Original Fic- Gates of the Country
Before I start- as you know, I went to London this summer with my family, and the song featured in this story is one that I listened to many, many times whilst overseas. You know how sometimes you'll hear a song and immediately, your mind will fill in a story? This is the story mine filled in. Lovely, lovely song.
Disclaimer: The song "Gates of the Country" is owned by Black Lab, and my friend Holly (who I wrote this for) is owned by herself.
Title: Gates of the Country
Rating: PG-13 for some difficult subject material
Genre: Romance/Angst
Summary: He dropped a bag containing a license that didn’t have his name on it and a passport that was under a fake name on the floor of an apartment that he’d paid for with blood money.
Warnings: Mentions of terrorism.
He dropped a bag containing a license that didn’t have his name on it and a passport that was under a fake name on the floor of an apartment that he’d paid for with blood money. This was home now. Well… home as much as home could be, now, after everything. He stared at the window, at the iconic skyline that was missing two towers, and thought of a very different skyline. And the girl. Always the girl.
-
April
Back in New York
The 31st floor
It seems somehow everything's changed
The kitchen too small
Plates on the wall
The sound of machinery
-
Two weeks earlier.
“I understand,” Kamil said, nodding. His superiors fixed their flat black eyes on him for a minute before nodding and then one of them pushed a folder across the table at him.
“A foreign girl,” he said gruffly in Arabic. “Preferably American. And pretty.”
“I understand,” Kamil said again.
In Heathrow, a girl with green eyes and brown hair was getting off of a plane with her family. But Kamil didn’t know that, not yet.
He left the room, left the building, and emerged into the city of London, slowly inhaling the air of the city as people, laughing, chattering, annoying, pushed past him. He had no qualms about this life he’d chosen, nor the life he was going to take. This war was holy. There had to be sacrifices. The girl, whoever she was, was one of the lucky ones. Her death would be relatively peaceful.
He got in his car and drove to the airport.
-
Present Day
He walked into the bedroom, collapsed on the bed, green eyes and brown hair in his mind, and, staring up at the ceiling, a single tear rolled down his face.
-
May
Where have you been?
Who were you running with?
Wasn’t he someone you used to call home?
Where is the ring?
Where is the boy who went travelling alone?
-
It was later that very day, when he was riding the Tube home, that he saw her. There was no attraction; no interest, but he could fake that well enough. It was that she was pretty, and that her family and her betrayed her as American. He had been taught to hate Americans more than any other, but he couldn’t manage any more emotion toward them than he could to any of the human race. He could fake that, too.
He approached her.
“Is this your first time in London?” he asked her as he grabbed the pole running over his head. She whirled around, her hair fanning out behind her, and then gave him a smile that was wide and bright and a small laugh that he returned.
“Uh. Yeah,” she said, and he smiled at her. It was all an act, but she didn’t need to know that. “I’m here with my family.”
He looked around at them- two parents and a teenage boy. The boy merely gave him a look, but the mother gave him a wide grin that matched her daughter’s, and he smiled back, genuinely. And then internally wondered what was wrong with him before turning back to the daughter.
“And how long will you be here?” he asked her, still charming, his accent thick but understandable. She was still smiling up at him, and she was very short.
“Two weeks,” she said.
Perfect, he thought. Outwardly, he gave her a wider smile.
“Would you like me to show you and your family the city? I know it quite well.”
“Do you just wait on trains to help out American families?” she asked him, teasing slightly. His grin widened and he prayed she didn’t see the flash in his eyes.
“Something like that.”
“Then I’d love it,” she said.
Game, set, match.
-
She is much better without me.
She walks through the gates of the country
Her hands at her side
And I smile as I watch her walk by
Somehow I see there are ships in her eyes
She is better off now
-
Time passed, as it was prone to do. Kamil told his superiors, the men who were planning this, about the girl- Holly- three days after he met her, and he wasn’t entirely surprised to find that he was going to miss her.
They met almost every day. He pretended to run into her all over the city, on the tube, on the buses, but she wasn’t fooled. Her guesses were wrong, she would never guess that he was a terrorist (he was thinking that word with less pride now) but she knew he wasn’t running into her and her family by chance. Lucky her parents and brother liked him as well, otherwise it would have been much harder to fool the girl.
