Fanfic: By Paths Coincident 8/?
Title: By Paths Coincident 8/?
Author: Honorat
Rating: T
Crossover: Leverage and The Librarians
Characters: Jenkins, Eve Baird, Jacob Stone, Cassandra Cillian, Ezekiel Jones, Parker, Alec Hardison, Eliot Spencer, Others TBA as needed.
Pairing: Parker/Hardison, Cassandra/Jake, Cassandra/Eliot, just a touch of Eliot/OC
Disclaimer: Dean Devlin, John Rogers, TNT own these characters.
Description: The Librarians discover Leverage International. Jacob Stone and Eliot Spencer have a family past, but they aren’t the only members of the two teams who’ve met before. Expect whiplash between light and dark. Lots of backstory in this chapter.
Previous chapters HERE.
* * * * *
By Paths Coincident
* * * * *
11 Years Ago
Complejo Hospitalario Punta de Europa, Algeciras, Spain
Her parents looked devastated. Which was odd, because they were smiling and so happy that she was awake.
Eve wanted to apologize for making them sad, for making them worry-again.
She was sorry for the new strands of grey in her mom’s hair, for the puffiness around her eyes that meant she had been crying a lot and often.
She was sorry for the tremor in her dad’s hands, for the way his eyes were seeing terrible memories as he looked at her. He had never discouraged her from being a soldier, but he had always known too well how precarious was the life into which she had followed him.
“I’m sorry,” she would write if she could. The paper and pen were on the table, beyond her reach.
I love you, she tried to say with her eyes.
* * * * *
Her father was the one who told her what she had already suspected from the fragments of her returning memory and the nightmares-that her team, all her friends, were dead.
She appreciated that he made it a formal occasion, wearing his uniform, and delivering to her the handful of broken identification tags, one at a time, each as unique as the person who had worn it-issued by the country in whose armed forces he or she had originally served before transferring to NATO.
With fingers trembling from more than weakness, Eve traced the DEU on the half oval that had belonged to Lieutenant Brader, her stern and utterly reliable second in command. The other half had remained with his body. The two of them had dragged each other in and out of hot spots and warzones across half the planet, but she hadn’t been able to pull him out of this one. She wondered where he had been taken, where they all were. She had not even been able to say good-bye.
Cradling the small bits of metal in her mostly immobilized right hand, she reached with her left for each dog tag her father handed her: Poptart’s I disc, the rounded rectangle broken from its twin, inscribed with CDN FORCES CDN-it would have to be returned to Canada’s National Defence Headquarters; Fortinsky’s nieśmiertelnik wz.-he’d told her that meant “immortalizer mark”; the identical, circular, non-reflecting stainless steel tags, engraved “Big 6” that had belonged to the Terrible Twosome. Each tag dropped into her hand with the weight of a millstone on her heart. Derya, Joscin, Teresinha, and Torbjørn-these scraps of metal were the last touches she would have of them all. Her fingers folded over the so very tiny handful, clenching until the broken edges scored her palm.
Eve could not weep for them. All her tears caught in her ruined throat and knotted in pain but refused to be shed. She wanted so desperately to talk about them, to tell her father who they had been, how brilliant, how close. She wanted someone to share her feelings of loss.
Instead, her father sat with her in the silence imposed by her injury, letting her grip his hand.
She wondered about their families, the ones they loved. Derya’s huge clan of brothers and sisters and cousins. Fortinsky’s boyfriend. Oh God, Poptart’s wife and little boy. Who had told them?
It should have been her, and she felt guilty that she was relieved that she had not been able to.
That night, they had to sedate her as she fought her nightmares.
* * * * *
Eve endured the interminable days with increasing impatience interspersed with extreme lassitude. She could communicate only the most basic of needs with her shaky, left-handed writing and her persistent fatigue. Anything beyond, and her head would ache even more than it already did, and her vision would blur.
Because she could not speak, many people did not speak to her. They talked to her parents or to each other as if she were not there, even when they were discussing her condition and treatment. Eve wrote a note in ragged, dark letters saying: TALK TO ME. She would thump the bed with her good hand and wave it at the person ignoring her. Generally, this resulted in an apology, and the offender would attempt to include her, but eventually old habits would take over, and Eve would find herself observing the conversation but no longer a part of it.
