Two Knight's Closing: Chapter Seven
Title: Two Knight's Closing: World So Cold
Author: Magpie
Rating: pg-13
Genre: Nate/Eliot, referenced pre-series Eliot/OMC, Parker/Hardison
Verse: BlackKing!WhiteKnight!Verse
Summary: Those who forget the past will be doomed to repeat it.
Notes: Many many thanks to she who should be praised LMX_v3point3. Without her I would be cast into a world of darkness and despair and even worse... a lack of commas. A Dante's Inferno of mediocrity.
Moving on. I am pleased to say I've finally broken the rest of the con for this so the last two chapters should be done before too much longer. I hope to have it done before I head back to school if not sooner. Once this is done I will turn my attention to finishing The Legacy Job.
This chapter is brought to you in part by the song World So Cold by 12 Stones.
Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Four, Chapter Five, Chapter Six
One Year Earlier
“Just go…”
Sophie knew the moment she heard the words, that the rules had changed to something she didn’t understand.
She stumbled as she tried to catch her balance, high heels and mid-rescue adrenalin not helpful when your rescuer suddenly shoves you forward.
Despite her distraction something in the words still registered. The desperation maybe. Or the way they sounded like they’d been shoved up his throat, past a force trying to smother him, and out from behind clenched teeth.
She turned, though later she’d try to deny that her instinct had been to turn to help him. He’d leaned against a wall, clutching injuries, trembling, looking like he was about to shake to pieces, pain of unknown origin written across his face.
“You’re hurt,” Sophie said, trying to get Eliot to let her see the wound, to administer first aid or something, anything, to ease that fear that he was about to implode.
It would take longer than she liked to admit to forget the next moment, when hands so adapt at breaking bone and rending bodies but always so gentle with her found her shoulder and shoved her away, sending her sprawling to the ground, scraped skin and bumped limbs not hurting nearly as badly as that place on her shoulder where she could have sworn her skin was burning.
“Run,” he stuttered out. There was fear in his voice now. She looked up and she realized it was fear for them. Sophie didn’t know what was going on, but she knew in her bones if she stayed to find out her blood would be on Eliot’s hands. “RUN.”
Sophie scrambled to her feet and fled, not letting herself look back, not wanting to see the true violence in the eyes of the Black Knight chasing her away.
Unknown Location in L.A.
Present Day
Later, if there would be a later, Sophie knows she is going to marvel at that moment, and this.
She had followed Eliot to L.A., to his old apartment, chasing a trail of seemingly false memories and cookie crumbs to a burned out youth center. She’d watched him walk about like he was in a trance, old memories chasing back into his mind and losing him in their return.
And then a man had come to the gate; older, tall, graying hair, flanked by goons. He’d spoken a single phrase.
“Echo, Check in.”
Calling Eliot 'Echo', and Eliot had turned, his attention locking onto him.
The man had spoken one more phrase and Eliot had collapsed, unconscious.
Years ago, when they were working together, Sophie had found Tara drinking one night in January in their normal meeting location. Drinking hard enough that she was already tipsy. A hour later she’d been drunk enough to explain that it was the birthday of her “other brother in arms”, a boy named Echo whose twenty-sixth birthday she and Charlie should have been celebrating.
Instead they were mourning the fifth anniversary of his death.
More than that though, Sophie never heard; but years later, she was in L.A. chasing the killer of a man named Charlie who both Tara and Eliot knew, and she was hearing someone call Eliot 'Echo'?
And now, seeing Eliot fall at just a word, the way she’d spent months convincing Tara Neuro-Lingusitic Programming *didn't* work…
Jigsaw puzzle pieces and bits were falling into place too fast for Sophie to comprehend the final picture.
She was stopped by the goons before she could reach Eliot. The guns pointed at her were held in steady hands and the expressions on the men carrying them were all business. The type of men Eliot took out because she couldn’t con her way past.
Only Eliot was down and Sophie was beginning to understand what was going on.
The old man looked down at Eliot and then up at her and smiled. “Ah, yes,” he said, simply. “You’ll do nicely.” Two goons appeared, half carrying, half dragging Eliot away. The two with guns on her patted her down, took away her cell phone, and hustled her toward a van and into the back with an unconscious Eliot.
She was allowed to sit with him at least, as they drove off towards wherever the hell was their destination and Sophie took advantage of her free hands, checking Eliot for injuries and then just holding him, silently praying that the others were looking for them, that Eliot would wake up and rescue them, that she’d get some kind of opening to turn this around.
The trip had been short to wherever they were going. The rear doors of the van were opened underground, Eliot was dragged out and she was nudged along at gunpoint. It looked like some kind of extensive underground basement facility, and the room they were eventually left in was some sort of large closet, emptied out and with a reinforced door and concrete walls.
They’d been left alone for a little while and as the first half hour passed, Eliot started to stir.
“That’s it,” Sophie muttered to him, trying to coax him back into the realm of the waking. Escaping captivity, at least this kind, was his forte. And she needed to know what they were dealing with. “Wake up.”
The door opened, the old man entered with a small metal box and two more of his goons (different men than the ones before, and she’d seen another different one on the way in. There were at least seven of them, probably more, not good odds but not the worst either).
“Sorry for my rudeness earlier,” the man stated, as if it were a regular Tuesday meeting arrangement for him to kidnap someone. “I am Dr. Samuel Kent.” Another man (number eight) brought in a stool and closed the door behind them. Kent sat the metal box on top of the stool.
