Introduction -- Agents Azrael and Boston
Fifteen minutes later, Az walked into the room full of Agents, Boston ducking in behind her. There was her customary chair, right where it should be. There were all the usual Agents who attended the Meetings. There was Derik, and the somewhat revered Ithalond. It was hard not to revere anyone who had survived C*l*br**n, much less one with as much sanity as he displayed intact. Ilaren, by far the most well-adjusted of the group, sat in his customary place next to Page, the Group Leader, ready to take over should Page be called away. Jane Doe, a relatively small, new face, was there, today sporting a truly impressive beard, into which she appeared to have braided something to make it hang right. Az tried to smile at the young Dwarf lady, but failed. Alyssa Tyniova, and her daemon Kian, sat next to Jane, the Osprey daemon perched on his human’s shoulder. Ethan Sinead was grinning in a very backslide-y manner at Toon, who was slightly out of focus due to a hyperactive vibrating leg-bounce. Kelok, an SGA Wraith, sat quietly, as always, reading a book and waiting for the meeting to start. Little Molly Rath sat contorted in her chair, chewing on the arm, which, Az noted, was a step up from chewing on the person she sat next to. But then, that would probably start later. Jack was trying to climb the wall, as per usual, with Caleb trying to keep him from doing so. The rest of the group was there too. Xericka, Natalie Green, Diana, the Knick of Time, Kestrel, Iratka, Amethyst, Anthony, and Danas, all in their usual places, gave Az the sense of normality that was key to her own sanity, and which her life had been lacking for the past week. Everyone, and everything, were in their proper places, doing exactly what they normally did.
Az took her place between Kelok and the Knick of Time, and was able to muster up a smile for Page. He was a tall, stocky man in his fifties, with shaggy silver hair and a mustache and beard, and a general friendly, supportive manner and attitude. He was the sort of man that anyone would want as a highschool English teacher, but very few got. That last, at least, was what Sheong had told Az. She had never had either highschool or an English teacher, so she herself wouldn’t know.
Az was surprised when Boston pulled up a chair and sat next to her, but the surprise quickly faded as routine took over. Jane had learned a few new words of English, but was still having problems when her beard disappeared at random. Alyssa and Kian had been having a conflict of interests, again, and people had been assuming that he was a Cute Animal Friend, and trying to pet him. Kelok had nearly let his empathy for Holmes get in the way of his mission again. Ithalond was Ithalond, and therefore permanently traumatized by his creation. Ethan was, as Az had thought she had observed, having problems with backsliding into his former Lecherous Jerk personality. Derik spent fifteen minutes apologizing for an apparent Dark Mood that Az had missed last week, while Ilaren tried to tell him that that was Okay Here(tm).
Before too terribly long, the group got around to her.
“You missed last weeks meeting, Az. Why was that?” Page’s comforting baritone was more worried than usual. He knew.
“I…” Az began, then stopped, looking down at her hands and picking at her nail polish. It was chipped. She needed to redo it. She needed to get on with her life. She needed to do what she had been doing for the better part of the last seven years, and forget.
But that wasn’t was BRS Meetings were about. “I was in Medical with Sheong. The fic we were in went sour. We got the bitch, but she got him, too. My partner’s dead. I’ve been reassigned. I haven’t gone to see Farawen since last week, this is the first time I’ve had the Giveashit to put on my makeup since I went into my last fic, I threw my book at my bookshelf and probably broke the spine, my new partner ripped my favorite page when he tripped over it, and I threw him into the wall when he tried to hug me because I was crying because my favorite page was ripped and my partner of four years is dead... And I think I still have my first-ever hangover. And I’ve been speaking in run-on sentences.”
Comforting things were said, and Az was given homework (“Go visit Farawen after meeting. You can introduce her to your new partner.”) and a writing exercise to help with rage and run-on sentences. Az, finding it rather hard to pay attention to the good advice being handed out, made a point about writing it all down for use later. They were right, though. She had to visit Farawen. It wasn’t only her duty, it was one of the few things that she knew would help. She had always been able to get through anything, provided she had Farawen.
Making both a mental and a graphite note to check when children were allowed out of the nursery, Az gave the group the first real, enthusiastic smile she had been able to muster in a week, heaving a heavy sigh of relief as a weight lifted off of her shoulders.