Some days Eve was simply too exhausted to care or even pay attention.
* * * * *
Of all things, Eve hated most the helplessness, despised being dependent on others for every personal function. The day they finally helped her sit up, fighting dizziness, she refused to let anyone know how weak and unsteady she felt. Nevertheless, she did not badger them to allow her to stand. Accepting that she would be wheelchair-bound for the immediate future, she waited while all her tubes and bags and IV poles and other noxious accoutrements of illness were situated about her conveyance.
She grimly endured the drum corps marching inside her skull and the way the world spun like a carnival ride as the aide pushed her chair to the bathroom where she might hope for an actual shower. Apparently she had over-estimated he ability to overcome her body’s autonomic responses. The nausea brought about by the unaccustomed mobility overwhelmed her, and she vomited, nearly aspirating.
Not only did she fail spectacularly to achieve cleanliness, but she gained another CT scan out of her escapade.
Nevertheless, the next day, she insisted on trying again, gradually increasing her time upright. She wanted out of this hospital, and she wouldn’t be able to leave until she could travel the eight hours from Spain to New York.
The fear that she would never completely recover from her injuries haunted her during her conscious hours while her sleeping hours were increasingly disturbed by memories returning in nightmares.
* * * * *
As far as Eve could tell, she had many, many letters of the alphabet in many combinations, not one of which was an actual word. Apparently, her TBI was being complicated with CSF fistulae, which might be causing her persistent headache, and which, because it hadn’t resolved on its own, was one of the reasons she had an EVD to relieve ICP. Obviously, the medical field was as bad as the military in its attachment to acronyms. The important piece of information in all this alphabet soup was that nothing appeared to be working, so she was likely to have to undergo a craniotomy to repair the fistula site-in other, more intelligible words, brain surgery.
Perfect. As if her brains weren’t already scrambled enough.
Brain surgery actually proved to be somewhat anticlimactic. She lost a day, but that had become a regular occurrence for her anyway. And her headaches did decrease in number and frequency. Also her neurosurgeon was a really attractive young man.
So there was that.
* * * * *
When her otolaryngologist finally informed her that they would be removing the trach tube and the nasogastric tube, and that she might resume ordinary breathing, swallowing, and phonating, Eve was thrilled.
The doctor informed her that they had repaired and reattached her vocal cords and reconstituted the anterior commissure as well as repairing all mucosal lacerations and closing exposed cartilage with mucous membrane grafts. They had then immobilized the cartilage fractures and reapproximated the strap muscles.
Eve listened to all the anatomical jargon with a blank expression and little comprehension. What she wanted to know was whether or not she would be able to talk.
This doctor, at least, waited while she laboriously printed her question: Will I be able to talk?
“It is impossible to say at this point,” the doctor told her with an honesty for which she was grateful. “Barring any laryngeal nerve injury or arytenoid subluxation, your chances of excellent voice results stand at around 61 percent. However, if the nerves have been damaged enough to cause vocal cord immobility, those chances decrease to around 17 percent.”
Since Eve knew her chances of having survived her initial injuries hovered around 10 percent, she figured 17 percent was pretty good odds. And she was so ready to begin eating again.
A plastic surgeon also visited her, but Eve was less concerned with that aspect of her recovery. If the scar on her throat was hideous enough, she’d just get a tattoo.
When Eve regained consciousness after the surgery, she was surprised to find herself afraid to attempt to speak. She had grown accustomed to believing that using her voice was forbidden and impossible, and perhaps she didn’t want to know yet if the repair hadn’t worked.
Her doctors and her parents were becoming worried that the surgery had been a failure, but Eve knew she had never tried to use her voice. She concentrated on enjoying the use of her throat-every swallow of liquid, every bite of very soft, blended food was a heavenly sensation.
