Prompt Project: The Camel's Back
Title: The Camel’s Back
Prompt: Movie, Television, Books: The Usual Suspects
Characters: Ian, Dani & other Push OCs.
Rating: R
Pairings: N/A
Warnings: Suicide, character death.
Author’s Notes: I’ve been waiting to get to this part of Ian’s story but there’s never been the right opportunity to start it until now. This follows the events of Subtext, and is something I always planned to do with Ian. Here starts his journey from Division flunky, to rebel. It does depict suicide so just be aware it might be bad for some people. I plan to do a follow up, after all I’ve got one last prompt to fill for Ian!
---
“Mr. Dole, Mr. Dole, you can’t go in there!”
The nurse grabbed his arm and tried to stop him, tugging him off course. Ian turned on her in a flash. He roughly shoved her against the wall and snarled, the sound rising from deep in his chest. He was not in the mood to be stopped or bothered.
“Stay out of my way.” He shoved her again, emphasizing that he was not kidding. Her named was Julia. He had seen her more than once when he came to visit his mother. He had even flirted with her a time or two. She looked sorry for him, not afraid. She needed to be afraid.
“Mr. Dole I know this is difficult for you…”
“Shut up,” he said coldly, his fingers digging in hard to her arms.
She gasped with pain and it seemed to sink in that he wasn’t the charming, caring man she had always known him to be.
Now that they had an understanding he let her go and walked to his mother’s room. There was police tape and an evidence seal on the door which he ignored. He knew no matter what the police did in the end they would rule it a suicide. There wasn’t any evidence for him to ruin.
He cut the seal with a pocket knife, used his key to unlock the door and walked into his mother’s single bedroom apartment. The first thing that hit him was her scent, rose water and her psychic essence, everywhere, invading all his senses. The grief hit him next, invisible fingers wrapping around his throat and heart to strangle him. He took a deep breath, almost expecting to hear his mother greet him.
She wasn’t there anymore. The apartment was empty and dead silent. If he heard his mother’s voice, it was just a psychic hallucination. He pushed down the grief and clung to the anger which had gotten him this far. Now was not the time to break down.
“Mr. Dole…” He slammed the door closed on Julia and locked it with a twist of his wrist. It would take a few minutes for her to retrieve the room key from the front desk and to call security to escort him out.
It gave him enough time to do what he needed to. He pulled off his glove, felt his mother stronger than before and took another deep breath before he put his hand to the wall. In a second, his eyes rolled back into his head and the first visions start to play in his mind.
He went backwards through time, the most recent images coming first. He watched the scene like a video on rewind. First, the police searching the apartment, his mother’s body being brought in and hung back up. The nurse ran back into the room, stared in horror at his mother and then walked backwards out of the apartment. His nails scratched the drywall as he watched his mother just hang there until the chair got back into place and she wasn’t dead.
Then they appeared; two suits that didn’t belong in his mother’s apartment. One he recognized as his superior, Leroy, the Sniff who had recruited him. The other was a man he didn’t know. He watched the unknown man Push his mother and then they walked out and his mother closed the door.
Groaning, Ian froze the vision and then pushed it forward watching it happen in time. It was a difficult trick for a Sniff but he needed to hear it, needed to see why Division had sent agents after his mother, his crazy mother who didn’t do a damn thing with her powers anymore. In the back of his mind he knew why but he needed to confirm it. Maybe, just maybe it wasn’t anything he had done. Maybe, just maybe he was wrong.
But he wasn’t.
“Ms. King,” the Pusher said, carefully catching his mother’s eyes. His went full black and his mother went still, caught in the Pusher’s thrall. “It’s all too much. The voices, the fear, the images in your head. You can’t do this anymore. You have to get out. You have to end it.”
The Pusher put a length of rope in his mother’s hand.
“The ceiling fan is strong enough. There’s no other way to escape. Hanging yourself will be quick. No one will have to suffer anymore.”
“No one has to suffer,” his mother said softly, clutching the rope tightly. “It’ll be quick.”
The Pusher and Leroy stood back and watched calmly as his mother got a chair, as his mother made the noose and finally as she hung herself.
“I told him he should know better by now,” Leroy said with a small shake of his head. “He should’ve known better.”
Ian punched the wall hard enough to crack the drywall.
---
Two Days Before:
Malibu wasn’t a bad place to run to. Ian stopped the Porsche they had confiscated from the Pusher Dani when she ran. The whole car was saturated with her psychic scent and made tracking her incredibly easy. From the driver seat he studied the bar, not yet opened for the day, but even from across the street he could smell her inside.
