I don't have a suitable icon, so have a pretty space ship
This is my yuletide fic, which I wrote for fantasmabob. This is also the reason I borrowed Royce's E:FC DVD's, for which I am eternally grateful.
I volunteered to write E:FC without thinking. In hindsight it was possibly a mistake, but y'know, what doesn't kill us makes us stronger.
I went through about five different plots and drafts which I may yet write in some form or another, before I settled down and watched Sandoval's Run and realised that this fit the request as best as I could.
It's not perfect, there were things that I wanted to do with it that time would not allow. As it was, I ended up defaulting and only getting it in on Dec 24th.
That said, I'm not going to do anything with it. I'm happy with it as it is.
Title: For Making Plans
Author: Jax (Beth)
Disclaimer: Not mine and that's that.
Rating: PG - 13
Word Count: 1994
Fandom: Earth: Final Conflict
Summary: Sandoval runs.
Notes: Feedback is adored. This hasn't been beta-read due to a lack of time, but I don't think there are any major errors.
It all starts with the headaches; right between his eyes there is a dull ache that flares up, well, with no warning and no reason. It's not a migraine, just the stress of the job he tells himself, and gets back to his work as it passes.
They come and go and he doesn't think all that much of it. He has a lot of work; Da'an is making more public appearances than ever before right now, and they're training new agents, and Boone seems to be dealing with his own problems a lot of the time, so everything falls on him.
When Captain Marquette notices his ear bleeding, he files the worry away for after the mission is done. His priority is Da'an, no matter what the synod may say, and his own well being can wait for the calm after the storm. Agent Price may look on in concern, and he knows that Captain Marquette his holding down her own concerns, but they are both well trained, and know better than to question a superior.
In the time after, he sits alone in his apartment and tries not to let the fear overwhelm him. Then he crawls into bed and allows his skrill to dream for him, taking solace in the primitive images that drive away his own memories and nightmares.
It was a warning, but hindsight is a beautiful thing, even to those with a CVI who see everything so clearly, and deep down he knows that he would have done nothing different had he known the pain that would follow.
It passes for a while, as he's preoccupied with not being fully briefed on security matters. Then the crisis passes and its back to interrogating suspected anti-Taelon activists.
She's an infuriating figure, publishing anti-Taelon propaganda without evidence, but he's convinced that she's his link to finding Jonathan Doors, so he pushes her and pushes her, both of them becoming more aggravated until everything blanks out for a second and he's remembering something and the pain in his head is more than he can bear. Gripping the edge of the desk he rides it out until Boone's arrival gives him an out.
He'll be fine in a minute. Then the shouting starts and the memories come flooding back.
The subtle implications and accusations of her words, his defensiveness, the shouting; they're the last thing he remembers before he hears Boone shouting for someone to call 911 and the blackness finally wipes away the pain.
He read somewhere that having no memory of who you are is the most terrifying thing that the human mind can experience. Whoever said that was maybe halfway right; remembering fragments and having nothing to tie them together is infinitely more terrifying right now.
He can remember Deedee and her accusations, and he knows the man in front of him is Captain William Boone, but what he and the Taelon, Da'an, are talking about means little too him, until it slowly starts filtering back.
Getting out of that room is his only thought. Out of that room and to his wife and plans start to form as the Taelon tells him to rest and they leave.
There's more blackness and then there are people in the room again and he sees his chance. The Taelon doesn't expect to be grabbed and puts up no fight.
He's bluffing about the skrill, he's almost sure that he can't use it right now but they don't know that. And they can see that he's desperate enough that he'll try anything.
Somewhere along the line it makes sense to throw the alien to one side. He has a shuttle and a pilot, and his memory is slowly coming back, enough for him to remember how to prevent them from being followed.
The brief moments of lucidity are that though. Brief. In between them he remembers the arguments from the early days of his employment with the companions.
He's bitter and he hurts; mentally and physically as the pain in his head multiplies each time he tries to think, but he has to keep going, away from the Taelons, towards his wife.
He doesn't realise how much danger he's in, how the Taelons want to be rid of him as much as he wants to be rid of them.
He knows that he can't bring the ones he's had killed back. He'll never be able to give Boone his wife back, and there are more grieving people out there who will never see their loved ones again because of his orders.
And the ones that he's had put in here, not just his wife condemned to a life of drugs and numbness; most of them will never know their families again.
If that's the man that the Taelons and their technology forced him to become, he'll be glad never to see them again, never to do their bidding.
The man that he had become wouldn't have shed a tear when he saw her, but he wasn't that man anymore and seeing her thin pale body sat motionless and blank in the wheelchair nearly broke him. For the sole reason that it had been his doing that put her there.