“Sophie,” Sophie responded to the introduction. She had no time to pick out an alias and she had a feeling Eliot might not be in a state to pick up whatever alias she was using later. Better to give her name now. It would be easier to get a lie past Kent if he didn’t catch her in one first.
Kent nodded approvingly. “Good good. I feel I should inform you, Sophie, that I am a teacher. The man you’re holding is one of my former students.” He opened the box and started to dig through it. “When I met him he was a street urchin, a couple weeks away from selling himself for something to eat, a couple months away from quieting the dreams with drugs. Maybe three years from ODing in some back alley, if somewhere along the way all that didn’t break that stubbornness he thought was control and cause him to snap and shoot up some corner store first.”
Any response Sophie could have come up with for that was silenced when Kent withdrew a syringe and small vial of clear liquid from the metal box.
“But I managed to catch him first. Like all my other students. He had the spark of promise if given direction and discipline. And I gave him both.” A proud smile crossed Kent’s lips as he drew some of the liquid into the syringe. “Taught them direction, focus, discipline. Made them into something that could benefit society. Right until…” He crossed to her and knelt next to her and Eliot. Sophie didn’t want to let Kent do whatever he intended on doing but she couldn’t move Eliot far on her own, even if there was anywhere to move to, and she could feel the goons' eyes on her. “He’s about to have a seizure so please let him lie flat. Though if you’d be so kind as to protect his head your friend would likely appreciate it.”
Dread.
Sophie slipped out from under Eliot but did her best to put herself between Kent and Eliot. She couldn’t just…
“Now, now… that’s not the way,” Kent chided gently. “If you behave I’ll let you stay with him, unbound, ungagged. You’ll be able to comfort him, take care of him. You two are partners in my classroom, you two should look out for each other, and understand should I have to discipline one I will discipline both.”
Sophie hated that every grifter instinct was screaming at her to obey his rules for now, get a read, build a rapport, this would be slow and delicate.
This was Eliot.
But she knew Kent meant everything he said and getting them both hurt for an exercise in futility was just idiotic.
She knelt next to Eliot’s head, brushing a strand of hair out of his face, not looking at Kent as he knelt beside Eliot. She slipped off her jacket and put it under his head, knukles white where she gripped the edges to keep from lashing out when Kent pulled up Eliot’s sleeve and injected him with god only knew what.
She fought the burning sensation in her eyes as she waited, moments ticking into minutes, Kent getting up and leaving, not looking away from Eliot.
He seized ten minutes after Kent left. His body jerking up, arms flailing, low grunts of pain escaping him. Seconds, a minute, less than two, but it felt like hours, passed and then he went still.
And she was left to wait for whatever came next.
Sophie let herself doze, knowing she needed to be rested if she was going to have her wits about her.
Sophie had no way of knowing how long she’d dosed before the nightmares started. Eliot tensed in her arms, shifting anxiously, eyes moving behind his eyelids as he muttered beneath his breath, broken bits of sentences she couldn’t interpret.
Then, after what felt like a short eternity, he calmed and quieted. His hand gripped a handful of her shirt and he told her, or whoever he thought she was; “When I’m with you I’m not as tired.”
Sophie didn’t know who the words were meant for but in that moment she silently promised to get him back to whoever it was.
Just as soon as they got out of here.
Eliot settled after that, but he was sleeping lighter, stirring just a little bit whenever she moved or called his name but never waking.
His eyes opened for the briefest moment when the door opened, looking up at her hazily before closing again as she fought to help him sit up, her attention split between him and Kent coming in with another bloody metal box. Eliot made a sound and she looked down, relieved to see his eyes open. “That’s it. Stay with me.”
Kent was coming closer and she looked up, the iron tight control over her panic and fear at this unknown situation cracking just a little. “No. Leave him alone,” she said in a voice she’d later tell herself shook with anger rather than fear.
Kent just tsked at her and nodded to the goons. She tried to fight them off, punching the way Eliot had taught her but with only one free arm and Eliot’s weight she never stood a chance. The goons grabbed Eliot and pulled him away from her, upright, toward Kent, while another goon pulled her to her feet and back.
She stumbled but kept her eyes on Eliot. His eyes were open but he wasn’t seeing anything, held up by the men supporting him. He wrenched forward, gagging but with nothing in his stomach to expel. Fear took over his face when one of the goons grabbed his arm and administered the drug.
The reaction was almost instantaneous this time, Eliot lashing and straining against the men holding him, shaking, trembling, a look Sophie recognized in his eyes.
She’d seen it on a job what felt like a lifetime ago. She could almost hear his words then echoing inside of her head.
Just go. Run.
But she couldn’t run. Instead, the men holding her pushed her forward so she stumbled to her knees in the space in front of Eliot like a sacrificial lamb.
“I never told you what I taught my students Sophie,” Kent said, just a hint of a taunt in his voice as he touched Eliot’s cheek. The Hitter flinched back like he’d been struck, his whole body rocking and quaking in response. “I taught my students to be soldiers. Perfect soldiers who obey commands without thought or hesitation. I’ve taken that violence Echo here has always has inside him and honed it to a perfect edge for efficiently killing. Taming the beast.” Kent turned to her with a smile. “Would you like a demonstration?”
Sophie looked up at Eliot, slow dawning horror at what she was hearing, understanding what it meant.
A word from Kent and Eliot would kill her.
“Echo ch-“
The words were interrupted by a noise escaping Eliot. Somewhere between a roar and a scream, and something so far beyond either, ripped free from deep within the hitter.