But he wasn’t sure, anymore, that he wanted to keep fooling her.
He grew to know her. Knew how she walked, bouncing slightly with each step, how she stared off into space like it was mesmerizing, how she held her hand up to her mouth when she ate, how she laughed, like she was delighted. He found that his responses to her were growing more genuine as time passed spent in her company.
And one day, he found that he was excited to see her. She seemed to blush around him more than usual, that day, and when she glanced away, he hadn’t been able to help himself- he put a hand on her face and pulled her close to him and kissed her- kissed her, an American heretic. She was everything Americans weren’t supposed to be- kind and thoughtful and tolerant and intelligent, if a little odd.
The next day, three days before she was to die in this “holy war”, he went into a Christian church, an ancient church with chanting and incense and robes and paintings of stoic saints with wide, wise eyes and thin lips and serene faces.
And for the first time, he felt like he was home.
That day, he realized he was in love with her.
-
June
The curtain is shut
The patterns are cut
The maid who will wake you at dawn
Pulls out a chair
Pulls down your hair
It’s just like you wanted
-
“I have something to tell you,” he told her the day before the day she was to die. She looked up at him, trusting and young. She shrugged.
“Alright.”
He told her everything, watched her mouth fall open, her face turn white. She clapped her hands over her mouth, backing away from him, tears filling her eyes. He felt his heart breaking with hers.
“Oh my God,” she said. He took a step toward her.
“Holly, I am so sorry-“
“I trusted you,” she hissed, the tears gone, her face white and angry, her hands clenched into angry fists at her sides before she strode up to him. “I loved you!”
He clasped her fists. “I’m so, so sorry-“
“Don’t say that to me!” she yanked out of his grasp, her eyes fiery, and began pacing up and down, her face harder than he’d seen it, calculating and intelligent.
“Holly?”
“Shut up,” she said, “I’m thinking.”
He shut up, and five minutes later, she turned back to him, the hot anger than had been in her eyes replaced by something icy and hard.
“You told me,” she said. “Does that mean you’ll help me?”
“I will die for you,” he said simply.
“It’s a little late for that,” she snapped. “But I have a plan.”
“Alright,” he said, leaning forwards. “I’ll do it-“
“You won’t be able to get away,” she said bluntly. “You won’t be able to get out of jail. Or you’ll have to go on the run.”
This stopped him for a moment, but he shook his head and clasped her chin, gently. She made to jerk out of his grasp, but he didn’t let her.
“I know I betrayed you,” he said softly. “And I can’t ask you to forget that or forgive it. But every word I said to you over the past week was true. I love you.”
She fixed him in her green gaze and said nothing.
-
July
What’s going on?
What are you running from?
Why are you sleeping alone on the floor?
Some people change
Others hang on till they can't anymore
-
They came for her that night, and she fought. She fought just enough to make them think she was trying. Kamil was in the group, assisting, trying to prevent her from being hurt without being discovered. It didn’t work, of course. She got a black eye and at least a cracked rib.
They threw her in the back of the car and drove to the center of the city while Kamil got the gun. They wanted him to be the one to kill her. They wanted to break her.
“I loved you!” she screamed, the noise muffled. “I loved you! Bastard!”
He had a feeling these cries weren’t all acting.
They dragged her out of the car and didn’t notice that she fought much less this time. Her eyes were closed.
They set her on the steps of St. Paul’s, her head lolling back on the white building, the floodlights bathing her in light. She looked like an angel. The man in charge turned to Kamil.
“Do it,” he said. “Finish her. Paint the walls of this evil building with the blood of that evil girl.”
Holly was glowering at him and Kamil knew she was slowly untying the knots he’d tied loosely around her wrists.
He pulled the gun out of his pants and shot her in the chest. She stared at him, her face white and betrayed, and then her head fell back against the white building, red splattered behind her. Kamil stared at her, lowering the smoking gun.
“Let’s go,” said his superior, clapping him on the shoulder.
She was just the beginning.
-
She is much better without me
She walks through the gates of the country
Hands at her side
And I smile as I watch her walk by
Somehow I see there are ships in her eyes
She is better off now.
