(Untitled)

[recanting]

The thing about adults, Alex found, was that they were always changing their minds about him. One day, he was an adult, and they’d send him off to dangerous situations without a single thought. On others, he was a child. They wouldn’t let him have a gun, or any weapons at all. Most adults - especially those in the intelligence game - simply didn’t

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[babyviper]

"What the fucking fuck?" O-Ren says plainly, when she finds the scene on the beach. Her hands go immediately to the swords on either hip, and before she even understands any of it, she's on guard.

"Did anyone come with you?" she asks. Her voice is calm, perhaps even quiet. "I'll take care of it if I need to take care of it, but it's easier if you tell me now." She's wearing a kimono hemmed short enough for running, and she uses the sleeve to dry his face. "Wakatta?"

[recanting]

There isn't enough air. There will never be enough air, or at least that's how Alex feels right now. The hood and wet towel were clumsily pushed off his mouth, but they're still dripping on his forehead, though in the tropical heat that's a blessing.

Tropical heat. Alex looks from side to side as far as he can stretch at this angle with his legs above his head. This place almost looks like the Bahamas, but he supposes it could be someplace in Egypt. He doesn't have any more time to think about it, though, when a slight, dark-haired girl appeared beside him. Wearing swords. Two of them, actually. Speaking Japanese to him.

A guard, maybe? She didn't seem like it. Alex blinked for a moment, coughing up some more water before speaking. "...Wakatteru," he responds after his brain starts working again. "It's just me. But who are you? You're not with them, are you

[babyviper]

More surprising than anything else is that he speaks Japanese. That's perhaps something imprinted too deeply on her, despite her own mixed heritage. "I'm not with anyone," she says truthfully. She might have been, someday, but that too has been corrected. "And you're on an island. Something to do with time and space. I don't really fucking know."

The whole thing has her on edge.

She laughs mirthlessly. "I dropped out of school," is offered as an explanation. "Who strapped you to this?" She tests the strength of one strap.

[recanting]

Japanese was just one of the many things that Ian Rider had taught him. His Uncle had emphasized language-learning as a useful skill, and Alex had thought was it was just one of those things Ian did. Like picking up every dangerous sport known to man. How was he supposed to know that he was being trained the whole time?

That being said, this girl might have been speaking in gibberish for all he understood. Space and time? An island? He was a boy who had seen and experienced a lot of implausible things, but this one took the cake. Even now he was still inclined to believe that the CIA had somehow transported him or knocked him out. Even if he had been knocked out so many times thus far that he knew the feeling very well.

"Which island? Are you telling me this isn't Egypt anymore?" he fields off her question with the practised ease of someone who had been doing this forever.

[dancin_maxxie]

So the beaches of Tabula Rasa are much more exciting than the beaches back home. For one, the water's warm enough that you don't feel like you're going to freeze your bits off half the time. For another, it's full of cool stuff, not trash and seaweed, but fish and crabs and sometimes, farther out, you can see dolphins leaping.

But Maxxie doesn't think a guy strapped nearly upside down to a table counts as Interesting Stuff to Find Washed Up on Shore. And yet, there he is, practically appearing out of thin air as Maxxie hikes up the shore from a swim. No, scratch that. Not practically. Definitely. He may not be the brightest kid ever, but there's no way he missed this.

"Jesus Christ," he yelps, jumping back like the dude in restraints could possibly do him harm. "What the fuck?"

[recanting]

His chest aches. His shirt's soaked through. Alex gasps and gasps for more air as if he can't get enough, and every single one of his senses are screaming at him in that familiar way that they do when he came close to death. By now the swiftly beating heart and pure adrenalin flooding through his veins was almost customary.

But it's over for now. He's alive, and for some reason, they've decided to stop. Had they suddenly decided to believe him after all? His reverie was interrupted by an English accent and a lot of profanity.

That's strange. The CIA was an American organization, after all.

