A work in Progress
Nov. 27th, 2004 01:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
platedlizardThis is a work in progress and is by no means done. The first two chapters can be found at http://www.fanfiction.net/s/2134126/1/ . I'm thinking of doing some drastic changes to this chapter, deleting Robin's POV scene that is right after Mrs. Smith's scene, for example, and adding something to further the Nagira-subplot. You're comments would be appreachated.
Chapter 3
Mechanical Firefly
Nagira didn’t come back.
Amon and Robin stood in line at the airport to check in for their flight. Amon carried the bags, Robin still seemed out of it despite the three hours of sleep she had while they were waiting for Nagira to return. She was drinking a Bepsi, and Amon was relieved to see that she could keep it down. They were both tired. He hoped he would be able to sleep on the plane.
Nagira was missing.
Amon had waited as long as he dared for his brother’s return, then dialed Nagira’s apartment. Nothing. No answer, and the message sounded different than the last time he had called. Amon then tried Nagira’s cell, only to get the voice mail message. He hung up without leaving a message, he didn’t dare.
They left. Robin was still groggy and slightly feverish, although not, thank God, as blazingly hot has she had been. His shoulder hurt, dammit, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it. He was wired with exhaustion and fear, and sick with worry over his brother.
Amon couldn’t get that out of his mind. It was bad enough that his parents were dead, that he never got to know his father, that his mother had Awakened and changed, and was killed. Now his brother was missing, and they had to run. He had raided all of his hidden catches of money, he had over twenty thousand dollars waiting in a bank in the US. That was it, for money. Hopefully it would be enough to tide them over until he could get a job.
The line moved forward, and Amon found himself looking at the lady at the counter. He wondered what it would be like to have that kind of job, where screwing up meant you got fired, not killed. Where your fifteen-year-old coworker could go to school and make friends her own age and not lose her childhood. A job where his brother wouldn’t disappear because he, Amon, had threatened or angered the wrong people.
Grief and guilt tore at him, but he was used to that. The grief of losing his mother, the awful gut-sucking guilt of shooting Kate and letting Touko get shot. The horrible numbness as he led Robin to the warehouse, like a lamb to slaughter. At the time his mind simply could not deal with the emotions and had stopped sensing them, like burned pain nerves that no longer could transport messages of damage to the brain. He was a damned man, he knew and accepted it. The only thing he could hope for was the chance to do one good thing in his life.
He felt Robin slip her hand under his jacket and wrap her fingers around his belt. He looked down at her and draped his arm around her shoulders. If he could do one good thing…
Robin leaned into him and sighed, her warm breath puffed into his shirt. Amon vowed silently that he would give her the chance at a real childhood. One that didn’t involve the people she cared about dying or trying to blow her brains out. He had lost his childhood when his mother had Awakened, and it was utterly destroyed the moment she was Hunted. Amon didn’t want Robin to lose what was left of hers.
The line moved forward another step.
His shoulder hurt. He was exhausted. Robin was sick, and he didn’t know what they were going to do in the US. He just wanted to get away. It was somewhere else, some alien world in which brothers don’t disappear and trustworthy friends weren’t on the other side of SOLOMON’s laws.
Amon found himself face to face with the woman behind the counter. He handed her the fake IDs he had made weeks before, when he realized that they might need to flee the country if Juliano was wrong about Robin. He felt a slight twinge of anxiety as the lady ran the IDs through the computer, but as promised the machine binged happily and the woman accepted the payment for two seats to the US. The next available flight was in four hours.
Security was a breeze, the guards allowed them through while the searched a white-haired old lady. Once through Amon steered the girl to one of the multicultural restaurants, whether or not she was hungry, he was starving. The restaurant clearly served the American tourists and businessmen. They sat down and Robin looked at her menu blankly before putting her head on the table and closing her eyes.
"Not interested?" Amon asked.
Robin shook her head negatively in response.
He frowned. "You should still try to eat something."
She shrugged. "Soup, I don’t care what kind," she answered.
He ordered for both of them. Tomato soup for her and something forgettable for him. The food arrived after a few minutes and they ate in silence, Robin consuming the soup with no sign of illness. He hoped that Nagira was right, that it was just dehydration, and that once she had replaced the lost fluids she would be fine.
He suddenly lost his appetite. God, Nagira. Somehow, without thinking about it, he had made another decision. He had decided that his own brother was not as important to him as Robin. He felt like he had betrayed his brother by leaving the country, rather than staying to find him. Amon looked across the table to the girl, and found that despite the guilt and shame at leaving his own brother to whatever destiny Fate had in store for him, he still felt like he was doing the right thing.
It almost didn’t matter. Nagira was still gone.
