Sirens are close behind her. She can hear them, see the red and blue like blood and fear on the walls. She knows a lot about what blood and fear look like, and she’s felt it much more starkly than this because right now she can escape it. This is an opportunity she cannot waste.
The cops are too close, she has to go now. Purple and blue and pink sparks– distinctly herself, with more fear and less blood– stretch under her fingers and she rips a hole in space that she steps into for safety. It’s a familiar place, she camped out here before, when she was looking for a past. Not too far from HQ, but just far enough that Sentinel Services can’t find it based on her location. She doesn’t have long in hiding though, so she has to make the most of it.
There’s a knife in the kitchen, and some tweezers in the bathroom, and those make short work of the tracker they tried to embed in her arm. Did she nick a major vein of some sort? I mean, maybe, but she stems the bleeding as well as she can with a rag from the disused laundry room and keeps moving. She portals about a mile from headquarters, because it has been six months, and if they’ve moved things around she might blink right into them. She walks from there, feeling Pedro’s fear creep into her bones, but reminding herself that there is nothing to fear for the moment and pushing through it. After about twenty seconds, his power rapidly quiets, and moments later she hears pounding footsteps in the 3 am forest.
It’s too dark to see, there’s no way to tell if this is a friendly or a hostile. Pedro’s powers aren’t fading from her system fast enough and she rips open a portal just in time to hear “Clarice?”
The voice is breathless, nervous, distraught, disbelieving: it’s John fucking Proudstar and Clarice chokes on a laugh as her portal dissipates. She can’t bring herself to respond, somehow.
He takes a few steps forward, “You’re bleeding,” he says, “I could smell you from inside.”
“Is that a bit creepy?” she responds. It’s all she can say. She can’t talk about anything that she needs to.
Clarice can just see his outline as he collapses into fits of laughter on the ground. It’s been so long since she’s seen someone laugh in any capacity that she can’t tell if there is something actually funny, or if John has gone into hysterics. She lets him work it out. After a few minutes, he quiets, sighs like he’s just put down something immeasurably heavy, runs a hand through his wildly disheveled hair, and finally, finally looks back up at her. There’s no night vision in those dark eyes, but the way he stares could convince her there is.
For an instant, two million and three questions flash across his face, but he represses them and says “You want to head inside?”
Clarice nods, she’s wanted nothing more for six months. Pedro watches her with horrified eyes like she’s the walking dead; and as if solely for juxtaposition, John’s eyes glow with exuberance and relief in a way Clarice has never seen, she’s hoping her eyes are communicating the same thing. The lights are almost all off in the bank, just the dim nighttime light from the common area. There are refugees, taking up residence around the hallways and common areas like normal, but there’s significantly less of them than when she’d last been here. When they go downstairs, the vault area has been turned into a medical room for all intents and purposes, which means the underground has some sort of doctor somehow. Clarice missed Caitlin, and Lauren and Andy, and even Reed, though she hadn’t known him, or any of them for that matter, very well.
John sits Clarice down on a bench and rummages through a very particular bucket for supplies. He comes back with a bent needle, some thread, and a roll of bandaging, among some cleaning supplies. He seems to know what he’s doing, so she doesn’t bug him.
“What happened to you?” The murmur is so quiet, Clarice isn’t sure it’s meant for her until John looks back up at her, still holding onto the arm he’s just bandaged. There’s enough anxiety blowing her pupils wide that he rephrases the question: “Who did that to your arm?”
Eventually, cautiously, “Me.” Then it’s John’s turn to look frazzled, and she can tell he’s terrified because his hands don’t tighten on her arm, they go rigid and loosen, “There, um–” she swallows heavily, her voice sounding foreign to her own ears, “there was a tracking chip.” Tears well in her eyes, but she blinks them back. She doesn’t remember John being all that touchy-feely, but that doesn’t stop him from wrapping her in a hug that sends her body into panic mode even though this is exactly what her brain needed.
Too many days strapped to a table. Too few seconds of an embrace. It hurts when she pulls away.
Clarice almost asks if they have food, because she’s starving, but she can’t make her mouth form the words to ask for it. Her lips are locked, there is no key.
“Do you, um,” John looks anxious, like he can’t tell how he’s supposed to approach this, “do you want a snack?” Clarice nods, hoping to convey a smile in the twitch of her mouth.
They have actual options in the kitchen now, instead of the leftover leftovers from whatever everyone could scrounge up, which speaks to how much things have calmed since she was last here. Her lips are still locked, and Clarice can’t possibly pick something through the bubbling tears, but soon she is sitting with a peanut butter jelly sandwich that she is literally crying over. The sandwich doesn’t even taste that good, but it feels good. Everything right now feels so nauseatingly good, Clarice might throw up.
Nobody suggests going to bed because it’s already dawn, the people who would be concerned with the return of the stolen woman are the ones who are up at dawn.
Lorna and Marcos stumble into the kitchen first to see Clarice staring at the crusts of a sandwich and John staring a Clarice with the same reverence.
Marcos blinks around sixty times, and rubs his eyes for good measure, to make sure he was seeing correctly and that this wasn’t a dream. Lorna walks right by, exhausted from feeding Aurora less than two hours ago, before doing a double take and choking on nothing. “Clarice?” It’s spoken like a normal word, but she might as well have screamed.
Clarice’s head snaps up, John beams, Marcos sputters, and Lorna sits the fuck down.
“Lorna,” Clarice responds, “Marcos,” after swallowing a deep breath of air she can ask them, “What’s up?”
John and Lorna both laugh at that, but Marcos, despite his best efforts, does not get past a non-plussed half-smirk.
“You’ve, um, lost some weight,” Lorna murmurs, trying to keep the conversation alive in spite of Clarice’s nervous eyes. Everyone can see almost all of Clarice’s skeleton, so they might as well start there.
Clarice deflects the comment, “So have you.”
“Labor does that,” Lorna’s eyes glow softly, and Clarice tries to smile back again, but she can’t get past a second of it before the effort is exhausting.
“How is she?” Clarice presses.
“Loud,” Marcos interjects, finally having his bearings enough to do so. “Clarice, are you okay? What happened to your arm? How did you get out of the detainment facility?”
“She did it once before,” John reminds him.
Sonia appears next to Marcos in the kitchen doorway, she locks eyes with Clarice and bolts over to wrap her in a hug, and the unexpected contact sends Clarice flinching into a portal.
They find her five minutes later when she strolls back into the kitchen like nothing happened.
“I am so sorry,” Sonia gushes in a whisper, and everyone gets the feeling that she means for it to apply to more than just the hug.
Clarice shakes her head, “No, I’m sorry I–… freaked out.” The sentence takes something tangible out of her, and she’s left breathless.
“I’m sorry I left you there.”
“Are you kidding?” Clarice is speaking louder than she has since she was stolen, “I’m so much happier that you got out, that place–…” Lips locked.
“...I’m sorry, too… about before… that memory.”
Every emotion drops from green eyes, “What you did was nothing.”
It gets noticeably colder in the kitchen, and nobody freaks out about that because a ten-year-old shuffles in with frost in her hair and a trail of ice dragging behind her blanket.
“Delilah, you’re leaking,” John says softly.
The kid startles, smiles sheepishly, “Sorry, John,” then re-assesses her surroundings. “Is she new too? Hi, I’m Delilah. Who’re you?” she’s so excited, but Clarice can’t get her name past her throat.
“This is Clarice, she just came back from a mission,” John supplies, because everyone else is still watching Clarice try to form the syllables of her own name.
Marcos gives Lorna a look, so Lorna gives John a similar look, so John gives Sonia an entirely different look, so Sonia takes Delilah upstairs for some coloring. Only then does John ask Clarice “You want to get some sleep?”
Shrugging, Clarice avoids meeting anyone’s eyes as she responds, “N-not… not really.” They can practically see how much she hates the fact that she stuttered. Clarice doesn’t stutter. Clarice knows what she’s going to say and she says it, stuttering isn’t part of that process– or, at least, it wasn’t.
Lorna, as much as her baby has rounded her edges, is an impatient woman before her coffee, “Okay, we’re going to just step outside while you finish your sandwich,” it’s spoken much softer than Lorna would care to adapt herself for most people, but this is Clarice, and something had clearly happened to Clarice. They leave her, reluctantly on both sides, with the sandwich crusts that clearly aren’t going to be eaten.
When they’re far enough to not be heard, Marcos starts with a whisper-eruption of “Guys, she’s back.” It’s excited, it’s confused, it’s concerned. Marcos hadn’t known Clarice as well as John or Lorna, but he’d known her pretty well. In the weeks she’d been with them before, he’d seen her as a younger sister. A very feisty, standoffish younger sister. He and Lorna had cried through several nights after she was taken.
“That she is,” John concedes. You can hear the difference between yesterday and today in the way his voice carries. The loss of Clarice had hit him hardest; they had been the closest. He’d been there for her when she discovered the death of her foster family, and she for him when Gus went down. If there had been stronger, faster-formed bonds in the darkness of that refugee camp, you’d be hard-pressed to find them. He didn’t cry in ways anyone could see– that is, he didn’t want to show weakness to the people who depended on him– but his exhaustion was visible after she was taken, and many mornings, if you could spot him, he’d have red-rimmed eyes and he’d be in some spot where he thought he wouldn’t be found.
“She’s different,” Lorna punctuates. She had been devastated when Clarice was captured, and that paired with the stress of all the ensuing events– Esme’s betrayal, the Strucker kids’ powers coming out, finding that mutant kindergarten– had sent her into labor two weeks early. The baby was healthy (“resilient,” Caitlin had said) but it had been a power outage in the Mutant Underground offensive force. Lorna holds the residual feelings of guilt for not having gone to get Clarice six, five, four months ago.
An uncomfortable silence takes over, and it keeps them for a few seconds. Really, there is nothing they need to do, as leaders of the Mutant Underground, about this, but they’re feeling a lot of feelings, and most of them are bad feelings, forgive them if they needed a moment to cope with the impossible and yet somehow current event of their good friend returning from the place where no one except Esme Cuckoo can get out on their own.
Suddenly, and before anyone can notice or ask why, John is spinning on his heels and racing calmly into the kitchen– where, of course, Clarice has pinned Sage’s girlfriend to the wall with a peanut-butter knife.
Both Sage and her girlfriend, Ju, are petrified, although for somewhat different reasons.
“Clarice!” John snaps, and it scares the girl so bad she flinches into another room, only to flinch right back into this one and dissolve into tears. Marcos and Lorna arrive immediately after, with matching looks of consternation. Now Sage and Ju are in each others’ arms, comforting each other while Marcos and Lorna question them, so John figures he can leave them be for a minute. “What was that?”
As if jarred into reality, Clarice abruptly stops crying and looks at John flatly, “She’s a hound.”
Oh. Of course she wouldn’t know yet. “Clarice, Caitlin’s been helping us detox all the hounds Sentinel Services has sent us for months.”
“Caitlin’s alive? The Struckers are alive!?” Her eyes are manic with hope, she’s clutching John’s sleeves like they’re a tether to sanity, a tether John is becoming more and more sure Clarice needs.
He blinks slowly, “Yes,” his own voice doesn’t sound sure, “of course they’re alive. Why would you think–?” He doesn’t finish because he’s starting to be able to see it in the twist of the marks on her face when Clarice won’t be able to answer.
“I’m sorry.” Clarice is no longer looking at John, or at the floor, she’s looking at Sage and Ju. “I didn’t know,” she adds, her voice is genuine and calm, unlike the manic/depressed tones she’d seemed to have no control over before.
Ju is the one to accept this, and she does it with a knowing smile, “I was there too. It gets better.” The sentence is downright horrific to Sage, who grips her girlfriend’s gray-spotted arm tighter; Clarice nods slowly, digesting the advice.
“Well, not that this morning hasn’t been chaotic enough,” Lorna shatters the silence with an air of normalcy, “but I need to get ready to train some pubescents, and Aurora probably wants some food before that. Marcos?” He checks to make sure John has this under control with a shared glance before following her out.
It’s back to just Clarice and John sitting in the kitchen, although they are sitting on the floor now, instead of in the chairs.
“You sure you don’t want a nap?” John pushes.
Clarice snaps. John is suddenly much too close and much too big, too strong and he’s trying to force her to sleep–
She doesn’t really recognize how far she backed up until she realizes that she has portalled herself into the forest outside the bank. It’s quiet out here. Not the quiet she knew. There are no people here, no one to watch her every move, to give her drugged food and to make her train and tell her every person she’s ever known is dead, captured, or has betrayed the cause, betrayed her. Just the whisper of the pine needles and a bird out there somewhere. No doubt there are more forest animals out there, but they know to stay away from her, unlike the humans.
John doesn’t follow her out, which she is grateful for (what is she going to tell him? “Four feet is too close”? No, she just needs to get herself together). However, another, very much smaller form tiptoes out of the building in a way that suggests she shouldn’t be out here. Clarice tries to keep to the shadows: she doesn’t want to interact, but this girl hardly looks old enough to be outside on her own.
“Come out~” the girl sings, and Clarice assumes that this was meant for her, and that the girl has some sort of enhanced perception, so she steps out. She is followed by a small flock of birds, some deer, a handful of squirrels, and three rabbits. That, combined with the girl’s momentarily surprised expression, signals to Clarice that she should go back to the shadows, or inside, or something. She almost does, except this girl says “You want to talk to the birds?”
Startled, Clarice shakes her head.
“The birds want to talk to you. They’re afraid.”
“Of me?”
“For you,” the child clarifies. Clarice doesn’t know what to do with that. Without looking her way, the child says “I’m Nina. The deer tell me your name is Clarice.”
Sitting down and letting the rabbits lay pressed to the side of her leg, Clarice asks, cautiously, “How do the deer know that?”
Frowning, Nina says “the deer live in the forest and they have good ears, they hear a lot of what goes on inside the bank.” She pauses to pet the forehead between the antlers of a young buck, who nuzzles at her shoulder. “They say John goes into the forest at night to cry. That’s how they knew to bring me here.”
Like the deer, and the rabbits and squirrels and birds who have all settled just as nearby, Clarice is put at ease around Nina, like a startled stray cat settling down at the sight of an outstretched hand. “Where were you before?” Clarice asks softly.
“Poland, with Mama and Papa. Then when they were gone, the birds led me to the ocean, and the fish led me across it, and then I was in America, and the deer and the rabbits and the squirrels led me here.” Clarice is inclined to believe Nina, despite the improbability of her story. I mean, here she is right now, petting the head of a robin with one intentionally careful finger.
“Where were you before?” Nina asks.
“Dead and gone,” is all Clarice can really say.
“Did you meet my mama?” Nina asks.
“Not that way,” Clarice qualifies.
“Oh,” Nina whispers, suddenly getting more sober, “then you met my Papa.”
There’s no good way to respond to that, and Clarice would rather jump in front of a truck than force this tiny child to relive a painful past. Instead she murmurs, “What did the birds want to say?”
Strangely, and finally, Nina turns to Clarice and looks her right in the eyes, and Clarice can feel the voices of a hundred, a thousand birds speaking from this one mouth when Nina says “You have wings, and they aren’t meant for flying away.”
Clarice is scared stiff, so stiff she hardly hears a voice call out, “Nina! Come back inside! Your stitches will get infected if you go out in this damp.” Nina pulls Clarice to a stand, and Clarice is still too terrified of the birds and too calmed by Nina to run from the touch. She’s too dazed to even recognize the voice, and so she’s absolutely shell-shocked to see Caitlin Strucker at the back door of the bank, with Andy trying to get her attention.
Consciously, Clarice knows that John told her earlier that the Struckers were alive, but seeing it is something entirely different. This is the family that Sentinel Services used to toy with her. They had known that she didn’t know if the kids had escaped safely, if the parents had gone after them, and so it was easiest for them to go with the story that if she didn’t cooperate the kids would be tortured, and that the parents had already outlived their usefulness and were buried in shallow, unmarked graves. She had seen through the lies that John had betrayed the cause, because he never would; that Lorna had died fighting them, because everyone knew Lorna just didn’t die; that Marcos had been captured and was already a hound, because she knew how they made hounds, and there had to be some part of you that gave up, and Marcos was undoubtedly an optimist; but the Struckers? That was the one story those fools had cooked up that might have been true.
