That their bodies are breaking down, heading exorably to an end whose route would only vary in how much pain you suffered for so long. That a loved one had died out of nowhere, due to the actions of others, intentional or accidental, or perhaps worse, just random capricious chance.
Discovering that no matter how hard you fought, someone was just bigger and stronger and that meant you did what they wanted.
Even die.
Hands around her neck. Mind afire. No more hurt.
----
("You scared, Leigh?)
Debera Chaud.
It's hard to describe what she was for me. Mentor, mother, friend, ally, maker...all my great deeds spring from her.
She deserved better. Better than me. Better than what the world gave her. She was so strong. I think, even without me, she would have found her way back...I am honored to think I had some small part of it...and sometimes horrified to think my part led to her death. The guilt has faded, but it will never go away. All I can do is balance it with the life she would have wanted me to have. What I would have given her if I could have.
I remember...
Hannah wasn't sure where her life had gone wrong.
It might have been when the Magpies first picked her up. She'd been no more than the average homeless street tough at first, kicking and biting and stealing in order to keep herself afloat. It was only when her powers had developed, of course, that she started attracting the wrong kind of attention - people are, strangely unsympathetic when they catch you next to a boy with a cracked skull. She didn't know if it had been the fifth or sixth time in the cells when the tall man in blue had approached her, but saying "no" hadn't seemed like an option at the time. With hindsight, maybe she ought to have said so.
Trapped. The Tomb of Mysar. An ancient burial ground built into a canyon. One way in and the Raze at our heels. Outnumbered twenty, thirty to one, and that was if we counted everyone in our retinue: if we just counted soldiers, it was more like seventy to one. We'd wanted to flee by the sea, but that had been cut off to us. Foul unnatural beasts consumed any boats that entered the waters. Redsin's creations, I would find out later. We couldn't escape Mason. We couldn't outrun Mason. All we could do was make a stand, and the Tomb was the best makeshift fortress and bottleneck we could get. It would be our Helm's Deep, our Battle of Metropolis, our 300 Spartans at whatever that place was called.
No one else ever called me Leigh. My full name is Ashleigh, an error on the birth cirtificate...I always preferred Ash. Deb started using it as a note of derision, but in time it changed. It was the same way I called her Deb, when she'd insisted on 'Ma'am' for just about anyone else.
It might have been choosing to side with Ivan. Boredom had set in during her first term, when she was no more than a low-level grunt sorting the goods when the trucks rolled in. The lure of the Ironsides, of action and weapons smuggling, called to her like the sirens of myth, and she was all too eager to respond to it. But it had taken more than a few weeks for her to realise what sort of a man Ivan was - injured, self-righteous, lashing out at imagined problems that nobody was even inflicting on him. The bottom line was, she saw too much of herself in him, and that scared her.
("Terrified."
"Good. If you weren't I'd be worried you'd turned to drink or drugs. Too many of the soldiers here are, and I can't really tell them not to."
"...No. Not even now."
"Yeah, I know.")
The invading of the strange new world didn't really inflict that much on her. It wasn't even her department, anyway - it was the Atoms, not the Ironsides, who were conducting it, and in any case she had no desire to get herself ripped apart by alien monsters. She mostly kept her head down and carried on with whatever she was doing, except what she was doing occasionally involved materials from this strange new world - and a lot of heavy-duty machinery. She didn't envy the people who had to collect it.
We had sort of a mad hope, this rumor that another army marched at the heels of the Raze, and that if we could provide a suitable distraction they could catch up and catch them in a pincer movement. But deep down, virtually all of us thought for sure we were dead. This was our last stand, our attempt to take as many as the bastards with us as we could. Including King Bastard himself, Mason Farrell. If I did anything, I would see him dead, at his ex-wife's hands. For all he'd done to her, and to others.
In retrospect...sometimes I think...by then...she could have gone without revenge. That she'd moved on past it. To the life she deserved...
Then came the prisoner. Some blond fucker who had tried to interfere, and had gotten swarmed for it. Hannah herself had no cares about it, at first, but then she soon heard he was being transferred to the Ironside detention centres owing the the need for power-dampening facilities. She'd shrugged, but privately wondered what sort of drugs Godfather had been taking. Then again, the new world had supposedly provided a new kind of just that...
("Hey Leigh...come here."
Ash was familiar with the older woman's touch; she was constantly smacking him on the head, for one reason or another. This time though, she just settled her calloused grip into the back of his head, leaning forward to touch her forehead to his. There was no romance in the gesture, Ash had never felt that sort of spark between them, but it was still shockingly intimate to him.