“How do you want to do this?” His partner, a Bleeder named Sam, asked from the passenger seat.
“We’re here to talk to her,” he reminded the other psychic, “You’re here to drown her out if she tried to Push. I’ll go in the front and you come in the back. If things get tricky, you come in screaming.”
“The Watchers didn’t see anything on this?” Sam was relatively new, a young man fresh out of Division training. Ian was supposed to ease him into the tracking end of things before he got passed on to a stronger Bleeder who would put on the polishing touches.
“The Watchers focus on the big things kid. This is small potatoes.” Ian opened the glove box and put his gun away.
“What are you doing?”
“First thing to remember about Pushers. Never make it easy for them. If you bring a gun around you’re just telling them ‘Go ahead and Push me to eat my gun’. You don’t need a gun for every encounter. Especially you banshees. I don’t know why they give you guns in the first place.”
He held out a hand and stared down the younger man who reluctantly turned over his gun. Ian locked them both in the glove box and got out of the car. He adjusted his suit jacket as he scanned the street. It bustled with the early morning crowd but no one noticed the closed bar.
“Like I said, back door for you.” He gave Sam a little salute and crossed the street.
Outside the door he took a deep breath through his nose. The Pusher was definitely inside. There were only two keys on the car keys, one for the car and one for a typical lock. Ian used the key to open the front door and walk in like he owned the place.
The Pusher was behind the bar, restocking. She looked up, a smile forming before she noticed it was him, then she went still. He smiled and closed the door behind him.
“You really spend too much time in your car,” he said as he walked up to the bar. “Then again, if I drove a Porsche I’d probably spend too much time in it too.”
She made a break for the back door put Sam appeared, stopping her. She looked between the two of them before she straightened up and stared him down just like she had at the party. The girl had some fight in her. His smile became more genuine.
“What do you want?” she asked, walking calmly back behind the bar.
“Nick Gant and Cassie Holmes.” Ian took a seat at the bar, gesturing for Sam to stay where he was.
“I don’t know where they are.” Dani braced her hands on the bar. Only her white knuckle grip gave away how nervous she was. If it wasn’t for that he wouldn’t have been able to tell he was bothering her at all.
“I believe you.”
“What?”
He folded his hands and leaned towards her. “I’ve Sniffed your car more than once. Holmes has been in it, but not for a very long time. Her scent is faint, distant. It’s definitely overpowered, but it’s proof you know her and you must know Gant. The two of them are a brother-sister team.”
“I don’t know where they are,” she repeated slowly, like he was dumb child.
He held out a hand. “I’d like your cellphone please.”
“What?”
“Your cellphone. Just because you haven’t seen them doesn’t mean you haven’t talked to them.”
She rolled her eyes. “I haven’t done that either.”
“Trouble in the rebellion? Do tell.”
“It’s not a rebellion.” She glared. “We haven’t talked, they’re busy doing stuff. Your Watchers know more than me.”
“And here I thought you guys were friends.”
She looked away, “So did I.”
Something in that statement was… genuine. It sounded a lot like regret to Ian, maybe even bitterness. Now that was interesting. The Watchers kept saying Danielle Houston was a part of Gant and Holmes’ future but it didn’t sound like that to him. Judging from Dani’s expression, it didn’t look like it either. The future was always changing, had it shifted away from her? He wondered if she was even worth the trouble anymore.
“Your phone.” He wiggled his fingers. “Please.”
She stared him down and he caught the subtle shift in her pupils.
“My friend over there is a Bleeder. Unless you want to end up a pin cushion for all the glass in this place I wouldn’t try that.”
Her grip on the bar tightened but her eyes didn’t flicker again.
“There’s no way out this time, princess. Cooperate and this ends well for you. Fight me, fight us, and Division will make your life a living Hell until you surrender or lead us to Gant.”
“Fucking bastards.” She slammed her phone into his hand. It was the flip phone he saw in his vision while Sniffing her car so he pocketed it and got up from the bar.
“I wouldn’t go anywhere if I were you, Ms. Houston, we might want to chat again.”
“Next time, Bleeder or not, you’re ending up with a whole different world, Sniff.”
He grinned. She was a pistol and trouble, but Ian found himself sort of charmed. She was alone in a bar with two Division agents, one of them a Bleeder who could break her eardrums in two seconds and melt her mind into soup in two and she was still challenging them. Yeah, she had brass ones. He loved a girl like that. If she was a Division agent he’d definitely try to hit on her. Too bad she was a runner.
Still, he winked. “Sounds like fun. Can’t wait, princess.”