“And what about you, Boston? You’re new here. What’s your story?” Page’s large, round baritone rolled out in friendly, enveloping waves of sound, making everyone who heard it just a little bit more at ease than they had been before.
Boston leaned forward in his chair, clasping his hands in front of him, his elbows propped on splayed knees. “My… my story? I don’t have a story.” He shook his head, and closed his eyes. “My author wrote me as amnesiac until the middle of the fic I was in. I… The first thing I remember is leading a blind girl through a forest. And then… It’s all sort of a blur. The next thing I clearly remember is being thrown into a rock, and breaking most of my ribs. The Sue… ‘healed me’, and I was… forced… a flood of memories. They’re not mine. I know that now. They can’t be mine. But that doesn’t stop them from hurting.” He raised his head, and looked around at the gathered crowd. “I miss them. The people that that man knew. His friends, his enemies, his lovers. I miss them all. Right now it feels like I’ll never be whole again.” He shook his head, again, clearing it this time. “And then this person was informing me that I could either join or die, and then informed me that I had joined. I don’t know why. And, well, I’ve spent the last three weeks in Medical and FicPsych, getting convinced that I’m not, in fact, who I have the memories of, and finding out exactly what I’ve joined. And then my new partner threw me into the wall when I tried to hug her because she was crying. My life seems to have been a long string of getting thrown at things.”
With a sigh, he leaned back, closing his eyes, and waiting.
“So, I’m going to give you…. Homework.” The significant pause and dire pronunciation in Page’s sentence made Boston smile. “You are to find ten things that you like to do, excluding the things that the character you were based off of likes to do - and excluding getting thrown into things - and make a list to bring to meeting next week.”
Boston nodded, and made a quick note in his notebook, ignoring the funny look that the person beside him was giving him for his lettering. It wasn’t his fault that he was imprinted with a writing system that even he couldn’t really understand if he thought about it too long.
******
When the hour of Meeting finally drew to its close - always too short for Az’s wishes - she gave Boston a silent head-jerk, beckoning for him to follow her, and trailed after the cavorting Molly toward the Nursery. The little ferret maid easily had the potential to be one of the most reasonably adjusted in Meeting, when she was older, at least in Az’s opinion.
Entering the nursery, Az was hit with a wave of sound and light and movement, and, in a more literal sense, a small child to the stomach.
“MOM!” The little girl grinning up at Az squeezed tighter, and Az knelt down, hugging her child to her. With her father’s smile and gray eyes and her mother’s skin tone, Farawen didn’t look much like the child that her original writer had intended her to look like. But then, the child had been so under-described at the point in which Az and Farawen had been recruited out of their Fic that it was no surprise that she hadn’t turned out as the Sue had wanted.
Az straightened, picking up her child as she did, and the little girl looped her legs around Az’s waist. “Fara, this is Boston. He’s my new partner. Boston, this is Farawen, my daughter.”
“Hello Boston,” said Farawen, obediently, before hiding her face in her mother’s shoulder. “I miss daddy…” she murmured, so quietly that only Az, her ear a few short inches from Fara’s mouth, heard it.
“Yeah, me too,” said Az, with a small, sad smile. “But we’ve gotta be brave now, okay? Gotta be brave and not let him being gone get us in a rut.”
Boston stood, looking at mother and daughter, his mind filled with memories not his own. They reminded him of the friends that his supposed self had had, once upon a time, before he himself had come into existence.
Shaking his head again, trying to clear it, Boston gave the pair a smile. “I’m sorry that I’m not the one you lost. And I’ll not try to replace him. But… Give me a chance to find out who I am before you decide not to like me?”
That made Farawen look up. “You’re out of fic too?” she asked, blinking at him with large, wide, almost Suish gray eyes.
“I am. And I’m just fresh out, too.” He smiled at her again, encouragingly. “How old are you, little lady?”
“Seven!” she responded, promptly, and for the first time smiled back. If Boston were to use the flowery language into which he had been born, he would say that it was like the sun coming out from behind a cloud.
“Hey Boston? Why don’t you talk to Fara for a minute. I have a question or two to ask someone.” Placing Fara back on the ground, Az gave her a kiss on the forehead, and went to find Miss Cindy.