It was frustration that finally cracked her mental paralysis. She was trying to reach the bathroom using her own actual legs. Since her brain surgery, the dizziness had diminished, and she was allowed to try out walking for brief intervals accompanied by a hovering aide. However, she had discovered that IV poles were possessed by the very devil. There were six wheels on the base, and each one would invariably head to a different point on the compass except toward the one for which she was aiming. The whole contraption would rotate as she tried to make it to the bathroom, winding up her tubing until it was too short once she did get there.
This day, she was so angry at the IV pole which was surely designed by Torquemada, that she damned it to hell. It was a very quiet curse, and she did not recognize the voice, but it said what she was thinking.
Her babysitter squeaked in excitement. “You’re speaking!”
Eve thought it was appropriate that the first thing she said after everything she had been through was profane.
* * * * *
Eve was grateful to have any sort of voice back when General Deschamps paid her a visit. She was surprised to see him, since-since Teresinha- she stumbled mentally over the name-had developed a theory that he was physically attached to his office, like a snail.
The sight of that familiar uniform twisted a longing in her. Such uniforms had meant home and family her whole life. Aside from how treacherously immodest hospital gowns were, she felt naked without hers.
The General came to her bedside and took her hand in both of his. His face looked drawn and his eyes sad, in spite of his smile. It had been his operation, and they had been his team, and it had been an utter failure with an appalling loss of life.
“Hello, sir,” Eve said in her too quiet, strange voice.
“Hello, Captain,” he answered. “Eve. It’s good to see you.”
He couldn’t really comment on how well, she looked, Eve thought. She was only a couple of artfully applied ketchup packets away from a zombie cosplay.
“It’s good to see you, too.”
The General had never been much for small talk, so the conversation languished. He patted her hand, then withdrew his hands, returning to parade rest, taking refuge in formalities.
“I wanted to speak to you before you went home,” he said. “You have been granted a medical discharge with all honour, of course.”
Of course. There had been no other possibility. But Eve’s heart twisted to hear it spoken aloud. She would not be fit to return to active duty for-for years, likely. If ever.
“Thank you, sir,” she said, as she had to.
He cleared his throat. “I am sorry-to hear-what-happened to the others.”
Eve clenched her hands and closed her eyes. “They were the best,” she managed hoarsely.
The General nodded, but said no more.
Finally, Eve spoke. Here was someone who might answer her questions. “Were they able to find the man who did this?”
General Deschamps was silent for too long.
“We suspect it was Damien Moreau’s chief enforcer, Eliot Spencer,” he said, finally. “Spencer is certainly capable of what was done-before he went solo, he did work for the US government, both in the military and in assorted PMCs, that is so secret even I cannot get past the red tape. In fact no one in US Armed Forces or Intelligence will admit he exists. The rest of the world-well that is a different story. There is a price on his head in five countries.”
A name. As long as they had a name, she could avenge her team. However, her look of fierce intention was shot down by the General’s discouraged head shake.
“We have no real evidence. Spencer has an alibi placing him in Panama during the incident, even though it seems unlikely that he could have torn an ACL and broken his jaw in the bedroom.”
Eve smiled grimly. At least, if she hadn’t been able to kill him, she’d made him hurt.
“So how do we go about getting this guy?” she asked, as if she could have any part in such a manhunt.
“Did you see his face? Would you be able to recognize him and testify against him?”
Eve thought about the man who had murdered her team-no identifying marks, his face hidden behind the shield. “No.”
“Then we don’t have a case,” the General said, frustration roughening his voice. “No court in the world would convict him with so little justification. There is no record of his departure from Panama nor his arrival anywhere else, and, while we know Moreau moves his people off grid all the time, that explanation will never hold up before a judge.”
Her hands were shaking, Eve noted through the red haze of rage. “So he goes free,” she said through gritted teeth. Her throat ached-with unaccustomed use or unshed tears.
“We cannot arrest a man with no evidence. We do not even have any surveillance. The Port cameras were damaged, their lenses broken out, so no footage remains of what happened.”
Eve took several deep breaths to calm herself down. If they couldn’t arrest the assassin, perhaps it would be better to go after the man actually responsible. “What about Moreau? Do we at least have something against him?”