-
As soon as they drove away, Holly slipped her wrists out of the bindings and dropped the remains of the crushed tomato that she’d squeezed when the paintball pellet from Kamil’s gun had hit her. It looked very convincing, she thought, as she examined the wall behind her. She pulled out her camera and snapped a picture of the wall, of her chest, of the bindings. Evidence.
Then, rubbing her stinging chest, she began walking.
She came across a policeman, a kindly Brit in his thirties with tan skin and bright blue eyes, and told him everything. He listened, eyes widening as she spoke, and she showed him the pictures.
She got into the passenger seat of his car and gave him the address Kamil had forced her to repeat over and over as he sped off, calling for backup.
They stormed the apartment and told her to stay in the car. She didn’t listen to them. She knew she wouldn’t be any safer there.
She opened the glove compartment and grabbed the gun, clumsily loading it and the cocking it, and then ran into the building.
Two of the British version of SWATS were dead and two terrorists were lying flat on the ground, not moving. The others were up and fighting, Kamil shooting against his own people.
Holly fired two shots into the air and every head turned to her. The terrorists gaped at her and Kamil just stared at her, pride clear in his eyes.
“You,” hissed one of the terrorists.
“Me,” she said, and aimed the gun at him.
“Don’t!” shouted the policeman who’d picked her up and a terrorist promptly shot him in the shoulder. Without thinking about it, Holly
turned the gun on him.
They won, in the end. The terrorists were carted away, but one of them looked peaceful. One of them was praying, and it wasn’t to Allah.
And Holly was an international hero.
-
She is much better without me
She walks through the gates of the country
Hands in the air
And I smile as I watch her walk by
Somehow I see there are ships in her eyes yeah
She is much better now.
-
He’d managed to get away and was now living in New York. There was never a moment his thoughts weren’t occupied by the green eyes of the American girl he’d known and loved.
He clicked the TV on to see her, in an airport, just a few miles from where he was now. She was smiling as cameras clicked, waving her hands in the air like the hero she was. A sad smile spread over his face as he watched her. She was born to be something more, and now she was. And he was born to love her, and need her, always knowing how much better off she was without him in her life.
She’d changed him. Everything from his religion to his personality. She may have been a hero, but no one would know what exactly she had done.
She hadn’t just saved the thousands of people that would’ve died, had he picked any other girl; she’d saved him.
She was so much better off without him.
fin.
Disclaimer: The song "Gates of the Country" is owned by Black Lab, and my friend Holly (who I wrote this for) is owned by herself.
Title: Gates of the Country
Rating: PG-13 for some difficult subject material
Genre: Romance/Angst
Summary: He dropped a bag containing a license that didn’t have his name on it and a passport that was under a fake name on the floor of an apartment that he’d paid for with blood money.
Warnings: Mentions of terrorism.
He dropped a bag containing a license that didn’t have his name on it and a passport that was under a fake name on the floor of an apartment that he’d paid for with blood money. This was home now. Well… home as much as home could be, now, after everything. He stared at the window, at the iconic skyline that was missing two towers, and thought of a very different skyline. And the girl. Always the girl.
-
April
Back in New York
The 31st floor
It seems somehow everything's changed
The kitchen too small
Plates on the wall
The sound of machinery
-
Two weeks earlier.
“I understand,” Kamil said, nodding. His superiors fixed their flat black eyes on him for a minute before nodding and then one of them pushed a folder across the table at him.
“A foreign girl,” he said gruffly in Arabic. “Preferably American. And pretty.”
“I understand,” Kamil said again.
In Heathrow, a girl with green eyes and brown hair was getting off of a plane with her family. But Kamil didn’t know that, not yet.
He left the room, left the building, and emerged into the city of London, slowly inhaling the air of the city as people, laughing, chattering, annoying, pushed past him. He had no qualms about this life he’d chosen, nor the life he was going to take. This war was holy. There had to be sacrifices. The girl, whoever she was, was one of the lucky ones. Her death would be relatively peaceful.
He got in his car and drove to the airport.
-
Present Day
He walked into the bedroom, collapsed on the bed, green eyes and brown hair in his mind, and, staring up at the ceiling, a single tear rolled down his face.
-
May
Where have you been?
Who were you running with?
Wasn’t he someone you used to call home?
Where is the ring?
Where is the boy who went travelling alone?