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Being a school teacher meant that Mrs. Smith had plenty of time during the summer to travel the world, and yearly trips to see the relatives kept her Japanese fresh. She sat in coach and tried to read her Beatrice Small novel, but she was distracted by her seat-mates. On her left in the center seat was a girl who couldn’t have been older then fourteen or fifteen. It wasn’t that the girl was noisy or intrusive, quite the opposite actually. The girl had fallen asleep as soon as she had sat down. Before she had fallen asleep Mrs. Smith had noticed the glassy look of her eyes, perhaps drugs the woman thought with disapproval. Mrs. Smith had certainly smoked a few joints during her hippie years, but the things children were doing these days were far beyond anything she had ever done, even as a college student. Really, it was their parents’ fault.
There was a rather intimidating man who looked, excitingly enough, like the hero in Love or Die, sitting on the other side of the girl. Mrs. Smith supposed they might be together, although why a young girl would be with such a dangerous looking man was anyone’s guess. Lurid tales of innocent young women seduced away from friends and family by dangerous older men danced her in head. She frowned, those tales were all very well and good Romance Land, but not in real life.
The meal cart came by and the man woke the girl up so she could eat. Mrs. Smith put down her book and concentrated on her food. Despite the stereotype airline food wasn’t really that bad, she had read somewhere that the reason why it wasn’t as flavorful as food elsewhere was because of the dry air up here, which carried fewer odors. Less smell equaled less taste.
From the corner of her eye Mrs. Smith watched the pair. The girl just picked at her food, occasionally taking a bite, and then stopping. The woman wondered if she was anorexic, she certainly looked ill and thin enough. The man had wolfed his down, and was now watching the girl impassively. He said something to her that Mrs. Smith didn’t quite catch, despite her command of Japanese. The girl sighed, and took a larger bite, and then another and another, slowly working her way through the meal.
Mrs. Smith must have been staring too intently, because the pair suddenly turned and looked straight at her. They said nothing, simply gave her a look that told her she snooping where she didn’t belong.
She pulled her book up close to her nose and started reading furiously, Lord Ryan and Annette the chambermaid were suddenly so much more interesting.
Really
, she thought, I should have brought along a Nora Roberts novel. I never meet odd people when I read Nora Roberts.………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Robin sighed with relief when the woman finally looked away. Her scrutiny had been unnerving, causing both her and Amon to wonder if they had somehow been found out. Fortunately it appeared that the woman was simply nosy.
She glanced sideways at her partner. Now that they were finished eating Amon was staring straight ahead, his face wearing it’s usual scowl. And yet, something had changed about him. There was a feral edge to his movements that hadn’t been there before, it looked very much like desperation. She wasn’t certain of the reason for his sudden paranoia, but given the last few days it wasn’t terribly surprising. She just wished that they had been able to say goodbye to Nagira.
She was tired. Robin closed her eyes, feeling every ache and pain in her body. If she was tired, then he must be ragged with exhaustion, she didn’t think he had rested since their escape from the Factory. Certainly he had not even tried to go to sleep on the plane. Surely they were as safe here as they could be, even if there was a Hunter on board, ready to capture or kill them at the first chance he had. Not even one of SOLOMON’s top Hunters would Hunt them on a plane, not with all the potential witnesses. Such a Hunt would be publicly known, and broadcast around the world within minutes of the event. No, they both knew that they were safe for the time being.
Yet he didn’t try.
Her stomach gave lurch, and she wondered briefly if she was going to be sick again. It settled down quickly enough when she took a sip of pop. It was her fault Amon was so miserable, if she hadn’t accepted his offer (not, a small voice inside her whispered, that she had a choice) then perhaps he wouldn’t have been separated from the only family he had left.
Perhaps. And perhaps not. There was nothing they could do to change the past.
She hoped that Nagira was all right. Amon didn’t say anything after he woke her up, but that fact that Nagira wasn’t back yet alarmed her. She remember Nagira calling Amon ‘Little Brother,’ Amon wouldn’t leave his own brother if he was in trouble, would he?
She just didn’t know. All she could do is trust that he knew what he was doing. And pray.
Robin had a feeling that they would all need lots of prayer.
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It was, strangely enough, the pervious day. Somewhere in the flight they had crossed the International Date Line, and time had slipped backwards. The exhaustion that had lifted slightly during the flight had returned at full force. The plane had finally landed…somewhere. Robin wasn’t quite certain where they were, and she didn’t much care. Later she could worry about things like where they were and what they were going to do.
Sometime, on this day, Robin had incinerated everything that was between them and freedom. If she closed her eyes she could see herself, burning through the tunnel step by step, feeling everything that made her her slip away, until there was nearly nothing left. She had an odd feeling that if the hall beyond the metal door had not been clear, and she had needed to keep burning, then she would have been lost. Her personality would have burned away like the chaff in a wheat field after harvest. She would have been nothing. A void.
They were standing inside a cheap motel while Amon spoke with the old man at the desk. Robin was too tired to try to make her English work well enough to understand what the men were saying. It didn’t matter.