Deschamps shook his head. “Damien Moreau covers his tracks perfectly. Our only possible link between him and the shipment you were to intercept was the testimony of our informant-who, along with his mother and sister, was the victim of a house fire, ruled an electrical malfunction, by the way. No arson suspected. But it may be years before anyone musters enough courage to turn on Moreau again.” The General sighed. “We cannot touch him.”
So there was to be no justice for her team. They had failed; they had died; and nothing could make any of it never have happened.
“Damien Moreau never loses,” Eve whispered to herself.
“I’m sorry, Captain Baird.”
Before he left, she gave him the dog tags of her team to return to their countries and families. Her heart broke as if she were losing her friends again.
* * * * *
The day finally arrived when Eve was considered stable enough to travel from Spain to the United States. She would be transported by ambulance to the airport at Jerez, flown to Madrid, and then put on the long flight to New York where she would be met by another ambulance and transported to the hospital where she would remain until they judged her fit to be cared for at her parents’ home and to begin her rehab.
It seemed that the entire hospital staff showed up to see her off. She’d pretty much occupied time from every specialist and every department. Gabrielle was there giving her a tearful hug. Even the doctor from the ambulance was there, introducing her to his driver, Jorge, who was responsible for her most rapid transport to the hospital.
“We had to replace the tires after that ride,” Doctor Villanueva Cortés said.
Jorge grinned and wrung her hand. “Always a pleasure to participate in a resurrection. You are a very lucky lady. You must have a very special destiny.”
Eve did not feel lucky, and she did not believe in destiny.
* * * * *
1 Year Later
Fort Hamilton, New York
Back in the United States, living with her parents on the army base, going to rehab at the VA every day, doing a little teaching of new recruits to keep her occupied, Eve tried and failed to find her feet again.
With her returning health, clearer and clearer memories also crept out of the murky fog of her damaged brain, ambushing her.
Why did fictional characters get to keep their amnesia when she remembered everything? For her, returned and always returning, every scent, every scrape of boot on gravel, every fleck of blood dried on her hands, every knife-edge of terror, every pulse of soul-destroying rage, the present folded into the past. That day back at the Port fighting to save her team-and failing-was engraved in her brain. Their eyes followed her from every shadow, in every reflection, just beyond the edge of sight, accusing her for living when they had died.
Every night, her faceless opponent returned in her nightmares, forcing her to watch him murder her friends, her team, then turning on her until she awoke gasping for air, striking at shadows, and shaking so badly the bed rattled the floor.
Sleep became a memory. Eve fled it as desperately as she longed for it.
Nights found her running miles on the treadmill, sweat dripping down her body, heedless of pain. When her pulse beat so fast that her vision blurred, and her stumbling legs betrayed her so that she could run no farther, she would lift weights, working her barely recovered muscles beyond quivering exhaustion. When she could stagger to her feet again, she would beat her fists bloody on the punching bag.
Sometimes, then, collapsing on the nearest available surface, she could sleep un-tormented for an hour or two before the hell of her memory re-ignited.
She lost weight she could ill-afford to lose. Her eyes were sunken and shadowed in her increasingly gaunt face.
Her mother watched her with the tragic gaze of one who loves and who does not know how to prevent the loss of what she loves, knowing, as the wife of a career military officer, that not all of the dead come home in body bags.
It was her father who would stand in her doorway and call her out of the nightmares, waiting until she knew where she was and who he was before entering and enfolding her in his arms.
Her father held her the night she finally broke down and wept like a child-the first tears she had shed.
It was her father who convinced her to seek help.
Her dad, who at age 18 had donned his proud uniform and shipped out to the Vietnam war that had devoured his youth, chewed up his body and his spirit, and spit him out at age 30 with rank, a promising military career, a collection of old photographs of friends who never grew any older, and nightmares that still visited him 40 years later.
Even though he was gone now, she could still call up the memory of him, the feel of his old cardigan on her cheek, the scent of his aftershave, and the grieving understanding in his voice as he told her, “Sometimes, my Eve, no matter how hard you try, you lose. You do your best, but you just lose.”