“Cait–” Clarice starts, but doesn’t finish because her legs have carried her right up to the Strucker mom and son, and she’s wrapped both of them in her arms, and she feels something dislodge in her throat that allows her to say “You’re alive.”
“Us?” Andy cries, and it’s muffled by the hug, “You’re the one who got herself captured for our sake and then stayed gone for six months!” Andy wants his voice to be angry, because he’s a typical teenage boy who’s been taught that aggression is how you handle your problems, but he’s just so happy to see that Clarice’s blood isn’t on his hands, that she’s back and mostly fine, that his heart isn’t really in the anger. “I’ve gotta go get Lauren–”
“What about me, dipstick?” Lauren calls, rounding a corner, “Lorna told me to come find you. What’s– holy shit, Clarice!” and then there’s one more hug. Caitlyn is normally so strict about the cussing, what with the sudden influx of small children, but this time she’ll let it slide. Nina certainly isn’t one to have a potty mouth (she says it scares the mice). “You’re alive! Oh my god, you’re alive? Clarice! Does John know?” Her gray-brown eyes are already welling with tears, but she’s wiping them away and letting Clarice go and rambling all at once.
Clarice nods. No matter how excited she is that the Struckers are alive and well, this might be too much… excitement. Nina gets it, or she must, because she sets a rabbit in Clarice’s arms and asks sweetly “Caitlyn, can we go inside and eat?”
This, paired with the stressed rigidity in every fiber of Clarice’s being, clues in Caitlyn, who responds, “Of course,” and she pulls Andy along with, “Andy, could you help me check her stitches?”
Then it’s just Clarice and Lauren and the animals, and Lauren is dragged away when there are sniffling sobs heard inside and a mournful call for “Laaaaauureennnn!” by two tiny voices.
And then it’s just Clarice and the animals. Clarice likes Nina.
Clarice sits with the animals, and no one bugs her because nobody ever goes out there. It calms her down, and she finally feels the exhaustion of the past few days catching up to her. The Struckers are alive, the animals have put her at ease, and she’s back home, so her mind and body relax enough to brush off the thorny vines of fear, and she climbs to a tree branch just high enough to be hidden, and she relaxes against the trunk. Nobody is nearby except for the birds that settle on the boughs around her. She can hear them chirp.
You have wings, and they aren’t meant for flying away.
It’s not that the dream is any scarier than normal– it’s the same genre of dream that Clarice has been having for the past six months, just red like blood and blue like fear and purple like her– but she wakes up terrified. She hadn’t been falling in her dream, but she wakes up falling, and she doesn’t know why because she’s half-asleep, so she assumes that her wings broke and now she will plummet to her death.
But she doesn’t plummet to her death, she just hits the ground, cushioned somewhat by the leaves and pine needles at the base of the tree she fell asleep in. Bruised, scraped, and now with a fresh sense of how terrifying falling can be. No more sleeping in the sky.
It’s dusk now, so she slept for a while, and she can feel that in her bones, but it isn’t the rested feeling she was looking for. It’s more of an anxious buzz, like coffee at three am or cocaine on an empty stomach. Can’t stay still, can’t do anything either.
She goes inside. Runs into Lorna before anyone else, and there’s the baby. Clarice nearly chokes. She hasn’t seen a baby in so long.
“Oh, Clarice,” Lorna smirks at Clarice’s stare, “isn’t she the cutest? Her name’s Aurora.” Clarice can only nod, she tries to smile but it gets strangled between her intentions and her actions. “Want to hold her?” It’s been something like 10 years since she was trusted to hold a baby, and she’s itching to take Lorna up on the offer, but she’s not sure she can trust herself. What if she hurts her? “It would really help me out, I want to go get some food,” Lorna commented, casting an accentuated glance down to where a few people were setting up a dinner of sorts in the main room. That gives Clarice an excuse, and she nods cautiously, and Lorna deposits her little bundle of joy in Clarice’s arms. Clarice tries to stifle the wince of pain when the weight is deposited, realizing that her fall may have bruised her ribs.
The baby has Marcos’s black hair, and Lorna’s blue-green eyes, and ears that look more like Clarice’s than either of her parents. She smiles and laughs a baby laugh at Clarice, who is instantly in love with her. The pair wander around the more deserted corners of the bank (and there are several of those because everyone else is eating), and Clarice will occasionally poke the baby’s face, creating hysterical, bubbling laughter that soothes the scars in Clarice’s chest and makes the discomfort from holding a squirming baby against her bruised form worth it. Aurora doesn’t look at Clarice like she’s lost something, and she doesn’t bother about the growing swell of bruising on Clarice’s forehead from falling out of that tree, and she doesn’t need answers about six missing months, she just coos in amazement and giggles when Clarice plays portal peek-a-boo.
John wasn’t expecting to see Clarice’s head portalled three feet away, or to see Aurora laughing hysterically in her arms, or to see Clarice giggling back at her, but there the scene be when he ascends the stairs. When she spots him through her portal, Clarice puts her head back in place and holds Aurora closer, her smile fading and her eyes looking apologetic. That’s what puts John off guard.
“Want, um, want dinner?” he inquires.
Clarice can’t say yes– wants to, but can’t make the syllables. She redirects, “Look at her ears.”
John does, and he thinks he’s being sly when he looks at her, instead of the baby, and says “They’re cute, right?”
“Shut it, Proudstar.”
And there’s the old Clarice, for a flashing instant, and John smiles wide enough that Clarice forgets to realize how loud she’d said it. Aurora claps her hands against Clarice’s face with a cackle.
Nina comes to the top of the stairs. “Jackson said to come get you,” she tells Clarice, “he says you’re hungry.”
Walking towards the stairs, John gives Nina a visual once-over that catches far more than anyone else could. “Did Caitlyn give you the go-ahead for using the stairs on your own? It looks to me like your stitches are acting up.”
Nina frowns, annoyed for the first time that Clarice has seen. “She said it was fine yesterday,” she insists, “and they only itch a little because I was playing with Laura and Gideon.”
“Laura plays so rough…” John mutters under his breath, and there’s a knowing fondness and a worry in his voice.
Aurora shifts restlessly, Lorna’s eyes scrunching and Marcos’s lips curling and an unnatural warmth growing amongst the folds of the blanket she’s in. Clarice knows the start of an “I miss mommy” fit when she sees it, and starts down the stairs to the main room, letting Nina grab the fingers of her free hand and casting a glance over her shoulder to check if John is following (he is, he pretty much always will be).
If there was ever a doubt about how much of a difference half a year can make, it’s gone when Clarice sees how the Underground apparently does dinner now. Lauren and Wes make dinner with the help of some of the more culinarily-minded of the children– and why are there so many kids in the Underground now? Clarice will have to ask John later– and lay it out on a big table, which everyone grabs off of, buffet-style, before settling down somewhere nearby. When Clarice had left, there had been over a hundred people crammed into the bank, and now it’s somewhere closer to 35, with at least twenty of those being kids. It felt warm, hot– uncomfortably hot– burning– she was going to burn to ash in a place like this with such warm people all around her– she was used to cold and empty not warm and full– what was she going to do with herself she was going to burn.
“Clarice?” It’s Marcos. “Sorry about that,” he says with a sheepish smile, “her powers take after me, so she does this when she gets fussy.” Oh. Aurora generates heat. Clarice hands the infant to the father. That doesn’t really seem to calm him down. “Oh, shi– shoot. Might want to have Caitlyn– oh, she’s eating– Andy– gone–”
“I’ll get it.” That’s John. “What happened?”
“Aurora got fussy, burned right through her blanket– again.”
John laughs good-naturedly, “She’ll run us out of blankets one of these days.”
Marcos smiles softly– he loves his daughter too much to be angry with her– and wanders off to get her some food.
John nudges Clarice’s shoulder in the direction of the vault/med bay, but doesn’t grab her hand and lead her like Nina does. It’s a good choice. He can hear how fast her heart is beating and how hard she’s working to keep her breath under control, he can practically feel how dizzy she is just by watching how her pace has slowed to keep her feet in line. If she got spooked by sudden contact earlier, she might snap if he tried something like a hand on hers now.
That in mind, he takes his sweet time pulling out the burn ointment from the drawer, and the bandages and pain relievers from the various cabinets. Just when he’s setting them down on the table next to where Clarice is standing, staring vaguely into space, he notices the bruise on her cheek and the angry red scrape on her collarbone.
“Where did those come from?” The question is direct, and harsher than John intended it to be. Clarice’s jade eyes blow wide. “Sorry.” He really hadn’t meant to even say that, but he kind of got spooked himself.
“Felloutofatree,” Clarice answers, her whole face contorting a little bit as she says it, like it’s painful– but that’s probably just the burn that she’s finally feeling. Her arms have turned to protectively cover her midsection.
Now that she’s said it, of course she fell out of a tree; the cuts and bruises he can see paint a scene for his powers that has him wincing in sympathy. He hopes that the parts he can’t see, the parts she won’t show him yet, are okay. Going back to the drawers and cabinets of medical supplies– because now he needs band-aids and stuff– John realizes that he would much rather be at five minutes ago when Clarice told him to shut up, so he goes for some light teasing. “What were you doing in a tree?”
This, Clarice can’t answer, and he sees that in the way the purple marks contort on her cheeks, and how her eyes screw themselves shut, and how tears leak out. Oh, shit, whoops. Hasn’t even been back 24 hours and he’s already managed to make her cry– and what’s worse, he hasn’t figured out how to respond fast enough, and she’s wiped her tears and started opening the burn ointment before he moves on from standing there with a box of band-aids like a dumbass. He coaxes the bottle from her hands and starts dabbing the ointment onto her left arm, if only to be doing something useful.
“Doesn’t that hurt?” He whispers it, because he wasn’t even really talking to her, because he doesn’t want to make anything worse.
But she still answers, so soft that John knows he wasn’t supposed to hear it, not soft enough that he missed it, “Not anymore.”
The shiver of fear that crawls up John’s spine, painted red like blood and blue like fear, begins to explain to John why the purple marks on Clarice’s face bend themselves out of shape when she tries to open her mouth.
Everyone who knew Clarice before gives her time and space– and they say it’s because she needs it, because she startles easily now and she’s got a skittish look in her eyes now and she’s quieter now, but if we’re cutting out the crap it’s because they need it, because she snaps more easily than before and then she’ll well up with apologies and tears and won’t know what else to say and they don’t know how to handle it. Something happened to Clarice, and she’s different now, and everyone who knew Clarice before are trying to put two and two together, but it keeps coming out as three. Clarice has the missing digit locked in her throat, but even she couldn’t really tell you how to get that little shit out of there.
Most of the new kids though– the ones that Clarice nearly-correctly assumes are from some abandoned care home for mutant kids– they didn’t know Clarice before, and so they just take her as she is, in their kiddish way, and assume that she’s always been the type you shouldn’t try to spook and that she’s always been the type to speak more with her body language than her mouth and that she’s always been the type to never really sleep or eat. They never knew her before whatever happened to her, and they don’t need time to adjust, or answers, they just want her to teach them how to make cookies and to supervise them so that Lorna and John agree to let them play outside by the forest with Nina’s animal friends and to smile at their jokes and antics.
Unsurprisingly, Clarice finds the kids easier to be around than the adults, the new easier than the old. She knows that something is wrong with her and she knows it’s not fair to the people around her and she knows that she needs to fix herself, but she physically can’t, and hardly knows how. But she better figure it out quick: she can’t sleep, eats so little that Caitlyn starts asking Lorna about eating disorders, and has lost the ability to talk about anything.
Ju seems to get it, somewhat, and she’ll come sit next to Clarice, sometimes– they don’t ever really say anything, but Ju will just sit there and hum and eventually she’ll stand up and smile widely and say “Good talk, kid,” and leave. Clarice likes their talks. They’re quiet.
John sticks close by when he’s not busy, which is just infrequent enough that it isn’t intimidating. In her head, Clarice knows she would have just been annoyed by this before, would have told him to get a job and quit worrying, but now it just reminds her of guards posted at every door and of guards following her to every room and of guards with little buttons on a little remote to shock her when she spoke out of turn and of guards who never left Clarice alone. It’s good that John stays busy
He’s not busy on the warm, lazy afternoon when he accompanies Clarice and the kids out into the forest behind the bank– not far, just far enough that the deer will come out and play. Nina is in the lead with Laura.
“It’s amazing they get along,” John murmurs.
Smiling softly, Clarice agrees, “yeah, they’re so different.” John nods, but Clarice can tell that wasn’t exactly what he meant. “Where’d they all come from?”
“Most of them came from a tip we got– a band of kids wandering the country, gathering more mutant children as they went– they’d gained a facebook page and an alert on the Sentinel Services bulletin by the time we swiped ‘em off the streets. They say their moms were killed down in Mexico, and Laura was the only one to ever really meet her father. Logan, if you can believe it.”
“Logan, like Wolverine!?” Clarice is whispering, drawing back from the kids to stay out of earshot, “Holy shit! Where’s he now?”
“Dead. Died saving them.”
“Oh my god.”
“Then there’s Nina, who just sort of wandered in one day– massive, infected cut on her chest. She barely pulled through. Guess who her dad is.”
“I don’t know, Mark Wahlberg at this point.”
“Magneto.”
“You’re shitting me. These are the tiniest badasses I’ve ever met! I would literally die for them!”
John laughs, and it infects Clarice, and then the kids want to know what’s so funny, and John tells them that they should probably stop here if they’re going to be so loud.
The birds come down first, because they were always the least shy, and then the squirrels, and then the rabbits, and finally the deer. There’s a fawn this time, and the mother doe will only really let Nina very close to her, but the buck seems to want to show off his massive antlers and rubs them against a nearby tree, while the rest of the does settle down on the infantile spring grass and leftover winter leaves. John, having not been on one of these excursions before, is absolutely captivated, and looks like a very large child the way he’s playing around with the rabbits and getting excited when a bird lands on his finger. Even the kids are giggling, watching the proud, stoic leader of the Underground look mesmerized by a squirrel climbing on his head.
After circling the clearing once, to make sure things were as safe as they seemed, Clarice sits down in the roots of a tree, and three baby rabbits accumulate in her lap, and a doe adjusts herself to sit closer. John is a little endeared when he realizes these are the same animals Nina had been whispering to moments ago.
Everyone enjoys playing with the animals a little while longer, and then Laura tugs on Nina’s sleeve– which alerts all the animals by proxy, which alerts everyone else– and points to the tree roots Clarice took up residence in. Her eyes are fluttering, brow is furrowing, head is wilting to the side. Inwardly, John is relieved: he hasn’t seen Clarice sleep since she got back home nearly two weeks ago, he had been starting to worry that she was going to collapse. Outwardly, John becomes confused when all the children start to hum the same song, and then they’re outright singing it, a soft song, almost like–…
“What’re–?” John doesn’t get half of his question out before Laura is gripping his arm and giving him a very stern look, without stopping her singing, of course. He should warn her that if he were anyone else she might have broken their arm (they still need to have a talk about gentleness). Still, her methods worked, because John uses his free arm to zip his lips. Then, and only then, Laura releases his arm. Nina is telling the birds to accompany them as well, and the effect is the most peaceful thing John has ever witnessed– and, if we’re being real here, what is more peaceful than a bunch of children and birds, surrounded by woodland creatures, singing quietly in the woods?
The whole thing lasts for about two minutes, during which nobody looks directly at Clarice, but everyone monitors her, until her eyes close fully and she is slumped against the tree trunk and her breathing, John can hear, is even and slow and deep: until she is truly and fully asleep. At that point, Jackson gives a thumbs up, and, in increments, the kids resume the former noise and vigor of their play.
“What was that?” John asks the Nina-Laura pair.
