Fluff, Relationships, and Traditions
This entry is part 52 of 52 in the series 365 Challenge
So characters have habits, ways they interact with certain people and situations, things they do and like to do, stories and histories together. I've known a lot of my characters' for a long time but getting them all into fic is interesting, particularly for the ones I don't know that for.
I've ( Read more... )
When she walked in the cell where Justus was being held, he knew he was looking at unadulterated danger-not so much beautiful as fascinating. Physically, she was all soft edges and dark auburn hair; she made you want to look at her and never stop. Inside, she was all sharp-edged and fierce; you knew if you touched her, you would come away bloody. He looked into those dark eyes staring into his, the gently tilted appraisal, the hand brushing against the stubby black gun at her hip. Pity, but not like any he had previously seen. This pity knew what he was losing. He knew with utter certainty, she was going to kill him.
"He’s yours if you want him," the man beside her said, nodding in Justus' direction. The man had stood in the background of Justus' interrogation and beating, had watched him manacled, then disappeared for hours before unlocking and opening the cell door to allow this woman's entrance.
She couldn't have been more than sixteen, maybe seventeen, but whatever childhood she had ever possessed had been long since stripped away.
She stepped toward him and yanked his head up to see him better. He couldn't read her, just see her intelligence working away behind her gaze until she stepped away from him again.
It welled up like something born of the darkness in the cell, fierce words: "I never lose one of my own." She was something wild and sleek and predatory hardening her eyes, tension coiled in muscle. "Do you want my protection?"
Justus stared at her, breath harsh and hurting as he realized what she was asking him. That pity could be wielded for or against him. Either way, she was going to kill him.
He tried to breathe, throat working, but forced himself not to move his hands, his wrists. Don't wrestle this angel. Don't fight against God. And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. He needed to make the right decision and yet, he wasn't willing to die. He should be, but he wasn't. It formed a tight knot of pain in his gut as he answered, "Yes."
Her eyes softened with resignation. She nodded abruptly to the jailer. "I'll take him."
She was comfort and softness, impossible to look away from as she unshackled him and washed his wrists and the blood off his back. "You got a handle?" she asked softly.
He was hungry and thirsty and hurting, but he looked at her and answered, "Justus."
Her eyes met his, dark but surprise glimmering through them. She chuckled softly, amusment with edges, glinting knifelike. She traced one finger over his jaw and he shivered. "Fitting," she said softly, eyes softening further. "Shift."
He looked at her.
"That's my name." Shift dropped the rag in a small heap and pulled a clean one from the stack. "We'll heal you later."
He didn't understand.
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He woke with another presence nearby, someone quiet and waiting for something to happen, but not threatening, so nonthreatening they barely registered. Then Shift handed him a knife and taught him to spar. Justus had fought before, rough-housed, learned to handle a gun before he was eight years old, learned about God and country the way his father had taught it, but he had never fought a girl, let alone a woman and it showed.
"D- it,"-he flinched at the curse-"you think all your enemies will be men?" she demanded harshly, enough to make him wary, expecting something worse, he didn't know what.
She launched at him, pure, vicious fury, and something inside him snapped with survival instinct.
He yanked himself back, staring at the blood welling out of her side, the knife she slid out from under her ribs where he had put it as though it were nothing. She coughed, blood, and the presence at the side of the room stepped forward into the light.
It was a young man, sandy hair, about their age but ageless in his eyes. He put a hand over the wound and stared at the side of Shift's face while she stared at Justus. The air felt charged with tension. The young man grimaced, then pulled his bloody hand away from her skin. Flawless. Unbroken.
Justus' world unraveled as he stared uncomprehending at healing, unequivocal in his face.
Shift jerked her head toward the door, and the healer went. She looked at Justus and said quietly, fiercely, "You have to be able to turn on your teammate, not to hurt them but because you know they can handle it. You have to be able to bloody a woman. You can't hold back."
He met her gaze evenly, jaw tightening, and asked with more honesty than he had previously managed, "What if I can't do it?"
She looked at him, head tilting gently, eyes softening. "They will kill you, drop you, torture you, whatever it takes." Her expression hardened as she came toward him, voice soft but sharp. "I never lose one of my own."
He knew then what she had been trying to tell him at the beginning. You made the choice. There's no turning back.
Shift studied him for a moment, then drew him into her arms, pure comfort, hushing him. "You don't have to, Justus. You don't have to kill. You can say no-once. But wait until the end of training, then choose." She looked at him, waiting.
He took a breath but did not answer.
After a long moment, she told him, "I'm going to screw with your head, Justus. Break you, bend you, remake you." And there was that pity that knew what she was taking, knew how badly this would kill him. She softened, holding him with the tension between her words and her body. "You're mine now."
Shift always kept her promises.
