Loyality
Their way back to that awful town had been almost awkwardly quiet.
The rumble of the engine had been pretty much the only sound apart from Kingo's two dreadful attempts to start a joking conversation, one with Phastos and one with Sprite. He had never taken it well when there was an oppressive feeling kind of silence somewhere.
Sersi, who had been sitting on the back seat between Sprite and Ikaris, kept checking her cell phone. The one time that Sprite had followed Ikaris' example and glanced over her shoulder at the screen unobtrusively, the only thing that she had discovered was that her immortal sister was playing a silly mobile game.
Probably to avoid fidgeting like she often did when she was nervous. Nothing interesting then.
Phastos had been making a face like he had bitten into a lemon the whole time and after Kingo had finally given up his attempts to talk neither of them had spoken a word. Which felt wrong for her family.
Sprite almost wished he had accepted Kingo's earlier attempt. Almost as much as she wished Makkari, or Thena, or Gilgamesh had been there.
However, while half of their team had gone to collect samples of the deviant responsible for all this mess, Makkari had refused to even leave the infirmary, let alone Druig's side. Thena had announced that she would stay at the farm as well once Ajak had declared her intention to do the same and where Thena was Gilgamesh usually stayed too in case of a sudden flash of Mahd Wy'ry. None of them where completely helpless against that but none of them came even close to Gilgamesh's skills in calming the warrior goddess down either.
No problem actually, after all it was an easy mission. In, collect samples and scans of the Deviant, and out again. Easy.
Except that of course it wasn't.
While they were all happy when Phastos finally stopped the car in a parking lot and they were able to leave the confined space, finding out what had happened to the Deviants' corpses proved more difficult.
Sprite had hoped that they would be still laying around, maybe guarded by cops who were there to fend of any curious passerbys, but apparently the humans in this place had been pretty quick with their cleanup. An impressive feat considering it had only been an evening and a night and moving dead Deviants was not an easy feat, but apart from that, it also was extremely inconvenient for them and their time planning.
She cursed when it became clear that the whole mission wasn't going to be over in an hour or two after all.
Ultimately, they made the decision to split up. Never a good option in movies, Kingo complained. He had gotten an eye roll each from Sprite and Phastos and a gentle reminder to stay serious from Sersi before they had agreed to indeed go separate ways to speed up the whole process.
For this reason, Sprite now found herself, with Ikaris more or less in tow, roaming somewhat aimlessly through small and larger alleys, past small shops and cafes and one or the other trace of their fight less than twenty-four hours before, always on the search for a trace of where those mortals could have taken the dead Deviants. Had someone told her that she would play bloodhound for Deviant corpses one day when they had arrived on earth, Sprite would have laughed straight at their face.
Reporters and film crews were standing in the large main square where their chase with the monsters had come to an end, and so they decided to avoid this place for the time being.
"We could turn left across Main Street," Sprite murmured, looking down at her cell phone nav. "Then we would have to get close to a junkyard. Maybe the Deviants were taken there."
"If no government special units were here to take care of it." Ikaris interjected .
Fair point.
Sprite shrugged. "We should still try. Druig is probably not getting better the more time we spend here." apart from the fact that she really did not like this city. For various reasons by now.
"You are pretty obsessed with it."
"With what?"
"Druig. Why?"
The red haired girl paused and looked at him. He had his arms crossed loosely across his chest and raised an eyebrow like he always did when he spotted one of her tricks. Only the slight upturn of his lips into a small smile that usually showed that he actually thought it funny was missing.
"Seriously?" she asked. In a way it offended her but it was also disappointing.
Ikaris had been her guiding star for a long time, almost like a light figure. Words like those did not really fit that image, she thought in the back of her mind.
"Yes." he answered. "And don't tell me you're doing it because we're family. That's Kingo's excuse."
"Aren't we?" she asked slightly challenging but Ikaris did not buy it and so Sprite sighed, dropping her playful but fake grin. How he ever so often managed to look right through her was still a mystery to her and would likely always be. She looked around in the small side alley they stood in to make sure to avoid any curious eyes or ears who had nothing to do with their business.
"Fine. I don't like Druig much more than Kingo does. But I owe him this." she finally admitted and boy, did that taste foul on her tongue.
She owed them all a great deal for what had went down on the day of the Emergence and she knew it. Kingo at least had the excuse that he hadn't wanted to go against one part of his family and side with the other part, so he had left, claiming that his believes meant less to him than they did. Sprite couldn't excuse her actions like that. In fact, she yet had to find a way to excuse them at all.
Ikaris raised an eyebrow. "He knocked you out with a rock against your head."
She shrugged. "Because I hurt Sersi." and she tried really hard to ignore how sorry she was for that. No matter how much she had always envied Sersi, she had felt awful when she had rammed the dagger into her side from behind. It had been a betrayal, no matter which way she turned it in her mind. Maybe, she was even a little relieved that Druig had suddenly appeared, if only because he had saved Sersi with it.
Not that she would ever admit even a little of that. Human feelings sucked.
However it did not actually bother her that the mind-controller had done what he had done. "He might as well have killed me, but he didn't."
Because the thing was, Sprite was well aware that she wasn't the only Thinker to carry a dagger or some other type of weapon on every mission, no matter how small.