“She’s sleeping,” Laura answers.
“We help her sleep,” Nina adds.
“It’s the only way she ever sleeps,” Rictor explains, “and the naps don’t last long.” When John gives a worried look, Rictor smiles, pats his shoulder familiarly, “Don’t worry, I watch the kids while she’s asleep.”
This grabs a chuckle from John’s chest, and he returns the shoulder-pat (nearly knocking Rictor over), “Thanks, Rictor.”
John has the urge get closer to Clarice while she’s so vulnerable, as if sitting next to her when she’s got her physical walls down could help him get through to her, but the moment he scoots in her direction, Laura is there with a worried pout.
“Don’t,” is all she says, and her expression says that this is a request, not a demand.
There’s no chance to ask why though, because Jackson stops playing with the squirrel at his feet and says “She’s up!” At which Nina asks the animals to leave, and they all wander back into the forest.
But she’s not up. Well, not at first. At first, there’s just the grimace that distorts her face. And then there are the flickering portals– blue like fear and red like blood and purple like Clarice– that pop up all over. And then there’s the grumbling, and that’s when John steps in, despite the tacit protests of several of the children.
He shakes her shoulders, “Clarice, Clarice,” before regretting not listening to the children when Clarice does something and he’s thrown back six feet against a tree and Clarice screams and there’s no time for John to shake off the hit and ask what the flying fuck before Clarice has thrown herself through a portal to god knows where.
Four of the kids run over, “John, John, are you okay?” Another several hold very still and try not to be seen, clearly terrified. Rictor sighs heavily. Laura glares at John and says “I told you so.” Nina has already grabbed Jackson and started tracking.
“I’ll help,” John offers the duo, standing up and starting in the direction they had been going.
One girl, Jamaica, frowns. “Don’t bother,” she snaps, “she needs a minute.”
“She’ll come home,” Laura assures John, and she sounds tired of him, like a mother with a child who’s made the same mistake so many times.
They go home, and Clarice isn’t there, and she doesn’t come down for dinner. The kids go out with her again three days later after begging and pleading, but John doesn’t see her for another six days, and she won’t look him in the eyes anymore.
Lauren and Wes hear about the whole thing from Bobby and Charlotte and Delilah while they make hamburgers and macaroni for dinner the next day. They’re complaining that, just because John didn’t listen, Clarice was hiding again. Hiding is an apt word for Clarice’s behavior– neither Lauren nor Wes has actually seen her eat anything in the past two weeks (although she had to have been eating something, probably).
“What did John actually do?” Wes asks, and he’s hiding his laugh, because he’s he can’t really see John– the perfect leader– screwing up bad enough to scare Clarice into hiding.
Delilah gives a hefty sigh, spilling frost all over the counter in the process, “He woke her up, and Laura had asked really nice for him not to and everything.”
The teenagers exchange a look– much like food, they haven’t seen Clarice sleep in the two weeks she’s been there either. Even if you wake up to go pee at three in the morning, she’s either wandering defensively outside or sitting in a second-story windowsill, much like a stray cat.
It’s Lauren who asks, and she’s trying not to sound too incredulous, “How did you get Clarice to sleep?”
Charlotte smiles wide, “Well, Nina puts the animals in her lap, and Jackson gives her some congestions–”
“Suggestions, Charlotte,” Bobby
“Some suh-jes-chuns, and then when she starts to close her eyes we sing with the birds. Rictor makes sure that we’re all safe until she wakes up.” Charlotte sticks her tongue out at Bobby, who rolls his eyes and returns the gesture more fondly than he probably intended.
“But you don’t wake her up?” Lauren presses, “When do you go home?” If Clarice sleeps as infrequently as everyone suspects, then these naps she’s taking in the woods might actually literally be the only sleep she’s getting, and it’s gotta last for hours in that case.
Delilah crosses her arms, smearing stains from the hamburger meat she was trying to shape all over her apron. “She wakes herself up pretty quick,” her tone says ‘duh,’ “She gets all frowny in her sleep, and then she starts opening portals all over the place, and then she sits straight up and yells, and then we go home– it’s kind of funny,” she admits with an impish grin.
Wes’s smile drops, he’s getting the feeling that these excursions are less safe than they had previously assumed.
“She has bad dreams,” Bobby explains to them. It doesn’t fill in as many holes as he thinks it does.
The teenagers exchange another look, this one decidedly different than the first.
“Why was it so bad that John woke her up then?” Lauren asks– her hands are still molding hamburger meat into patties, but her mind is absolutely everywhere else.
“He stood right over her,” Delilah groaned, “shook her shoulders– it scared her so bad she threw him.”
Threw him. Not “screamed at him,” or “hit him,” but motherflipping threw John motherflipping Proudstar. He is not a small man, and Clarice is a small girl– I mean, you can still see every rib when she’s got a sweater on, there’s just no way.
“Threw him?” Wes presses.
“Yeah,” Delilah spouts, now that she’s got their full and undivided attention, “She snapped up like this and then there was purple sparks like this and then John flew, like, this far–”
Bobby senses that they have shared something they shouldn’t have, because now both Lauren and Wes are frowning, he grabs Delilah’s hand to stop her theatrics. “Does she do that often?” Lauren asks softly
“No, only if you touch her while she’s sleeping,” Charlotte supplies (and she’s the only one still earnestly working on those hamburgers), “she threw Laura once– but Laura’s tough too, so she was okay.”
Starting to panic, Bobby tries to see if he can dig Clarice out of the grave they’ve dug her in the frown lines in the kitchen staff’s faces. “You can’t tell anybody,” he insists, “please.” Delilah and Charlotte don’t really get it, being younger, but they play along with puppy dog faces because they trust Bobby’s instinct.
Wes gives in first– because if a kid’s willing to plead for a secret for someone, then there’s got to be something behind it– “Okay, we won’t tell,” Lauren gives him a sharp look for speaking for her, but he ignores it in the moment, “but you’ve got to be careful.”
“We are careful,” Charlotte insists.
“It’s John who wasn’t careful,” Delilah grumbles.
“And now Clarice won’t take us to see Nina’s friends in the woods,” Bobby pouts.
“And we’ve come full circle,” Wes grins.
“Can we finish dinner already?” Lauren begs.
Lauren and Wes definitely talk about this later, and they decide that there are a few people they shouldn’t be keeping this from.
While Lorna trains the kids old enough and willing, it’s Marcos’s turn to watch Aurora. He feels a little bad leaving the brunt of the work for keeping the Underground running to John, but he does suppose there has been a lull lately. With the Cuckoos spiriting away over half of their fighting force, there is the silver lining that their new group– the Hellfire Club– has been drawing pretty much all of the fire by making a ruckus up north somewhere. Agent Turner has been relocated there, and Sentinel Services no longer sees much value in the Underground station that has lost most military (and therefore monetary) capacity. And since the Hellfire Club is getting all the publicity, that’s where the refugees are being drawn nowadays. The Underground will get the occasional straggler (or, in the most recent case, a small horde of mutant children), but mostly they’re all going to the place that’s doing something at the moment, and that’s kind of perfectly fine. The Hellfire Club has more violent measures than the Underground prefers, but– and Marcos hates to admit this– usually the guy who goes down deserves it, and there’s very little collateral. They’re good at what they do, and they have the resources to take in the huddled masses of mutants that the Underground could barely house. Now, the Underground is little more than a home with open doors, and there isn’t much to do besides the occasional supply run and making sure none of the kids have disappeared.
John usually does the former, and Marcos or the Struckers or Ju will go with him. The latter used to be a bit of a toss up– one day Ju and the next Sonia and then Wes and then Marcos and then and then and then– but now, pretty consistently, it’s just Clarice. All the kids love her, and she seems to open up a bit around them (or, at least, she’s smiling once in a while).
But today, Clarice is nowhere to be found, and she hasn’t been anywhere for at least four days. The kids know why, and they aren’t telling. More surprisingly, John knows why, and he’s not telling either.
Fortunately, Marcos knows something that nobody else seems to remember: Clarice loves Zingo, and Zingo loves the couch in the basement. Dogs will never judge you or make you uncomfortable, they just want you to pet them.
So Marcos makes his way to the basement, making faces at Aurora as he descends the steps, and he almost sits on the couch, except there’s the faintest flicker of purple sparks remaining on it, next to a bewildered Zingo, pawing at something that is clearly there, but that nobody can see. Ah. Invisibility. It wasn’t something Marcos knew she could do, but he’s doing his best not to be too surprised by it– she’s hiding from him, after all.
But Lorna has done worse, and Marcos is consequentially well-practiced in baiting out hidden people, and he has the perfect lure squirming discontentedly in his arms.
“Okay, Aurora,” he coos, “you wait here on the couch, I’m going to go get you a bottle.”
And he leaves her alone on the couch– or, well, not alone, he supposes, but it sure does look that way to a concerned Clarice. When he comes back twenty seconds later (just because he knows Clarice is there doesn’t mean that he’s not going to hurry back), Clarice is too busy murmuring something funny at Aurora to notice him, and he announces his return as non-startlingly as possible with the sound of his footsteps across the concrete floor.
Clarice still jumps. “Oh, sorry, I’ll go,” she squeaks. To be honest, she looks awful– she’s gotten thinner, if that is even possible at this point, her cheeks are starting to get gaunt and her eyes are bruising from a lack of sleep; she must have showered at some point, because her hair isn’t matted even though she clearly hasn’t brushed it and she doesn’t smell awful, but that looks to be the extent of her self-care. Marcos, paternal instinct kicking in, and forgetting to say anything, hands her the bottle and runs back upstairs, returning with a package of cookies and a banana and a juice box. They were the easiest things he could grab so fast, and they’re what Wes gave some of the younger kids when they had just arrived in the Underground and were too stressed to eat.
“Trade me,” Marcos dumps the food into her lap and steals Aurora back with her bottle.
With tears in her eyes, Clarice eats the banana, and then the cookies, and then drinks the juice box. It’s silent except for Clarice munching cookies and Aurora getting fussy after her bottle.
Torn between not wanting to upset Clarice and feeling like he should upset the silence, Marcos says nothing, save the occasional conciliatory murmur to Aurora, who is definitely ready for a nap now.
Even Clarice’s eyes are fluttering closed, and the way she looks, the way she’s acting, she needs the nap bad. He could ask Caitlyn, but Marcos doesn’t think you need to be a nurse to be sure that going without sleep for as long as Clarice has can seriously damage your health. Aurora drifts off without too much more fuss, and it almost seems like Clarice will follow her. Bright green eyes– too bright, feverish– open some and close more and open a little and close all the way and then they don’t open for a few moments. Zingo lays down at Clarice’s side. It’s a full-on siesta now– and Marcos is almost ready to join in, his eyes are slowly closing…
And then Clarice sits up fast enough to give Marcos vicarious whiplash and starts to dry heave– the green eyes that are clearly much too bright are blown wide open with fear of something that clearly isn’t here. There’s no chance for Marcos to even try and comfort her, ask what’s going on, nothing. She throws a portal open and throws herself through it so fast he barely sees the sparks– red like blood and blue like fear and purple like the girl herself.
That night, when he and Lorna are laying very still in bed, trying to get a wiggly Aurora to sleep between them (Sage and Ju work on a crib in their spare time, but they haven’t found a mattress the right size yet), Marcos decides that if anyone is going to know what to do about this, it’s Lorna. It’s not just that she was held in a similar place, albeit not for nearly as long, she knows what it’s like to struggle with your head not being in quite the right place sometimes, albeit not nearly this severe. Bipolar disorder isn’t anything like–… whatever Clarice has going on… but it’s probably closer than anyone else can get. And Lorna and Clarice knew each other, were friends. If anyone can get to the bottom of this, it’s his overworked girlfriend.
“What’s up?” She requests– she can see when he’s overthinking before he even starts overthinking, and she knows it won’t stop until he lets it out
Without even trying to beat around the bush, Marcos asks “You seen Clarice lately?”
“No, but I heard an interesting story about her from Lauren and Wes– who heard about it from some of the kids.”
“Really? What happened?”
“Somehow, she managed to throw John several feet in the air. On accident.”
“John’s, what, four times her size?”
“God, at least. Wes said Delilah wasn’t super clear, but it seemed like Clarice used some sort of energy-releasing power. I don’t think she was able to do that before.”
“About that,” Marcos adds, a little nervously, he feels bad talking about Clarice when she isn’t here, but it does sort of have to be done, “I saw her earlier, and she can– somehow, don’t ask me how– use her powers to turn invisible.
“Like, you can’t even see her?” Lorna exclaims, exciting Aurora enough to make her crawl over and flop onto her mom’s chest.
“Well, you can see the little sparks, that’s how I knew it was her,” Marcos explains, resetting Aurora back in between them. “But, babe, she looks awful. There’s food in the kitchen, she can grab it anytime, but she’s getting thinner. She doesn’t look like she’s slept since she got here– she almost passed out right next to me, but, babe, she didn’t look like she could sleep, even if she wanted to.”
“Marcos, honey,” Lorna deadpanns– no-bullshit is the only way to get through to Marcos when he gets all worked up over a basket case (although, Lorna supposes she’s the pot, and Clarice the kettle)– “I’ll talk to her in the morning, but Aurora can hear your worry.”
It’s true: the baby is getting anxious, and it shows in the reddening grimace on her face, the huffy baby breaths that spell out the closest to fear that a 6-month old can manage to convey.
“Sorry, sweetheart,” Marcos coos, petting his daughter’s wisps of hair, “Daddy’s done stressing now. He’s actually going to bed this time.”
Lorna giggles– and it isn’t that she laughs especially rarely nowadays, but Marcos can never really get enough of the sound.
Lorna hardly has time for anything, between a baby and teaching prepubescents how to control their powers and helping keep everything running in the Underground, and she likes to keep it that way. She doesn’t mind how few her spare moments are, because that means there are fewer moments when she’s thinking about the people the Cuckoos took with them and Clarice’s final scream that echoed through the communications link and the hollow eyes of children that have lost too much. However, not every single moment is occupied.
It is in one of these rare moments when the prepubescents are off playing and Marcos has taken the baby and John has told her with a hopelessly empty voice that there isn’t much for her to do for now that she finds Clarice perched on a windowsill, her legs hanging out the other side, leaning precariously far over the edge.
“You’ll fall sitting like that,” she starts, and Clarice, by way of greeting, turns slowly around to give Lorna as close as she ever got to a smile these days.
After several minutes, and a decided battle within Clarice’s mind that is revealed in the way her marks twist over her face, she states simply “I like windows.”
With anyone else, Lorna would have left the comment at that, but it took Clarice so long to say it that it carries a weight that Lorna can’t seem to set down. It takes her a minute, but Lorna deciphers it, and interprets, “There weren’t any windows in that hellhole, were there?” With a face that has absolutely lit up, Clarice nods.
Oh, god. Lorna has been an absolute disphit.
It hasn’t been that Clarice won’t talk, she realizes with growing embarrassment, she can’t, and she’s been trying to maneuver around that for three weeks now. Guilt comes down as Lorna realizes that Clarice hasn’t changed as much as everyone thought she did, those bastards just locked her entire personality up inside her, and she needs help letting it out. Clarice had needed help, not time. Dumbass.
An echo of John’s dejected voice from earlier rings in Lorna’s ears, and two and two starts adding up to, like, 3.8 in Lorna’s head.
“What happened with John?” she asks Clarice, raising an eyebrow now that she has a more certain footing of what she’s dealing with– that is, Clarice, her friend.
There isn’t a huge gap of time in this admission, but it takes a deep breath out of Clarice to say “I hit him,” and before Lorna can ask why the flying fuck, Clarice is spilling everything in an exhale “I was sleeping and he woke me up really suddenly and I didn’t mean to I just–” and then her lips lock up again, and she can’t say anything else. Lorna can now recognize her tears as those of frustration– and it must be really fucking frustrating to not be able to talk about anything– and how could she have missed that crucial difference?