"Whatever happens...you've done me proud. I want you to keep doing it. Tomorrow, the next day, etc etc. Okay?"
"Yes ma'am."
"Hmmmm." Debera said, closing her eyes. Ash had always been a little unsure of how she saw him. The platonic friend version of a May/December relationship? A surrogate son? Or maybe just a reason to keep going, that the only way the world would get better was if she devoted effort to nurturing his like in whatever way she could.
"I have a vial for you. To help you sleep." Debera said, as she bumped her forehead against Ash's and then drew away. "And...another. If...things go bad.")
Then Ivan had ordered her to beat the shit out of him.
That had been fun, at first. But the more he talked, and the more unhinged Ivan got, the more frightened she became. It was obvious there were other reasons for doing this, beyond torture and beyond getting information. She should have said something, should have put up a hand and said she didn't want in on this, it was too much and too personal for her, but Ivan's glare and growling voice always intimidated her into silence.
(The words hung heavy in the air. Debera was a master of drugs and poisons. The second offer's intent was clear.
"...No. I don't want the second."
"...Good boy." Debera said. "...No. Good man. Good man...")
Good man...
And now, here she was, trapped in a cell with the very man she'd been torturing, her powers not working.
Maybe not saying no had been where things had gone wrong.
---
"You've done me proud..."
Her flailing was weakening.
"If things go bad..."
Blood had bloomed in one eye.
"You scared, Leigh?"
There was all sorts of fear. Some fears were impossible to grasp for some. Phobias. Superstitions.
Isms.
"MEN. DON'T. TREAT. WOMEN. LIKE. THAT!"
Burn it out. Turn it within. And so in the grip of madness Ash released his choking grip and turned to the wall, slamming his head into it. Again. Again. Again.
"Good man..."
At long last, a darkness that took away the pain.
Perhaps permanently.
---
Ash surged up with a gasp, his movements coming to a stop unexpectedly. He was restrained, his arms and his forehead tied down. Hannah must have re-appropiated his sheets.
"...this is probably smart." Ash said, his voice thick with sleep.
"To be honest," grumbled Hannah, "I dunno who I'm protecting. Myself from you, or you from your sudden bouts of batshit insanity. What's next, cartwheels?"
"Probably not." Ash said, going quiet as he tried to get his facilities together. "...I'm sorry."
A sharp, barking laugh. "That don't cut it, fuckface. You try to strangle me, then brain yourself on a wall. You think 'sorry' is enough to explain that?"
"No...I'm just sorry. I shouldn't have done that. And thank you. You could have killed me while I was unconscious, and didn't. You had more control than I did. You're strong."
"The boss wants you alive. That's all there is to it." The response was dull and listless, as if Hannah was... tired.
"And I'd just tried to murder you. I've seen your temper. When it mattered most...you kept control." Ash said. "...I'm sorry I failed you."
A pause.
And then Hannah shuffled around, boots scraping on the surface, until she was facing Ash. In the dim lighting, her face seemed more drawn and haggard than he remembered.
"Alright." She held out her hands. "Where's this going?"
"....It's a very long story...but we have time. In theory. Can I have some water? And...can you undo the restraint around my forehead, at least? I'm good now. No more attacking. I swear it on my mentor's legacy."
Another pause.
And then a huge sigh, as Hannah got up and walked over to the table on the far end of the room. A plastic bottle full of water sat on it - obviously brought in for just such an emergency. Picking it up, she walked back over to where Ash lay, knelt down and held out the bottle with one hand whilst untying the restraint around his head.
"Too soft," she grumbled. "That's my trouble."
"Well, might as well start at the beginning..."
And so Hannah heard a tale. A normal world. A god sealed in it. His awakening. His incomprehensible motivation to turn the world into a incomprehensible patchwork forged by a billion desires granted, twisted, and denied. Ash's old life. His new one. And his mentor, a great woman, and the horrific man she'd had to share her life with. Who'd murdered her.
"...Men don't hurt women. They DON'T. So...yes. I beat my head on the wall. To stop myself, and remind myself. Pain is weakness leaving the body."
"...I get your point, but that's fucked up. That'd be like if I broke my arm every time I drank a beer because my dad was an alcoholic."
"Well to be fair your boss did sort of sleep deprive me." Ash said. At some point, Ash forget when, Hannah had undone his other restraints.
"Touche." Hannah said. "...my powers don't work."
"I noticed."
"I... I don't get it. I thought he wanted me to beat you up some more, but... why block my powers? What good would that do?"
Ash could only look at her. Waiting for the pieces to fall into place.
"Like, he should have known that you'd go for me, after all the shit he pulled on you and all the times I broke something. So why would-?"