*****
Fifteen minutes later, she had her answer, and a small backpack full of Fara’s belongings. Like her mother, or, for that matter, her father, Farawen had very little that she would call her own. No more than she herself could carry, in fact. The one exception that Az had found, in her self, at least, was books. It had taken her over a year to learn to read English, under Sheong’s careful tutelage, but since then she hadn’t managed to go for very long without burying her nose in a book. She was rather sure that her collection of books now weighed more than she did. Whether or not Fara would follow her mother’s literary tendencies was yet to be discovered: Thus far the girl wasn’t reading much more advanced than the Animorphs books, but that was a start, and only time would tell.
“Guess what?” she asked, when she had managed to dodge the flying children and get back to her own. “I get to take you back to the RC with me. They’ve decided that it might be a little less dangerous for you to live with me now that I’m out of DMS.” The grin on her face was almost beginning to hurt, but she couldn’t wipe it. She had her Fara back. It was for this little girl that she had ended up in the PPC to begin with. To be fair, this child was the reason that she existed at all, but it was her need to keep Fara safe from what could happen to her that had broken the Suvian influence for long enough to keep Az herself alive, and keep her daughter.
Shifting her balance just in time to not get toppled by a child to the chest, Az gathered up her daughter, and turned back to Boston. “Well, come on. I’ve got what I came for. Let’s get out of here.” Waiting for Boston to unfold himself from where he had been sitting - Really, ‘unfold’ was the only way to put it - Az headed out the door, carrying Fara and the little bag of Fara’s things.
The trip back to the RC was slightly shorter than usual, mostly because Az was crowing internally at having retrieved her child. When she got the door open, Az stopped dead. There was something…. Wrong.
It took only a brief look around the room to note what the wrongness was: There were a whole two extra doors now positioned in the wall behind where her bed had once been, and her bed was gone.
Az gave the doors a carefully calculated look, and then turned back to Boston, and said, rather more loudly than necessary, “Oh, look, they have installed bedrooms. I wonder which is yours and which is mine.” There was an obedient low grinding noise, and when Az turned back to the doors, the Generic Surface had numbers and names embossed into it:
RC 688.5 a RC 688.5 b
Agent Amira Azraelle Agent Boston.
Sharbat Typon,
And
Farawen Typon.
Az smiled, and went into the door marked with her name and her daughter’s. Her own bed still wasn’t there. Instead, there was a bunk bed, the top bunk of which had been turned into an elaborate canopy bed, with a lamp shaped like a black and gray pony with eyeliner and liberty spikes attached to one post of the bed. “I think that the top bunk is yours, Fara,” said Az, amused, lifting her daughter up and onto the bed. It was a bed fit for a Sue Princess of Gothy Gondor, which, all things considered, was appropriate. Fara immediately burrowed into the contraption with a squeak of delight, turning the lamp on and off several times before settling for watching the lightshow it sprayed over the ceiling.
Her mother flopped down on the lower bunk, letting one leg hang off, staring up at the springs of the upper bunk. Well then. A new start, as it were. Heaving herself up out of bed, Az popped her head out into the main room. “I’m going to take a nap. Wake me up if the RC shrieks.”
Az took her place between Kelok and the Knick of Time, and was able to muster up a smile for Page. He was a tall, stocky man in his fifties, with shaggy silver hair and a mustache and beard, and a general friendly, supportive manner and attitude. He was the sort of man that anyone would want as a highschool English teacher, but very few got. That last, at least, was what Sheong had told Az. She had never had either highschool or an English teacher, so she herself wouldn’t know.
Az was surprised when Boston pulled up a chair and sat next to her, but the surprise quickly faded as routine took over. Jane had learned a few new words of English, but was still having problems when her beard disappeared at random. Alyssa and Kian had been having a conflict of interests, again, and people had been assuming that he was a Cute Animal Friend, and trying to pet him. Kelok had nearly let his empathy for Holmes get in the way of his mission again. Ithalond was Ithalond, and therefore permanently traumatized by his creation. Ethan was, as Az had thought she had observed, having problems with backsliding into his former Lecherous Jerk personality. Derik spent fifteen minutes apologizing for an apparent Dark Mood that Az had missed last week, while Ilaren tried to tell him that that was Okay Here(tm).
Before too terribly long, the group got around to her.
“You missed last weeks meeting, Az. Why was that?” Page’s comforting baritone was more worried than usual. He knew.
“I…” Az began, then stopped, looking down at her hands and picking at her nail polish. It was chipped. She needed to redo it. She needed to get on with her life. She needed to do what she had been doing for the better part of the last seven years, and forget.