This one takes some inference– a hop from what Wes and Lauren said and a step from what Marcos said and, like, half a leap from what Clarice said– and then Lorna ventures “Flashbacks?” When Clarice’s eyes dart up to look Lorna in the eyes, she knows she’s got it. “You can’t sleep because you have nightmares about–… what they did.”
“Doing.” Clarice corrects, but when she doesn’t elaborate, Lorna is left to fill in the blanks: whatever they did didn’t stop when Clarice escaped. A violence Lorna hasn’t felt in a long time rattles the metal lock on the windowsill. How could she have been this blind– how could they all have been this blind? It should have been clear– it is so clear it might as well be transparent. They left Clarice to fight her demons alone, just like they did in that warehouse six months ago. Absolute idiots.
Lorna calms herself down fast though. “Why don’t you just, ya know, apologize?” she asks, sitting down in the empty half of the windowsill.
“How can I?” Clarice snaps, “How can I explain it? I hurt him, and– and–” now the warning sign that Clarice had reached her maximum word count has evolved from a grimace to seizing breaths and a full-body tremor and her eyes starting to bug out of her head. “I hurt him and I didn’t want to.”
Lorna, honestly, has instantaneously passed right by freaked out and gone directly into a motherly panic, because now Clarice’s eyes are starting to roll back into her head. Lucky for her, there’s a stampede of footsteps coming up the stairs, and there’s John looking horrified and nervous, with a small brood of children squishing past him up the stairs. Not exactly helpful, but reassuring that there’s someone there.
One of them, Jackson, murmurs “She’s figured it out.”
Somewhere along the line, Lorna has actually just grabbed Clarice and is holding her on the floor, because god forbid she fall out the window.
“How can I explain that to him?” Clarice whispers. Her face is screwed up in pain, and she’s clutching the sleeve of Lorna’s sweater hard enough to stretch it out.
“Well, I mean, you just explained it to me,” Lorna mutters.
And then Clarice passes out.
John has been shifting nervously at the top of the stairs (while the five children who had come up with him are all anxiously sitting near Clarice, and holding her hand, and petting her hair), and when Clarice passes out he erupts “What was that?”
“What was what?” Lorna asks demurely, obtusely, with a smirk. Yes, that was scary, and it should be: they all deserve a bit of a scaring right now. Besides, Lorna knows John, and she knows that all of Clarice’s efforts in the past thirteen minutes would be wasted if she apologized for her, if she explained away the accident for her. John’s got to figure this one out on his own.
“She was– her heart rate– breathing–”
“Should you really be listening to a girl’s heart without her permission, John?” Lorna teases, she’s trying to take the tension out of his shoulders. Clarice isn’t dying, just exhausted and napping. She’s trying to tell him to calm the fuck down.
The message doesn’t go through. “Lorna, this is serious,” he snaps, and it’s loud enough to startle the kids, loud enough to have Andy Strucker poke his head out of his family’s room. John hasn’t ever raised his voice at Lorna, not once.
“She talked to me,” Lorna responds, and there’s a chill in her voice that warns John that, in any other situation, this wouldn’t be resolved without consequences. John looks sufficiently chastised. “Now help me put her in a bed– I don’t think she’s slept in one since she got here.”
Waking up in a bed feels wrong to Clarice– correction, she thinks it feels wrong, she was told it should feel wrong. She stands up too fast, and the pain in her ribs from that fall from the tree when she first tried to sleep at the Bank (the bruising that never really healed properly) kicks in, and she almost falls over, but manages to land on the bed like she’s been sitting there the whole time.
That’s when Reed Strucker walks by, and he sees her sitting there, and he stops mid-step. For a man of something like mid-forties, he somehow managed to look like a deer in the headlights all the time. It’s one of the things Clarice knows she couldn’t say out loud– correction, it’s one of the things Clarice knows she shouldn’t say out loud.
Couldn’t and shouldn’t are very different.
And Clarice is going to prove it.
“Hey, Reed,” she greets with a plaster-fake smile (Hey, what was your name? Jefferson? Bzzzzzzzz.), trying to control the way her body is starting to convulse and her head is starting to feel light (You gotta respond eventually, you sack of shit. Bzzzzz.), “You look terrified, did I do something?” (What? Scared of someone half your height? Bzzzzz.)
And then there’s the inky blackness of unconsciousness again.
When Clarice wakes up again, it’s to Sage and Ju murmuring quietly to each other from a cot nearby, and Ju sees Clarice’s eyes open and grins widely, “Sweetie, look, she’s awake.”
Who knows how long Clarice has been out– and it’s just occurred to her that even she has no idea whether it’s been hours or minutes since she talked to Reed Strucker. Time was something she wasn’t allowed to talk about before. She’ll take what she can get.
The shaking comes earlier than last time, it starts before she’s even opened her big mouth, and Sage sees it and panics, but Ju sees it and grins wider. Ju gets it.
“How long have I been asleep?” She asks (How long have I been here? Bzzzz.), and she forces her consciousness to stay afloat over the torrent of emotions that she knows are forced and sensations that she knows are not there (Jeez, what time is it? Bzzzzzz.). There is no collar on her neck (When are we going to– Bzzzzzz.), she’s not going to be shocked (How long until– Bzzzzzz.), but her body disagrees (When can I get out of this cell? Bzzzzzz.).
Sage calls for John and Lorna (What? Can’t take me down a hallway by yourself? Bzzzzzzzzzz.). Ju answers with bright grey eyes “seventeen hours. Good luck.” (Don’t hurt her! Bzzzzzz.)
Clarice just misses the stomp of boots up the stairs behind her eyelids.
Her eyes flicker open like light switches this time, and she’s still not sure how long she was out, but it was long enough to make her feel good– or maybe that’s just how it feels when you start to peel the paint off of the walls someone put in your head. Either way: refreshing.
The kids are nearby this time, several of them anyway. Nina and Rictor and Jackson are sleeping, while Laura watches Clarice with wide, wide eyes. She can’t practice with the kids, she doesn’t want to scare them. She’ll stay awake for a few minutes this time.
Laura beams– and she doesn’t do that very often, Clarice feels blessed– and begins to shake Nina awake. “Nina, Nina,” she whispers, “Clarice is awake!”
“Hm?” Nina rubs her eyes until she’s sitting up, leaning heavily on Laura, “What time is it?” she mumbles.
Laura looks at her little pink watch. “3:46 a.m.,” she says, and then (after a moment of counting on her fingers) tells Clarice, “Ju told me to tell you that you were asleep for twelve and a half hours this time.”
“Thanks, Laura.”
This seems to spark a memory for Nina because she digs around on the floor underneath the cot they’re on and pulls out a sandwich. “Lorna said to give you this,” and then she digs out a water bottle and adds, “but then Marcos said to give you this too. Take both, they said.”
Clarice smiles, it feels more genuine than any smile she’s forced on herself lately.
The half of the sandwich that Clarice can fit in her stomach gives her more energy than she reasonably needs at nearly 4 in the morning, but drinking the water seems to settle it down and then she’s just comfortable.
“Clarice,” Nina asks, “Is something wrong with you? Are you hurt?” her brown eyes are wide and afraid– and Clarice is reminded of her own eyes the night she first got back to the bank, unsure and unknowing. Laura holds her eyes like brittle steel, like ice: it’s a strong front to hide the fact that she is just as terrified.
Even though they probably don’t see much of it in the half-moonlight dropping through the window behind her, Clarice grins, and it’s open and wide and somewhat malicious. “Not for long,” she hisses. “Why don’t you two go to sleep, it’s late,” she tells them more softly. When Laura seems inclined to argue, she makes an exaggerated yawn and whispers at a level very much audible from any distance “I know I’m going back to bed.”
“John said to keep an eye on you– Caitlyn said so too,” Nina argues, but she doesn’t have much room to be fighting this, she looks exactly as exhausted as a 9(ish) year old would look being woken up at four in the morning.
“Well, you won’t be seeing much,” Clarice informs her pointedly, “just me sleeping– and when was the last time John got mad at you anyway?” She expects a laugh, but gets a worried look and makes a mental note to have a discussion with John when she gets the ability to say things like she wants to. For the moment, she just whisper-hums “Goodni-ght,” and pointedly lays down like she has instantaneously fallen asleep.
After a few long minutes: “Is she really asleep?”
“No.”
“Why don’t you think so?”
“No one falls asleep that fast– except my dad when he was dying.”
“She’s not dying. I promise.”
“How do you know?”
“The birds told me.”
A long pause– so long Clarice almost thinks they are sleeping.
“Nina, why do birds know so much?”
“My Papa told me it’s because they’re always up so high. They see everything up there, so they know a lot more than people do.”
More silence.
“Laura?... Oh…”
When the silence presses on for long enough that Clarice is certain they’re both asleep, she says the one thing she’s been wanting to say since she cut that tracker out of her arm in the safehouse before she even got to the bank: “My arm really fucking hurts.” There’s the shaking (Do I get to take breaks? Bzzzzzz.) and the dizziness (Hey, I don’t think the bone is supposed to poke out like that. Bzzzzzzz.) and the uncomfortable waves of feelings (Ow, ow, ow, fuck, aaagh. Bzzzzzzzzz.), and then Clarice is asleep again (I’m going to die, aren’t I? Bzzzzzz.).
This time, Clarice wakes up at around 3 pm the next day (someone has left a clock on the floor next to the bed)– and she has to say if there is one advantage to her new method of stealing her autonomy back it’s the fact that each blackout she has plunges her into a deep and dreamless sleep: long, restful, and unplagued by horrific nightmares. With all of these forced naps, she’s starting to feel her old pep come back.
There’s nobody right nearby at the moment, so she stands up (carefully this time, her ribs still hurt like hell) and starts to wander around.
She considers going to see Zingo in the basement but has a better plan on the way there. If her ribs still hurt after falling out of a tree three weeks ago, then they might need something more than nothing. She ducks into the vault, where Caitlyn is detailing to Andy the difference, in mutants, between two chemicals with names much too long for Clarice to even pronounce.
Andy sees her first, and he greets her with a joke, “Oh, hey, done with seizures for a few minutes?”
Trying, and being mostly successful, in grinning back, Clarice informs him plainly, “They’re not seizures.” She’d tell him what they are, but she doesn’t think she should say that if she wants to be conscious enough to hear what Caitlyn has to say about her ribs– if she can even manage to stay awake after she talks about them.
After giving her son a raised eyebrow, Caitlyn smiled a mother’s smile, “Nice to see you awake, Clarice. Did you need something? Or just saying hi?”
Taking a clearing breath, Clarice steels herself. She won’t fall this time. “Actually,” here comes the test, “my ribs are killing me.” Twitching (Fuck, that hurt. Bzzzz.), throat closing (You can’t expect me to train, my arm’s broken! Bzzzzzz.), light headed (Can you at least throw me a box of bandaids? Aspirin? Bzzzzzzz.). But not down. “I fell out of a tree about three weeks ago, and I think I bruised them.” She’s shaking hard now (Please, please, it hurts. Bzzzzz.), feels like she’s suffocating (... Bzzzzz.), but she won’t fall.
She’s scared Caitlyn will ask why she’s trembling and practically hyperventilating, but the woman, bless her soul, just responds to her concerns, “Well, I’ll have to look at the area– is that going to be okay with you? I’ll have to look under your shirt.” Clarice nods, she isn’t sure she can speak any more than she already has. “Andy, go bug your sister,” Caitlyn tells her son, and he saunters out of the room as nonchalantly as he can (while being very concerned). He closes the door on the way out.
Cool, gentle fingers lift Clarice’s t-shirt out of the way to reveal bruising that’s more discoloration than swelling now– red like blood and blue like fear and purple like the marks on Clarice’s face. When Caitlyn looks up to make sure Clarice’s previous consent stands, Clarice nods obligingly, trying to get at least her breathing under control. The same cool, gentle fingers move over the bruises, not pressing hard enough to hurt much, but enough to feel for anything poking out where it shouldn’t be. A stethoscope listens to Clarice’s breathing, heartbeat. Nothing moves fast. Nothing moves unexpectedly. Nothing hurts. Caitlyn is good at what she does. Clarice calms down.
“Nothing seems broken,” Caitlyn announces after several minutes, “but there might be something fractured that I can’t see without an x-ray.” She sighs airily, maybe remembering some far-off day when she had an x-ray, and this might have been easier on her then. “Well, either way, not much to do– except I’d recommend not lifting anything heavy or running long distances. Try not to stress anything is all.” She smiles brighter, and then seems to remember something and holds up a finger, “Wait right there.”
She dashes out the door and returns with an Andy, who’s looking reluctant and eager all at once. “Mind if this guy takes a look at those burns? The bandages definitely need changing.” Clarice had nearly forgotten about the burns she had gotten from holding Aurora before, had sort of started to see the bandages as sleeves. Caitlyn had accosted her about a week ago to force her to change the ones John had put on, but fresh ones were a good idea. Clarice nodded and Andy went to work with a nervous expression.
John. There’s another thing that needs to be changed. It had been unintentional, but she had probably really hurt him. Throwing someone six feet in the air tended to do that. I mean, it’s John so it’s probably healed by now, but that doesn’t mean Clarice shouldn’t apologize. She hadn’t seen him in at least a week though– maybe he was just really busy. John was next up for Clarice to visit, she decided. An apology probably wouldn’t send her over the edge, probably, and then she could visit Zingo after it all.
“That doesn’t hurt, does it?” Andy asked– and she actually had no idea what he was referring to, so she just shook her head. The kid was almost endearingly nervous, and Caitlyn was smiling knowingly.
“Am I your first real patient?” Clarice asked, the corners of her mouth turning up just a little.
Andy doesn’t answer, just swallows nervously and tries to secure the end of the bandage on her second arm. Caitlyn nods, her nose wrinkling as she contains a laugh.
“Not a whole lot of dangerous stuff going on while you were gone,” Caitlyn explains. Her eyes sober, shade, sadden. Clearly, she understands that Clarice wasn’t so lucky, and there’s something else, something underneath that she doesn’t say.
In the meantime, Andy has finished with her arms, and they don’t look much worse than his mom’s work. Of course, there’s still a lot he needs to learn about everything else, but his bandaging skills are up to par.
“Thank you,” Andy says. It startles Clarice, who has absolutely zero idea what she’s done to deserve a “thank you.” Andy clarifies, “On that last mission, you saved us. Literally. And you paid the price for it too.” He clasps his hands together, an anxious habit he no doubt picked up from his father, “Lauren and Sonia and I, we can never really thank you enough for that.”
Somehow, Caitlyn has teared up, and Clarice is left flabbergasted– it’s the first time she’s heard Andy talk seriously about anything. In the end, all she can think to say is “Better me than you.”
Andy gives her a warm look, and Caitlyn has excused herself from the room, Clarice realizes she’s shaking again. She hadn’t realized that those words would give her a reaction. Curious, Andy asks “My mom was totally sure it was some kind of seizure– what is it?” He’s not pushing, just curious.
Clarice feels inclined to answer anyway– she’s tired now. Taking a deep breath to ready herself, she answers “My body still thinks I have a shock collar on,” and there’s the hyperventilation (What is this thing? Bzzzz.), the paralyzing waves of dizziness (Take it off. Bzzzzzzz.), the black (What? This thing supposed to keep me quiet? Good luck with that. Bzzzzzzz.), black (Jesus, fine, I’ll keep my mouth shut, just stop doing that. Bzzzzzz.) sleep that she’s more than ready for (... Bzzz.).
It’s almost eight in the evening when Clarice next opens her eyes. Her naps are getting shorter, and that’s very likely because she’s catching up on most of her lost sleep. Lorna and Marcos are sitting on the cot across from her this time, talking quietly amongst themselves, and Aurora has been left snuggled up with Clarice. The baby isn’t asleep, but she isn’t squirming either, just tapping Clarice’s face with one hand and smiling to herself.
Giving Aurora a mischievous grin, Clarice creates a portal above her head as quietly as she can, and she sticks her head through, and Aurora cracks up when she sees Clarice’s head appear just outside the window behind Clarice’s body.