-
It was later that very day, when he was riding the Tube home, that he saw her. There was no attraction; no interest, but he could fake that well enough. It was that she was pretty, and that her family and her betrayed her as American. He had been taught to hate Americans more than any other, but he couldn’t manage any more emotion toward them than he could to any of the human race. He could fake that, too.
He approached her.
“Is this your first time in London?” he asked her as he grabbed the pole running over his head. She whirled around, her hair fanning out behind her, and then gave him a smile that was wide and bright and a small laugh that he returned.
“Uh. Yeah,” she said, and he smiled at her. It was all an act, but she didn’t need to know that. “I’m here with my family.”
He looked around at them- two parents and a teenage boy. The boy merely gave him a look, but the mother gave him a wide grin that matched her daughter’s, and he smiled back, genuinely. And then internally wondered what was wrong with him before turning back to the daughter.
“And how long will you be here?” he asked her, still charming, his accent thick but understandable. She was still smiling up at him, and she was very short.
“Two weeks,” she said.
Perfect, he thought. Outwardly, he gave her a wider smile.
“Would you like me to show you and your family the city? I know it quite well.”
“Do you just wait on trains to help out American families?” she asked him, teasing slightly. His grin widened and he prayed she didn’t see the flash in his eyes.
“Something like that.”
“Then I’d love it,” she said.
Game, set, match.
-
She is much better without me.
She walks through the gates of the country
Her hands at her side
And I smile as I watch her walk by
Somehow I see there are ships in her eyes
She is better off now
-
Time passed, as it was prone to do. Kamil told his superiors, the men who were planning this, about the girl- Holly- three days after he met her, and he wasn’t entirely surprised to find that he was going to miss her.
They met almost every day. He pretended to run into her all over the city, on the tube, on the buses, but she wasn’t fooled. Her guesses were wrong, she would never guess that he was a terrorist (he was thinking that word with less pride now) but she knew he wasn’t running into her and her family by chance. Lucky her parents and brother liked him as well, otherwise it would have been much harder to fool the girl.
But he wasn’t sure, anymore, that he wanted to keep fooling her.
He grew to know her. Knew how she walked, bouncing slightly with each step, how she stared off into space like it was mesmerizing, how she held her hand up to her mouth when she ate, how she laughed, like she was delighted. He found that his responses to her were growing more genuine as time passed spent in her company.
And one day, he found that he was excited to see her. She seemed to blush around him more than usual, that day, and when she glanced away, he hadn’t been able to help himself- he put a hand on her face and pulled her close to him and kissed her- kissed her, an American heretic. She was everything Americans weren’t supposed to be- kind and thoughtful and tolerant and intelligent, if a little odd.
The next day, three days before she was to die in this “holy war”, he went into a Christian church, an ancient church with chanting and incense and robes and paintings of stoic saints with wide, wise eyes and thin lips and serene faces.
And for the first time, he felt like he was home.
That day, he realized he was in love with her.
-
June
The curtain is shut
The patterns are cut
The maid who will wake you at dawn
Pulls out a chair
Pulls down your hair
It’s just like you wanted
-
“I have something to tell you,” he told her the day before the day she was to die. She looked up at him, trusting and young. She shrugged.
“Alright.”
He told her everything, watched her mouth fall open, her face turn white. She clapped her hands over her mouth, backing away from him, tears filling her eyes. He felt his heart breaking with hers.
“Oh my God,” she said. He took a step toward her.
“Holly, I am so sorry-“
“I trusted you,” she hissed, the tears gone, her face white and angry, her hands clenched into angry fists at her sides before she strode up to him. “I loved you!”
He clasped her fists. “I’m so, so sorry-“
“Don’t say that to me!” she yanked out of his grasp, her eyes fiery, and began pacing up and down, her face harder than he’d seen it, calculating and intelligent.
“Holly?”
“Shut up,” she said, “I’m thinking.”
He shut up, and five minutes later, she turned back to him, the hot anger than had been in her eyes replaced by something icy and hard.
“You told me,” she said. “Does that mean you’ll help me?”
“I will die for you,” he said simply.
“It’s a little late for that,” she snapped. “But I have a plan.”
“Alright,” he said, leaning forwards. “I’ll do it-“
“You won’t be able to get away,” she said bluntly. “You won’t be able to get out of jail. Or you’ll have to go on the run.”