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They had both seen something they shouldn't have, heard shattered glass, and seen dark figures exiting the high window of a building and more, and now were praying silently together they wouldn't be seen.
Gravel hit the box in front of them and Justus told himself, don't look up, don't look up. But it was too late, and he wasn't sure what set Ben off, but he knew without doubt they had been seen and that was why Ben grabbed his arm and sent them running for their lives, splitting up. He almost got away. He almost got away... He heard the thump of flesh on flesh and Ben struggling, slipping on the street.
Justus woke with a sharp jerk of pain to Protector's hand hovering at his shoulder. Pitch black on Protector's half of the room, dim light from his own lamp, and Protector studying him intently.
Shift had brought him here, to the team. For the first few nights, he was sharing with Protector who had merely shrugged and directed him to the bed across the room.
Justus sat up, ran one hand through his hair, still finding it hard to breathe with the fear. "Was I...?"
"Yelling," Protector breathed quietly. He drew his hand away. "I'm sorry."
Justus glanced up at the apology.
"I'm an aggressive mindreader. It hurts the ones I hear." Protector paused. "You probably have a low level headache."
Headache. Justus drew his hand from his head, realizing that Protector was right. His voice tightened as he realized what his team member had said. He was a mindreader. "Let me guess. We're not allowed to have nightmares here." It would make sense to disallow yet another liability, he thought bitterly.
But Protector said evenly, "We all do."
Silence stretched between them for a long moment.
Justus finally broke it. "Do they ever go away?"
"The yelling does."
He clamped his jaw shut and took in all the implications in that statement. Shift's words echoed in his head, and he smiled ironically, without humor. "Low level headache, huh? I can handle the pain." He rolled back over and tried to sleep.
Three nights after Justus' had settled into his own room, the Database knocked on his door and gave him that measuring look she used on him so often, then walked in and he let her.
She turned to him, reddish auburn braid sliding to her back. "I'm here to keep you from getting too attached," she said.
He caught his breath in something akin to a laugh. "I'm not going to love her." Falling in love with Shift was a bad, bad idea. Maybe she still knew the difference between right and wrong, but she didn't care.
The Database scoffed, disgusted expression and acid tongue implying she knew from experience: "They all say that."
Justus held her gaze steadily, unmoving until she yielded, his first victory over the Database. They would be rare.
She shrugged, the gesture far from casual. "Kilter did."
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Shift's preferred form was blonde, fair, girl-next-door but with that incredibly noticeable sparkle in her eyes-the playful grin with her innocent pencil skirts, the sober-faced ponytail with working clothes, blonde hair loose over jeans and white shirts with the icy threat in her voice as her fingers snapped and the team formed rank behind her.
Justus started at the back and to the right, then slowly moved up and inward as he became one of them. He had trained with Shift for three months; now, he trained with the team for an equal period before Shfit finally told him he was ready for active assignments.
“So you’re the new fourth.” Justus looked up to see Sear leaning on the rail above him, her black eyes snapping with interest. “Hear tell, Protector doesn’t even mind.”
His hand paused on the gun he’d been cleaning after practice, but then he opted to continue, finish, pull out a knife to clean that too.
Sear wasn’t someone Justus had really gotten to know yet. Three months back when Shift briefly introduced him to the rest of the team, he had noticed Sear only as a black-haired, olive-skinned female with the ability to sear with a look, metaphorically or literally. She covered exits from hostile territory with sniper fire and worse and frequently bloodied her hands in defense of her team. This was the first she had ever spoken to him.
He answered carefully but not slowly-showing uncertainty here was exposing blood: “Protector said he preferred his old rank.” Rank was something else Justus hadn’t really gotten to know yet.
Black eyes narrowed slightly and Justus stared back stoically under the fierce sensation of having all his layers peeled up under her scrutiny.
"First rank," Sear demanded abruptly. "What do you think it does?"
He raised his eyebrows over the knife. "Take care of the team."
"Wrong." She flipped over the railing to land in a crouch beside him. "The leader leads. They serve as a buffer between the team and the admin. The leader punishes us, keeps us in line, enforces the rules both ways."
"And Shift wouldn't do any blessed, cursed, or crazy thing for any of you?" Justus answered back, incredulous.
Sear shrugged. "She used to be a third."
He stared at her. Sear was ranked third, Kilter second, Justus... fourth. "Why are you here?" he asked finally, wearily.
"I used to be fourth." Sear's gaze flickered over him briefly. "Different teams divide duties between second and third by temperament, but as a rule, third is a loose cannon. Third takes care of the team. Third bloodies her hands and sacrifices and is reckless and doesn't care what it costs. Third ticks off the admin for distractions and takes the heat off the rest of the team. Thirds would bloody the whole Department if that's what it took to save someone."