* * * * *
TBC
Author: Honorat
Rating: T
Crossover: Leverage and The Librarians
Characters: Jenkins, Eve Baird, Jacob Stone, Cassandra Cillian, Ezekiel Jones, Parker, Alec Hardison, Eliot Spencer, Others TBA as needed.
Pairing: Parker/Hardison, Cassandra/Jake, Cassandra/Eliot, just a touch of Eliot/OC
Disclaimer: Dean Devlin, John Rogers, TNT own these characters.
Description: The Librarians discover Leverage International. Jacob Stone and Eliot Spencer have a family past, but they aren’t the only members of the two teams who’ve met before. Expect whiplash between light and dark. Lots of backstory in this chapter.
Previous chapters HERE.
* * * * *
By Paths Coincident
* * * * *
11 Years Ago
Complejo Hospitalario Punta de Europa, Algeciras, Spain
Her parents looked devastated. Which was odd, because they were smiling and so happy that she was awake.
Eve wanted to apologize for making them sad, for making them worry-again.
She was sorry for the new strands of grey in her mom’s hair, for the puffiness around her eyes that meant she had been crying a lot and often.
She was sorry for the tremor in her dad’s hands, for the way his eyes were seeing terrible memories as he looked at her. He had never discouraged her from being a soldier, but he had always known too well how precarious was the life into which she had followed him.
“I’m sorry,” she would write if she could. The paper and pen were on the table, beyond her reach.
I love you, she tried to say with her eyes.
* * * * *
Her father was the one who told her what she had already suspected from the fragments of her returning memory and the nightmares-that her team, all her friends, were dead.
She appreciated that he made it a formal occasion, wearing his uniform, and delivering to her the handful of broken identification tags, one at a time, each as unique as the person who had worn it-issued by the country in whose armed forces he or she had originally served before transferring to NATO.
With fingers trembling from more than weakness, Eve traced the DEU on the half oval that had belonged to Lieutenant Brader, her stern and utterly reliable second in command. The other half had remained with his body. The two of them had dragged each other in and out of hot spots and warzones across half the planet, but she hadn’t been able to pull him out of this one. She wondered where he had been taken, where they all were. She had not even been able to say good-bye.
Cradling the small bits of metal in her mostly immobilized right hand, she reached with her left for each dog tag her father handed her: Poptart’s I disc, the rounded rectangle broken from its twin, inscribed with CDN FORCES CDN-it would have to be returned to Canada’s National Defence Headquarters; Fortinsky’s nieśmiertelnik wz.-he’d told her that meant “immortalizer mark”; the identical, circular, non-reflecting stainless steel tags, engraved “Big 6” that had belonged to the Terrible Twosome. Each tag dropped into her hand with the weight of a millstone on her heart. Derya, Joscin, Teresinha, and Torbjørn-these scraps of metal were the last touches she would have of them all. Her fingers folded over the so very tiny handful, clenching until the broken edges scored her palm.
Eve could not weep for them. All her tears caught in her ruined throat and knotted in pain but refused to be shed. She wanted so desperately to talk about them, to tell her father who they had been, how brilliant, how close. She wanted someone to share her feelings of loss.
Instead, her father sat with her in the silence imposed by her injury, letting her grip his hand.
She wondered about their families, the ones they loved. Derya’s huge clan of brothers and sisters and cousins. Fortinsky’s boyfriend. Oh God, Poptart’s wife and little boy. Who had told them?
It should have been her, and she felt guilty that she was relieved that she had not been able to.
That night, they had to sedate her as she fought her nightmares.
* * * * *
Eve endured the interminable days with increasing impatience interspersed with extreme lassitude. She could communicate only the most basic of needs with her shaky, left-handed writing and her persistent fatigue. Anything beyond, and her head would ache even more than it already did, and her vision would blur.
Because she could not speak, many people did not speak to her. They talked to her parents or to each other as if she were not there, even when they were discussing her condition and treatment. Eve wrote a note in ragged, dark letters saying: TALK TO ME. She would thump the bed with her good hand and wave it at the person ignoring her. Generally, this resulted in an apology, and the offender would attempt to include her, but eventually old habits would take over, and Eve would find herself observing the conversation but no longer a part of it.
