Heart On A Sleeve (Interlude 1)
Restive Nature
Rated PG-13
Disclaimer- I own nothing of either Angel the Series or Dark Angel. They and all recognizable characters and settings belong to their respective owners, Whedon and Cameron/Eglee. The only character that is mine is Eva O’Connor.
Timeline: Takes place during Book 2 of the Warrior Souls, "Essence of the Heart".
Summary- Wesley finds himself on a journey of introspection, with an unexpected traveler to help lead him to peace.
Chapter Five
One Woman’s Dream
Elizabeth ran after Wes as he hurried back to his car. Questions burned through her mind. How was it possible that 452 were here? In this time and place? But her companion didn’t seem inclined to drop any more tidbits. He reached his car, his fingers absently finding the keys. He juggled them impatiently as he shifted the journal aside and swiftly unlocked the door. He was about to slide in when he caught the resigned look on her face.
"The car?" she reminded him absently, then gestured to herself. "Ghost?"
"Oh just get in," he growled. She rolled her eyes. "Look, you’re walking aren’t you? Why haven’t you just slid through the pavement? What’s holding you up?" She gaped dumbly in realization and had she been corporeal, Wes would have sworn she’d blush. "Look, just imagine yourself riding in the car and it will be fact. As long as you believe you can."
"What a load of bunk," she murmured, even as she inserted herself through the door and into the passenger seat. She had to stop herself from buckling up. Wes climbed in, tucking the book under the armrest between them. He pulled his door shut, did buckle himself in and with barely a glance at his passenger, started the car. He headed towards the Hyperion, hoping that Max and Angel were still up. Well, that Max was. With her shark DNA, it was almost a given. But he pondered the wisdom of Angel being awake to offer emotional support to his wife. There were just so many variables
"I think perhaps you’d better tell me everything," Wes urged in a low voice as he pulled out onto the street.
"Everything?" Elizabeth questioned humorlessly. "That could take a while."
"We might as well start somewhere," Wes countered. He wasn’t exactly angry, just anxious to understand. "Now, you were one of these ‘women who watch’?" he asked. He didn’t need to see her nod. "And what precisely were you watching?"
"Like I said," she stressed the words heavily, "we were watching for a girl." She sighed, seeing no other course but the one he’d presented. To tell him the tale she had kept secret from all people in the world but two. Her grandmother and Sandeman. "I told you that I lived a good deal with my grandmother. When I was old enough, she explained the destiny of her calling. Eons ago, our sect were made aware of a prophecy. That in the end of days, all our lives would depend on the actions of one girl. The women set out to discover everything we could about this girl. Who she was, what the end of days would be, everything. But over time, she didn’t come. Unbelievers fell away from the group. Until finally, it was down to my grandmother. She never lost faith."
"What about your mother?" Wes asked carefully.
"She never believed," Elizabeth answered dryly, as if it should have been obvious.
"And you did?"
"At first," she replied, hesitant. Here she was, with a man she barely knew, but who knew her, or of her, baring the deepest, most secret part of her soul. But once begun, she could hardly stop. "When I was a teenager, being abandoned so often by my parents, I was searching for something. Some purpose in my life."
"And you’re grandmother provided that?"
"Love, direction, a purpose, yes," she agreed softly. "But then I went back with my parents. My mother belittled the women who gave their lives over to this prophecy. She said it hadn’t come true in thousands of years. It wasn’t about to come true in her lifetime and she knew it wouldn’t come true in mine. So I stopped believing."
Wes glanced sharply at her. Even if he wasn’t the most proficient at it, he’d still learned to read people to an extent. "No, you didn’t."