Her parents, looking up sharply at the sound, all but shit themselves. It takes them about two and a half seconds to remember Clarice’s power set and calm down, and then they laugh too. Clarice pulls her head back through the portal, looking sheepish.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you,” she says (Scaredy-cat. Bzzzzz.)– and it’s easier to say today than it was two days ago.
Lorna looks fascinated, “You didn’t use your hands for that portal, did you?”
“Uh, no.”
“Crazy.”
And, just because she knows she can, and she has the energy to do it after sleeping for nearly three days straight, her smile widens, “Wanna see something else?”
Both Marcos and Lorna nod, both looking like they know what she’s going to do already, and Clarice slips herself halfway into a portal– effectively invisible. “See, I told you,” Marcos hisses enthusiastically.
Lorna laughs and asks, “Okay so what about combat capability? I heard you threw John several feet in the air.” She’s half teasing, but the other half has a morbid curiosity to know how portals can create such explosive capability.
Clarice’s face darkens marginally, “Ah, he’s probably still upset about that, huh?” And of course he would be– it’s rude to throw your friends, even unintentionally.
“Not as upset as he is about you hiding from him,” Lorna responds flatly, and this is about 30% joke. The joking tone is now just a formality to soften very real information. Hiding? Okay, maybe hiding is what she had been doing– but it wasn’t like she meant to hide from John specifically. She’d been hiding from everyone, and it wasn’t like she was enjoying it either. Clarice is capable of being self-aware: she knows she looked like shit and she knows her conversational skills had fallen off a cliff and she knows she had been liable to pass out and/or freak out at the drop of a hat. The last thing she had wanted was to hurt somebody again, hurt somebody that couldn’t just shake it off. But still, pinpricks of pain well up in Clarice’s chest at the thought of John assuming she had been avoiding him. Apologizing is definitely next on her list– apparently, she has more to apologize for than she had initially realized. It suddenly occurs to Clarice that she hasn’t seen John in any of the times she’s woken up on this cot. She misses him.
When it becomes clear that Clarice has picked up the hint (okay, it wasn’t a hint, really, more of a statement), Lorna adds with a smile that purrs “I’d love to train with you sometime– see what other upgrades you’ve got hidden.”
Returning the smile somewhat awkwardly, Clarice responds “Well, I mean, it wasn’t like they were torturing me for information– I’d never tell them shit.” (Ha, it’ll take more than a hot stick to make me talk. Bzzzzzzz.) Oh, whoops. (I’m not telling you shit. Bzzzzzzzzzz.) That cuts the conversation short with shaking and gasping breaths (I don’t care where you stick that knife, it’s not happening. Bzzzzzzzzz.) and her consciousness dwindling (How long are you going to try this? Bzzzzzzz.), dwindling (I’m not going to talk. Bzzzzzz.), dwindling (Just stop it. Bzzzzz.) into nothing (... Bzzz.).
She hadn’t realized what she was saying until it was out of her mouth.
That felt good.
This time Clarice wakes up just 2 hours later, at 9:30 p.m. The downtimes are getting shorter– or maybe she was woken up early by the impatient growl of her stomach. She hasn’t eaten anything since the sandwich the kids gave her yesterday: the first things they train out of you are asking questions and getting food. Clarice had taken a step to tackle the first beast when she asked Ju and Sage for the time, but food might even be harder.
Before any of that, however, Clarice has some unintentional wrongs to right, so she stands (slowly) and heads down the walkway towards John’s room. Nobody else is really awake (except she can hear Sage or Reed typing away at a computer downstairs), so there’s no distractions or ways to stall. She reaches his door much too fast.
John’s door seems impenetrable, even though Clarice knows she just has to knock. What’s she even going to say? And how is she going to say it in such a way that she won’t just topple like a house of cards mid-sentence?
Well, Clarice has never been good at thinking things through to the end, so she just knocks before she’s ready.
The door opens almost immediately, but John doesn’t seem to expect it to be her, he trips over his words two, three times before finally managing “Clarice, you’re up.”
“That I am.”
“Oh, uh, come in,” and the door swings a little further out so Clarice can enter the sparsely furnished room. He seems nervous– arms crossed, but the fingers of the arm on the bottom are twitching if you know where to look (spoiler alert: Clarice does)– but Clarice couldn’t tell you why: he’s not the one who threw someone and then avoided them for three weeks.
“Look, I don’t want to keep you up too late, so I’m just gonna say it,” Clarice has never been good with small talk, or beating around the bush. “I’m sorry–” and she pauses to make sure she can finish this (I’m sorry! Bzzzzz.) “for throwing you, that one time, and for avoiding you. I didn’t mean to–” (I didn’t mean to– Bzzzzzzz.) She stops herself there (Do you even know what an accident is, dipshit? Bzzzzzzzzzzz.). Her breath is running away from her and her consciousness might be following soon (I’ll do better next time. Bzzz.).
As opposed to responding to her apology, John seems lost in his own thoughts. I mean, he’s looking directly at Clarice, but he’s clearly focusing more on the way she’s barely able to keep her knees from collapsing than what she’s saying– or, so it seemed, but he deepens his frown and says “No, I’m sorry for scaring you: I should have listened to the kids.”
Deep breath, (one two three), deep breath (one two three). “Did I–?” Clarice isn’t sure she wants to finish the sentence, but she refuses to half-ass it and goes for it anyway: “Did I scare you?” She’s been avoiding him because any conversation they have will culminate to this question. She wants him to say “oh no, of course not, you aren’t terrifying at all;” she wants validation that she’s not a freak after what they did to her, are doing to her. Logically, anyone would be scared shitless after someone comes back from the equivalent of certain death (in all the ways that count) acting like a feral cat and just accumulating angst, and then throws your ass against a tree, but Clarice can always hope. After all, it is John, and he’s never really let her down in the past.
“Well, I mean, sort of, yeah,” Clarice feels like her heart should sink at that, and it would if it weren’t for the sheepish beam John is trying to stifle on the other side of the room. “It really scared me when you started avoiding me–” which is not what Clarice was asking (although, if she’s honest, it pretty much hits two birds with one stone, one of which is filling her insides with feathers). Changing the vulnerable smile to an impish one, John informs her, “If you don’t make fun of me, no one will. Lorna’s too busy nowadays.”
Clarice grins, chuckles, lets out some of the scream that’s been building in her for weeks in a laugh– and it feels like paradise on earth, feels like she’s two years old and she’s just said her first word, feels like spring just blew out the snow drifts of winter and that shit just left.
Feeling how hungry she is, she moves for the door behind her, “Well, I’m going to go eat something, I’m starving–” and she’s plummeting, unconcerned, towards to the floor (I’m hungry. Bzzzzzz.).
Unconcerned because John is literally four feet away and, like I said, he’s never really let her down before, not even when Clarice is about to fall flat on her face because she did something she shouldn’t have(Are you ever gonna feed me? Huh, dipshit? Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz).
She passes out for a second (Can I have some food, please? Bzzzzzzzzzzz), but it must have really been only a second because she hears the first syllable of her name before she loses it and the last syllable when she comes back around (Please, man, please, even a little bit of food. Bzzzz).
“Clarice!?” He looks horrified, eyes stretched open, looking for something to tell him how to fix this. Why had she fallen? Should he go get Caitlyn? What can he even do in this situation?
Clarice misses some of this, but understands the gist, and elects to discuss it later. “Guess I’m done sleeping, huh?”
He gives her a half-smirk, strained by worry and confusion, “I guess?”
“Well, in that case, you want to help me, uh…”
“Get food?” he finishes– because god forbid she has to pass out again.
“Yeah, that,” and she grins at him for understanding.
“Sure, let’s go.” He helps her up and they both go straight to the kitchen.
It’s uphill from there: difficult and entirely optimistic.
Clarice is doing her best to ask for help when she needs it, and everyone around her is doing their best to help her when she asks. Sonia is still wary because she still feels guilty, but both her and Clarice are trying to get over that. Andy and Caitlyn are a bi-weekly visit for nutrition checkups, if not daily for random scrapes and bruises or daily just because. Lauren and Wes collaborates closely with the medical team Struckers for weight-gaining foods, and they try to incorporate them into the Underground meals as inconspicuously as they can (because Clarice claims it’s ridiculous to base the diets of 36 people off of her, and doesn’t realize that Wes decided to do this because he was running out of meal ideas). Ju and Clarice still have their talks, and they’ve become meditative; rather than heavy silences communicating volumes of understanding, they’re quiet contemplation with friendly company– still silent, less weighted. Clarice had never been very close with either Sage or Reed before, so if anything they’ve gotten somewhat closer since Clarice began to visit them in the strategy room, wondering if there’s any news on Sentinel Services and what all has happened while she was gone. Marcos, who, when not helping Lorna, is usually on baby duty, will sit with Clarice and Aurora while the two of them play, and they talk like they’ve known each other for years, and Marcos will tell Clarice about his family just on the other side of the border and Clarice will tell Marcos about that one time she broke her knee skateboarding when she was 7.
Lorna does actually hold her to the training thing, and it’s somewhat cathartic for both of them. When they spar, Lorna gets to release the anxiety of a baby and the loss of friends and the guilt of what happened to Clarice while Clarice feels every emotion that she’s trying to dredge up and work through fade away in the heat of the moment. Lorna discovers several of Clarice’s new powers– invisibility, no-hands portals, partial portals, floating with portals– and Clarice is spotty on what she says about it. As far is Lorna is concerned, these new sub-powers are so fucking cool she doesn’t need to ask which part of Clarice they sliced at to get them to manifest.
John, now that he knows he’s not being avoided for any reason other than general anti-social tendencies, sticks to Clarice like glue, so he’s pretty much there whenever she needs him. She tries to make sure that it’s not often, but there are unavoidable things– you know, reaching tall shelves and stuff. It’s convenient when he’s nearby though because Clarice can practice talking about stuff. If she wants to practice asking for food, or getting it by herself, or telling someone to stop doing something she’s not comfortable with, or saying something hurts, or talking about any of the things she couldn’t– wouldn’t– talk about before, she can just say “Hey, John, catch?” and he’ll smile a little and nod, and she’ll do whatever she was going to do, and if she falls, he’ll catch her. Recently, she’s been falling less, but he’s still ready to catch her when she asks him to.
Clarice sleeps more normally now too– as normally as she can manage. She still has nightmares, and they’re still bad enough that nobody can touch her, but she doesn’t rely on the kids to fall asleep anymore. However, she’ll take them on a walk into the woods as often as they like, and John comes with them unless he has something important to do. The fact that she lets them use her like a jungle gym now only increases their affection. However, just like Laura and Wes have favorites in Charlotte, Bobby, and Delilah, Clarice has favorites in Laura and Nina. Those two follow her like baby chicks when they have nothing else to do– they’re almost as bad as John– and they insist on eating when she does and sleeping on the bed’s near her (which is really helpful for those eating and sleeping habits she’s trying to fix). It’s terribly endearing, and it has something of a healing feeling for all three parties. That’s not to say Clarice is anything like a parent, or that Laura and Nina are anything like her children, but maybe that wasn’t what they really needed anyway.
What everyone needs, at the current moment, is a good nap. The kind that lasts for about 8 hours and usually starts at about 9:00 pm. It is nearing midnight. Clarice is still up, tossing and turning because it is a bad night, and every time she shuts her eyes she sees a figure hovering over an operating table, hears her own screams echo, tastes the coppery sting of blood, feels the thick weight of a collar on her neck and a painful shock. Sleep is not going to happen.
So, downstairs to Zingos couch it is. She’s careful not to wake anyone on her way down both flights of stairs, but Zingo isn’t alone either– sitting next to her is John, still up and wearing the same bewildered look in his eyes that he’d had the first night she’d come back. His eyes are red like he’s been crying– and, sure, Nina has already told Clarice that the deer said that he used to cry in the woods, but Clarice still hardly believes it.
“Can’t sleep?” Clarice murmurs when she realizes that he’s too lost in his head to notice her.
He glances at her halfway, like he can’t quite bring himself to look directly at her. “You ever have a dream that you wish was fake, but you know is real?” he asks, but then seems to realize who he’s talking to and runs a hand over his face, “What am I saying? Of course you do.”
And John says that like a normal sentence, but it doesn’t sit right with Clarice, feels more significant, feels like a secret. “Want to talk about it?” she coaxes. He’s been helping her, standing right there with her as the shit gets blown, chunk by chunk, out of the fan, catching her whenever she fell, and he deserves, at the very least, an open ear.
“Not until you do,” he counters, and there’s more of that secret.
Clarice sits on the other side of Zingo, and the message is clear: she’s not going to leave him like this. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He seems a little tentative, a little exhausted, and he still keeps his eyes resolutely on Zingo, on the couch, on anything except Clarice. “You know what my powers are, right? I can see the event from the debris left behind, the crime from the blood on the wall, the trail from the broken twigs.”
“Yeah, sure,” she isn’t entirely sure where he’s going with this, but she gets a cold pit in her stomach all the same.
“I– earlier today, before dinner, I caught you, remember?”
“Yeah, thanks for that, John.”
He chuckles a little, runs a hand through his hair, then through Zingo’s. “Your sweater rode up a little, and I saw, um, I saw a scar.”
“Yeah, I’ve got plenty–” this is starting to make sense in a chilling way.
Silence settles, and it feels sickly, like stagnant water or an infected wound.
Clarice can’t handle it, “John, why can’t you look at me?” The red pain of memory can’t handle the thick blue of silence. Pity. That’s why John won’t look her in the eyes. It feels like a bug, crawling all over her skin and stinking of rot. “Fine,” there’s more of a snap to that than Clarice would like to admit. Pity is just a pretty way of looking down on someone– and after an entire lifetime of being looked down on, she’s not sure she can take it from John. “I’ll go.”
He grabs her hand when she stands up, and that isn’t about to stop her, but she certainly pauses when he looks up at her, and his eyes are leaking tears. “Clarice every time I see you I can see what they did to you,” it’s a whisper, she’s reading his lips more than hearing his voice.
Oh.
Oh, god no.
“Which one?” Clarice asks. No response, John’s expression details a confusion as to why it matters. “Which. One.”
“They burned you.”
Not specific enough. “With what?” she demands through clenched teeth.
“A metal rod,” John chokes out.
Oh, that one. Not as bad as it could have been, then. She breathes an audible sigh of relief. Clarice supposes they’ve been lucky: it’s still cold enough that she’s been wearing nothing but thin sweaters, so even the scars on her arms and chest have been consistently covered. If this is what happens every time John sees a scar, they’ve both been lucky. But sweaters don’t last forever– summers in Georgia are hot and unforgiving. There’s no way to keep this under wraps forever. All that, and Clarice has never been good at dodging the point.
So here goes nothing.
Clarice settles back down next to Zingo. “John, do you want me to tell you what happened?” she asks, and he can’t seem to tear his eyes off of her anymore. “I’m not at peace with it– I don’t really think I ever can be– but I will tell you if it’s going to let your brain sleep instead of wondering how bad it was.”
John won’t say he wants to know, because he does not want to know, but he understands that he needs to know because the alternative is his brain concocting every what-if scenario it can imagine at midnight until he is literally in tears. He does not want to know, but the uncertainty is surely worse. “You don’t have to–”
“I’ll take that as a go-ahead,” Clarice interjects, “and you can tell yourself this is me talking it out because I need to.”