But that wasn’t was BRS Meetings were about. “I was in Medical with Sheong. The fic we were in went sour. We got the bitch, but she got him, too. My partner’s dead. I’ve been reassigned. I haven’t gone to see Farawen since last week, this is the first time I’ve had the Giveashit to put on my makeup since I went into my last fic, I threw my book at my bookshelf and probably broke the spine, my new partner ripped my favorite page when he tripped over it, and I threw him into the wall when he tried to hug me because I was crying because my favorite page was ripped and my partner of four years is dead... And I think I still have my first-ever hangover. And I’ve been speaking in run-on sentences.”
Comforting things were said, and Az was given homework (“Go visit Farawen after meeting. You can introduce her to your new partner.”) and a writing exercise to help with rage and run-on sentences. Az, finding it rather hard to pay attention to the good advice being handed out, made a point about writing it all down for use later. They were right, though. She had to visit Farawen. It wasn’t only her duty, it was one of the few things that she knew would help. She had always been able to get through anything, provided she had Farawen.
Making both a mental and a graphite note to check when children were allowed out of the nursery, Az gave the group the first real, enthusiastic smile she had been able to muster in a week, heaving a heavy sigh of relief as a weight lifted off of her shoulders.
“And what about you, Boston? You’re new here. What’s your story?” Page’s large, round baritone rolled out in friendly, enveloping waves of sound, making everyone who heard it just a little bit more at ease than they had been before.
Boston leaned forward in his chair, clasping his hands in front of him, his elbows propped on splayed knees. “My… my story? I don’t have a story.” He shook his head, and closed his eyes. “My author wrote me as amnesiac until the middle of the fic I was in. I… The first thing I remember is leading a blind girl through a forest. And then… It’s all sort of a blur. The next thing I clearly remember is being thrown into a rock, and breaking most of my ribs. The Sue… ‘healed me’, and I was… forced… a flood of memories. They’re not mine. I know that now. They can’t be mine. But that doesn’t stop them from hurting.” He raised his head, and looked around at the gathered crowd. “I miss them. The people that that man knew. His friends, his enemies, his lovers. I miss them all. Right now it feels like I’ll never be whole again.” He shook his head, again, clearing it this time. “And then this person was informing me that I could either join or die, and then informed me that I had joined. I don’t know why. And, well, I’ve spent the last three weeks in Medical and FicPsych, getting convinced that I’m not, in fact, who I have the memories of, and finding out exactly what I’ve joined. And then my new partner threw me into the wall when I tried to hug her because she was crying. My life seems to have been a long string of getting thrown at things.”
With a sigh, he leaned back, closing his eyes, and waiting.
“So, I’m going to give you…. Homework.” The significant pause and dire pronunciation in Page’s sentence made Boston smile. “You are to find ten things that you like to do, excluding the things that the character you were based off of likes to do - and excluding getting thrown into things - and make a list to bring to meeting next week.”
Boston nodded, and made a quick note in his notebook, ignoring the funny look that the person beside him was giving him for his lettering. It wasn’t his fault that he was imprinted with a writing system that even he couldn’t really understand if he thought about it too long.
******
When the hour of Meeting finally drew to its close - always too short for Az’s wishes - she gave Boston a silent head-jerk, beckoning for him to follow her, and trailed after the cavorting Molly toward the Nursery. The little ferret maid easily had the potential to be one of the most reasonably adjusted in Meeting, when she was older, at least in Az’s opinion.
Entering the nursery, Az was hit with a wave of sound and light and movement, and, in a more literal sense, a small child to the stomach.
“MOM!” The little girl grinning up at Az squeezed tighter, and Az knelt down, hugging her child to her. With her father’s smile and gray eyes and her mother’s skin tone, Farawen didn’t look much like the child that her original writer had intended her to look like. But then, the child had been so under-described at the point in which Az and Farawen had been recruited out of their Fic that it was no surprise that she hadn’t turned out as the Sue had wanted.
Az straightened, picking up her child as she did, and the little girl looped her legs around Az’s waist. “Fara, this is Boston. He’s my new partner. Boston, this is Farawen, my daughter.”
“Hello Boston,” said Farawen, obediently, before hiding her face in her mother’s shoulder. “I miss daddy…” she murmured, so quietly that only Az, her ear a few short inches from Fara’s mouth, heard it.