But now he's come to take her home and she recognises only the monster that put her there.
"It's me. It's Ron."
But she won't believe him, won't come to him and he breaks again.
Part of him still thinks tactically, as they made him think, and realises that if he wants to get her out, he's going to need a distraction; the fire alarm will do, and confuse who ever is in the shuttle that just landed. No doubt Boone sent by the Taelons to bring him back to be made into a drone again.
The white coat might have stopped others from seeing who he was, but Boone was trained for this.
They face off in a car park with the homes other patients just round the corner, fleeing from a fire that doesn't exist as his own men search the building for him.
It's automatic for him to fire on Boone, his imperative seeing just another threat; this time to his wife rather than the Taelons. Boone and Deedee scream at him, for different reasons but the chaotic result is the same.
Then Boone lets him go and he's free. Free to be with Deedee even though he knows that he's running out of time
He sits with her in a dingy room as she shakes through the withdrawal, staring hatefully at him for hours.
Finally it wears off enough tat she starts asking questions. Questions that he knew he'd have to face sooner or later but that he never had the answers to.
But it all starts spilling out, the brain damage making it easier for him to talk than it ever had been.
She was a threat to the Taelons to his implant controlled mind; a rival for his attention and devotion that would have impaired his ability to do his job. No matter that he had loved her, the implant over wrote that so that nothing else mattered and nothing came before his alien masters, so that eventually he loved them more than anything else.
She hadn't seen it that way though; she'd seen a husband who had chosen to sacrifice everything for his work and she'd fought tooth and nail to claim him back, even against something that she believed in, until they'd both given up. She'd threatened him with the end of their marriage and he'd had her drugged into insensibility.
For all the time that he'd worked for them, he'd kept her in the back of his mind, he truly believed that, but there was something on her face that showed him her disbelief, even though she never gave up loving him.
Now he's faced with a hard decision to make. He knows that he's dying; that he has limited time left and his hatred of the Taelons compels him to do something. With no access to his files, he's forced to call Boone, to stall him so that he can retrieve the data he wants.
A way in to the resistance. A way of getting back at the Taelons and a way of providing safety for his wife after he's died.
He tells Boone a stream of lies and half truths. He is sorry that he caused the death of Kate Boone, and he does envy the control that Boone has on his emotions thanks to the CVI, but he's not jealous at the complete lack of emotion Boone should be feeling, not now that he has those emotions back after so long in the dark.
And once he has what he wants he cuts the connection, hoping the Boone isn't quite as good a detective as he should be.
By the time that they're sitting n a darkened alleyway, Deedee is slowly becoming his Deedee again, at least smiling at him as he rails on about the anti-Taelon movement. Trying to explain it without expressly telling her that he's dying is hard, trying to explain all the enemies that he's made who could possibly come after her, all the reasons that she needs sanctuary is almost impossible without making her hate him all over again.
He can see that she doesn't believe him when he tells her that his ear bleeds from time to time, but she doesn't argue and he goes off to face the resistance.
Then it's all fallen apart because Boone is there rather than the resistance, appealing to the humanity that they both know an implant doesn't have, taking chances because dying in the service of the Taelons is what every implant dreams of.
But then, calmly as ever, with a gun pointed in his face, Boone is telling him that he's a resistance agent working from the inside and that he can offer him and his wife protection. But Boone really is the good little implant isn't he? Offering him what he wants to get him re-implanted.
Boone flinches at the mention of his wife but never lets down the charade, and maybe, just maybe it isn't a charade and Sandoval has finally found what he's been searching for.
Trusting Boone is a leap of faith, but one that for the sake of Deedee he is willing to make.
One that finds himself hooked up to monitors and he and his wife in a small cell under surveillance by Doors and the resistance movement.
Hearing her ask him if he can still go back, so that he can live is agonising, and there are no words he can say that will tell her how he feels about that, he can only tell her that he'll never go back and lay his head in her lap, eventually letting the pain and the darkness overcome him again.
He goes from that to strapped to a medical table ready for implantation without realising. He puts up a fight but it's not much use.
Then Boone hands him her wedding band and tells him that he's taken care of that problem, and it seems that nothing matters any more, he may as well be an emotionless drone now that he has nothing to live for.
He stands before Da'an and Boone and pretends to be humbled that the Taelons would allow him back; thanks Boone for doing for him what he had once done for Boone.
Then later he tells Boone what he knows, sows he seeds of doubt in the other mans mind as to what the Taelons are doing, then leaves, back to his job, back to his life.
What little is left of it.
