I can’t do it myself).
Ok, hmm…I’ll see if I can add in a scene.
^_^
Oh dear god, that’s what he was going to write?
Dunno, just saying. If anyone can do it, he can. ^_^ And I’m very, very, very curious to read his grand, evil (EVIL) creation! Hehehe :p
I didn’t know I was this predictable???
But, no, i’m not going to write this, at least… I read Stormy’s comment and i thought about it, but i was more curious about the Carol/Ryan thing. Can Stormy write that as a Side Story?
And…
Argh, you guys are getting high expectations… 🙁 . Now I’m really anxious about it.
BTW: you’ll have to wait a bit, i’ve been “upgrading” my server (which always result in breaking everything, and have to fix it way into the night). Plus almost all weekends are getting full (all family and friend wish to see Mona), not to mention the next weeks are going to be hell at work. But i will try to work on it next week.
…however, Carol and Ryan’s entire story will be told in Book 3, can you wait that long? 😛
…including the three hours of post-waking-up-from-death-to-calm-her-down-lovemaking… (not in explicit detail, of course :P).
Nooooooo!
Nooooooo!
Well, I just gonna hafta wait…
…their story is so worth the wait. Everything being relayed without lie or obfuscation, the whole ugly truth from beginning to end…you’re going to love it.
(Oh hell, all of book three is going to be awesome. >_>).
You keep saying, book 3 is going to be awesome, book 5 is going to be awesome, book 7 is going to be awesome and let’s not even speak about book 8 or 9…
Is book 2 not-so-awesome then? or is it just that you’ve written it before?
…it is that I’ve written it before. I mean, it’s fun in parts, it does its job, and there are some parts that you guys are so going to hate me for, but…I dunno. At least the way I’ve got it planned, everything more comes together in 3, more people get fleshed out, and a lot of missing pieces are put into place. 5 is a story I’ve been wanting to tell for ages. 7…I don’t even know what 7, 8 or 9 are. >_> I’ve only got the first arc planned out. ;_;
I was only wondering if you were getting any kewl ideas for more crackfick ^_^
Mona is the little wonder’s name? That’s so, so sweet! ^_^
Still, I’m curious about how she would react.
Ok, hmm…I’ll see if I can add in a scene.
If your takeing request I would really like to know what or who that captain hook think was.
Just…MWHAHAHAHAHA!
*cough cough*
I, er, shall consider it.
Typical Stormy answer, I’m going to have to agree with Bufi on this one…
We should blame Emma, it was her shooting the mirror that lead to Stef waking up, so technically shes the one that revived Stef. Ryan was just… storing her and her mirror heart, which given that they had a piece of the mirror in the tech department, (before Emma destroyed it) it shouldnt be a major offense.
In fact I think Stef should go up to Emma and thank her for reviving her, in full view of multiple agency security cameras… the look on Emma’s face would be… enough to make even Taylor smile, he would probably get a mural of it painted on one wall of his gym.
…storing a piece of a mirror that big is kind of a no-no, Jonesy got away with it because a) it was a tiny piece, b) it’s whereabouts had been logged by the clean-up crew, c) it was for educational purposes d) it was surrounded on all sides by Plexiglas. >_>
Taylor…smile…isn’t that one of the signs of the apocalypse? >_> I mean, he doesn’t even smile when- ooops, can’t say that, that’s a spoiler. 😛
…not to mention, it would likely make Emma go nuclear and start destroying everything in her path.
…not to mention, it would likely make Emma go nuclear and start destroying everything in her path.
Exactly, that’s what the security cameras are for, teleport Stef out of there real fast and let Emma do her war path thing. I imagine all those “emotion is bad” super agents would look down on someone going on a rampage, which would really hurt her chances of taking over. They could even include the footage in the OSHA video for visitors 🙂
…the “emotion is bad” guys aren’t like there to stomp out free will or anything, they’re just kind of…snobs with the rule books shoved up their rears. Emma freaking out wouldn’t be much more than a reprimand/basic punishment. (Though, yeah, she probably wouldn’t be able to take over, the point would still remain that ZOMG WHAT IS DEAD GIRL DOING WALKING AROUND?! and that’s what they’d focus on).
They could even include the footage in the OSHA video for visitors 🙂
That, though, that would be awesome.