“Ugh.” She rolled her eyes and shoved herself away from the bar, getting back to restocking. “Fuck off before my boss gets here.”
“Let’s go.”
“But…”
“That wasn’t a suggestion rookie. Now.”
Sam didn’t look happy but he followed Ian out of the bar. When they got back into the Porsche, he tossed the phone over to him.
“Write down the numbers she has for Gant and Holmes. We’ll track them the old fashioned way if we can.”
“We’re supposed to… put down psychics who threaten us,” Sam said, sounding a little annoyed as he started to scroll through the phone.
“Second lesson, you don’t have to kill everyone right away. Dean men produce no leads, besides if the bosses don’t like the report we give them they’ll just send us back. I wouldn’t mind seeing her again.”
“We’re going to get in trouble, we should bring her in. The Pushers will get her to talk.”
“You heard her, she doesn’t know anything.” Ian snorted. “She’s useless.”
“We’re not supposed to…”
“Look, the field is different. Sometimes, you have to make a call that isn’t following procedure. You don’t always have to follow orders to the letter.”
---
After confirming his worst fear and being escorted out by security, Ian went back to his apartment. There were messages on his phone from his family, his brothers and sister calling to try and talk to him. He didn’t want to talk. His mother, the woman he had adored since he was six, was dead. The ache in his chest was unbelievable. He had been sad when his dad died, but it didn’t feel like this. Right now he felt like someone hollowed out his chest with a piece of glass and poured battery acid into his stomach.
He didn’t know how long he cried, going through grief and rage. He threw a few things, flipped over his coffee table at one point and then just sat on the couch, head back as he just cried until his eyes dried up. Then he was left staring at the ceiling, thoughts swirling around in his head.
Everyone would believe it was suicide but it wasn’t. He knew the truth. It was his fault, what he’d done with that Pusher had been an improvisation too far. His mother’s death was supposed to scare him. Division was saying: ‘Oh look, we can get to your mother. We’ll get everyone else too if you don’t behave’, but they had pushed the wrong button.
The anger had been building in him ever since the first time Division used hurting his mother to teach him a lesson. It boiled over into rage, white hot and furious. This was too far. He went into his closet and pulled out his favorite rifle, a beautiful tactical black M24 with a 800 meters effective range. Looking at it, he ran a hand over the stock.
“Once Mom’s buried, you and me have some work to do beautiful,” he said softly. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
Prompt: Movie, Television, Books: The Usual Suspects
Characters: Ian, Dani & other Push OCs.
Rating: R
Pairings: N/A
Warnings: Suicide, character death.
Author’s Notes: I’ve been waiting to get to this part of Ian’s story but there’s never been the right opportunity to start it until now. This follows the events of Subtext, and is something I always planned to do with Ian. Here starts his journey from Division flunky, to rebel. It does depict suicide so just be aware it might be bad for some people. I plan to do a follow up, after all I’ve got one last prompt to fill for Ian!
---
“Mr. Dole, Mr. Dole, you can’t go in there!”
The nurse grabbed his arm and tried to stop him, tugging him off course. Ian turned on her in a flash. He roughly shoved her against the wall and snarled, the sound rising from deep in his chest. He was not in the mood to be stopped or bothered.
“Stay out of my way.” He shoved her again, emphasizing that he was not kidding. Her named was Julia. He had seen her more than once when he came to visit his mother. He had even flirted with her a time or two. She looked sorry for him, not afraid. She needed to be afraid.
“Mr. Dole I know this is difficult for you…”
“Shut up,” he said coldly, his fingers digging in hard to her arms.
She gasped with pain and it seemed to sink in that he wasn’t the charming, caring man she had always known him to be.
Now that they had an understanding he let her go and walked to his mother’s room. There was police tape and an evidence seal on the door which he ignored. He knew no matter what the police did in the end they would rule it a suicide. There wasn’t any evidence for him to ruin.
He cut the seal with a pocket knife, used his key to unlock the door and walked into his mother’s single bedroom apartment. The first thing that hit him was her scent, rose water and her psychic essence, everywhere, invading all his senses. The grief hit him next, invisible fingers wrapping around his throat and heart to strangle him. He took a deep breath, almost expecting to hear his mother greet him.
She wasn’t there anymore. The apartment was empty and dead silent. If he heard his mother’s voice, it was just a psychic hallucination. He pushed down the grief and clung to the anger which had gotten him this far. Now was not the time to break down.
“Mr. Dole…” He slammed the door closed on Julia and locked it with a twist of his wrist. It would take a few minutes for her to retrieve the room key from the front desk and to call security to escort him out.
