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Posted (edited)

"You can't be everything." Queen laughed, inconspicuously shifting her position so that Ayia couldn't read the contents of her letter.

She wrote for another few minutes, then folded it up and mentally reached out to Icona.

Icona, you there? I finished a response to Fadran, if you could deliver it to him.

@Channelknight Fadran

 

Edited by DramaQueen
Posted

Queen nodded. I know.

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Tag me when you "deliver" the letter to Fadran and I'll post its contents on the main FotT thread :-)

 

Posted
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How about we timeskip to the airfield?  

Also I was listening to 'What Could Have Been' (Haven't watched Arcane) and now I want to write scenes from Martin's backstory but I know they wouldn't come out as well on paper as they do in my head.

 

Posted
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Here 'tis.  It has nothing to do with the current story.

Spoiler

Martin has a scar on his left thigh. Well, two scars, one on the front of his leg and the other on the back, shorter and thinner than the first. Entry and exit scars from a blade, when he was too slow, didn't move fast enough.

He doesn't remember a lot of that night. He thinks he might have let it happen.

It was a standard early mission, meant to get him used to working in the field. Go into a high-society gala and gather information. There had been a specific type of intel he was supposed to gather, maybe troop movements? That's one of the things that is a blur of muted colors and sharp emotions.

He had gone in, like normal. It was his fifth week undercover. His false identity well established at this point. Nathan Carlos, a young representative of Magnus Jackson, a ISC sympathizer, who spent evenings like this mingling with the other elite, laughing, flirting, and all the while, listening.

He had been almost eighteen. That birthday had passed, uncelebrated as usual, while he was laid up after the infiltration.

There was more urgency that night. ISC's timeline had been moved up, and the brass needed him to get them what they needed as soon as possible, however possible. So Martin did what he had to do.

There are two sharp moments from that night that he can remember without having to try. In the first, he is walking down a hallway with someone, wearing emotions he doesn't feel on his face as his stomach churns. He says something. And the demeanor of the person he is with changes as they realize that Nathan Carlos is a lie. The next fragment of that moment is hands around his throat, a struggle to breathe, and breaking free by breaking the other's wrist, terror thrumming through every part of his body, the animalistic desperation to simply get away. Then, a knife, a new aggressor, someone who he doesn't remember at all, not the face or name or appearance, and a blade running completely through the meat of his leg.

He hadn't felt it at first. He'd looked at it, thought numbly, that is my leg, and I have been stabbed. And then, before the pain, clarity.

The gun was supposed to be a last resort. So it was. Draw, remove the safety, aim, and fire. Shift, aim and fire.

Two shots. Two bodies. Two pools of red, mingling on a smooth wooden floor. His own blood soaking his clothes, the expensive fabrics irreparably marred, his cover blown.

In the second moment, he is on the roof of the same building that he had killed in. What was once his jacket is now a makeshift tourniquet, pain radiating from the wound. He has the grapple from the emergency kit. There are security guards on the roof. No. Not security. The enemy. ISC's enemy.

A woman is speaking, trying to talk him down. He isn't anywhere close to the edge of the roof. Her voice is worried, sympathetic even. And then, in that moment, Martin remembers that she does not see him. What this woman sees is a young Mica. A young Martin. The pretty version, the sob story. A child, abused and forced into the place he is now, bleeding, bruises forming on his throat, and two bodies cooling that are his fault. She doesn't know what he is. And it's that realization that drives him to back up, eyes wild he's sure, to turn, to run, to leap onto the edge of the roof, twist and fire the grapple at the ground, and jump, all in one motion. To fall towards the lights, staring up at the faces that have rushed to the edge, who watch him fall, arm outstretched, who can't see the pain on his face at the feeling of all his weight on one arm, at the awful sensation of swinging through a broken window from Mica's arrival and stumbling on a wounded leg across broken glass.

How he had gotten out of there, he can't remember. The next thing he can remember is waking up with an three IVs and a throat that feels like the broken glass he stepped on, his thigh neatly stitched up and burning. YTP never asks why he can't remember, and they don't care either. Just wait until they can send him out again, with a different face and name, and he does what he has to, and lets it sink behind the fog in his brain where he hides the worst of what he has done.

So now he walks, and the scars pull, and the demons in his head claw at their prison as it happens. And he keeps the walls strong. Because there will be more. There are always more.

Reese.

Mica.

Another dark night on a rooftop, without a grapple.

Searing brightness and blood in the snow that he can't hide from.

But he does anyway.

 

 

Posted (edited)
4 hours ago, Channelknight Fadran said:

Ayia put her Rowlet back into her mini dimension, then stretched her arms, pointedly nicking the tip of Queen's nose. "Haven't been on anything that flies for awhile." Other than my Line, of course, but that doesn't count.

@DramaQueen

Queen smacked Ayia in the shoulder. "Rude. And...I've never been on anything that flies."

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She's very afraid of heights except for trees so

 

Edited by DramaQueen

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