Its just time for him to start making plans. They'll never take his life from him again; he gave that to someone else a long time ago, as the band on his finger proves.
I volunteered to write E:FC without thinking. In hindsight it was possibly a mistake, but y'know, what doesn't kill us makes us stronger.
I went through about five different plots and drafts which I may yet write in some form or another, before I settled down and watched Sandoval's Run and realised that this fit the request as best as I could.
It's not perfect, there were things that I wanted to do with it that time would not allow. As it was, I ended up defaulting and only getting it in on Dec 24th.
That said, I'm not going to do anything with it. I'm happy with it as it is.
Title: For Making Plans
Author: Jax (Beth)
Disclaimer: Not mine and that's that.
Rating: PG - 13
Word Count: 1994
Fandom: Earth: Final Conflict
Summary: Sandoval runs.
Notes: Feedback is adored. This hasn't been beta-read due to a lack of time, but I don't think there are any major errors.
It all starts with the headaches; right between his eyes there is a dull ache that flares up, well, with no warning and no reason. It's not a migraine, just the stress of the job he tells himself, and gets back to his work as it passes.
They come and go and he doesn't think all that much of it. He has a lot of work; Da'an is making more public appearances than ever before right now, and they're training new agents, and Boone seems to be dealing with his own problems a lot of the time, so everything falls on him.
When Captain Marquette notices his ear bleeding, he files the worry away for after the mission is done. His priority is Da'an, no matter what the synod may say, and his own well being can wait for the calm after the storm. Agent Price may look on in concern, and he knows that Captain Marquette his holding down her own concerns, but they are both well trained, and know better than to question a superior.
In the time after, he sits alone in his apartment and tries not to let the fear overwhelm him. Then he crawls into bed and allows his skrill to dream for him, taking solace in the primitive images that drive away his own memories and nightmares.
It was a warning, but hindsight is a beautiful thing, even to those with a CVI who see everything so clearly, and deep down he knows that he would have done nothing different had he known the pain that would follow.
It passes for a while, as he's preoccupied with not being fully briefed on security matters. Then the crisis passes and its back to interrogating suspected anti-Taelon activists.
She's an infuriating figure, publishing anti-Taelon propaganda without evidence, but he's convinced that she's his link to finding Jonathan Doors, so he pushes her and pushes her, both of them becoming more aggravated until everything blanks out for a second and he's remembering something and the pain in his head is more than he can bear. Gripping the edge of the desk he rides it out until Boone's arrival gives him an out.
He'll be fine in a minute. Then the shouting starts and the memories come flooding back.
The subtle implications and accusations of her words, his defensiveness, the shouting; they're the last thing he remembers before he hears Boone shouting for someone to call 911 and the blackness finally wipes away the pain.
He read somewhere that having no memory of who you are is the most terrifying thing that the human mind can experience. Whoever said that was maybe halfway right; remembering fragments and having nothing to tie them together is infinitely more terrifying right now.
He can remember Deedee and her accusations, and he knows the man in front of him is Captain William Boone, but what he and the Taelon, Da'an, are talking about means little too him, until it slowly starts filtering back.
Getting out of that room is his only thought. Out of that room and to his wife and plans start to form as the Taelon tells him to rest and they leave.
There's more blackness and then there are people in the room again and he sees his chance. The Taelon doesn't expect to be grabbed and puts up no fight.
He's bluffing about the skrill, he's almost sure that he can't use it right now but they don't know that. And they can see that he's desperate enough that he'll try anything.
Somewhere along the line it makes sense to throw the alien to one side. He has a shuttle and a pilot, and his memory is slowly coming back, enough for him to remember how to prevent them from being followed.
The brief moments of lucidity are that though. Brief. In between them he remembers the arguments from the early days of his employment with the companions.
He's bitter and he hurts; mentally and physically as the pain in his head multiplies each time he tries to think, but he has to keep going, away from the Taelons, towards his wife.
He doesn't realise how much danger he's in, how the Taelons want to be rid of him as much as he wants to be rid of them.
He knows that he can't bring the ones he's had killed back. He'll never be able to give Boone his wife back, and there are more grieving people out there who will never see their loved ones again because of his orders.
And the ones that he's had put in here, not just his wife condemned to a life of drugs and numbness; most of them will never know their families again.
If that's the man that the Taelons and their technology forced him to become, he'll be glad never to see them again, never to do their bidding.
The man that he had become wouldn't have shed a tear when he saw her, but he wasn't that man anymore and seeing her thin pale body sat motionless and blank in the wheelchair nearly broke him. For the sole reason that it had been his doing that put her there.
But now he's come to take her home and she recognises only the monster that put her there.