Suddenly Eliot was moving, pulling free of the goons, lashing out. The guards were down before it even registered that he’d broken free and he was attacking Kent, knocking him back and down, a blow to his solar plexus making it impossible for Kent to finish the command.
Then Eliot was turning toward her and Sophie felt whatever she’d been preparing to say suddenly cut off as those two blue eyes turned on her, alight, on fire…
She was caught in the gaze of a cobra.
Later the uneven hitching of his breath would make her amend that to rattlesnake.
He hesitated for a moment. For only a moment.
“Echo,” she said, remembering the words spoken. “Check in.” His attention shifted. Something in his eyes changed. She forced herself up to her knees and then her feet, holding out a hand. A soft litany of words she wouldn’t remember later escaped her lips as she crossed the space between them.
New Sparks Youth Center
Eighteen Years Ago
He remembers this. He’s always remembered this.
Nightmares. Dreams. Flashbacks of sensory input he both could and couldn’t place.
There’s an apology in Charlie’s eyes. They knew someone had to do this. That this was their best choice. Echo had volunteered. The conditioning had never taken as strongly in Charlie and Echo felt like it was their job to do this to protect the other students.
And at some point Echo had gone from one of the worst fighters to the best.
They had agreed upon this. Charlie had taken every step to make this different somehow.
But there was still an apology in his eyes when he spoke the words that reverberated through his mind. “Echo, check in.”
The second phrase, the command phrase, didn’t even register consciously. Echo felt it hit him like a wave and he surrendered to it as he’d been taught. Fighting conditioning was futile and agonizing.
A moment in the memory. Something. A hint. Gone too quickly.
He felt himself move, his mind was spinning with disjointed calculations and plans, dodging things he distantly knew were attacks, placing perfectly aimed movements of his arms and legs to take down the obstacles in his way. It was slow and sharp and fast and disconnected like pieces of a puzzle he couldn’t put together.
He had single clues and hints but he couldn’t hold onto enough to understand or comprehend what they actually meant as a whole.
He felt sick but knew in his bones he couldn’t stop until all the obstacles were down.
Warmth splattered across his face. Blood. He registered that it was blood.
He felt something give way. His mind told him he’d snapped a bone.
Was the blood from the bone?
What bone? He was smelling urine mixed with blood now. Had one of the obstacles died? Had he managed to get a knife.
He had a knife in his hand. He could do more damage to the targets now.
His face was wet. He couldn’t remember how that happened.
Nothing was moving anymore.
He touched a railing, blood on his hands. He remembered where he was now. He looked up from the body at his feet, slipping into unconsciousness, saw the corpses littering the yard of the youth center. Cops would be coming soon.
Where was he?
“Echo, Check in.” A voice, and anchor, pulling him back, giving him direction. He turned. Seeing Charlie. He knew where he was.
He was home.
“Close your eyes,” Charlie said. “Breathe. Give yourself a few moments. You’re done.” A hand in his hair and he knew he was done for now. He breathed, looking back down, the hand moved away.
Another breath. The world still felt far away but it was coming back. He could put pieces back together. He knew where he was. What he was doing.
He was waiting. For what he wasn’t sure right then, but it would come back to him in a minute.
“Are you ready?”
He opened his eyes, ready to respond, to move forward, always ready when Charlie asked.
Bright pain touched the base of his neck, searing out in blinding white pain that sent him tumbling into oblivion.
Present
Sophie saw one of the goons move too late to stop him. She’d been trying to calm Eliot. Getting him back to himself might be their only chance to get out of here.
But the man moved, a taser touching the back of Eliot’s neck and sending him crashing down to the floor.
Kent got unsteadily to his feet, dusting himself off, trying to regain the posture he normally kept. “It appears some lessons need to be retaught.” Kent snapped his fingers and gestured toward Sophie.
Two goons grabbed her shoulders as she sought the right words for this. She could talk her way out of this. She just needed the right angle.
Maybe it was the forty eight hours or more since she’d gotten decent sleep, or her worry about Eliot, or the fact she’d been kidnapped by a sociopath who had managed to defy the fact she *knew* behavior conditioning and neural linguistic programing did not work like that and that she was discovering way more about Eliot than she probably wanted to know.
Or maybe it was the fact she was a good enough grifter, had spent enough time with Eliot, to know what was coming next.
But she couldn’t figure out the right thing to say. All she could do was brace herself.
She could have just run.
The thought played over and over and over in her head.
She’d gotten away clean. It was her mother who’d gotten caught. Her mother had gotten greedy and made a mistake and didn’t listen when Eva told her they needed to go.
Her mother never listened to her. You didn’t listened to what tools thought, she thought bitterly.
She was just her mother’s tool. A prop. She had every reason to not go back for her mother.
Her mother wouldn’t have gone back for her.
Eva pressed the bag of ice harder against her eye, not sure why except as some kind of distraction from the cracking of the world around her. The pain from the black eye, the broken finger, the cuts and bruises and tears.
She’d gone back for her mother and they’d…
She was fourteen.
It was her mother.
Unbidden memory drifted forward, the little boy she’d known for a few brief months, the one who’d called her Eva, who was why she held onto that name when her mother tried to deny her one…
”You’re like Cinderella. Cindereva. I want to rescue you. Your Mama’s not a good mama.”
She’d gone back for an idea of a mother that didn’t exist. The woman sleeping in the next room…
She’d taken a beating to protect that woman and an hour ago that woman had slapped her for being hysterical.
She should have just left her and run. Blood maybe, but they weren’t real family.