Elizabeth’s eyes widened, as she understood that he’d seen to the heart of the matter. She hadn’t stopped believing. But the story, the ideal had become that to her. Nothing more than a dream to one day hope for. The worst part of the disillusionment had been, never knowing how this girl might one day save them. As a teen, Elizabeth had envisioned herself, discovering the girl, standing by her side as she fought honorable battles, going down in a blaze of glory, forever remembered as the woman who’d helped avert an apocalypse of biblical proportions. "It became more of a fairy tale than anything else, I suppose," she finally told him. He nodded. "When my parents died and I went back to her, I… I humored her. Pretended that I believed, even as I laughed over her devotion to the cause." She glanced out the window as buildings flew by. "I think she knew how I felt. But she never reproached me over it."
"So you began to study medicine?" Wes prompted her when she would have stayed silent, lost in remorse over the ill-mannered behavior of a self-absorbed, grieving teenager.
"Yes. And when I returned to America, and met him-!"
"Him?"
"The man whose ideals restored my faith," Elizabeth laughed at the absurdity of their conversation. All grand tones and sweeping observations of the philosophical nature. "I’m sure it sounds utterly ridiculous, but he had a dream. And one evening, after this professor and I had run into each other, I discovered that he’d been given the same purpose in life. To find this girl."
"Sandeman?" Wes remarked sharply. Elizabeth, slightly surprised that he knew so much, tried not to show it. But she nodded all the same. If he knew of Sandeman, then he might know of Manticore. He truly did know who she was, what she had done. "And you said that he was the one that led you into the military?"
"He told me of his family, the familiars," she explained and then hesitated. But he didn’t ask who the familiars were. She was glad she didn’t have to go into that. It was a long and boring account. "The problem was, Sandeman wasn’t sure were the girl was going to come from. He was inspired to… well…"
"Create her," Wes supplied dryly. "And I assume that there were certain conditions that had to be met in her creation? Such as perfect DNA?"
"That was one of them, yes."
"So how did you fit in?"
"At the time I met him, he’d begun work on the X5 series," she continued. "He needed someone to watch his back for him. So I worked my way into a position where I could watch the familiars, warn him if they came after him. I had suspicions, knowing of their breeding line, that the girl might come from them. And I also began to work in the army, aiming for Manticore. When I was high enough up, Sandeman brought me in. He’d managed to create the X5’s, but things were getting dangerous for him. I caught rumblings from the familiars and warned him. He fled, but not before he was able to tell me that the girl was among us."
"Max?"
She nodded again, waiting, as they finally seemed to have arrived at their destination. She glanced out the window at the imposing structure of a hotel. She glanced back at him, but didn’t question the place. He shut the engine off and turned to her. Evidently, he wanted the rest of the tale before he took her in. "I didn’t know at the time, which one it was. There were hundreds of X5’s. Of course, only one third of them were girls. It took time, but I was finally in a position to where I could get my hands on them. I had each and every one of those girls tested. But none of them were the One."
"You realized it had to have been one of the escapees," Wes frowned. Elizabeth sighed as she remembered the furious rage she’d endured upon that epiphany. She’d torn her office apart in fury.
"Yes, one of five girls," she murmured. "I maneuvered my way into command over Donald Lydecker, who at the time was in charge of finding those soldiers that had escaped. He’d already gotten back one, they called her Brin. I had her tested, even though she’d been ill. It wasn’t her." Her eyes darkened momentarily before she continued. "And then Deck discovered that one of the women had a family. Had bred a child, containing some of her genetically superior traits. I was… overjoyed."
"But it wasn’t the right one?"
"No. I really thought that she was the one," Elizabeth growled, frustrated still at the memory of her elation, then disappointment. "You see, in all tests performed, breeding X5’s back to humans, the offspring were surprisingly normal, containing no hereditary genetics of the superior parent. That little boy was a certifiable genius. Deck surmised that it was something in the woman, Tinga’s genes that allowed her traits to be passed on."
"I take it that you didn’t see things that way."
She shook her head. "No, all I could see was what I had dreamed of since I was a teen. The one woman in the entire world that could save us. And I had found her." She drew in a deep, unnecessary breath. "All this before me, I was utterly determined to find her. And when we at last had her in our custody, I had to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt that this girl was the one."