He turns his head to see a blonde boy who looks as if he's just seen a ghost.

"Is this a trick? Who are you? Where am I?"

[dancin_maxxie]

He's talking. In full sentences. How did someone strapped to a board like that talk like a person in full control of his senses?

"It-- What-- I don't-- Shit." It strikes him, at the completely wrong time, that this guy is new in the island sense and Maxxie's going to have to explain everything to him. He sucks at that, really badly, without people already being in awkward positions.

"It's not a trick, it's just.. fucking weird. You're on an island, dude. It's a long story."

[recanting]

Most of it was bravado, and Alex's own stubborn will. If his captors were here, if they were watching him, he wouldn't let them see how scared he was. And at this point, being captured, threatened and hurt were almost routine. Better people have tried. Alex had always escaped.

Not this time. Every muscle in his body trembled, and he took a few more deep breaths to even out his voice. It was hoarse, and he knew that he couldn't disguise that.

"Can you untie me? Please. I'd appreciate it."

[slowspeedster]

Bart was running on the beach to stretch out some of the strained muscles he'd gotten fighting the possessed toys, trying to figure out how he was going to handle the next time. There were a couple deep scratches on his arms from Bob's reaction to his panic, and bruises he didn't know how he got, but he was fine.

Unlike the guy restrained on a table that had seemingly just shown up. Wherever he had been, the guy was maybe his age, and he'd been through something bad. "Take it slow," Bart said. "You're safe. I can get you out of these."

[recanting]

If nothing else, Alex adapted. It was one of the things that made him such a good spy. It was what kept him sane. The reason why he could go from being shot at to seemingly perfectly alright within a matter of hours. It fooled most people. The truth was that nine times out of ten, he was not okay but simply faking it for the purpose of getting through unpleasant situations.

So after about two or three minutes, when the initial panic and unbridled fear had faded, he was more or less in control of all of his mental faculties. He was shaking, but covered it up fairly well, or so he thought.

"You're not with them. What happened? How did I get here? Was I knocked out?" it's a lot of questions at once, and Alex isn't expecting good answers to any of them, but he's got to ask.

[slowspeedster]

Bart blinked a bit at the easy response, something he was used to from team, but not the average person to show up out of the blue.

"It's not what you think, probably. About 90% sure on that front. It's the island. Kinda like the Bermuda Triangle, but for real. People just get yanked out of their lives," Bart tried to explain. "I don't know how to explain it. I'm really bad at explanations. But you weren't knocked out and moved. The transition pretty much is instantaneous."

[recanting]

The Bermuda Triangle. Well, the metaphor works. Alex tries to recall everything he learned about it from class, but his brain is acting sluggishly at the moment. It's not connecting. Usually, he's pretty good at figuring things out - his teachers always said that he could be great if he just applied himself. But there's something missing here.

Alex squints. The afternoon sun is so painful for someone who was in complete darkness just seconds before. "Can you get these off me?" he wriggles his arms to show what he means.

[odunham]

She was spending more time on the beach than usual, as if going down to the sand and spending time in the sun could burn away her memories and stress. As if the day before, toys hadn't come to life and tried to destroy everyone. As if anything about her life here was normal.

With Walter and the few people she checked in on safe, Olivia could find nothing much to do -- which was always the case after bouts of inexplicable island madness, and she almost didn't want to do anything this time around. The few stuffed toys she'd gotten her hands on were back to being inanimate, and after a few hours of absolutely nothing, she went walking.

She'd made it to the beach and was preparing to head back to the compound when she stopped dead in her tracks, a table and a boy on it suddenly appearing in front of her. It had none of the impending pressure of a universe shift, just a blink of her eyes and there he was.