A figure appeared at the doorway, blurry. A soft cloth pressed against the cut on her lip.
“Shouldn’t of come with me.”
Sophie opened her eyes slowly, ghost of old pain mixing with the fresh hot fire that had taken up residence in her body.
But her eyes seemed to work okay. No damage there, though she’d blacked out which might explain why it took a moment for vision to focus.
Eliot looked down at her, she was laying on his knees, his back against the wall of their cell. He smiled a little when she managed to focus on him. “Welcome back,” he said, worry and relief in his voice.
He touched a wet cloth to her face, she could feel his hand shaking and she half wondered if the wall was the only thing keeping him semi upright.
She tried to sit up but his hand settled on her shoulder. “You took a bad beating, rest.” His expression tightened as he said it but his hand stayed gentle and though she could see hints of rage in his eyes he held it down.
For her sake.
“Good to see you lucid,” she said, glad her voice wasn’t hoarse. She hadn’t cried or screamed or anything. As beatings went it was probably only a mild one but…
Something about her world view had become extremely warped in the past few years if a beating that made her black out registered only as “mild” to her now.
Eliot winced a little. “I’m not glad to be,” he responded. “Only reason they let the drugs wear off was so I could really appreciate what they’d done to ya." He bit his lip, pulling back from that flash of rage. “Starting training again. 'Cept you’re standing in for Charlie this time.”
“Maybe it’s the blows to the head but I’m not really following you,” Sophie stated. “I still don’t really know what’s going on.”
Eliot took a breath and leaned his head back, closing his eyes, struggling for a moment before he started to talk, to tell a story.
A story about a boy on the run, who met another boy who made him feel safe and a man who made him feel like he was worth something. About twists and betrayals and that man turning the boys who trusted him into lab rats and soldiers he drugged and pimped out as fighters. How that man used the love those boys had for each other as a teaching tool. A failure meant the other would be punished.
He told her about those two boys. Their desperation to save eachother. A woman who came to get revenge only to fight to stop the nightmare she’d been through herself. How together they’d taken back their lives and defeated the man who’d betrayed them and become the guardians of the other boys they’d saved.
He told her how the story ended. The boy called Echo getting caught, using a memory trick and his own unstable mind to protect the ones he cared about. How after days of torture and drugs and convincing himself the his story was the truth something inside him broke. The creature known as The Black Knight was released and when Eliot came back to himself it was the false story he remembered. Truth locked safely away from even him until he followed the clues he’d built into the false memories decades ago back to the youth center.
“And now he’s got you. He doesn’t know what you are to me but you care and I care and…” Eliot’s voice trailed off. “I’m gonna get you through this Sophie,” he promised. “I’ll do whatever I have to to keep you safe. The others’ll come for us. I just… have to keep you alive until then.”
Slowly Sophie pushed herself upright, fighting through the pain that made her mind hazy and her stomach fight to rebel, leaning against the wall and catching her breath before speaking. “You went Black Knight earlier,” she stated. “This is where it comes from isn’t it? A ghost of the conditioning?”
Eliot didn’t respond.
“Kent’ll make you go back to that. He’ll pull the Black Knight out if you let him.” She turned, looking to Eliot, willing him to look up from the floor where his eyes had become fixed and look at her. “Don’t let him,” she insisted. “The others will come for us. Nate needs you to come home.”
That made Eliot look at her. He opened her mouth and she shook her head, not letting him respond.
“No. Eliot. Don’t start. Nate loves you. You love him. And I wish to God you two could just get over yourselves already and see that. In another story Nate might have loved me but… this isn’t that story.” She blinked her eyes clear, damn concussion blurring her vision and making her eyes water. “Damnit Eliot this is Nate’s last chance. If you don’t come home it’s over. He’s done. Me, Parker, Hardison… all of us together couldn’t keep him from self destructing. We lose you, we lose him. We lose you both and the teams gone. Hardison’ll disappear into cyberspace and maybe he’ll try to reconnect to someone, some day, he’s young, but maybe not. I don’t even want to consider what it would do to Parker. I’d survive but…”
Silence. Just long moments of silence.
“You need to get home alive Eliot,” she said, simply. “Your job is to protect our team, our family, but you act as if you dying to do that job is acceptable… if you die...” She shook her head. “Eliot. No matter what happens you need to stay alive.”
She looked back at the other wall of their cell, worn out, hurting, praying he understood…
A calloused, shaking, hand found hers and held it gently. “I need to stay alive,” Eliot’s voice repeated back to her. “We both need to stay alive.”
He repeated it like a mantra and fell silent.
Time passed, she leaned sideways, resting against his shoulder, the movement startling him out of his thoughts and he put an arm around her. “You know.” He said after a moment. “I feel like we should be playing chess.” It sounded like he was joking but she couldn’t figure out what he found so amusing. “I wonder if we get room service here.”
“You’re a very strange man, Eliot,” she quipped back at him softly.
He nodded his agreement.
More silence, time stretching on around them.
“Hey Soph. When Kent gets back… when he gets back he’s probably going to ask me to do something. I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna play his games. It’ll keep both of us alive. And I’ll fight like hell to come back to you… and go back with you.”
Sophie worried at her lip. It wasn’t a promise, and considering the circumstances it wasn’t really reassuring as she’d like.
But...
The hand still holding hers was steadier now and there was determination in Eliot’s voice all the same and maybe… maybe she’d finally managed to get something through to him.
She tightened her grip on his hand, trying to ground him and herself, trying to hold onto whatever they had left.