Outwardly, he didn't react, just held that knife in his grasp as he studied Sear and subtracted from her all the qualities she exhibited now that fit that bill.
"Fourth rank," she said, flicking a brow in question.
"Fourth watches the team's back and does the dirty work that needs to be done," he answered. "Fourth sacrifices and counts the cost so it doesn't go too high." It was a terrible sort of balance, the weapon against their own administration in third and the weapon against those outside it in fourth. He followed that through mentally and finished, "Fifth plays coverage." The ultimate in defense.
Respect flickered in Sear's eyes. "Exactly."
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On the flight back from Lascek, a country prone to small but effective terrorist groups, Shift slid back from the cockpit into the hold where Justus and Protector were cataloging confiscated materials. Shift's eyes watched him darkly, almost black in the nonlight. She didn't look like Shift at all; instead, she was wearing heavy bones and thick curves under a knot of luscious golden hair-a native.
"We call this an easy assignment," she said suddenly, quietly, faint curve of a sweet smile that belonged on this skin, but not on her.
Justus nodded shortly. He heard what she wasn't saying. Easy assignments were rare.
He hadn't realized she meant most assignments would slam you in the gut.
"We're splitting the team," Kilter ordered him sharply and gestured him into line.
Justus obeyed and kept his eyes and ears open until he understood. Shift had her top four-Kilter, Sear, and himself-as they headed through the reinforced, data-locked doors that separated Team Thirty-Four's quadrant from the rest of the base. His breath caught as he watched Shift toss her braid over one shoulder and turn the back of her neck to the scanner.
She saw him watching and shrugged. "Implant." Then she tapped the glowing four on the keypad and waved them through.
He hadn't been outside, unless you counted the time he spent below in containment, and he took the opportunity to study the elevator and it's security, then the hallway it emptied them into before they walked into a wide administrative bay identical to their own.
Sear leaned over, mouth almost brushing his ear. "Team Eight." She straightened and cocked her gun, feigning a cursory check of its functionality.
They entered a small room off the side and that's when Justus stopped solid.
Team Eight's top four included two men well over six feet-one dark-haired and intent, the other fair and deceptively relaxed-and a young woman with smooth brunette hair curving the left side of her forehead and obscuring the keen intelligence in her eyes. She seemed to be standing at ease, but was in truth, in a light cat stance, ready for combat and showing it even less than Sear. The other man was a redhead, black t-shirt over camo pants, leaning over the table in the center in the room, clearly the leader.
It was Ben. He glanced up at the other team's entrance, gaze flickering over Justus, and there was no recognition in his eyes.
Justus blanked his face and settled into his rank behind Shift with Kilter and Sear between them. He listened to the mission brief, destruction of a terrorist cell on the southern continent in Dabouri, but spent half his energy clamping down on the nauseous knot in his gut. Shift's line was hard and absolute while the dark-haired man seemed to recommend a lighter approach. Ben said nothing, just watched and listened as the two disagreed.
"I'd almost think you were going soft, Storm," Shift said with a flick of her brow. She was clearly goading him, yet there was respect there. She hadn't gone predator.
"You're suggesting we destroy the entire cell in combat," Storm commented dryly back.
Kilter set his jaw and seemed to be grinding his teeth; Justus had little doubt that he agreed with Storm's position against slaughtering an entire encampment-men, women, and children. The woman from Team Eight, known as Whisper, looked on with bland indifference and Justus began to wonder just why administration had chosen to merge these particular operatives.
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"Destroying the cell is fine," Ben interjected abruptly, "but detonation would be a thousand times cleaner."
Justus shifted his gaze sharply to his one-time friend. He looked anywhere in that face for something familiar, something good that he remembered.
"Where's the fun in that?" Shift grinned back sharply.
Ben's expression closed to something significantly harder than it had been. It wasn't an expression Justus recognized. It wasn't Ben. It was all the horror of this place and what it represented slammed in his face. It was all his softness gone and replaced with a hardened warrior in perfect control that Ben had never been.
"I agree that we should wipe out the entire cell," he said coolly.
The fair-haired man, Maker, disagreed. "We're talking about potentially having families with them."
Justus shoved his anger tightly under a lid and spoke as a fourth for the first time since he became an operative. "As a blind. They want to keep their base a civilian target, but footage shows their children are learning the trade already."
Bald facts. He refused to look at the implications until Whisper relaxed her cat stance a fraction further and flayed open their wounds and their walls with the ever so quiet words, "We did."
Both teams fell silent. Shift nodded respect to the other woman, an inside gesture Justus wasn't so sure he wanted to understand.
Ben leaned back a little from the table and looked at Shift with a keen gaze he had never had before. "You're brutal." It was a plain statement, unadorned, unjudging, but absolute.