“The first thing they do is they put a collar on you,” she starts, “and the collar has a barcode number, and that number is your new name.” John’s stomach has already dropped to his knees. It’s not that he’s never heard stories this bad, but he’s never heard them from people close to him. “My number was 602391.” This is Clarice, and that makes it worse. “You keep that same collar the whole time, and the collars don’t come off for any reason.” As if unconsciously, Clarice’s hand goes to rub her neck, an anxious habit she’s picked up since she started trying to talk about the things that are hard, and it makes a bit more sense now. It’s a reassurance that the collar is gone and that she is where she is and not where she was. “There are two settings on the collar: the sleep setting is for when the guards aren’t around, and with that you get shocked for any loud noise or use of your power; the training setting is for when guards are around, and you get shocked for whatever they feel like shocking you for.” Zingo is really doing her job now, John balling his fists in her fur and Clarice using the rhythm of petting her to soothe her psyche. Maybe at first she’d just been a misfit stray pup, but now she’s as good as any therapy dog. “Speak out of turn? Bzz.” She wouldn’t talk, and that’s why. “Ask for food? Bzz.” She was just getting thinner all the time, and that’s why. “Complain? Bzz.” She had been acting entirely different, and that’s why. “Call one of them an ass-faced sociopath whose spouse never loved them? Bzzzzz.” She hadn’t been herself because they shocked the soul out of her with 100 volts on a dog collar. John didn’t suppose she’d ever wear a necklace without feeling some anxiety, she’d probably be too nervous to live near the buzzing of power lines, her eyes might never get all of the sparkle back that they’d once had. The laws made by bigots who knew nothing had gotten Clarice thrown in a cage that tore out a part of her soul and left the rest of it weeping the red blood and living in the blue fear. There was no certainty that the wound would ever scar over, and there was no certainty that the stolen part of her would ever grow back. John tried to focus on the consolation prize: she got out, somehow, and they’d never get a chance to put a collar on her again.
Clarice is still talking though, “You get fed once when they wake you up and once when they let you sleep.” John has to wonder if, based on Clarice’s recent sleep pattern, the sleep they were allowed there lasted any longer than a few hours a day. “In between is interrogation in the first two months and then training for however long it takes to make you a hound.” Caitlyn has deconstructed the general process of becoming a hound, based on the ones she’s treated. The first thing you lose is hope, then yourself, then free will. Once you lose the first, you rarely keep the other two. What had Clarice been hoping for? What had there been to hope for in all of that?
“How did you–” John interrupts, trying to figure out what, exactly, he’s trying to ask. Clarice catches her breath, which has gotten away from her, and waits (somewhat) patiently. Eventually, he settles for “Why didn’t you turn into a hound?”
She grins mischievously. “I always knew I’d get out if I just kept it together. I’d gotten out of a holding facility before, and this place wasn’t much different. I knew I’d get out.” And then John understands a crucial shade of difference. Clarice hadn’t had hope. She’d had faith. Faith in herself to be able to survive and to be able to get out alive and on her own. Hope is an empty cup waiting to be filled by a soda machine. Faith is knowing you have to push the soda button yourself. He nods slowly and waits for Clarice to continue.
When she does, it’s on an entirely different note. “The interrogation team doesn’t play nice,” she tells him didactically, as if he might be scheduling a visit sometime soon, “but if you survive then the training isn’t as bad.” This talk seems less strenuous for Clarice as it goes on. The more locks she opens in her mind, the more easily she breathes, the less she shakes, the brighter her sardonic smile is, the more this talk is for John than her. “You get no medical treatment unless you’ve passed out, can’t move, or died. They push you as far as you can go and tear at any flesh they can until you can and will do what they ask.”
At ‘tear at any flesh’ John nearly loses it. He saw the scars, or at least one of them. He understands that they really will do that, he understands that Clarice understands that her semantics were pastels and reality is in neon. Clarice notices, uses the opportunity to take a deep breath, give Zingo some more pets, wait for him to be ready the same way he’d wait for her. She’s still wearing that bittersweet smile that she used to wear, before, when she’d talk about something that hurt– the smile that was only a smile because she refused to allow her past the satisfaction of a grimace.
“What’d they want from you?” John probes, knowing that it wasn’t anything personal because Lorna clearly knew since she wouldn’t shut up about it at dinner these past few weeks.
“Me?” Clarice clarifies, like he might be talking to Zingo or a light fixture. “First they wanted portals with consistency, more focus, more stamina, more distance.” And, to be really honest, that might be really useful to have, but it would have been better to have jelly-donut focus for Clarice’s whole life than for lab coats to extract it with brute force and fear. “Then they wanted portals without using my hands. Then they wanted perfect defense using portals. Next was invisibility, and then combat capability–” which explains that one time when Clarice threw John six feet in the air on accident, although the missing piece is how the fuck that involves a portal. “They would have just had me keep adding powers until I was a trained monkey, doing whatever they asked when they asked.” Clarice physically shakes this off and continues “Sucks for them there’s nothing I hate more than doing what I’m told. Broke out first chance I got.”
This, honestly, almost seems fake. That place sounds airtight, even if the collars were the only line of defense, which John was sure they weren’t. “How?”
“Faked a spinal injury,” Clarice says with a proud grin. “Told them I couldn’t move from the neck down– they beat the shit out of me to make sure. They had to take off the collar to take a look, and I portalled my ass straight here– well, right after making a stop to cut out the tracker.”
“And here we are,” John murmurs– noticing the faintest change in shade of light in the air. It must be something like two or three in the morning, the sun hasn’t started rising, but it will.
Clarice echoes “And here we are.” She’s not breathing heavily, pulse isn’t racing, body isn’t shaking– and John would be able to hear it if she were. It’s just like anybody else was speaking, except Clarice hasn’t felt this clear in months. Maybe this talk was more for her than she realized because every word cleared the tar out of her lungs and the seeping puss out of her heart and the ash out of her trachea and the blood red out of her eyes and the blue fear out of her mind. She can breathe. Finally, and it feels like the first time. Something euphoric and uncontrollable bubbles up in her chest and rolls out as laughter and tears and Clarice wrapping her arms around John because the freedom has settled into her bones. She needs to hold onto John because the weight of it all just lifted, and the rapture she feels might blow her away if she doesn’t hold onto something.
John knows none of this. All he does know is that Clarice is laughing into his collarbone and making his neck damp with tears. He’s holding Clarice because he needs to make sure she’s real.
Zingo keeps them company, and the three of them stay like that until sunrise.
The next morning, Lorna has some training scheduled with the Strucker kids, Wes, and Rictor, so Clarice beelines for Marcos. She wants to talk to him about everything she wouldn’t say before, that she had to say in increments. He’s where he normally is at eight in the morning, feeding Aurora and trying to get bites for himself between hers. Clarice all but steals Aurora out of his lap, like she does whenever it is this painfully obvious that he can’t multitask too well, and sits across from him.
“Did it finally happen?” Marcos asks, taking her in.
Clarice beams, “Yep.”
It becomes clear that she has misunderstood the question when Marcos nearly chokes on his eggs and barks with laughter. “You’re serious? I’ll have to buy John a cake.”
“What– why–? Oh, god, Marcos, no! Not that!” Clarice sputters, stilling her hands long enough that Aurora grows warmer and begins to reach for the puree-laden spoon by herself. “It’s done,” she tells him, “I’m free. Watch this: Marcos, you are a crack whore in an alpaca’s body, and you suck at cooking eggs.”
“Do I really?”
Clarice rolls her eyes. “No. You know your eggs are the closest thing we’ll ever get to ambrosia on this planet. Can I have some?” He passes the plate. “The point is that I can say it, and I don’t get the shakes, I’m not woozy, my breathing doesn’t pick up like a bulldog at the beach– Marcos, look at me, I’m free!”
“Okay, so the cake will have your name on it then,” Marcos amends, grinning wider, and Clarice erupts with laughter just because she can, so loud Marcos joins her. She’d never been big on shows of emotion before, but being deprived of the option to laugh or scream or cry or smile somehow makes you want to be as honest and loud as you can, just to spite the assholes who’d try and stop you. “Seriously though, Clarice, I’m so proud of you,” Marcos tells her. “What happened?”
“I told John everything,” Clarice’s eyes are glowing, even when some baby food drips onto her hand when Aurora pushes at the spoon. “And now, somehow, nothing hurts. It’s like as soon as I told him everything else went away, and I’m just me again.”
Marcos has never truly experienced a secret so heavy that just telling someone frees you from its weight– even his dealings with the cartel had always been as open as the air, if stressful– but he knows the glowing ebullience in Clarice’s eyes and the excited bounce to her knee. He’s seen it on his girlfriend’s face when she admitted to him the struggles she’d had with her bipolar disorder. It’s the face of someone freed from their own mind.
Smiling affectionately, Marcos puts a hand on her shoulder, “Well then, it’s good to have you back, Clarice.”
“Thanks, Marcos,” she responds, and then Aurora gets grabby again and Clarice feeds her the last few bites of her breakfast. When Marcos finishes his breakfast as well, Clarice returns his daughter to him and nearly skips away to see her little ducklings, who were just rising upstairs.
Laura is the first awake and, as always, is on high alert when she notices that Clarice is not in her normal bunk. Clarice uses her tension to sneak up behind her, whispering “Boo!” and grabbing her shoulders (it spoke to how comparatively calm Laura had become since arriving at the bank that this did not send her claws ripping through the mattress).
“Clarice, you are never up before us,” Laura immediately fires off, furrowing her brow.
Nina rubbed her eyes awake as well. “Was it a bad night?” she asks. The sight of these two little girls wrapped in a blanket together, bedhead and bleary eyes and all, asking her if she had slept okay, is too much. Clarice wraps them both in as much of a hug as her arms can reach– and while both girls are surprised for a minute, they melt into the hug easily.
This morning is a whole new side to Clarice– a surprising, but welcome side to Clarice.
“Hey, how about just the three of us go into the forest today?” Clarice suggests, pulling back. “Maybe we can walk to town and get something from that bakery you two like.”
Both girls are suddenly very awake, and they’d suggest leaving right now, except that Laura’s stomach growls. It’s a three-mile walk to that bakery.
“Get some breakfast, you two,” Clarice tells them, “I’m going to go see Lorna for a minute.”
Laura jumps up and runs downstairs, but Nina pauses to ask, “What about John? Is he coming with us?”
“I don’t think this time,” Clarice says. On the inside, Clarice wants to shake John awake and ask him to come, but she knows he needs sleep as much as anybody. Just because he’s built like a truck doesn’t mean he runs on diesel. “He stayed up really late with me last night, so I want to let him sleep.”
The explanation suffices, and Nina responds “Okay,” before adding “Laura! Wait for me!” Clarice hears her as she bounds down the stairs grumbling “You better not eat all of Marcos’s eggs again.”
It strikes Clarice with a sudden clarity, as she ambles to where Lorna is finishing the morning training session, that Nina didn’t use to be able to bound down the stairs. She could hardly even walk up them when Clarice had first returned; and, according to Caitlyn, Nina had been bedridden for two weeks when she first arrived, infection verging on sepsis. And Laura didn’t use to be able to either, she was so skittish that she would creep up them as quietly as she could, trying not to be seen or heard. These little girls, and at 12 years old they are little, have seen some shit. Daughters of titans, suffering from their father’s brutal legacies. Children shouldn’t be exposed to the sins of their parents so young, and the prices wrought by those sins shouldn’t be paid by the children in ounces of blood or weeks of pain. But who was Clarice to speak of parents or parenting?
Somehow, she’s already gotten to the training room. “You look like Zingo peed in your bed,” Lorna says, and Clarice starts for a second, but only a second. The fact that it’s only a second, and that it doesn’t leave a lingering shadow in Clarice’s eyes, clues Lorna in somewhat. She doesn’t mention it, just smiles a little more genuinely than usual and says “Want to spar?”
Clarice shakes her head, “Don’t have time, I’m taking Laura and Nina into the woods in a minute. We’re going to walk to that little bakery in town.”
“Sounds fun,” Lorna says.
Clarice nods, “But watch this,” and she throws a portal that slides across the concrete floor of the training room, and it slices through the metal shelf it encounters like a chainsaw through bone. Before Lorna can even start wanting to ask, Clarice explains, “Took me twenty-one days to do that– and they pulled off three of my finger nails for it.”
“Holy shit,” Lorna breathes, “That was literally the coolest fucking thing I’ve seen in, like,” she counts on her fingers, trying to remember, “like, six days!”
“What happened six days ago?” Clarice asks excitedly.
“You showed me that levitating thing you can do.”
“That is definitely a cool one, yeah,” Clarice assents, “took me four days and one session under the knife.”
That gets Lorna’s attention, “Under the knife?”
Clarice lifts up the bottom of her thin sweater, revealing a meshwork of scars, “Some of these.” She’s still excited, but Lorna’s enthusiasm wanes. Before, this might not have bothered her, but motherhood does something to your insides– the baby kicks them so much they turn softer, or something like that. “Sorry,” Clarice pulls her shirt down at Lorna’s stricken face, “TMI?”
“No,” Lorna murmurs softly, “I’m just sorry we didn’t come sooner.”
Clarice forgoes saying that she never expected them to come, never thought that anyone would save her except for herself, and instead nudges Lorna’s shoulder with her own. “I’m here now– all of me.” Then she heads towards the kitchen, calling back “And I’m going on a picnic with my two little ducklings.”
Lorna almosts lets her go, but remembers to wonder, “Hey, what about your really big little duckling?”
“Sleeping,” Clarice stops to tell her.
“This late?”
“Rough night… for both of us.”
Lorna doesn’t worry about how rough. Clarice is okay after it all, and John has never really been shakable. She shrugs and takes a sip of water.
The walk is largely uneventful– unless you count the part where Nina got tired of walking and asked a large buck to carry her for a bit. Then Laura got tired, but Clarice insisted that she could carry her because Nina had fallen asleep on the deer and they couldn’t ask for help without her.
“I’m not too heavy?” Laura asks suspiciously.
“Nope,” Clarice assures her, “I’m tougher than I look.”
And so Clarice walks with a deer and two sleeping children the rest of the way to the bakery– wondering how kids got this tired at just after noon. Then she remembers how fast they were running when Clarice told them to get dressed and put their shoes on, and how long it really took them because they were sprinting in circles because Laura stole Nina’s favorite pair of pink tennis shoes and Nina could not be convinced for at least half an hour to just wear the blue ones she said were her other favorites two days ago. That pretty much clears it up.
At about one pm, when they’re about 50 yards from the treeline, close enough to see your way out but far enough in that nobody in town could really see or hear you, Clarice wakes the girls up. They had a system for this bakery: the girls went in and got the stuff, and they brought it back to Clarice. The baker is a nice enough woman, but that’s without her knowing they are mutants, without seeing Clarice’s eyes and ears and hair and facial markings– and it’s better to be safe than sorry.
“Be right back,” Nina waves as Laura practically drags her through the treeline to the bakery just across the street.
Nobody looks twice at the pair, largely because there wasn’t anybody out to look twice. The only human they encounter is the baker, and she beams at them like the sun through tree leaves.
“Same as always?” She asks, her thick accent (something European, the girls were never sure what) stretching the ‘a’s. Laura nods avidly.
“Yep!” Nina squeaks. Both girls watch with something like concentration as the old baker woman pulls three chocolate-filled croissants out of the warm glass case. Their mouths are watering as Laura (the designated money-holder, because she would rather kill you than unwillingly hand you something) trades money for a paper bag.
“You’re sister waiting across the street again?” the baker asks.
Laura nods, “In the forest.” Neither of them realizes at the moment that, to the baker woman, this sounds very strange.
But the woman is no idiot, and she’s had children and grandchildren who have said strange things before, so she smiles and tells them, like every other time they’ve visited, “Tell her I said ‘hi’ for me.”
“Okay,” Nine promises, “thank you, ma’am–”
And then the door opens. And it stays open as twelve Sentinel Services agents burst into the room with their guns trained on the two little girls with the paper bag of pastries. Laura hands the bag to Nina and her claws rip out of her skin, easier than breathing, easier than the growl escaping her throat.
The old baker woman is having none of this shit, no sir, not this afternoon. She pulls a twelve-gauge shotgun out from under the counter and aims it straight between the eyes of one of the agents. “I’m going to ask you to leave my property,” she tells them.
“Ma’am,” and this agent’s voice sounds rough and garbled, “put the gun down, please. These are not human children, they are–”
“Mutant children,” the baker finishes, “and they’re on my property, which I am asking you to leave. Now.” There’s the sound of a gun safety coming off, but nobody has any idea whose it is.