This stopped him for a moment, but he shook his head and clasped her chin, gently. She made to jerk out of his grasp, but he didn’t let her.
“I know I betrayed you,” he said softly. “And I can’t ask you to forget that or forgive it. But every word I said to you over the past week was true. I love you.”
She fixed him in her green gaze and said nothing.
-
July
What’s going on?
What are you running from?
Why are you sleeping alone on the floor?
Some people change
Others hang on till they can't anymore
-
They came for her that night, and she fought. She fought just enough to make them think she was trying. Kamil was in the group, assisting, trying to prevent her from being hurt without being discovered. It didn’t work, of course. She got a black eye and at least a cracked rib.
They threw her in the back of the car and drove to the center of the city while Kamil got the gun. They wanted him to be the one to kill her. They wanted to break her.
“I loved you!” she screamed, the noise muffled. “I loved you! Bastard!”
He had a feeling these cries weren’t all acting.
They dragged her out of the car and didn’t notice that she fought much less this time. Her eyes were closed.
They set her on the steps of St. Paul’s, her head lolling back on the white building, the floodlights bathing her in light. She looked like an angel. The man in charge turned to Kamil.
“Do it,” he said. “Finish her. Paint the walls of this evil building with the blood of that evil girl.”
Holly was glowering at him and Kamil knew she was slowly untying the knots he’d tied loosely around her wrists.
He pulled the gun out of his pants and shot her in the chest. She stared at him, her face white and betrayed, and then her head fell back against the white building, red splattered behind her. Kamil stared at her, lowering the smoking gun.
“Let’s go,” said his superior, clapping him on the shoulder.
She was just the beginning.
-
She is much better without me
She walks through the gates of the country
Hands at her side
And I smile as I watch her walk by
Somehow I see there are ships in her eyes
She is better off now.
-
As soon as they drove away, Holly slipped her wrists out of the bindings and dropped the remains of the crushed tomato that she’d squeezed when the paintball pellet from Kamil’s gun had hit her. It looked very convincing, she thought, as she examined the wall behind her. She pulled out her camera and snapped a picture of the wall, of her chest, of the bindings. Evidence.
Then, rubbing her stinging chest, she began walking.
She came across a policeman, a kindly Brit in his thirties with tan skin and bright blue eyes, and told him everything. He listened, eyes widening as she spoke, and she showed him the pictures.
She got into the passenger seat of his car and gave him the address Kamil had forced her to repeat over and over as he sped off, calling for backup.
They stormed the apartment and told her to stay in the car. She didn’t listen to them. She knew she wouldn’t be any safer there.
She opened the glove compartment and grabbed the gun, clumsily loading it and the cocking it, and then ran into the building.
Two of the British version of SWATS were dead and two terrorists were lying flat on the ground, not moving. The others were up and fighting, Kamil shooting against his own people.
Holly fired two shots into the air and every head turned to her. The terrorists gaped at her and Kamil just stared at her, pride clear in his eyes.
“You,” hissed one of the terrorists.
“Me,” she said, and aimed the gun at him.
“Don’t!” shouted the policeman who’d picked her up and a terrorist promptly shot him in the shoulder. Without thinking about it, Holly
turned the gun on him.
They won, in the end. The terrorists were carted away, but one of them looked peaceful. One of them was praying, and it wasn’t to Allah.
And Holly was an international hero.
-
She is much better without me
She walks through the gates of the country
Hands in the air
And I smile as I watch her walk by
Somehow I see there are ships in her eyes yeah
She is much better now.
-
He’d managed to get away and was now living in New York. There was never a moment his thoughts weren’t occupied by the green eyes of the American girl he’d known and loved.
He clicked the TV on to see her, in an airport, just a few miles from where he was now. She was smiling as cameras clicked, waving her hands in the air like the hero she was. A sad smile spread over his face as he watched her. She was born to be something more, and now she was. And he was born to love her, and need her, always knowing how much better off she was without him in her life.
She’d changed him. Everything from his religion to his personality. She may have been a hero, but no one would know what exactly she had done.
She hadn’t just saved the thousands of people that would’ve died, had he picked any other girl; she’d saved him.
She was so much better off without him.
fin.