Realization hit her like a piano dropping on Goofy's head.
"...son of a BITCH!"
"Maybe." Ash said, taking the sentence literally. And as if that was a siren call, the sound of the door being worked
Ash wasn't really surprised who was there. Hannah, however, was.
And where she'd held her temper with Ash, she did not hold it here, as she lunged at him.
"You shit! You turned off my powers so he could kill me! Who even does a thing like-?!"
Ivan didn't so much stop her as he used his bulk and armor to just sort of shoulder PAST her, the current situation quite pointedly indicated. Having walked past her, he approached Ash. There was no anger on his face, or anything that would indicate violence on his mind.
Just confusion.
"...why?"
Ash just stared, bleary-eyed. Once again, he did not understand the question.
"You had the chance. The opportunity for revenge against the one who hurt you. Yet you did not take it. Why?"
"...there are...two people...in a room."
"I do not understand."
"There are two...people in a room. One has a pained tooth, and on a level...of pain marked from 1 to 10, we shall say that he is suffering pain...with a numerical value of 3. The other person has just been shot...in the leg. We will say he has a ‘pain value’ of 6. Ergo, is anybody in that room suffering from a combined ratio of 9? Do we say that both are...suffering from a pain value of 4.5?”
"...what?"
"Not clicking? Okay, try this...if you leave for your destination now...you will arrive on Thursday. You are leaving now. Therefore...you will arrive on Thursday."
Ivan merely stares.
Then he turns to Hannah.
"Clearly delusional, no? Headbutting a wall scrambled his mind more than I thought."
Hannah, however, is still pissed. "We're not leaving until you explain why you turned my powers off, asshole."
Ivan doesn't reply, at first. He just looks from one to the other.
"Ivan. Mr. Silver."
His eyes, ever masked, turned back to Ash.
"Why do YOU think I did it?"
"You think yourself some knight in shining armor, no?"
"Actually, I like to...think of myself...more as a paladin."
"...What's a paladin?"
"Why do YOU think I did what I did?" Ash repeated, not answering.
"Because you are weak. But not in way I assumed."
Ivan lowered himself down in a crouch to glare at Ash behind his mask.
"You could have taken revenge. Paid Hannah and me back for pain I caused you. But you would not take it, refusing to even score despite all the wrongs I have done. Yet you have no problem with attacking me for punishing insolent subordinates, over morals you build around yourself, like child building sandcastle. You claim to be hero, but will not do what is necessary."
"...so you turned off my powers and threw me in here," Hannah slowly chokes out, "just to prove a point?!"
Ivan ignored her, though his mask did snap back up over his face and head, so perhaps he did pay SOME attention.
"You are no better than me, little man. At least I am honest. You are hypocrite and coward."
"...Ah....ha. There it is....deep down...I am just like you. And you're right..." Ash said. "...Well...save for one thing. Do you know what a diamond is, Mr. Silver?"
"Yes."
"How is it made?"
"By exposing carbon-bearing material to high pressure and temperature. What has this to do with anything?"
"And can I punch this bastard yet?" growls Hannah. Ivan continues to ignore her.
"To get me...to even try and do...what you want to do...what you always do...you had to...subject me...to so much...pressure, hmmm? So much work to resemble you...which makes me a diamond and you a piece of coal. After all, they're both carbon, right? So we're the same, RIGHT? One doesn't have...more strength...and more value...over the other? One didn't have to be...subjected to so much...to get...something of worth, right?"
"...what are you saying?" Ivan's voice comes as a low, threatening growl that rattles behind his mask.
"Ha...ha..." Ash said, finally standing as best he could. "...My brain's a bit scrambled, so forgive me for appropriating...you think me...hypocritical...as all decent men must be, if you assume that decency can't exist. Heh."
Ash cocked his head, meeting his gaze.
"Blind you are, Mr. Silver, and blind shall ever be, seeing only the dark. You know not what rules the hearts of men, and if you knew you could not give it."
The silence that filled the room afterwards was made of iron. A whole minute of iron silence, leaving the air cold and empty with tension.
Hannah, feeling the need to break it, opened her mouth-
"RAAAAAAAAAAGH!"
-and shrieked as Mr. Silver swung a massive, unstoppable fist at Ash's head.
Blood sprayed. Teeth flew. Hannah screamed, a sound that seemed very far away.
"You think you are clever?!" Ivan said, as he both punched Ash again and drove his head into the wall. "With all this bullshit you spout?! NO! You are insolent, idiotic child! You speak nonsense and call it wisdom, you brain yourself on walls and call it heroism! You are IDIOT!"