“Don’t worry Sophie,” he told her, squeezing her hand in return. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Author: Magpie
Rating: pg-13
Genre: Nate/Eliot, referenced pre-series Eliot/OMC, Parker/Hardison
Verse: BlackKing!WhiteKnight!Verse
Summary: Those who forget the past will be doomed to repeat it.
Notes: Many many thanks to she who should be praised LMX_v3point3. Without her I would be cast into a world of darkness and despair and even worse... a lack of commas. A Dante's Inferno of mediocrity.
Moving on. I am pleased to say I've finally broken the rest of the con for this so the last two chapters should be done before too much longer. I hope to have it done before I head back to school if not sooner. Once this is done I will turn my attention to finishing The Legacy Job.
This chapter is brought to you in part by the song World So Cold by 12 Stones.
Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Four, Chapter Five, Chapter Six
One Year Earlier
“Just go…”
Sophie knew the moment she heard the words, that the rules had changed to something she didn’t understand.
She stumbled as she tried to catch her balance, high heels and mid-rescue adrenalin not helpful when your rescuer suddenly shoves you forward.
Despite her distraction something in the words still registered. The desperation maybe. Or the way they sounded like they’d been shoved up his throat, past a force trying to smother him, and out from behind clenched teeth.
She turned, though later she’d try to deny that her instinct had been to turn to help him. He’d leaned against a wall, clutching injuries, trembling, looking like he was about to shake to pieces, pain of unknown origin written across his face.
“You’re hurt,” Sophie said, trying to get Eliot to let her see the wound, to administer first aid or something, anything, to ease that fear that he was about to implode.
It would take longer than she liked to admit to forget the next moment, when hands so adapt at breaking bone and rending bodies but always so gentle with her found her shoulder and shoved her away, sending her sprawling to the ground, scraped skin and bumped limbs not hurting nearly as badly as that place on her shoulder where she could have sworn her skin was burning.
“Run,” he stuttered out. There was fear in his voice now. She looked up and she realized it was fear for them. Sophie didn’t know what was going on, but she knew in her bones if she stayed to find out her blood would be on Eliot’s hands. “RUN.”
Sophie scrambled to her feet and fled, not letting herself look back, not wanting to see the true violence in the eyes of the Black Knight chasing her away.
Unknown Location in L.A.
Present Day
Later, if there would be a later, Sophie knows she is going to marvel at that moment, and this.
She had followed Eliot to L.A., to his old apartment, chasing a trail of seemingly false memories and cookie crumbs to a burned out youth center. She’d watched him walk about like he was in a trance, old memories chasing back into his mind and losing him in their return.
And then a man had come to the gate; older, tall, graying hair, flanked by goons. He’d spoken a single phrase.
“Echo, Check in.”
Calling Eliot 'Echo', and Eliot had turned, his attention locking onto him.
The man had spoken one more phrase and Eliot had collapsed, unconscious.
Years ago, when they were working together, Sophie had found Tara drinking one night in January in their normal meeting location. Drinking hard enough that she was already tipsy. A hour later she’d been drunk enough to explain that it was the birthday of her “other brother in arms”, a boy named Echo whose twenty-sixth birthday she and Charlie should have been celebrating.
Instead they were mourning the fifth anniversary of his death.
More than that though, Sophie never heard; but years later, she was in L.A. chasing the killer of a man named Charlie who both Tara and Eliot knew, and she was hearing someone call Eliot 'Echo'?
And now, seeing Eliot fall at just a word, the way she’d spent months convincing Tara Neuro-Lingusitic Programming *didn't* work…
Jigsaw puzzle pieces and bits were falling into place too fast for Sophie to comprehend the final picture.
She was stopped by the goons before she could reach Eliot. The guns pointed at her were held in steady hands and the expressions on the men carrying them were all business. The type of men Eliot took out because she couldn’t con her way past.
Only Eliot was down and Sophie was beginning to understand what was going on.
The old man looked down at Eliot and then up at her and smiled. “Ah, yes,” he said, simply. “You’ll do nicely.” Two goons appeared, half carrying, half dragging Eliot away. The two with guns on her patted her down, took away her cell phone, and hustled her toward a van and into the back with an unconscious Eliot.
She was allowed to sit with him at least, as they drove off towards wherever the hell was their destination and Sophie took advantage of her free hands, checking Eliot for injuries and then just holding him, silently praying that the others were looking for them, that Eliot would wake up and rescue them, that she’d get some kind of opening to turn this around.
The trip had been short to wherever they were going. The rear doors of the van were opened underground, Eliot was dragged out and she was nudged along at gunpoint. It looked like some kind of extensive underground basement facility, and the room they were eventually left in was some sort of large closet, emptied out and with a reinforced door and concrete walls.
They’d been left alone for a little while and as the first half hour passed, Eliot started to stir.
“That’s it,” Sophie muttered to him, trying to coax him back into the realm of the waking. Escaping captivity, at least this kind, was his forte. And she needed to know what they were dealing with. “Wake up.”
The door opened, the old man entered with a small metal box and two more of his goons (different men than the ones before, and she’d seen another different one on the way in. There were at least seven of them, probably more, not good odds but not the worst either).
“Sorry for my rudeness earlier,” the man stated, as if it were a regular Tuesday meeting arrangement for him to kidnap someone. “I am Dr. Samuel Kent.” Another man (number eight) brought in a stool and closed the door behind them. Kent sat the metal box on top of the stool.