Shift bared her teeth in a razor-edged smile. “You just now figured that out?”
It was reality. Justus felt all his insides tighten with tension at the words but couldn't stop himself from shifting his weight and returning harshly, "You're bloody." Justus was willing to be harsh to survive, but this unrepentant willingness to kill- Ben was dead. Justus met his stare head on and forced himself to change the name to match. Shift had called him Red Wolf. His friend had been rewritten even deeper in his bones than Justus.
Red Wolf studied Justus for a long moment, slight puzzlement buried behind his look. He dispelled it with a matter-of-fact nod. "We're a strike team. Our targets have earned death, and we deliver it. It's as as simple as that."
Justus had gone on missions between Lascek and Dabouri, but this time, he didn't stop, he didn't hesitate, and he didn't ask questions of himself as he did what he was supposed to me, guarding the exit corridor with Whisper, as Sear and Maker planted the detonation device.
The sound of running feet and Justus leveled his gun. It was a little girl. She saw them with wide eyes and her mouth opened as to scream.
Whoever he had once been died with her.
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"Wolf." Justus nodded curtly back.
Red Wolf paused for a brief moment, studying him as if he could determine what he felt in Justus when he said it. But Justus had roomed with Protector and learned under Shift and been seared with a scrutiny more revealing. He kept his face stoically polite until the other leader left with his team.
Sear stood near and nodded at Justus. "Keep your count," she said. "You've eighteen verified from this one."
Eighteen people. Hostiles, enemies, it didn't matter. He turned away from the grudgeless respect in Sear's eyes. He hadn't wanted to be worthy of it. He would have gone to his own quarters but Shift's look held him in place until the hallway was empty of all but the two of them.
"You rang?" he asked her, anger tightly controlled and out of his voice.
Her eyes searched his in a look she could have controlled herself but didn't. She was all Shift, dark auburn hair, softness and sharp edges, fierce predator measuring him as if to kill. "What do you have against Wolf?" she asked neutrally.
He raised his own eyebrows in something like amusement and was startled to see her flinch without moving. He blew out a breath. He didn't even know how he had hurt her, how he could. "Nothing," he said. "He did a good job."
He had done well. Red Wolf led his team more seamlessly than Shift led hers, and he flinched less than Justus from their work. Somehow, Justus doubted that Wolf had been given the same choice.
Shift tilted her head, waiting for the rest of that, brow raising when he did not immediately provide it.
He hardened his face and his heart. A time to live and a time to die. "Forgetfulness is its own absolution." Justus would not forget.
He didn't wait for her dismissal. He turned away from the knife without a sheath and knew as he walked away that were she to fight him now, he would not die.
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Painful, but good.
I mean that in all the insights into what happened to him, how it changed him, how he changed himself, even how Red Wolf changed.
There's so much... information here. I had to read it a couple times, and I'm sure there's more there that I need to go back for.
This would be more than I was hoping for back when I asked why Wolf and Justus didn't get along, what it was like when he first saw him again.
It's good... Terrible in some ways because of what is going on, but very good.
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That's half the trouble of this stuff. You pick at one thread and a mess of them come unraveling with it. Why did it hit him so hard and why those two can barely stand each other is so wrapped up in what each of them separately became. And I was able to work in the rank thing, so that made me happy.
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Threads are important, though. Things tie together more than we think, and almost all of it matters.
I was glad to see the rank thing in there, too. It made a lot of things make sense, too.
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Why Justus and Ben ended up being taken (it was just a hint, but I'd never known why they'd do it when it was illegal and the teams were already grown.)
The way Justus acted is a lot more clear in almost every aspect.
There was a bit more of Sear and Protector, and they hadn't gotten a lot of prompts or "screen time" so the insights into them were interesting as well.
Kilter. I saw more of him, too and his role in things.
I did forget to mention that Justus' question about why the teams were assigned to work together made me wonder if the admins had been trying to see what would happen if he worked with Wolf.
And of course, there was lots of Shift in there, too.
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I did mention more about the origin in Wake and Thrive, but I'm not sure if you ever read Rett's scenes in there. But in this, I did want to clarify it from the two's perspective. It was just hard because I couldn't decide/remember exactly what they'd seen so left it at "more." :le sigh:
Shift and Whisper were really the reason they were assigned to the mission. Those two had the most experience at that sort of thing.
Again, thanks for the breakdown. As I'm moving toward bookifying this world, I kinda need the help. :shakes head at self:
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I read the whole thing back when you first wrote it. If you added to it, I may not have read that part, and I know there was other little stuff I missed, so I need to reread it.
Ah, okay. It did seem almost like it might have been a test to see how well Wolf and Justus had been readjusted, but it makes sense that it was the others.
You're welcome. Again.
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