“Yeah, me too,” said Az, with a small, sad smile. “But we’ve gotta be brave now, okay? Gotta be brave and not let him being gone get us in a rut.”
Boston stood, looking at mother and daughter, his mind filled with memories not his own. They reminded him of the friends that his supposed self had had, once upon a time, before he himself had come into existence.
Shaking his head again, trying to clear it, Boston gave the pair a smile. “I’m sorry that I’m not the one you lost. And I’ll not try to replace him. But… Give me a chance to find out who I am before you decide not to like me?”
That made Farawen look up. “You’re out of fic too?” she asked, blinking at him with large, wide, almost Suish gray eyes.
“I am. And I’m just fresh out, too.” He smiled at her again, encouragingly. “How old are you, little lady?”
“Seven!” she responded, promptly, and for the first time smiled back. If Boston were to use the flowery language into which he had been born, he would say that it was like the sun coming out from behind a cloud.
“Hey Boston? Why don’t you talk to Fara for a minute. I have a question or two to ask someone.” Placing Fara back on the ground, Az gave her a kiss on the forehead, and went to find Miss Cindy.
*****
Fifteen minutes later, she had her answer, and a small backpack full of Fara’s belongings. Like her mother, or, for that matter, her father, Farawen had very little that she would call her own. No more than she herself could carry, in fact. The one exception that Az had found, in her self, at least, was books. It had taken her over a year to learn to read English, under Sheong’s careful tutelage, but since then she hadn’t managed to go for very long without burying her nose in a book. She was rather sure that her collection of books now weighed more than she did. Whether or not Fara would follow her mother’s literary tendencies was yet to be discovered: Thus far the girl wasn’t reading much more advanced than the Animorphs books, but that was a start, and only time would tell.
“Guess what?” she asked, when she had managed to dodge the flying children and get back to her own. “I get to take you back to the RC with me. They’ve decided that it might be a little less dangerous for you to live with me now that I’m out of DMS.” The grin on her face was almost beginning to hurt, but she couldn’t wipe it. She had her Fara back. It was for this little girl that she had ended up in the PPC to begin with. To be fair, this child was the reason that she existed at all, but it was her need to keep Fara safe from what could happen to her that had broken the Suvian influence for long enough to keep Az herself alive, and keep her daughter.
Shifting her balance just in time to not get toppled by a child to the chest, Az gathered up her daughter, and turned back to Boston. “Well, come on. I’ve got what I came for. Let’s get out of here.” Waiting for Boston to unfold himself from where he had been sitting - Really, ‘unfold’ was the only way to put it - Az headed out the door, carrying Fara and the little bag of Fara’s things.
The trip back to the RC was slightly shorter than usual, mostly because Az was crowing internally at having retrieved her child. When she got the door open, Az stopped dead. There was something…. Wrong.
It took only a brief look around the room to note what the wrongness was: There were a whole two extra doors now positioned in the wall behind where her bed had once been, and her bed was gone.
Az gave the doors a carefully calculated look, and then turned back to Boston, and said, rather more loudly than necessary, “Oh, look, they have installed bedrooms. I wonder which is yours and which is mine.” There was an obedient low grinding noise, and when Az turned back to the doors, the Generic Surface had numbers and names embossed into it:
RC 688.5 a RC 688.5 b
Agent Amira Azraelle Agent Boston.
Sharbat Typon,
And
Farawen Typon.
Az smiled, and went into the door marked with her name and her daughter’s. Her own bed still wasn’t there. Instead, there was a bunk bed, the top bunk of which had been turned into an elaborate canopy bed, with a lamp shaped like a black and gray pony with eyeliner and liberty spikes attached to one post of the bed. “I think that the top bunk is yours, Fara,” said Az, amused, lifting her daughter up and onto the bed. It was a bed fit for a Sue Princess of Gothy Gondor, which, all things considered, was appropriate. Fara immediately burrowed into the contraption with a squeak of delight, turning the lamp on and off several times before settling for watching the lightshow it sprayed over the ceiling.
Her mother flopped down on the lower bunk, letting one leg hang off, staring up at the springs of the upper bunk. Well then. A new start, as it were. Heaving herself up out of bed, Az popped her head out into the main room. “I’m going to take a nap. Wake me up if the RC shrieks.”