He was a boy, and after the shock registered, Olivia was already by the table side, fingers fumbling over the straps. Her stomach

[recanting]

For a few seconds, Alex's eyes were squeezed shut as he took in as much air as his lungs could possibly accommodate. But then there was a voice beside him - a woman's voice, calm and commanding - as well as hands slipping the straps off his arms and he had to look. The first few seconds were agonizing as the hot tropical sun presented an impossible glare to someone who had been in complete darkness just moments ago.

It couldn't have been her that had stopped it. The voice he'd heard was clearly a man's -- or was it? Alex's memory of the past few minutes were hazy at best. His mind wasn't thinking straight without the necessary oxygen. And if it wasn't her, then why, then, was she here?

For that matter, why was he here?

Alex takes in enough air to make sure that he's calm enough to speak. He won't let his voice tremble, won't let them see that he's scared, because he's not some kid they can easily bully into submission. "Why did you stop them?"

[odunham]

"I didn't," Olivia replied after a moment's pause, that question all she needed to know to put the puzzle together. His damp face and hair were damning enough, and it took a considerable amount of control to keep herself from demanding who did it and finding some way to enact some sort of pay back. He looked and sounded like an older teenager, but that was no excuse. He was still a child.

She got the first strap undone, and tempted as she was to soothe the raw skin on his wrist, letting him get his bearings back was probably what he needed. She knew exactly what it felt like, to be strapped to a table and completely helpless.

"Let's get you out of this and situated, and I'll explain it all. Okay?"

[recanting]

Despite making a subconscious choice to not let his missions affect his daily life, Alex knew that deep down, he didn't trust adults. Except for Jack, but she hardly counted at this point. Adults all seemed to want something from him, whether it's his skills or his loyalty, or anything else. Children were sometimes the same, but the things they wanted had more to do with homework help and games of pick-up football. Adults were more insidious with it all.

Alex figures she must be lying, but then, he himself can't figure out how he got here in the first place. He knows what it's like to be knocked out, whether it's from drugs or simply from being hit in the face and knows that the first thing he often recalls is pain. Either from the needle going into his arm or the punch that knocked him out cold. Here, there was nothing except for the feeling of breathing water instead of air.

The textbooks and news articles had gotten it all wrong. It wasn't simulated drowning. He had been drowning."...Okay," he agrees, mostly with the air of

[lastof_five]

Helen didn't often go running, that was usually more Will's schtick, but today she'd chosen to burn off a little steam with a jog and very nearly stumbled over what appeared to be a boy strapped to some sort of torture device. She'd been through plenty of that herself, yes, but never at that tender an age.

"Dear God, let me get you out of this. Who did this to you? Someone here or did you just show up?"

Too many questions, perhaps, but Helen needed to know if there was a threat to...eliminate first.

[recanting]

Although he had spent a few minutes on the island before she had found him, the blinding sun wasn't becoming any less so, especially at this angle. It did, however, give Alex the necessary few minutes in order to catch his breath, so at least he wasn't a gasping wreck like a fish out of water when she found him. He was grateful for that, even now.

"I just showed up," Alex replied plainly, keeping his voice remarkably steady despite the slow drip of the wet towel that had been pushed up to his forehead, yet even so it wavered a little bit here and there. His hands shook, and he clenched them to make it stop. "But I don't understand. If you didn't bring me here, then how did I get here?"

[lastof_five]

"This island pulls people from all sorts of universes and simply deposits them here," Helen explained, drawing close enough to actually touch him. She paused, though, hands hovering over the bonds.

"Are you all right if I try to get you unstrapped from this table? I don't want to startle you, obviously, but I think you'd be happier if you were free, yes?"

[recanting]

"Yes," Alex breathes, already feeling the sun's heat beginning to concentrate on the metal table. Soon it would be very hot, and he wanted to get off of it before it did. He doesn't know who this mysterious woman is, but right now it hardly matters. As usual, when faced with danger, Alex's mind becomes completely objective-specific. As in, he was concentrating solely on getting out of these restraints first, and everything else the world wanted to throw at him could come next. "Please. I'd appreciate that."