A moment later the man handed Amon a couple of keycards for the room and gestured toward the hall, before turning back to his magazine. Amon didn’t even turn to look at her, he simply trudged down the hall, trailing her in his wake. The moment he entered the room he crossed directly to one of the beds and flopped down on it, lying face down, and not bothering to even turn off the lights. Robin stood at the door and stared at the room blankly. There was nothing here, just cheap furniture.
Without conscious thought she drifted into the room, the door closing on it’s own behind her. She could feel her heart pounding in her chest and throbbing in her temples, like it was some savage beast trying to get out. She was tired, and yet was far to keyed up to sleep. She touched the TV and the empty bed before going to the bathroom, hoping that a nice long soak was what she needed. A moment after she turned the water on in the tub she turned it off again, frustration boiling beneath the surface of her mind. She didn’t know what she wanted.
By their own motivation she drifted out of the bathroom again, to find that Amon was still in the position he had laid down in. Her feet walked across the room and took her with them, and she found herself sitting on the bed next to him, one hand on his back.
"Amon?" she said softly, hoping not to wake him if he was asleep, but still wanting to talk to him if he wasn’t.
"Yes?" His voice was somewhat muffled by the pillow.
"What happened to Nagira?"
The ex-Hunter turned his head to look at her, charcoal gray eyes meeting green. Robin thought she saw a flicker of emotion in their dark depths, pain or fear or grief. She wasn’t sure which. He sighed deeply, his back under her hand rising and falling.
"I don’t know," he said, "I wish to God I did."
"Oh." The girl tried to think for a moment, but found herself staring at the wall. "Oh," she repeated. She bit her lip, not noticing Amon’s sudden smile at that. "If you didn’t know where he was, then why did we leave Japan?" she asked finally.
"It was too dangerous for us to stay."
"But what if Nagira needs us?" she asked plaintively. "If he’s missing then there’s something wrong!"
"And do what, exactly?" he answered. "We’re both exhausted. I’m hurt, and we don’t know what’s wrong with you. Nagira’s an adult and a lawyer, he’s going to have to take care of himself. He would not thank me for letting you get killed." He breathed in deeply again, and let it out in one shuddering whuff of air. "We can’t do anything for him."
Robin was silent. She wanted to argue, and knew it was foolish. The time for argument was long past, they were here now (wherever here was) and couldn’t go back.
She was too tired to argue, any ways.
"Robin, go to bed."
She nodded mutely, flicked the switch near the head of the bed off, and curled up next to him, her back pressed against his side, and then shifted around, trying to find a more comfortable position.
"Robin?"
"Hmm?"
"The other bed is empty," he pointed out mildly.
She stilled. "Do you want me to leave?"
"Heh. You should," he said.
She sighed, disappointment washing over her, and stood up. The room tilted crazily around her, causing her to sit down abruptly on the bed again.
"Robin?" Amon prompted.
"I’m sorry…I’m dizzy."
He grunted in reply and then there was silence for several minutes while Robin waited for the world to stop spinning. The sheets rustled and a moment later Amon appeared at her should. She smiled at him shakily, and then remembered that he couldn’t see her in the dark.
Amon placed a hand on her shoulder, and then touched her brow. "Jesus. It hasn’t gone away, has it?" he said, and then continued before she had a chance respond, "We’re going to have to find you a doctor tomorrow."
"I’m sorry."
"I just wish I knew what was wrong with you."
After several more minutes of silence Robin finally felt strong enough to try standing again. This time the world did not tilt and everything seemed stable. She lay down in the empty bed, feeling oddly drained and cold.
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It was a scene he was strangely familiar with. They sat in a waiting room for a doctor to see them. The glaringly bright lights reflected off the strained expressions of the patients, and the forced cheerful expressions of the receptionists only seemed to confirm that impression. In the corner of the room were toys for children to play with so they wouldn’t bother their parents, and outdated magazines sat on a nearby table.
He remembered the fist time they had sat in a waiting room like this. Robin had been annoyed, indignant at the though that there was anything wrong with her eyes. He had made her go, privately hoping that her poor aim was the result of an organic cause, and not because she was losing control. He hadn’t wanted another Kate.
The second time was after a Hunt, during which she had injured her arm. The Witch they had been Hunting had sacrificed himself in order to save her life. Amon sometimes wondered about the kind of man who would do that for an enemy.
Beside him Robin stirred slightly while she read a travel magazine. The pictures of a brightly lit Mediterranean village reminded him sharply of how homesick she must be. He turned back to the papers the receptionist had asked him to fill out. This was going to cost them a great deal, they had no health insurance and they still needed to find an apartment near good public transportation, or buy a car. The $20,000 he had managed to hide in bank in the US didn’t seem like such a large amount of money, now.
He could only hope that money was the least of their worries.
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-29 08:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-29 11:27 pm (UTC)Oh, and I DO log IPs, even if I allow anonymous posting. So don't flame me again or I will block you, dipshit.