“Sophie,” Sophie responded to the introduction. She had no time to pick out an alias and she had a feeling Eliot might not be in a state to pick up whatever alias she was using later. Better to give her name now. It would be easier to get a lie past Kent if he didn’t catch her in one first.
Kent nodded approvingly. “Good good. I feel I should inform you, Sophie, that I am a teacher. The man you’re holding is one of my former students.” He opened the box and started to dig through it. “When I met him he was a street urchin, a couple weeks away from selling himself for something to eat, a couple months away from quieting the dreams with drugs. Maybe three years from ODing in some back alley, if somewhere along the way all that didn’t break that stubbornness he thought was control and cause him to snap and shoot up some corner store first.”
Any response Sophie could have come up with for that was silenced when Kent withdrew a syringe and small vial of clear liquid from the metal box.
“But I managed to catch him first. Like all my other students. He had the spark of promise if given direction and discipline. And I gave him both.” A proud smile crossed Kent’s lips as he drew some of the liquid into the syringe. “Taught them direction, focus, discipline. Made them into something that could benefit society. Right until…” He crossed to her and knelt next to her and Eliot. Sophie didn’t want to let Kent do whatever he intended on doing but she couldn’t move Eliot far on her own, even if there was anywhere to move to, and she could feel the goons' eyes on her. “He’s about to have a seizure so please let him lie flat. Though if you’d be so kind as to protect his head your friend would likely appreciate it.”
Dread.
Sophie slipped out from under Eliot but did her best to put herself between Kent and Eliot. She couldn’t just…
“Now, now… that’s not the way,” Kent chided gently. “If you behave I’ll let you stay with him, unbound, ungagged. You’ll be able to comfort him, take care of him. You two are partners in my classroom, you two should look out for each other, and understand should I have to discipline one I will discipline both.”
Sophie hated that every grifter instinct was screaming at her to obey his rules for now, get a read, build a rapport, this would be slow and delicate.
This was Eliot.
But she knew Kent meant everything he said and getting them both hurt for an exercise in futility was just idiotic.
She knelt next to Eliot’s head, brushing a strand of hair out of his face, not looking at Kent as he knelt beside Eliot. She slipped off her jacket and put it under his head, knukles white where she gripped the edges to keep from lashing out when Kent pulled up Eliot’s sleeve and injected him with god only knew what.
She fought the burning sensation in her eyes as she waited, moments ticking into minutes, Kent getting up and leaving, not looking away from Eliot.
He seized ten minutes after Kent left. His body jerking up, arms flailing, low grunts of pain escaping him. Seconds, a minute, less than two, but it felt like hours, passed and then he went still.
And she was left to wait for whatever came next.
Sophie let herself doze, knowing she needed to be rested if she was going to have her wits about her.
Sophie had no way of knowing how long she’d dosed before the nightmares started. Eliot tensed in her arms, shifting anxiously, eyes moving behind his eyelids as he muttered beneath his breath, broken bits of sentences she couldn’t interpret.
Then, after what felt like a short eternity, he calmed and quieted. His hand gripped a handful of her shirt and he told her, or whoever he thought she was; “When I’m with you I’m not as tired.”
Sophie didn’t know who the words were meant for but in that moment she silently promised to get him back to whoever it was.
Just as soon as they got out of here.
Eliot settled after that, but he was sleeping lighter, stirring just a little bit whenever she moved or called his name but never waking.
His eyes opened for the briefest moment when the door opened, looking up at her hazily before closing again as she fought to help him sit up, her attention split between him and Kent coming in with another bloody metal box. Eliot made a sound and she looked down, relieved to see his eyes open. “That’s it. Stay with me.”
Kent was coming closer and she looked up, the iron tight control over her panic and fear at this unknown situation cracking just a little. “No. Leave him alone,” she said in a voice she’d later tell herself shook with anger rather than fear.
Kent just tsked at her and nodded to the goons. She tried to fight them off, punching the way Eliot had taught her but with only one free arm and Eliot’s weight she never stood a chance. The goons grabbed Eliot and pulled him away from her, upright, toward Kent, while another goon pulled her to her feet and back.
She stumbled but kept her eyes on Eliot. His eyes were open but he wasn’t seeing anything, held up by the men supporting him. He wrenched forward, gagging but with nothing in his stomach to expel. Fear took over his face when one of the goons grabbed his arm and administered the drug.
The reaction was almost instantaneous this time, Eliot lashing and straining against the men holding him, shaking, trembling, a look Sophie recognized in his eyes.
She’d seen it on a job what felt like a lifetime ago. She could almost hear his words then echoing inside of her head.
Just go. Run.
But she couldn’t run. Instead, the men holding her pushed her forward so she stumbled to her knees in the space in front of Eliot like a sacrificial lamb.
“I never told you what I taught my students Sophie,” Kent said, just a hint of a taunt in his voice as he touched Eliot’s cheek. The Hitter flinched back like he’d been struck, his whole body rocking and quaking in response. “I taught my students to be soldiers. Perfect soldiers who obey commands without thought or hesitation. I’ve taken that violence Echo here has always has inside him and honed it to a perfect edge for efficiently killing. Taming the beast.” Kent turned to her with a smile. “Would you like a demonstration?”
Sophie looked up at Eliot, slow dawning horror at what she was hearing, understanding what it meant.
A word from Kent and Eliot would kill her.
“Echo ch-“
The words were interrupted by a noise escaping Eliot. Somewhere between a roar and a scream, and something so far beyond either, ripped free from deep within the hitter.