“Ma’am, they’re dangerous, and wanted criminals,” another agent chimes in.
“They’re barely ten,” says the baker, “and you hunt them like my ex-husband hunts rabbit. I hope they’ve done a number on you in self-defense.” She spits at them, “Now, I will not ask again, leave us alone.”
Despite the situation, Laura’s guard drops momentarily– she hasn’t had anyone point a shotgun at someone for her since her dad died, and it feels nice. Despite the situation, Nina feels something warm in her– she has a best friend and a mysterious old woman who are willing to defend her. However, both girls have faced battle before, even if Nina has just the one experience, and they know that adults will take out adults before moving onto the children. This old woman is their best chance of defense before a fight, but they don’t want her killed.
They are not idiots, and they’ve had parents die for them before, so Nina turns around, trusting Laura to have her back, and says “Go.” What Nina doesn’t verbalize is the reminder that they’ve just told the baker woman where their ‘sister’ is.
The baker woman understands this, but there’s no way she’s leaving two children on their own against twelve Sentinel Service agents and their guns and armor.
When the old woman stands her ground, Laura adds “Please go.” What Laura doesn’t verbalize is the fact that she can handle these men, and that she has Nina by her side. Nothing can ever hurt them if they stay together.
The baker woman believes this. Leaving the gun close to the girls on the counter, the woman backs away slowly, taking a back exit and running into the woods across the street– although, the agents only notice is that she’s gone.
“We won’t hurt you if you come quietly,” the second agent lies smoothly.
“Vete a la mierda,” Laura hisses, and she doesn’t give anyone a chance to undo their safeties, much less pull the trigger, before she’s flying at them with something a hair softer than killing intent– maiming intent sounds about right. Three go down like cards on carpet, and two more fold, but then one of them fires at Laura and it gets her forearm. There’s none of the characteristic bang of a gun, just the soft fwip of a tranquilizer dart. Laura goes down.
Nina, of course, is at the wrong angle to see this and just sees a gun fire and Laura fall, and something snaps like it did in that forest when they tried to take what she loved. Glass shatters as birds crowd the air, and the grates in the floor erupts with mice and rats from everywhere in town. The men can’t see through the wings and feathers, can’t fight through the rats blackening the floor and burdening their legs and biting through their shoes. Just like that time in the forest, they fire blindly. Just like that time in the forest, Nina goes down right along with the one she was trying to protect.
Clarice, way out of earshot of the commotion just through the trees, is starting to get worried about the girls getting too close to the baker when said baker burst through the trees, crying out in something that might or mightn’t be German. Clarice’s first instinct is to hide, but her gut tells her to grab the woman by the shoulders and demand to know “What happened?”
“You’re little sisters– my bakery– they had guns I am sorry!” The baker woman stutters, her old lungs giving out after all the activity. Clarice wastes no time abandoning her fear of being spotted to dart out of the tree line and head for the bakery, which was leaking birds and rats like a sieve.
Nothing in the bakery except a few fallen birds and a few dead rats. Clarice portals to the roof over the bakery to try and see where they could have gone, but whatever getaway vehicle they used, it’s gone now.
Panic in her bones and a buzz of fear and adrenaline in her veins, Clarice sprints to the baker woman in the forest.
John is just finishing his muffin, ambling at his own pace in the direction of the bakery. He’d heard, both from Marcos (who had clapped his shoulder with the hand that wasn’t bouncing a baby, and thanked him) and from Lorna (who gave him a slow, sad look and a sympathetic smile) that Clarice had taken her ducklings there, and while he wasn’t walking fast enough to join them, he’d certainly catch them as they walked back home. Or, he should have anyway, but they must have stopped for a while because he was nearly at the edge of the forest, and there was no sign of them. It wasn’t like he could have missed them– there was only the one trail.
Breaking news: screaming. Angry screaming. Clarice’s livid screams laced with violence and dripping fear.
Of course, both her and the old woman trying to explain herself hear him coming a long ways off– he’s built more like a bull than a deer, he’s loud when he’s running at full speed through dense undergrowth– so Clarice is prepared to let John take over listening to the old woman (a baker, the smells she’s drenched in tells him) while she sits down and tries not to fall into the massive pit that’s opened in her stomach.
“They’re so little, what could they have ever done?” the old woman is howling in a thickening german accent. When she sees John start to open his mouth to ask her what happened, she starts “I tried– I swear, I tried!– I left the shotgun on the counter for them. But they told me to go, to come find her, and I thought she could help but they’re already gone. I am so sorry.”
“Breathe, ma’am, breathe,” John interrupts, and then glares at Clarice. “What did you do to her?” he mouths, gesturing at the panicked state the woman was in.
Clarice shrugs, genuinely unsure, and John wonders if the woman just frightens easily.
“Okay,” John reboots the conversation once the baker had breathed for a minute, “what happened?”
“The little ones, they always come in for my croissants,” the woman explained shakily, “I knew they were mutants, but they’re such sweet little girls, I never thought–” she breaks off, tearing up and wiping her face with work-weathered hands, “and then those agents came in with their protective gear and their masks and they pointed guns at us.” Big tears form and fall in the baker’s eyes, and she whispers “They took those sweet girls, Mein Gott.”
“Go back to your bakery ma’am,” John instructs softly, “we’ll get the girls back, don’t worry.” This woman, for all her good intentions, should be involved in this as little as possible.
“Make them pay,” she hisses, ambling back out of the trees.
John can barely wrap his head around any of it. How had a walk to town gone so wrong? How did Sentinel Services even know where to grab them? And, most importantly, how were they going to get them back? John’s trying to think of the fastest, least risky way to go get the girls when Clarice snaps his attention away with a flickering portal– red like blood, blue like fear, and purple like the marks on her face.
“Ready yet?” she demands impatiently.
He blinks, uncomprehending, and she sighs in exasperation and snaps the portal shut. “Ready for what?” John asks.
“Ready to go get our girls back,” Clarice says. There’s a bloodlust in her eyes that John is unfamiliar with.
“Wh– now? We need backup, and a plan!” John insists, but in the face of Clarice’s scowl, it feels more like a child’s whine than a genuine concern.
Grabbing his arm, Clarice pins him with a glare. “Do you remember what I told you last night? The first thing they do is put a collar on you. Then they send you to interrogation.” John flinches internally. Clarice had explained it so matter-of-factly the night before, but the fear and violence in her eyes was less didactic. “I spent two months in interrogation,” Clarice hisses, “and then they put me in training because my body physically couldn’t take any more damage like what they were doing. You want to see?” and Clarice lets go of John’s arm and rips off her sweater, down to just the sports bra underneath. John can see every single scar above the waistline, can see every cause: this one was where they stuck a knife in the spots only a surgeon would know, that one was where they peeled off the skin on her shoulder, another one where they fucking branded her with an ‘M’. He can hear when she screamed and when she spit in their faces and when she laughed hysterically and told them that there wasn’t anything they could do to her that she couldn’t handle.
And then, all at once, all the scars are gone. Clarice is pulling her sweater over her head. The remorse in her eyes only lasts while she wipes the tears from his cheeks, and then it’s gone and she’s saying “I’m not waiting. I’m going now.”
“Alone?” John snaps suddenly.
“Well, I don’t really want to go alone, but if you’re not game–”
“Just because I think this plan is dumb doesn’t mean I’m going to let you do it by yourself,” John says, huffing with something close to an exasperated laugh. He’s stressed, he’s terrified, he might be slightly emotionally scarred, but these are all feelings to deal with when the source of them has been resolved– and like hell he’s letting Clarice waltz through a portal into the enemy camp by herself. It’s a terrible plan, and if he was capable of stopping her then he might try, but he’s not really capable of stopping her so he’s doing the next best thing and joining her. Two’s better than one, he supposes.
So Clarice shows him a grateful, somewhat impish smile, and she snaps open a portal (and oh wow Lorna was right she really doesn’t need her hands anymore), and they both sneak through it.
It isn’t until they are less than safe on the other side that John asks “Wait, where are we?” and Clarice shushes him harshly and drags his bulky ass underneath a nearby table– a medical table. A medical examination table. There’s dried blood on the floor and John wants to vomit. He can hear a boy’s screams in the flaking droplets.
“Closest thing they have to a doctor’s office in here,” Clarice whispers, “this is where they fix you up and send you back out.”
“They don’t fix people here. They don’t fix people here,” John doesn’t even really hear what he’s saying.
However, Clarice has no time for panic– not here. She grabs both sides of John’s head and says “John, ignore it. We’ll have plenty of time to melt down and freak out and cry later, but right now there are people here that need us.” John holds the hands that are holding his head, and that seems to ground him a bit, help him block out the auto-translate his powers are providing into past events. He takes a deep breath, and Clarice continues, “This is the only place that isn’t guarded and doesn’t have cameras, but there’s no guarantee that it’s going to stay empty.” Grabbing his hands, Clarice pulls him out from under the table. “The girls will be in the holding cells first–” she explains, peeking out the window in the top of the door, “a suit comes in and tries to get them to play nice before they start peeling off your fingernails.”
John follows as Clarice waits for a guard to pass, then counts the seconds (ninety-four of them) before pulling the door silently open. An empty hallway greets them, and John follows as Clarice presses herself to the wall and inches along it.
It’s slow, excruciatingly slow, turtle slow, snail slow, sloth slow, internet explorer slow. John’s muscles are cramping by the time they’ve rounded a corner. The speed is not helping him ignore the shoe scuffs on the floor (where they dragged a woman from her sister), or the dent in the wall (somebody tried to escape, and the guard who found him threw him), or the scraped baseboard (a man clawed at it, trying to beg for solitary instead of training). Their trek is a constant assault of everyone else’s painful pasts, and John is trying to just concentrate on his one goal, involving a three-step plan: follow Clarice, get the girls, leave. Follow Clarice, get the girls, leave. Follow Clarice. Get the girls. Leave. It should be easy, but it’s so slow and John can see everything, so it’s hell with air conditioning.
On the other hand, Clarice seems in her element– as if she’s walked these hallways, just like this, a thousand times. Maybe she has. Who knows. All John knows is that she’s as strong as a spider’s web and as fragile as a water droplet right now. Yes, she’s got her head facing forward on a swivel, and yes she could kill someone at a moment’s notice– there aren’t any physical tells– John just knows Clarice, and he knows that she’s exactly as terrified as him. He knows she’ll pay for this strength later by curling in on herself the same way he does.
There’s no time for soft thoughts, however, because before they know it, they’re face-to-face with a burly man in his forties, and he’s got a little remote in his hands that he’s pointing at them like it might do something. Clarice doesn’t hesitate, she snaps open a portal and shoves the man through, remote and all, while he screams.
“Greenland,” Clarice tells him with a beam, “not so nice this time of year,” and then she’s cut off by an alarm screeching to life and whining through the air. They had forgotten that, similar to themselves, these guards come in pairs. Clarice portals the younger, more frightened man to join his companion in Greenland, but it’s too late now. They’re up to their eyeballs in bullshit now, and they’re about to be as deep in Sentinel Service guards.
Now sprinting– because who cares if the camera sees you now that everyone already knows you’re here?– John and Clarice don’t make it to the next turn before they’re forced back around the corner by a wave of guns and a small litter of spider drones. They’re crouching behind another wall, while the guards waste their bullets on the drywall. Adrenaline spikes, and for John, it turns to anxious annoyance– he gives Clarice a look. A this is why we plan and wait for backup and think ahead look. It’s scathing and upset because let’s all be honest with ourselves: John has a right to be mad. What, was this ‘plan’ supposed to go well? Just waltz on in using a camera blind spot and see how far they got? It was horribly thought out and totally panic-induced.
However, Clarice just sees a scathing look, and so she responds by taking responsibility for her mistakes and darting out from cover and using the explosive power she used to blow John off his feet a few weeks ago, and she chains it to detonate all the spider drones. What she does not account for is the guns, so, by Murphy’s Law, one blows through the outside of her leg and another grazes the curve of her shoulder. This course of action was not what John was intending to convey with his scathing look. It happens too fast for her to process, the shooting, and so she dives back around the corner without even realizing that she’s leaving a sputtering trail of blood.
One with medical experience– that is, Caitlyn or Andy Strucker– would say she was in shock. Fortunately, the adrenaline that accompanies shock makes for an excellent painkiller, and they need a painkiller more than they need to not be in shock. John doesn’t see “shock” when he looks at her though, he sees “shellshock.” He’s a soldier, after all, not a doctor, so he just sees the echoes of little boys in their first firefight missing the top of their pinky without realizing it, or trying to hold their organs in while they shoot with their other hand, or obediently keeping pressure on a gunshot wound as a medic rushes to administer first aid, it’s just that this time it’s Clarice with a scowl on her face and blood starting to seep into her blue sweater. Red like blood. Blue like fear. Blending to create a very Clarice shade of purple.
And then the chaos clicks into place, somewhat.
This is a firefight.
This is the terrain of the battlefield.
Clarice is his only surviving soldier.
They have to reach the pickup point or the hostages will be killed.
This is a firefight.
And then things get easier– like grease over water, slipping over the surface and filling in the cracks and settling on top. Easy. Slippery. Disgusting. Easy.
“Can you fight?” He shouts over the din of flying bullets and the blood rushing in both of their ears and that damned, screaming alarm. Clarice doesn’t answer, just nods, breathing hard.
Her clothes are wrong. Not fatigues. Not camo. Civvies. Wrong.
“We’re going to pick them off, one by one. Get their guns out of the way first,” John commands. “We’re outnumbered and running out of time. We need this done fast, and that means we go hard. You hear me, soldier?”
Clarice’s eyes are growing more dazed, and she shakes it– whether to disagree or to try and clear it is up for debate. “Not a soldier,” she huffs, but she pokes her head out for a second, two, three. Long enough that she should have been shot, but there’s no gunfire anymore.Just her breathing and his heartbeat and the waves of cacophony that come with the goddamned alarm. Switching spots with John, Clarice pulls herself back into cover and sighs heavily. She still hasn’t gotten to the pain yet, but she’s suddenly exhausted. Who knew a handful of portals could be so exhausting?
John is looking out to see a very… let’s call them a very consternated squad of guards who are all missing the front half of their guns. The frontmost man is missing his first finger. There’s no room for complaints or scathing looks– that’s a pretty clean job. Just the guns are gone. No killing, just one missing fingers, and a bunch of suddenly unarmed guards.
John regrets taking so long to be impressed when the guards get their shit together and sprint at him collectively. John’s good reflexes save him from the initial assault, but there’s only so much he can do before falling at the odds of 12 to 1. Or 12 to 2 if you count Clarice, who screams “Back off!” and does the weird thing that makes all of them fly up as far as the ceiling before rattling it and falling to the floor with a collective dunk. This close, John can finally see how she does it: and it’s just air, a lot of air teleported into a space much too small to hold it. Lorna’s going to be ecstatic.
This time, John recognizes that he doesn’t have the time to be impressed, and he jumps to his feet and starts down the hallway. Those men will be out for a solid several minutes, and they’ll be long gone by then. Or, John will. Not Clarice so much. She’s still panting against the wall, not even registering the thin trickle of blood making its way down her arm. Or the small hole at the edge of her thigh.
They don’t have time for this.
Except it’s Clarice, not a soldier.
Do they have time for this?
It’s prison, not a battleground.
Well, they’ll have to make time for this because you don’t just leave your girl bleeding on the cold tile floor.
Because this is a rescue mission, not a firefight. There are no stakes except the lives you brought in and the lives you take out.
So John uses Clarice’s uninjured arm to haul her over his shoulders and run back to the room they first portalled into– something close to a doctor’s office should have something close to medical supplies– and he tries to ignore how her blood is soaking into his clothes too. It’s easy. It’s slippery. It’s disgusting. It’s easy.
“‘M fine,” Clarice mutters, barely audible above the still blaring alarm, but the way John can hear her eyelids fluttering, and how much he is increasingly holding her weight, is speaking to the contrary.