She hadn't heard Druig coming, to wrapped up in her mind about the new chance they would all have together, to lost in her delusional hope and fierce loyalty to Ikaris. If he had wanted to, he could have easily stabbed her just like she had done with Sersi but he had decided against it for whatever reason. He always carried that golden dagger. He had not wanted to hurt her, not seriously at least, that was the only logical conclusion.
In comparison to what could have been, the blow with the stone actually seemed harmless, even though she had had a headache for two straight days afterwards.
Sprite sighed, stuffing her hands in the pockets of her jeans. "Look, can we just get this over with? I am tired, I am hungry and I don't even want to be here."
Those where things about being a human that sucked as well, she couldn't deny that.
She was about to turn and continue her way down the alley in the direction of the much more busy main street again but she caught Ikaris' glace in the movement and stopped again.
He made no move to follow her, just looked at her with an unreadable expression she had absolutely no patience for right now, she had given what little she had had to give.
"What?"
"Do you regret taking my side back then?"
Alright, that had been unexpected. Of all the things she might had seen coming, a question about her life decisions had not been on the list.
Sprite stared at him, dumbfounded. "We hurt the others, Ikaris."
Wasn't that obvious to him by now?
He nodded but his expression didn't change a bit, which was unsettling. "Yes, but the others were our enemies at that moment. Even if I don't like to say it." he sighed. "Some of us where mislead. I regret what has developed from the situation."
"Yeah, probably." she agreed though she had a sinking feeling that they meant the polar opposites of who the other thought had been mislead.
They hadn't really talked much about what had happened on that day at the beach and to be honest, none of them really had. Sprite, for her part, had been quite busy trying to settle into her new human life and besides that, no one was really keen to admit they had been wrong or, how Ikaris put it, mislead.
She couldn't really tell how the other's had dealt with their respective package, be it being taken by Arishem, having to fight for humanity's survival once more or getting revived... neither of those things sounded pleasant to her.
Trying to grow together again had at least proved harder than some of them obviously had expected. The roles they had filled out for so long had changed too much for that, they all had changed individually.
"You know, maybe you owe him too. For trying to kill him, for trying to kill all of them?"
Maybe if he apologized for real instead of always stating that he was sorry but had only followed Arishem's plan, Thena wouldn't take any chance she got to push him down the stairs or make him trip, preferably on a muddy ground.
But Ikaris didn't show any sign of agreeing with her suggestion, the look on his face told her that much.
Sprite sighed, she was starting to get annoyed. "Actually yes. I do. We were about to sacrifice an entire planet of sentient beings. Yes, I regret that.”
Ikaris scoffed. "I didn't want to do that either. I lived on this planet and protected those people just like you guys did. I didn't want them all to die, but without Tiamut the Celestials lack a powerful force that could have helped create thousands of worlds like this. As sorry as I would have been for humanity, at some point their time would have come anyway and you know that. They are only human, Sprite."
The thing was, Sprite had spend thousands of years with following Ikaris. She had been on his side even when his side had meant to turn against the rest of her family, even though she knew and had known for years that she could never be with him.
It hurt, quite a lot but it had been okay because she always knew that Ikaris was a hero, that it was okay to admire him from afar and stand behind him and his decisions for the so called greater good.
But those words, especially the last sentence, stung and that image she had adored so much was splintering more and more since the day of the Emergence and so did the trust she had had in him for all those years and centuries. That hurt. Quite badly and maybe it was the fact that she hadn't slept in almost two days and that her brain and body weren't made for that anymore but it made something in her snap.
"I am only human!" she yelled, surprising both of them with her volume. "Would you have sacrificed me too?!"
Ikaris stared at her, dumbfounded. Unbearably long seconds of silence passed between them before he apparently found an answer.
"Of course not." he said after this pause, which had been a few seconds too long for Sprite's liking.
Seconds that actually told her everything she needed to know. Because she knew how he thought about people. About humans. How valuable he actually thought them to be and, by conclusion, how valuable he thought her to be.
Her eyes burned. With the bitter realization came a feeling of emptiness.
What really mattered to Ikaris, or at least what had mattered, was the will of his creator.
She didn't even knew why she was surprised. After all, he had been willing to kill the other Eternals to do Arishem's will and dirty work, he had said so himself, he had threatened to do it and he had actively tried.
No one could say why exactly he hadn't succeeded and how Druig had managed to free himself from the grave Ikaris had buried him in, not even Druig himself, but the point was that he had tried. He had tried to kill another Eternal. One of their own.
If the other Eternals counted so little, then it was actually clear that the people of earth and their lives didn't mean anything to him. That she didn't mean anything.
It made her angry. She was angry at herself and her own blindness. It filled the emptiness up just as fast as it had come.
"Alright then."
Sprite gave him a venomous look and turned on her heel to storm back to where she had last seen one of the others.
"Sprite!" Ikaris called after her. "Sprite! Wait!"
But she didn't care. She wanted to hide somewhere to deal with her endless disappointment, but even though she looked like it, even thought her body was that of one now, she did not had the mind of a little girl. Right now there were more important things than her hurt feelings.
They had a mission to fulfill, to rescue a brother, and she had a debt to repay.
Ikaris or not.