Suddenly Eliot was moving, pulling free of the goons, lashing out. The guards were down before it even registered that he’d broken free and he was attacking Kent, knocking him back and down, a blow to his solar plexus making it impossible for Kent to finish the command.
Then Eliot was turning toward her and Sophie felt whatever she’d been preparing to say suddenly cut off as those two blue eyes turned on her, alight, on fire…
She was caught in the gaze of a cobra.
Later the uneven hitching of his breath would make her amend that to rattlesnake.
He hesitated for a moment. For only a moment.
“Echo,” she said, remembering the words spoken. “Check in.” His attention shifted. Something in his eyes changed. She forced herself up to her knees and then her feet, holding out a hand. A soft litany of words she wouldn’t remember later escaped her lips as she crossed the space between them.
New Sparks Youth Center
Eighteen Years Ago
He remembers this. He’s always remembered this.
Nightmares. Dreams. Flashbacks of sensory input he both could and couldn’t place.
There’s an apology in Charlie’s eyes. They knew someone had to do this. That this was their best choice. Echo had volunteered. The conditioning had never taken as strongly in Charlie and Echo felt like it was their job to do this to protect the other students.
And at some point Echo had gone from one of the worst fighters to the best.
They had agreed upon this. Charlie had taken every step to make this different somehow.
But there was still an apology in his eyes when he spoke the words that reverberated through his mind. “Echo, check in.”
The second phrase, the command phrase, didn’t even register consciously. Echo felt it hit him like a wave and he surrendered to it as he’d been taught. Fighting conditioning was futile and agonizing.
A moment in the memory. Something. A hint. Gone too quickly.
He felt himself move, his mind was spinning with disjointed calculations and plans, dodging things he distantly knew were attacks, placing perfectly aimed movements of his arms and legs to take down the obstacles in his way. It was slow and sharp and fast and disconnected like pieces of a puzzle he couldn’t put together.
He had single clues and hints but he couldn’t hold onto enough to understand or comprehend what they actually meant as a whole.
He felt sick but knew in his bones he couldn’t stop until all the obstacles were down.
Warmth splattered across his face. Blood. He registered that it was blood.
He felt something give way. His mind told him he’d snapped a bone.
Was the blood from the bone?
What bone? He was smelling urine mixed with blood now. Had one of the obstacles died? Had he managed to get a knife.
He had a knife in his hand. He could do more damage to the targets now.
His face was wet. He couldn’t remember how that happened.
Nothing was moving anymore.
He touched a railing, blood on his hands. He remembered where he was now. He looked up from the body at his feet, slipping into unconsciousness, saw the corpses littering the yard of the youth center. Cops would be coming soon.
Where was he?
“Echo, Check in.” A voice, and anchor, pulling him back, giving him direction. He turned. Seeing Charlie. He knew where he was.
He was home.
“Close your eyes,” Charlie said. “Breathe. Give yourself a few moments. You’re done.” A hand in his hair and he knew he was done for now. He breathed, looking back down, the hand moved away.
Another breath. The world still felt far away but it was coming back. He could put pieces back together. He knew where he was. What he was doing.
He was waiting. For what he wasn’t sure right then, but it would come back to him in a minute.
“Are you ready?”
He opened his eyes, ready to respond, to move forward, always ready when Charlie asked.
Bright pain touched the base of his neck, searing out in blinding white pain that sent him tumbling into oblivion.
Present
Sophie saw one of the goons move too late to stop him. She’d been trying to calm Eliot. Getting him back to himself might be their only chance to get out of here.
But the man moved, a taser touching the back of Eliot’s neck and sending him crashing down to the floor.
Kent got unsteadily to his feet, dusting himself off, trying to regain the posture he normally kept. “It appears some lessons need to be retaught.” Kent snapped his fingers and gestured toward Sophie.
Two goons grabbed her shoulders as she sought the right words for this. She could talk her way out of this. She just needed the right angle.
Maybe it was the forty eight hours or more since she’d gotten decent sleep, or her worry about Eliot, or the fact she’d been kidnapped by a sociopath who had managed to defy the fact she *knew* behavior conditioning and neural linguistic programing did not work like that and that she was discovering way more about Eliot than she probably wanted to know.
Or maybe it was the fact she was a good enough grifter, had spent enough time with Eliot, to know what was coming next.
But she couldn’t figure out the right thing to say. All she could do was brace herself.
She could have just run.
The thought played over and over and over in her head.
She’d gotten away clean. It was her mother who’d gotten caught. Her mother had gotten greedy and made a mistake and didn’t listen when Eva told her they needed to go.
Her mother never listened to her. You didn’t listened to what tools thought, she thought bitterly.
She was just her mother’s tool. A prop. She had every reason to not go back for her mother.
Her mother wouldn’t have gone back for her.
Eva pressed the bag of ice harder against her eye, not sure why except as some kind of distraction from the cracking of the world around her. The pain from the black eye, the broken finger, the cuts and bruises and tears.
She’d gone back for her mother and they’d…
She was fourteen.
It was her mother.
Unbidden memory drifted forward, the little boy she’d known for a few brief months, the one who’d called her Eva, who was why she held onto that name when her mother tried to deny her one…
”You’re like Cinderella. Cindereva. I want to rescue you. Your Mama’s not a good mama.”
She’d gone back for an idea of a mother that didn’t exist. The woman sleeping in the next room…
She’d taken a beating to protect that woman and an hour ago that woman had slapped her for being hysterical.
She should have just left her and run. Blood maybe, but they weren’t real family.
A figure appeared at the doorway, blurry. A soft cloth pressed against the cut on her lip.