It gave him enough time to do what he needed to. He pulled off his glove, felt his mother stronger than before and took another deep breath before he put his hand to the wall. In a second, his eyes rolled back into his head and the first visions start to play in his mind.
He went backwards through time, the most recent images coming first. He watched the scene like a video on rewind. First, the police searching the apartment, his mother’s body being brought in and hung back up. The nurse ran back into the room, stared in horror at his mother and then walked backwards out of the apartment. His nails scratched the drywall as he watched his mother just hang there until the chair got back into place and she wasn’t dead.
Then they appeared; two suits that didn’t belong in his mother’s apartment. One he recognized as his superior, Leroy, the Sniff who had recruited him. The other was a man he didn’t know. He watched the unknown man Push his mother and then they walked out and his mother closed the door.
Groaning, Ian froze the vision and then pushed it forward watching it happen in time. It was a difficult trick for a Sniff but he needed to hear it, needed to see why Division had sent agents after his mother, his crazy mother who didn’t do a damn thing with her powers anymore. In the back of his mind he knew why but he needed to confirm it. Maybe, just maybe it wasn’t anything he had done. Maybe, just maybe he was wrong.
But he wasn’t.
“Ms. King,” the Pusher said, carefully catching his mother’s eyes. His went full black and his mother went still, caught in the Pusher’s thrall. “It’s all too much. The voices, the fear, the images in your head. You can’t do this anymore. You have to get out. You have to end it.”
The Pusher put a length of rope in his mother’s hand.
“The ceiling fan is strong enough. There’s no other way to escape. Hanging yourself will be quick. No one will have to suffer anymore.”
“No one has to suffer,” his mother said softly, clutching the rope tightly. “It’ll be quick.”
The Pusher and Leroy stood back and watched calmly as his mother got a chair, as his mother made the noose and finally as she hung herself.
“I told him he should know better by now,” Leroy said with a small shake of his head. “He should’ve known better.”
Ian punched the wall hard enough to crack the drywall.
---
Two Days Before:
Malibu wasn’t a bad place to run to. Ian stopped the Porsche they had confiscated from the Pusher Dani when she ran. The whole car was saturated with her psychic scent and made tracking her incredibly easy. From the driver seat he studied the bar, not yet opened for the day, but even from across the street he could smell her inside.
“How do you want to do this?” His partner, a Bleeder named Sam, asked from the passenger seat.
“We’re here to talk to her,” he reminded the other psychic, “You’re here to drown her out if she tried to Push. I’ll go in the front and you come in the back. If things get tricky, you come in screaming.”
“The Watchers didn’t see anything on this?” Sam was relatively new, a young man fresh out of Division training. Ian was supposed to ease him into the tracking end of things before he got passed on to a stronger Bleeder who would put on the polishing touches.
“The Watchers focus on the big things kid. This is small potatoes.” Ian opened the glove box and put his gun away.
“What are you doing?”
“First thing to remember about Pushers. Never make it easy for them. If you bring a gun around you’re just telling them ‘Go ahead and Push me to eat my gun’. You don’t need a gun for every encounter. Especially you banshees. I don’t know why they give you guns in the first place.”
He held out a hand and stared down the younger man who reluctantly turned over his gun. Ian locked them both in the glove box and got out of the car. He adjusted his suit jacket as he scanned the street. It bustled with the early morning crowd but no one noticed the closed bar.
“Like I said, back door for you.” He gave Sam a little salute and crossed the street.
Outside the door he took a deep breath through his nose. The Pusher was definitely inside. There were only two keys on the car keys, one for the car and one for a typical lock. Ian used the key to open the front door and walk in like he owned the place.
The Pusher was behind the bar, restocking. She looked up, a smile forming before she noticed it was him, then she went still. He smiled and closed the door behind him.
“You really spend too much time in your car,” he said as he walked up to the bar. “Then again, if I drove a Porsche I’d probably spend too much time in it too.”
She made a break for the back door put Sam appeared, stopping her. She looked between the two of them before she straightened up and stared him down just like she had at the party. The girl had some fight in her. His smile became more genuine.
“What do you want?” she asked, walking calmly back behind the bar.
“Nick Gant and Cassie Holmes.” Ian took a seat at the bar, gesturing for Sam to stay where he was.
“I don’t know where they are.” Dani braced her hands on the bar. Only her white knuckle grip gave away how nervous she was. If it wasn’t for that he wouldn’t have been able to tell he was bothering her at all.
“I believe you.”
“What?”
He folded his hands and leaned towards her. “I’ve Sniffed your car more than once. Holmes has been in it, but not for a very long time. Her scent is faint, distant. It’s definitely overpowered, but it’s proof you know her and you must know Gant. The two of them are a brother-sister team.”