His tongue is already locked up behind his teeth. It’s making him laugh a little– the absurdity of it. Clarice is here for six months and she kicks and screams and cries and tries until she can speak. He’s here for four minutes and he can’t say a word and isn’t sure he wants to. It’s ridiculous. He’s supposed to be the stoic leader everyone needs him to be, but here we are! Looking through drawers for bandages (and, I don’t know, disinfectant of some kind? John isn’t sure an alcohol swab will cover this one), trying not to speak because he’s straining his ears to hear how fast her heart is beating. And is it supposed to be beating that fast? Is that even her heartbeat, or is it his?
Panicking. That is what John motherfucking Proudstar is doing now, and he hides it behind a nervous grimace of concentration.
He wipes off the blood as best as he can with a bottle of disinfecting alcohol and some cloth, then he wraps her shoulder. He’s got no clue how she’s going to walk on that leg, but he finds a tampon in the bottom drawer of the desk and he shoves that in there and wraps it all up like it’s a problem solved. It’s all improv. Burns from holding Aurora John can handle– largely because he’d done it several times before– but he doesn’t have the time to sew anything up and he doesn’t know shit about how to fix a hole in someone’s leg.
Lucky for them, this isn’t the first time Clarice has dealt with this problem. Of course, last time she had been sent to her cell and hadn’t had to run around looking for stolen children, but you know what she’s going to try her best anyway. All that said, her best is currently swallowing the pain she’s starting to feel, barking “Let’s go,” over the alarm, and beginning to limp out of the room.
Six feet and thirty seconds later, she amends her plan. “It might be faster if you just carry me.”
So John carries her and she points him in the right direction. Down the way they’d been going, past the guards who are starting to wake up with massive headaches and sprained everything, to the left, another left, another left, and a right, two doors in. There’s the interrogation room– the nice one where they try to reason with you like a human being. Beyond the door, there’s only a big metal table and four chairs.
No people, not to mention violent little girls. “What now?” he mutters to himself. He can’t really track them. Not here, in this place with so many trails all overlapping, and with the sound of the alarm cutting off any quiet noises coming from more than a few feet away.
“Shit,” Clarice breathes. She’s not even sure how long she’ll be able to be useful. As it is, she’s awake on willpower and necessity.
“No, I know her shoes,” Laura whispers, “she let me try them on one time and they almost fit.” John hears a little voice from under the tangle of table and chairs.
“Laura, stop, somebody else could have the same shoes,” Nina whispers back.
“Then I’ll kill them.”
“No, Laura, you can’t just– Laura!” And both heads pop out from under the table.
“Clarice!” Laura cries, wrapping herself at Clarice’s waist, “and John!” Nina hugs the whole group, as well as she can fit them in her little arms.
Peeling the girls off, Clarice instructs them “Stand very still for a second,” and the girls do, and then Clarice snips their collars with a portal just like she did with the guns earlier. Then she slumps back against John, and the girls bury their faces into the two of them once again.
It’s as close to perfect as you get in a place like this. For about three seconds. Then the alarm drops off. Then there’s a noise like a bass drop stretched into eternity. Then there’s gunfire, lots and lots of gunfire. However many reinforcements are beyond the door of the interrogation room all just empty their clips. Clarice is trying to open a portal, John is trying to protect everyone. Both are failing. Nothing more than sparks for Clarice, and John is feeling, for the first time, bullets penetrating his skin. The only one who seems unaffected is Laura, whose claws rip out of her skin with their normal fervor, although her skin doesn’t heal around it like normal.
“LAURA FLIP THE TABLE!” Clarice screams, and Laura does as asked, and Nina and Clarice work together to maneuver John behind it. It’s metal, that’s got to stop some of the bullets. There’s hardly enough room behind it for everyone. The hail of bullets is denting the table like foil. John is bleeding like he’s got a deadline to meet.
None of them are stupid: they know whatever makes that noise is shutting off their powers.
None of them are stupid: they know this table won’t last as long as those guns will.
None of them are stupid: they know this is the end of the line.
Either they make it out of this or they don’t.
There’s the one entrance to the room. No windows, no other exits. It’s oozing guards and guns and who knows what else. They have no weapons. Just a dented table. John won’t last much longer, not at the rate he’s going. Clarice is rapidly bleeding through John’s patchwork of medical treatment, and she won’t be far behind him. Nina and Laura are huddled together and sobbing.
A bullet flies through the table. It scrapes John’s ear, but he doesn’t even move.
What none of them can hear over the bass of the machine is a shouted conversation between two of the guards.
“I think they’re dead!” “What!?” “I can see blood under the table!” “I can’t hear you!” “I said–” and there are footfalls and there’s the smash of a button and there’s the dying of the noise of the machine and there’s “I said I think they’re dead.”
Everyone hears that last bit. Even the still living mutants hiding behind the dented metal table. Clarice is not about to waste any time letting those guards figure out otherwise.
A portal snaps open below them and four mutants drop into the basement of the bank, right next to Zingo’s couch. The dog herself is there, and barks happily in greeting.
“CAITLYN!” Clarice bellows, and it takes less than twenty seconds for Caitlyn to be rushing down the stairs, thinking one of the kids has finally broken a bone trying to get into the ceiling. She certainly does not expect a bullet-riddled Clarice and John, with a petrified Nina and Laura.
Lorna and Marcos have followed Caitlyn downstairs– because they were pretty sure Clarice was out on a walk to the bakery, but apparently she’s just gotten back and she’s angry for some reason– and they nearly shit themselves. Aurora, snuggled into Marcos’s arms, has actually shit herself, but that is because she is a baby, not because of the sight of her godparents filthy with blood and halfway collapsed on the floor.
“Andy, get a stretcher down here!” Caitlyn calls calmly, and everyone hears Andy begin shuffling hurriedly through things upstairs. “Now!” And he’s shuffling faster now.
“What happened?” Lorna demands.
The girls unfreeze and resume their sobs, trying desperately to explain “It’s all our fault– the bakery– they had guns and they got us– I’m sorry–”
“Sentinel Services got the girls. We went after them,” Clarice clarifies. She’s breathing heavily again, she can barely sit up straight from the pain.
“Alone!?” Marcos snaps.
“Yes, I’m an idiot and I should have waited,” Clarice says, “I’m sorry,” and her voice cracks, “just fix him, please,” she’s crying now, and it’s not the frustrated tears of not being able to let out your own voice, it’s the tears that Laura and Nina are crying: fearful and guilty and grieving. She’s full-on sobbing, and then she just falls over like that and Lorna doesn’t even have time to tell her that John’s already halfway healed.
Of course, John has been awake for none of this. With the amount of blood he lost, he had passed out a few seconds before that bullet pierced the metal table. However, the moment they were through Clarice’s portal, and in the bank, and away from that machine, his body had been healing and restoring the lost blood, and so he wakes up when something starts dripping onto the back of his neck– but before he can sit up, the wind gets knocked out of him by Clarice’s head falling on his back. It’s only then that he really starts to wonder what the heck is going on.
His findings: he is laying on his stomach, partially across Clarice’s lap, and she’s folded over him like a taco shell; Laura and Nina can be heard crying somewhere; Andy’s footsteps are pounding on the ground, and he’s carrying something heavy that his mom is grabbing from him and positioning on the floor; Aurora is getting fussy and crying, but Marcos is hesitating in taking her upstairs to change her diaper because he’s worried; Lorna is leaving the adults to the medical team, and is trying to get Laura and Nina to calm down so that birds will stop flying at the windows of the bank. Overall: the same chaos he fell asleep to, but with a much more hopeful outlook. There’s just one thing that worries him here.
“Clarice?” he murmurs to the form collapsed around him. No response. He’d panic if he had time, but Caitlyn and Andy are already hauling Clarice up and laying her top half on the gurney they’ve brought down. There are no flickering portals, and John supposes that’s a measure of growth. After the weight is gone, John can move, is told to move so they can get to Clarice’s legs– oh shit, her legs. Not that he’d been able to help it, but John’s been laying on the leg that has a dime-sized hole in it. He practically jumps away, and in doing so he alerts everyone to his consciousness, and in doing that the Laura-Nina pair recognizes that he has not died, and they jump at him and cling to him like a tether to sanity John is certain he needs right now.
It occurs to him, like someone broke a vase of water over his head, that nobody in the room can afford to lose anybody else. The way Lorna looks at him, how tightly Marcos holds Aurora, the sniffles that are dampening his shirt, the speed that Caitlyn and Andy carry the gurney up the stairs, the gathering crowd of faces with worry molded and painted into their features cuts like glass. When he realizes that he could lose Clarice– the way he lost her before, the way he lost Gus, the way he lost friends from war, the way he’s lost too many people– that’s the water, and it drenches him with exactly what everybody else is feeling. He looks around, holds the girls tighter in each arm, and follows Caitlyn and Andy up the stairs.
“Mom, she’s got a hole in her leg,” Andy is moaning, “what do you even do when there’s a hole in her leg?”
Caitlyn is clearly at her wit’s end. Nurses for hospitals in upper-middle-class residential areas don’t typically have a need to know how to fix a bullet hole in a leg. “Same way you fix a hole in the skin: you sew it up and wait for it to heal,” she tells him, and it’s a convincing guess. “John,” she snaps, not looking at him, but knowing he’s there, “what happened?”
“M416 assault rifle. Went through the left thigh, and grazed the left shoulder,” he reports. Caitlyn doesn’t mean why were they there or why did she get shot, or why John let this happen, just what did happen. She can handle the rest.
It’s a relief, John isn’t sure he can tread more water than he’s in.
They all wait– everyone in the bank. Wes and Lauren pull together something fast for dinner, and the kids poke at it halfheartedly. It’s not that nobody’s hungry, it’s just that nauseous anxiety has overridden the feeling. John washes off the blood in the shower and throws away the clothes– it used to be his favorite shirt before the back of it got destroyed this afternoon.
“We never even knew you were gone,” Marcos mutters hollowly. “Clarice left at noon, you followed an hour later–” he’s talking to himself, trying to reason away the guilt he feels, “we figured you guys got sidetracked, lost track of time,” after all, this is the second time that Clarice has come back later than expected and riddled with holes. Just this time they can see the red blood, feel the blue fear. “If you guys hadn’t–”
“Shh, babe,” Lorna murmurs, “they’re home. Everyone’s safe.” She’s got a hand running up and down his spine, her head on his shoulder.
Laura and Nina creep up to John, like he’s one of their animal friends, like he might try and run off. “Is Clarice going to die?” Laura asks. Her eyes are hollow, and John can tell that she and Nina have been trying to work up the courage to ask for a while. It’s 5:23 and Clarice has been with Andy and Caitlyn since 4:19.
“No, no,” John assures them, “not this time.” Nobody dies from two bullet wounds if they miss all the organs– right? Doubt brings the tide in. Blood loss. Infection. Complications. Lost time. Any of these things could take Clarice in the time it took for him to give her that scathing look, and for her to run out in front of twenty guns like it was her job. The tide rises higher. He hadn’t meant for her to get shot– of course he didn’t. Why did she do that? Why would she take a risk like that?
“She said she’d been dead and gone before,” Nina admits to nobody in particular. “Did she mean like this?”
“It takes more than this to kill her,” Lorna says, with battle-hardened eyes that nobody has seen on her in several months.
Nina begins to cry leaky little tears, and Laura is the only one who knows why. “The birds wanted to say congratulations this morning,” she whispers.
“You told me,” Laura answers, “you can tell Clarice later.”
Caitlyn strolls out of the medical room then and beelines for the macaroni and hot dog dinner, but pauses before getting herself a plate. “Why the long faces?” she wonders aloud, then frowns annoyedly. “Andrew Strucker,” she shouts, and the boy slips out of the medical room too, “did I, or did I not tell you to come out here and let them know she was okay?”
“Well, you did,” Andy squeaks, “but then you were all like “I need that clean needle now,’ so I didn’t get a chance.”
Huffing, Caitlyn asks “You don’t think you could have done it when I was suturing and you were sulking in the corner?”
“You told me to watch!”
It’s with an eye roll and a cleansing, deep breath that Caitlyn announces “Clarice is fine. Just exhaustion.” Quieter, mostly to John, she adds “And John, were you the one who shoved a tampon in her leg?”
“Yes– was that an issue?”
“Well, the cotton bits were a pain to get out,” Caitlyn jokes, “but it probably saved her from more blood loss. That, and the fact that the bullet somehow missed any huge veins or arteries, was the reason we aren’t asking you all for blood donations right now.” She settles next to him, on the side where the little girls aren’t, and sighs, “That could have gone so much worse, and we wouldn’t have known until it was too late.
“But it didn’t, and here we are,” chimes Andy, who sits on the arm of the couch next to his mom. He’s scarfing down macaroni and cheese, much like the other kids, who are now starting to eat, since the source of the stress has dissipated.
“Is she hurting?” Laura asks quietly.
“On two Percocet?” Andy scoffs, “She wouldn’t feel it if she got hit by a truck. Literally.” The girls smiles shyly begin to return. Andy takes the encouragement and runs with it, “No, really. John, go elbow drop her, she won’t even wake up, I promise.” Laura laughs at that, and then Nina, even John chuckles a bit. Say what you will about the scrawny little medical assistant, Andy Strucker has bedside manner down to an art form, especially when it comes to all the kids. He switches the side of the couch he’s on to be next to the kids and to let Caitlyn and John talk.
“She’ll be fine, John,” Caitlyn reassures him softly, “she just–”
“She just what?” John snaps. He doesn’t mean to. Really. He’s just worried.
But Caitlyn is a nurse worth her salt, and she gets it. “She just needs some time to heal.”
“Sorry,” John mutters.
Caitlyn gives a soft, calm smile, “Don’t worry about it. Just be there when she wakes up tomorrow.”
John isn’t going to take chances with this, so he goes to sleep in Caitlyn’s desk chair in the medical office. He is definitely there when Clarice wakes up the first time, and the second time, and pretty much every time after that until they get old.
Nightmares get worse when they have experiences to draw from. By the time you’re thirty-six with two kids, a husband, and a lifetime of bigoted bullshit to deal with, you have enough nightmare fuel to last you and a small town for at least the next millennium. What if the ghosts of your past come to get you? How about the skeletons in your closet? The demons in your head? What if they come for your family? Your friends?
What if they take all of you and sink your feet in concrete and throw you in a river so you can watch while they take a hammer to your husbands kneecaps and they scrape a knife along your baby girl’s ribcage and they cut the fingers off of your best friend and they wrap you in rebar so you can’t move and you’re drowning drowning drowning and you can’t do anything for them but you can’t watch but you can’t look away and you would do anything to just wake up wake up wake up
And then you do wake up. Drenched in a cold sweat and tearing up and breathing hard.
But then you see you’re in your bed, with the really stupidly soft sheets your husband pretty much needed because of his touch sensitivity that he just decided not to even tell you about until you catch him washing a new pair of jeans five different times because the material was too rough, and you make fun of him for a minute because his skin is way rougher than jeans from all the fights he’s fought, but you also buy him those really expensive and stupidly soft sheets for his birthday anyway. You’re in your room, with the crayon drawings on the wall under the windowsill because your first kid realized your second kid wasn’t big enough to step on the step stool to reach the window so she drew another window below it so her baby sister could also look out the window, never mind that the younger one was too young to know what a window even is at the time. You’re in your house, the one that you had to remodel because the hellfire club decided that the bank would make a perfect battleground for their little war with Sentinel Services, and you and everyone else had to somehow evacuate safely in the middle of it all to go live in tents with homeless people for three weeks while they fought their own fight on top of your house, and then when you got back it was all broken to shit, and repair fell mostly on John and Lorna’s shoulders while everyone else tried to reclaim what was left of their home. You’re home. You’re home and nothing can take that away from you and nobody can pry it out of your fingers anymore. You’re home, and there’s red like the weird new fridge that Lauren found at goodwill for twenty dollars, and there’s blue like the new front door that all the kids put their handprints on after Aurora did it accidentally, and there’s purple like you.