Some days Eve was simply too exhausted to care or even pay attention.
* * * * *
Of all things, Eve hated most the helplessness, despised being dependent on others for every personal function. The day they finally helped her sit up, fighting dizziness, she refused to let anyone know how weak and unsteady she felt. Nevertheless, she did not badger them to allow her to stand. Accepting that she would be wheelchair-bound for the immediate future, she waited while all her tubes and bags and IV poles and other noxious accoutrements of illness were situated about her conveyance.
She grimly endured the drum corps marching inside her skull and the way the world spun like a carnival ride as the aide pushed her chair to the bathroom where she might hope for an actual shower. Apparently she had over-estimated he ability to overcome her body’s autonomic responses. The nausea brought about by the unaccustomed mobility overwhelmed her, and she vomited, nearly aspirating.
Not only did she fail spectacularly to achieve cleanliness, but she gained another CT scan out of her escapade.
Nevertheless, the next day, she insisted on trying again, gradually increasing her time upright. She wanted out of this hospital, and she wouldn’t be able to leave until she could travel the eight hours from Spain to New York.
The fear that she would never completely recover from her injuries haunted her during her conscious hours while her sleeping hours were increasingly disturbed by memories returning in nightmares.
* * * * *
As far as Eve could tell, she had many, many letters of the alphabet in many combinations, not one of which was an actual word. Apparently, her TBI was being complicated with CSF fistulae, which might be causing her persistent headache, and which, because it hadn’t resolved on its own, was one of the reasons she had an EVD to relieve ICP. Obviously, the medical field was as bad as the military in its attachment to acronyms. The important piece of information in all this alphabet soup was that nothing appeared to be working, so she was likely to have to undergo a craniotomy to repair the fistula site-in other, more intelligible words, brain surgery.
Perfect. As if her brains weren’t already scrambled enough.
Brain surgery actually proved to be somewhat anticlimactic. She lost a day, but that had become a regular occurrence for her anyway. And her headaches did decrease in number and frequency. Also her neurosurgeon was a really attractive young man.
So there was that.
* * * * *
When her otolaryngologist finally informed her that they would be removing the trach tube and the nasogastric tube, and that she might resume ordinary breathing, swallowing, and phonating, Eve was thrilled.
The doctor informed her that they had repaired and reattached her vocal cords and reconstituted the anterior commissure as well as repairing all mucosal lacerations and closing exposed cartilage with mucous membrane grafts. They had then immobilized the cartilage fractures and reapproximated the strap muscles.
Eve listened to all the anatomical jargon with a blank expression and little comprehension. What she wanted to know was whether or not she would be able to talk.
This doctor, at least, waited while she laboriously printed her question: Will I be able to talk?
“It is impossible to say at this point,” the doctor told her with an honesty for which she was grateful. “Barring any laryngeal nerve injury or arytenoid subluxation, your chances of excellent voice results stand at around 61 percent. However, if the nerves have been damaged enough to cause vocal cord immobility, those chances decrease to around 17 percent.”
Since Eve knew her chances of having survived her initial injuries hovered around 10 percent, she figured 17 percent was pretty good odds. And she was so ready to begin eating again.
A plastic surgeon also visited her, but Eve was less concerned with that aspect of her recovery. If the scar on her throat was hideous enough, she’d just get a tattoo.
When Eve regained consciousness after the surgery, she was surprised to find herself afraid to attempt to speak. She had grown accustomed to believing that using her voice was forbidden and impossible, and perhaps she didn’t want to know yet if the repair hadn’t worked.
Her doctors and her parents were becoming worried that the surgery had been a failure, but Eve knew she had never tried to use her voice. She concentrated on enjoying the use of her throat-every swallow of liquid, every bite of very soft, blended food was a heavenly sensation.