“I don’t know where they are,” she repeated slowly, like he was dumb child.
He held out a hand. “I’d like your cellphone please.”
“What?”
“Your cellphone. Just because you haven’t seen them doesn’t mean you haven’t talked to them.”
She rolled her eyes. “I haven’t done that either.”
“Trouble in the rebellion? Do tell.”
“It’s not a rebellion.” She glared. “We haven’t talked, they’re busy doing stuff. Your Watchers know more than me.”
“And here I thought you guys were friends.”
She looked away, “So did I.”
Something in that statement was… genuine. It sounded a lot like regret to Ian, maybe even bitterness. Now that was interesting. The Watchers kept saying Danielle Houston was a part of Gant and Holmes’ future but it didn’t sound like that to him. Judging from Dani’s expression, it didn’t look like it either. The future was always changing, had it shifted away from her? He wondered if she was even worth the trouble anymore.
“Your phone.” He wiggled his fingers. “Please.”
She stared him down and he caught the subtle shift in her pupils.
“My friend over there is a Bleeder. Unless you want to end up a pin cushion for all the glass in this place I wouldn’t try that.”
Her grip on the bar tightened but her eyes didn’t flicker again.
“There’s no way out this time, princess. Cooperate and this ends well for you. Fight me, fight us, and Division will make your life a living Hell until you surrender or lead us to Gant.”
“Fucking bastards.” She slammed her phone into his hand. It was the flip phone he saw in his vision while Sniffing her car so he pocketed it and got up from the bar.
“I wouldn’t go anywhere if I were you, Ms. Houston, we might want to chat again.”
“Next time, Bleeder or not, you’re ending up with a whole different world, Sniff.”
He grinned. She was a pistol and trouble, but Ian found himself sort of charmed. She was alone in a bar with two Division agents, one of them a Bleeder who could break her eardrums in two seconds and melt her mind into soup in two and she was still challenging them. Yeah, she had brass ones. He loved a girl like that. If she was a Division agent he’d definitely try to hit on her. Too bad she was a runner.
Still, he winked. “Sounds like fun. Can’t wait, princess.”
“Ugh.” She rolled her eyes and shoved herself away from the bar, getting back to restocking. “Fuck off before my boss gets here.”
“Let’s go.”
“But…”
“That wasn’t a suggestion rookie. Now.”
Sam didn’t look happy but he followed Ian out of the bar. When they got back into the Porsche, he tossed the phone over to him.
“Write down the numbers she has for Gant and Holmes. We’ll track them the old fashioned way if we can.”
“We’re supposed to… put down psychics who threaten us,” Sam said, sounding a little annoyed as he started to scroll through the phone.
“Second lesson, you don’t have to kill everyone right away. Dean men produce no leads, besides if the bosses don’t like the report we give them they’ll just send us back. I wouldn’t mind seeing her again.”
“We’re going to get in trouble, we should bring her in. The Pushers will get her to talk.”
“You heard her, she doesn’t know anything.” Ian snorted. “She’s useless.”
“We’re not supposed to…”
“Look, the field is different. Sometimes, you have to make a call that isn’t following procedure. You don’t always have to follow orders to the letter.”
---
After confirming his worst fear and being escorted out by security, Ian went back to his apartment. There were messages on his phone from his family, his brothers and sister calling to try and talk to him. He didn’t want to talk. His mother, the woman he had adored since he was six, was dead. The ache in his chest was unbelievable. He had been sad when his dad died, but it didn’t feel like this. Right now he felt like someone hollowed out his chest with a piece of glass and poured battery acid into his stomach.
He didn’t know how long he cried, going through grief and rage. He threw a few things, flipped over his coffee table at one point and then just sat on the couch, head back as he just cried until his eyes dried up. Then he was left staring at the ceiling, thoughts swirling around in his head.
Everyone would believe it was suicide but it wasn’t. He knew the truth. It was his fault, what he’d done with that Pusher had been an improvisation too far. His mother’s death was supposed to scare him. Division was saying: ‘Oh look, we can get to your mother. We’ll get everyone else too if you don’t behave’, but they had pushed the wrong button.
The anger had been building in him ever since the first time Division used hurting his mother to teach him a lesson. It boiled over into rage, white hot and furious. This was too far. He went into his closet and pulled out his favorite rifle, a beautiful tactical black M24 with a 800 meters effective range. Looking at it, he ran a hand over the stock.
“Once Mom’s buried, you and me have some work to do beautiful,” he said softly. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”