“Shouldn’t of come with me.”
Sophie opened her eyes slowly, ghost of old pain mixing with the fresh hot fire that had taken up residence in her body.
But her eyes seemed to work okay. No damage there, though she’d blacked out which might explain why it took a moment for vision to focus.
Eliot looked down at her, she was laying on his knees, his back against the wall of their cell. He smiled a little when she managed to focus on him. “Welcome back,” he said, worry and relief in his voice.
He touched a wet cloth to her face, she could feel his hand shaking and she half wondered if the wall was the only thing keeping him semi upright.
She tried to sit up but his hand settled on her shoulder. “You took a bad beating, rest.” His expression tightened as he said it but his hand stayed gentle and though she could see hints of rage in his eyes he held it down.
For her sake.
“Good to see you lucid,” she said, glad her voice wasn’t hoarse. She hadn’t cried or screamed or anything. As beatings went it was probably only a mild one but…
Something about her world view had become extremely warped in the past few years if a beating that made her black out registered only as “mild” to her now.
Eliot winced a little. “I’m not glad to be,” he responded. “Only reason they let the drugs wear off was so I could really appreciate what they’d done to ya." He bit his lip, pulling back from that flash of rage. “Starting training again. 'Cept you’re standing in for Charlie this time.”
“Maybe it’s the blows to the head but I’m not really following you,” Sophie stated. “I still don’t really know what’s going on.”
Eliot took a breath and leaned his head back, closing his eyes, struggling for a moment before he started to talk, to tell a story.
A story about a boy on the run, who met another boy who made him feel safe and a man who made him feel like he was worth something. About twists and betrayals and that man turning the boys who trusted him into lab rats and soldiers he drugged and pimped out as fighters. How that man used the love those boys had for each other as a teaching tool. A failure meant the other would be punished.
He told her about those two boys. Their desperation to save eachother. A woman who came to get revenge only to fight to stop the nightmare she’d been through herself. How together they’d taken back their lives and defeated the man who’d betrayed them and become the guardians of the other boys they’d saved.
He told her how the story ended. The boy called Echo getting caught, using a memory trick and his own unstable mind to protect the ones he cared about. How after days of torture and drugs and convincing himself the his story was the truth something inside him broke. The creature known as The Black Knight was released and when Eliot came back to himself it was the false story he remembered. Truth locked safely away from even him until he followed the clues he’d built into the false memories decades ago back to the youth center.
“And now he’s got you. He doesn’t know what you are to me but you care and I care and…” Eliot’s voice trailed off. “I’m gonna get you through this Sophie,” he promised. “I’ll do whatever I have to to keep you safe. The others’ll come for us. I just… have to keep you alive until then.”
Slowly Sophie pushed herself upright, fighting through the pain that made her mind hazy and her stomach fight to rebel, leaning against the wall and catching her breath before speaking. “You went Black Knight earlier,” she stated. “This is where it comes from isn’t it? A ghost of the conditioning?”
Eliot didn’t respond.
“Kent’ll make you go back to that. He’ll pull the Black Knight out if you let him.” She turned, looking to Eliot, willing him to look up from the floor where his eyes had become fixed and look at her. “Don’t let him,” she insisted. “The others will come for us. Nate needs you to come home.”
That made Eliot look at her. He opened her mouth and she shook her head, not letting him respond.
“No. Eliot. Don’t start. Nate loves you. You love him. And I wish to God you two could just get over yourselves already and see that. In another story Nate might have loved me but… this isn’t that story.” She blinked her eyes clear, damn concussion blurring her vision and making her eyes water. “Damnit Eliot this is Nate’s last chance. If you don’t come home it’s over. He’s done. Me, Parker, Hardison… all of us together couldn’t keep him from self destructing. We lose you, we lose him. We lose you both and the teams gone. Hardison’ll disappear into cyberspace and maybe he’ll try to reconnect to someone, some day, he’s young, but maybe not. I don’t even want to consider what it would do to Parker. I’d survive but…”
Silence. Just long moments of silence.
“You need to get home alive Eliot,” she said, simply. “Your job is to protect our team, our family, but you act as if you dying to do that job is acceptable… if you die...” She shook her head. “Eliot. No matter what happens you need to stay alive.”
She looked back at the other wall of their cell, worn out, hurting, praying he understood…
A calloused, shaking, hand found hers and held it gently. “I need to stay alive,” Eliot’s voice repeated back to her. “We both need to stay alive.”
He repeated it like a mantra and fell silent.
Time passed, she leaned sideways, resting against his shoulder, the movement startling him out of his thoughts and he put an arm around her. “You know.” He said after a moment. “I feel like we should be playing chess.” It sounded like he was joking but she couldn’t figure out what he found so amusing. “I wonder if we get room service here.”
“You’re a very strange man, Eliot,” she quipped back at him softly.
He nodded his agreement.
More silence, time stretching on around them.
“Hey Soph. When Kent gets back… when he gets back he’s probably going to ask me to do something. I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna play his games. It’ll keep both of us alive. And I’ll fight like hell to come back to you… and go back with you.”
Sophie worried at her lip. It wasn’t a promise, and considering the circumstances it wasn’t really reassuring as she’d like.
But...
The hand still holding hers was steadier now and there was determination in Eliot’s voice all the same and maybe… maybe she’d finally managed to get something through to him.
She tightened her grip on his hand, trying to ground him and herself, trying to hold onto whatever they had left.
“Don’t worry Sophie,” he told her, squeezing her hand in return. “I’m not going anywhere.”