It was frustration that finally cracked her mental paralysis. She was trying to reach the bathroom using her own actual legs. Since her brain surgery, the dizziness had diminished, and she was allowed to try out walking for brief intervals accompanied by a hovering aide. However, she had discovered that IV poles were possessed by the very devil. There were six wheels on the base, and each one would invariably head to a different point on the compass except toward the one for which she was aiming. The whole contraption would rotate as she tried to make it to the bathroom, winding up her tubing until it was too short once she did get there.
This day, she was so angry at the IV pole which was surely designed by Torquemada, that she damned it to hell. It was a very quiet curse, and she did not recognize the voice, but it said what she was thinking.
Her babysitter squeaked in excitement. “You’re speaking!”
Eve thought it was appropriate that the first thing she said after everything she had been through was profane.
* * * * *
Eve was grateful to have any sort of voice back when General Deschamps paid her a visit. She was surprised to see him, since-since Teresinha- she stumbled mentally over the name-had developed a theory that he was physically attached to his office, like a snail.
The sight of that familiar uniform twisted a longing in her. Such uniforms had meant home and family her whole life. Aside from how treacherously immodest hospital gowns were, she felt naked without hers.
The General came to her bedside and took her hand in both of his. His face looked drawn and his eyes sad, in spite of his smile. It had been his operation, and they had been his team, and it had been an utter failure with an appalling loss of life.
“Hello, sir,” Eve said in her too quiet, strange voice.
“Hello, Captain,” he answered. “Eve. It’s good to see you.”
He couldn’t really comment on how well, she looked, Eve thought. She was only a couple of artfully applied ketchup packets away from a zombie cosplay.
“It’s good to see you, too.”
The General had never been much for small talk, so the conversation languished. He patted her hand, then withdrew his hands, returning to parade rest, taking refuge in formalities.
“I wanted to speak to you before you went home,” he said. “You have been granted a medical discharge with all honour, of course.”
Of course. There had been no other possibility. But Eve’s heart twisted to hear it spoken aloud. She would not be fit to return to active duty for-for years, likely. If ever.
“Thank you, sir,” she said, as she had to.
He cleared his throat. “I am sorry-to hear-what-happened to the others.”
Eve clenched her hands and closed her eyes. “They were the best,” she managed hoarsely.
The General nodded, but said no more.
Finally, Eve spoke. Here was someone who might answer her questions. “Were they able to find the man who did this?”
General Deschamps was silent for too long.
“We suspect it was Damien Moreau’s chief enforcer, Eliot Spencer,” he said, finally. “Spencer is certainly capable of what was done-before he went solo, he did work for the US government, both in the military and in assorted PMCs, that is so secret even I cannot get past the red tape. In fact no one in US Armed Forces or Intelligence will admit he exists. The rest of the world-well that is a different story. There is a price on his head in five countries.”
A name. As long as they had a name, she could avenge her team. However, her look of fierce intention was shot down by the General’s discouraged head shake.
“We have no real evidence. Spencer has an alibi placing him in Panama during the incident, even though it seems unlikely that he could have torn an ACL and broken his jaw in the bedroom.”
Eve smiled grimly. At least, if she hadn’t been able to kill him, she’d made him hurt.
“So how do we go about getting this guy?” she asked, as if she could have any part in such a manhunt.
“Did you see his face? Would you be able to recognize him and testify against him?”
Eve thought about the man who had murdered her team-no identifying marks, his face hidden behind the shield. “No.”
“Then we don’t have a case,” the General said, frustration roughening his voice. “No court in the world would convict him with so little justification. There is no record of his departure from Panama nor his arrival anywhere else, and, while we know Moreau moves his people off grid all the time, that explanation will never hold up before a judge.”
Her hands were shaking, Eve noted through the red haze of rage. “So he goes free,” she said through gritted teeth. Her throat ached-with unaccustomed use or unshed tears.
“We cannot arrest a man with no evidence. We do not even have any surveillance. The Port cameras were damaged, their lenses broken out, so no footage remains of what happened.”
Eve took several deep breaths to calm herself down. If they couldn’t arrest the assassin, perhaps it would be better to go after the man actually responsible. “What about Moreau? Do we at least have something against him?”