"It's me. It's Ron."
But she won't believe him, won't come to him and he breaks again.
Part of him still thinks tactically, as they made him think, and realises that if he wants to get her out, he's going to need a distraction; the fire alarm will do, and confuse who ever is in the shuttle that just landed. No doubt Boone sent by the Taelons to bring him back to be made into a drone again.
The white coat might have stopped others from seeing who he was, but Boone was trained for this.
They face off in a car park with the homes other patients just round the corner, fleeing from a fire that doesn't exist as his own men search the building for him.
It's automatic for him to fire on Boone, his imperative seeing just another threat; this time to his wife rather than the Taelons. Boone and Deedee scream at him, for different reasons but the chaotic result is the same.
Then Boone lets him go and he's free. Free to be with Deedee even though he knows that he's running out of time
He sits with her in a dingy room as she shakes through the withdrawal, staring hatefully at him for hours.
Finally it wears off enough tat she starts asking questions. Questions that he knew he'd have to face sooner or later but that he never had the answers to.
But it all starts spilling out, the brain damage making it easier for him to talk than it ever had been.
She was a threat to the Taelons to his implant controlled mind; a rival for his attention and devotion that would have impaired his ability to do his job. No matter that he had loved her, the implant over wrote that so that nothing else mattered and nothing came before his alien masters, so that eventually he loved them more than anything else.
She hadn't seen it that way though; she'd seen a husband who had chosen to sacrifice everything for his work and she'd fought tooth and nail to claim him back, even against something that she believed in, until they'd both given up. She'd threatened him with the end of their marriage and he'd had her drugged into insensibility.
For all the time that he'd worked for them, he'd kept her in the back of his mind, he truly believed that, but there was something on her face that showed him her disbelief, even though she never gave up loving him.
Now he's faced with a hard decision to make. He knows that he's dying; that he has limited time left and his hatred of the Taelons compels him to do something. With no access to his files, he's forced to call Boone, to stall him so that he can retrieve the data he wants.
A way in to the resistance. A way of getting back at the Taelons and a way of providing safety for his wife after he's died.
He tells Boone a stream of lies and half truths. He is sorry that he caused the death of Kate Boone, and he does envy the control that Boone has on his emotions thanks to the CVI, but he's not jealous at the complete lack of emotion Boone should be feeling, not now that he has those emotions back after so long in the dark.
And once he has what he wants he cuts the connection, hoping the Boone isn't quite as good a detective as he should be.
By the time that they're sitting n a darkened alleyway, Deedee is slowly becoming his Deedee again, at least smiling at him as he rails on about the anti-Taelon movement. Trying to explain it without expressly telling her that he's dying is hard, trying to explain all the enemies that he's made who could possibly come after her, all the reasons that she needs sanctuary is almost impossible without making her hate him all over again.
He can see that she doesn't believe him when he tells her that his ear bleeds from time to time, but she doesn't argue and he goes off to face the resistance.
Then it's all fallen apart because Boone is there rather than the resistance, appealing to the humanity that they both know an implant doesn't have, taking chances because dying in the service of the Taelons is what every implant dreams of.
But then, calmly as ever, with a gun pointed in his face, Boone is telling him that he's a resistance agent working from the inside and that he can offer him and his wife protection. But Boone really is the good little implant isn't he? Offering him what he wants to get him re-implanted.
Boone flinches at the mention of his wife but never lets down the charade, and maybe, just maybe it isn't a charade and Sandoval has finally found what he's been searching for.
Trusting Boone is a leap of faith, but one that for the sake of Deedee he is willing to make.
One that finds himself hooked up to monitors and he and his wife in a small cell under surveillance by Doors and the resistance movement.
Hearing her ask him if he can still go back, so that he can live is agonising, and there are no words he can say that will tell her how he feels about that, he can only tell her that he'll never go back and lay his head in her lap, eventually letting the pain and the darkness overcome him again.
He goes from that to strapped to a medical table ready for implantation without realising. He puts up a fight but it's not much use.
Then Boone hands him her wedding band and tells him that he's taken care of that problem, and it seems that nothing matters any more, he may as well be an emotionless drone now that he has nothing to live for.
He stands before Da'an and Boone and pretends to be humbled that the Taelons would allow him back; thanks Boone for doing for him what he had once done for Boone.
Then later he tells Boone what he knows, sows he seeds of doubt in the other mans mind as to what the Taelons are doing, then leaves, back to his job, back to his life.
What little is left of it.
Its just time for him to start making plans. They'll never take his life from him again; he gave that to someone else a long time ago, as the band on his finger proves.