Blows rained down. Ash fell onto the bed, only for Ivan to pick him up and throw him against the opposite wall. More blood splattered.
"I never claimed to be anything else! I am killer, criminal and much more! But I do not dress myself with idiotic codes of honour and give it a stupid name! You are like a character in a pantomine - all costume but no substance! You parrot idiotic phrases you have memorized because you have no real answers!"
Ivan's boot came down, again and again. Stomp. Crunch. Squash.
"But I have won, little man! I have worn you down and broken the costume and shown the pathetic idiot inside! You thought you could beat me with words? You were beaten long before I even began the torture! I have found what you are, and I find it wanting! I win!"
No more kicking. Because in a mirror of events gone by, his hands had closed around Ash's throat.
"YOU LOSE!"
Squeeze.
Good man...
Suddenly, Ash felt the world lurch, and Mr. Silver's grip was yanked off of him. As he lay on the floor, barely able to see, he got a good view of three other subordinates dragging the writhing, snarling Russian away from him. It took one each for the arms and another with a clutch to his midsection as though he were clinking to a charging horse - either Ivan had worn himself out with all the punching and kicking, or these guys hit the gym on a regular basis.
"LET ME GO!" roared Ivan, kicking like a spoilt child. "HE MUST-"
And then Hannah's body blocked his vision. Not his ears, though, which picked up every word that she spat out at her boss like acid.
"Two and two equals four, fuckwit. So do the math here - Important Prisoner gets killed by Psychopath in a Tin Can. How do you think Godfather is going to react when she finds her major source of info on this world is a bloody pulp? And whilst I'm at it, shall we add 'using soldiers as guinea pigs' to the long list of shit you've been pulling?"
Ivan stopped, and stared. A range of emotions flickered across his eyes behind the mask - outrage, bewilderment, exhaustion... it was hard to catch everything on there. For a horrible moment, Ash though the brutish Magpie was going to charge again.
Then he wrenched himself free of the other three soldiers and, with a last hateful glance at the prone Ash, stalked out of the room. The trio followed close behind, shadowing the bigger man with deliberate purposefulness, but Hannah didn't move until their footsteps were no longer audible.
Then she turned to Ash and knelt down, concern on her face.
"You still alive?"
Ash emitted a faint cough. Even that sent waves of pain through him.
"I'll take that as a yes."
Then the next thing Ash knew, the Geokinetic had taken a strange bottle from her pocket, along with a cotton pad, and was pouring stuff from the bottle onto the pad before daubing his wounds with it. It stung, predictably, but over time the pain started to dull into mere throbs.
"...I hate him," he finally realized Hannah was saying. "Thinks he can do whatever the fuck he wants just because he's been dicked over. And blocking my powers like that... should have shattered his nose before he even walked into the fucking room."
A bitter laugh. And then Hannah sighs, and it's full of sadness and regret.
"Things aren't the same anymore. Godfather wants to start something, and she's clearing out anyone who won't be a part of it. And I don't think I want to."
"...I'm...sorry...if I could...do...anything...it's...my...dutyyyyyyyyyyyyyy..."
And then Ash slipped away into the darkness.
---
"Is he okay, Bacta?"
"I dunno, Babel... I managed to fix him up as best as I could, but he needs to stabilize on his own."
Those are the words that come filtering in on the edge of Ash's hearing, as he slowly rises from unconsciousness.
The first thing he saw was Willis.
"Welcome back," smiled the man, although without much happiness. "We thought you'd really caught it."
"Lots of broken bones," came in Tracy's too-fast voice as she appeared from the edge of his vision. "Massive internal injury, possible hemorrhaging. Luckily, we have dedicated medical teams and healer battalions stationed at these locations. Very efficient."
"Geneva convention still stands," babbled Tracy. "Prisoners need to be kept healthy. Couldn't have you bleeding out on us, not while-"
It was obvious from the beginning that Tracy's babbling was more out of nervousness than her usual method of speech. And it became even more obvious when Willis lifted one of his hands and she quickly stammered to a stop, opting to twiddle her fingers and stare at the floor instead.
"Sorry," came an echoing voice in Ash's head. Tracy's.
"Someone might want to remind your boss of those conventions...if he cares. Which I doubt."
A small giggle from Tracy. "You sound just like Eeyore."
"Look," cut in Willis' actual voice, interrupting the silence. "Rubble told us what happened. And... well, me and Tracy, we've talked about it and... we've had enough. It's one thing when you have to smuggle, steal and defraud for a woman who doesn't even care for you, but when your boss decides she wants to rip apart time and space for the sake of profit and petty revenge..."
"It's too much," Tracy finishes, speaking aloud.