Deschamps shook his head. “Damien Moreau covers his tracks perfectly. Our only possible link between him and the shipment you were to intercept was the testimony of our informant-who, along with his mother and sister, was the victim of a house fire, ruled an electrical malfunction, by the way. No arson suspected. But it may be years before anyone musters enough courage to turn on Moreau again.” The General sighed. “We cannot touch him.”
So there was to be no justice for her team. They had failed; they had died; and nothing could make any of it never have happened.
“Damien Moreau never loses,” Eve whispered to herself.
“I’m sorry, Captain Baird.”
Before he left, she gave him the dog tags of her team to return to their countries and families. Her heart broke as if she were losing her friends again.
* * * * *
The day finally arrived when Eve was considered stable enough to travel from Spain to the United States. She would be transported by ambulance to the airport at Jerez, flown to Madrid, and then put on the long flight to New York where she would be met by another ambulance and transported to the hospital where she would remain until they judged her fit to be cared for at her parents’ home and to begin her rehab.
It seemed that the entire hospital staff showed up to see her off. She’d pretty much occupied time from every specialist and every department. Gabrielle was there giving her a tearful hug. Even the doctor from the ambulance was there, introducing her to his driver, Jorge, who was responsible for her most rapid transport to the hospital.
“We had to replace the tires after that ride,” Doctor Villanueva Cortés said.
Jorge grinned and wrung her hand. “Always a pleasure to participate in a resurrection. You are a very lucky lady. You must have a very special destiny.”
Eve did not feel lucky, and she did not believe in destiny.
* * * * *
1 Year Later
Fort Hamilton, New York
Back in the United States, living with her parents on the army base, going to rehab at the VA every day, doing a little teaching of new recruits to keep her occupied, Eve tried and failed to find her feet again.
With her returning health, clearer and clearer memories also crept out of the murky fog of her damaged brain, ambushing her.
Why did fictional characters get to keep their amnesia when she remembered everything? For her, returned and always returning, every scent, every scrape of boot on gravel, every fleck of blood dried on her hands, every knife-edge of terror, every pulse of soul-destroying rage, the present folded into the past. That day back at the Port fighting to save her team-and failing-was engraved in her brain. Their eyes followed her from every shadow, in every reflection, just beyond the edge of sight, accusing her for living when they had died.
Every night, her faceless opponent returned in her nightmares, forcing her to watch him murder her friends, her team, then turning on her until she awoke gasping for air, striking at shadows, and shaking so badly the bed rattled the floor.
Sleep became a memory. Eve fled it as desperately as she longed for it.
Nights found her running miles on the treadmill, sweat dripping down her body, heedless of pain. When her pulse beat so fast that her vision blurred, and her stumbling legs betrayed her so that she could run no farther, she would lift weights, working her barely recovered muscles beyond quivering exhaustion. When she could stagger to her feet again, she would beat her fists bloody on the punching bag.
Sometimes, then, collapsing on the nearest available surface, she could sleep un-tormented for an hour or two before the hell of her memory re-ignited.
She lost weight she could ill-afford to lose. Her eyes were sunken and shadowed in her increasingly gaunt face.
Her mother watched her with the tragic gaze of one who loves and who does not know how to prevent the loss of what she loves, knowing, as the wife of a career military officer, that not all of the dead come home in body bags.
It was her father who would stand in her doorway and call her out of the nightmares, waiting until she knew where she was and who he was before entering and enfolding her in his arms.
Her father held her the night she finally broke down and wept like a child-the first tears she had shed.
It was her father who convinced her to seek help.
Her dad, who at age 18 had donned his proud uniform and shipped out to the Vietnam war that had devoured his youth, chewed up his body and his spirit, and spit him out at age 30 with rank, a promising military career, a collection of old photographs of friends who never grew any older, and nightmares that still visited him 40 years later.
Even though he was gone now, she could still call up the memory of him, the feel of his old cardigan on her cheek, the scent of his aftershave, and the grieving understanding in his voice as he told her, “Sometimes, my Eve, no matter how hard you try, you lose. You do your best, but you just lose.”
* * * * *
TBC