"What did you do to her?" Wes questioned softly. He could have sworn there were tears in her eyes.
"I had her taken to a facility to extract information of her body," she continued, somewhat shakily. "But it wasn’t what I was looking for. Deck was right. There was nothing of her that I had been searching for. There was simply an anomaly that allowed her to pass on her traits. She wasn’t the one." She looked away, still unable to completely come to terms with what she had done, what she had turned into. "When I discovered this, I was beyond angry. Beyond rage. It felt like something broke inside me. For so long, I had carried this hope in me. I lost that. The kids… those kids to me, were what made me lose that hope. And I took it out on them. I had her contained within a machine, to keep her alive, but basically brain dead, in case I could use her some way in the future. But the others…I punished them. I used them, for my own purposes. I knew they were more than soldiers. People in their own right. But I ignored that. I made them hate themselves for what they were, for feeling when I said they shouldn’t. Made them go on missions to satisfy my hatred of them. I took sick pleasure in every failure of a soldier that would have been a triumph of a moral, upright, feeling human."
"What happened to change that?" Wes whispered.
"We caught 452," she whispered back, unable to speak more loudly as she relived all the misery she’d caused. "Her brother sacrificed his life for her. I did everything I could to play on those fears and insecurities she had. But she surprised me." She laughed, bitterly. "She took everything I put on her and came out stronger. I thought I had found a weakness in her, by keeping 599 alive. But she still defied me. I went after Eyes Only, hoping to break her. But she assured me that I would never win. I put her in the breeding program to shame her. But she refused to co-operate. Finally, I arranged for her to be the killer, the poison I told her she was. I sent her to kill Eyes Only. Oh, I knew immediately that she cared for him. It would have killed her to be the instrument of his death. I knew it and I did it anyway."
She was crying now. Luminescent tears rolling down her translucent skin. Wes was shaken by the depth of emotion she was sharing with him. Never before had he considered what had driven the enemy of his friend. And while sickened by her actions, he certainly understood how the disillusionment of something she’d held dear her entire life being torn away from her could cause such a breakdown.
Elizabeth swiped at the tears on her cheeks, squaring her shoulders once more. She was mortified to have broken down before this stranger. But seeing the understanding in his eyes gave her the strength to continue. "When she left on her mission, escaped, the news came that it had been her all along. I was so… so stunned. I can’t even begin to explain what was going through my mind at the time. It was like I was on automatic pilot. Here was the girl I had been searching for. All I could do was call Sandeman and tell him that we had found her. He wanted me to bring her home. I agreed. I figured that when 494 brought her in to trade her life for the antidote for Eyes Only, I would take her with me. But word came that we had been exposed. Manticore, I mean. I had orders to cauterize the site, destroy the facility. I gathered what information I could. I think, in some ways, I was glad to be rid of that burden around my neck. The hatred was still there, despite realizing that 452 was our savior. I had lived with it so deep within that I couldn’t just let it go. So I did nothing to save those kids."
"But Max saved them?" Wes knew that she had, but he could see what Elizabeth needed so desperately. She needed redemption. The one thing Wes and his friends seemed to specialize in. This was why Lorne had sent him.
"She returned, without 494," the woman explained slowly. "She released the soldiers. Set them free. I ordered my men to find her and return her to me, alive. But she found me first. She wanted the antidote. All I could think of was that we had to get out of there. Had to get to Sandeman. And then it would be over. I could rest. But she was determined to save her friend’s life. I gave her the antidote, but one of my men returned. He tried to shoot her."
"But you stepped in the way," he recalled. "And told her to find Sandeman." She nodded.
"And then I died," she murmured. "I was done."
"Amazing," Wes sighed. They were silent for many minutes. Absorbing this information for the first time on Wes’ part. Elizabeth going over what she could have done differently. Finally, she turned back to him.
"I have one question, though," she frowned. "How did 452 come to be here? In this time?"
"Oh," Wes grinned at her. "That’s easy. You see, she died too."
Je Trouve en Ciel
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