"...But no one leaves the Magpies." Ash said.
"We're going to."
Tracy's face was firm, her eyes hard. Enough, it seemed to say. I've had enough, and I'm going to let you know I've had enough until you get it.
"We're going to do it by means of a trick. And this trick has to do three things. One, it has to ensure that we get as far away from the Magpies as possible - another dimension, if that's what it takes. Two, it has to ensure that we can't be followed. Three, it has to expose Ivan's rule-breaking to Godfather. Imagine snatching away his sandwich and then kicking him in the balls, and that's what we're going to do."
Willis cast a sheepish look at Ash at this. "She's... been thinking about this a lot."
"...What do you need?"
Willis, surprisingly, was the one to speak first.
"First, somewhere to jump to," he started. "We can't just run to your dimension, because Godfather will know about it and we'll be hunted up and down without pause. So somewhere the Magpies won't expect us to go to. And because we listen in a lot, we figure that one dimension Dallas got sent to would be good - nobody's really figured out how to get back there."
"Second," added Tracy, "someone to vouch for us. From what reports we managed to dig up, that dimension is heavily protected, and it's guardians don't take kindly to people in our line of work. I don't know about you, but I like my rib bones intact, so a more diplomatic approach would be required in this instance."
"And third, a way to stop Ivan from pursuing us once we've gotten through," finished Willis.
"....You need to find the machine used to get to my world. See if you can figure out...how to get to where Dallas went. Even if you can just...send signals or probes or something...there's a girl there whose business is dimensional transfer, she'll hopefully pick something up. Once we get that...we can proceed from there."
Willis nodded. "We'll get right on that. Don't worry, we have clearance, so if we pretend we're running a maintenance check, they'll let us in no problem."
"I trained to use transmitters before I was transferred here," put in Tracy. "With any luck, I ought to get a good signal out to this friend of yours."
---
Ash wasn't sure how long had passed since then. He was healed up, he slept, he ate the nutrient paste they provided him, he pondered.
The alarms going off was a rude awakening. Standing up, he blinked a few times, then fell into a crouch.
When the door opened, the fact that Tracy was panicked was a bad sign.
"We have a problem!"
"What sort of problem?"
"Our invasion force was completely neutralized! Your world...a whole bunch of people showed up and kicked everyone's ass so hard Godfather's put the whole building on lockdown! And that's with the door closed behind them!"
The implication sunk in. The portal to his world was closed off. And from the sound of things, someone had rallied the troops. And Godfather had discovered her reach exceeded her grasp.
For someone as unstable as her, the likely consequences were not pretty.
Willis arrived, looking equally scared.
"Everything's in chaos. If we're gonna go, we need to go NOW."
"You got an entry point?"
"Yes! Somehow! It's as stable as we're going to get!"
"Guys?"
Hannah, fists of rock flecked with blood, also stepped into the room, with the man with the flashbangs whose name Ash couldn't remember. With a familar sword.
Magnificence. The blade of Debera, gifted to him. Ash expected someone else to bring in Erdrick, and when no one did, the realization that he hadn't seen his partner-weapon ever since he'd been captured sunk in. What the hell...?
Questions to answer later.
"Someone started asking questions...I had to punch them out, I couldn't think of anything else to do! We have to go, now!"
"Okay, okay..." Ash said, taking the sword and throwing the harness that held the sheath over his shoulder, looping it around and clicking it on his bare chest. No armor, pants and paper shoes, but he felt better, even though by all logic he couldn't use the weapon at all. Magnificence made one exception for its constant virulent emissions: him. And he'd have to rub his blood on the weapon a whole bunch of times to get that guarantee. If he drew it in these confined spaces, the poisons and gasses would not discriminate between friend and foe. Well, worst came to worst...he had a club.
"Okay. All right. We can do this. This sort of crap..." Ash said, stepping out of the door.
And stopping dead.
The hallway was filled with Magpies. Not Magpies come to stop him. Magpies who looked at scared as the rest, even as the alarms kept blaring.
"...the hell?"
"We want to go."
Hannah suddenly looked much younger, her eyes pleading.
"If we just run...Ivan will hurt our friends. We...we can't take it any more. Most of them, us, are with Ivan because Godfather made the assignments...we can't leave them behind."
Ash swallowed. So now instead of an escape this had become a rescue mission with several dozen scared more-or-less-kids, a time crunch, right in the heart of enemy territory with the enemy utterly furious and on the defensive because of a literally-might-have-just-happened defeat.
"You scared, Leigh?"
"Yeah." Ash said, turning to Tracy. "Lead the way."
Time to do proud.
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