In perfect darkness he feels it stalking and lays perfectly still. He breaths in shallow breaths, squeezes eyes shut under the ruse of sleep. The hand beneath his pillow creep slowly towards the handle of a gun. There are phantoms that stalk the night, wisps of regrets and memories that take shape. But this thing is real and how it got pass every trap and defense is concerning. When he feels the encroach of his space Fetch acts, thumb clicking down hammer and taking aim. Movements are swift, untainted by promise sleep and dark patches settle heavily beneath the eyes. Inhuman eyes widen meeting something much more monstrous that dares to wear the skin of a someone long gone. The gun remain level between her– its eyes every instinct telling him to squeeze the trigger and end its existence. Act. But it wears her face.
His skin crawls when he sees her, and she speaks his name tearing his heart from his chest right into his throat promises to tear what little of his soul asunder.
There is danger. A sudden heaviness to the air, and she at the center of it all. The hairs on his neck rise. Yet the dog doesn’t bear its teeth how could he? It’s her.
“Who are you?” He knows the answer, doesn’t want to believe it. There’s no playful banter to his voice, no boyish charm, but something raw and too frail hidden beneath usual lenses and a confident grin. She was gone, every file said she was dead. She is dead, a voice warned. What struck him the most like a silver knife to the chest was she was here– she was here, but different.The silent question lies at the tip of the tongue, unvoiced. What are you?
She almost smiles when Atlas levels a gun at her in that breathless dark. Good boy. She keeps it to herself and instead keeps her form familiar in its rigidly, as if she were merely working mental gymnastics for supply forms as she once did.
The stark shift in his behavior is not lost to her. He lacks that youthful spirit, the jovial arrogance that was altogether charming and irksome. He was scared. Horrified, even, because even now he must know her as a corpse.
“Shannon. It’s not a trick.” comes the reply. Why bother with him?
“She hid the full truth from you. I knew she would.” Nothing in her, even in the dark, seems to regard his weapon with concern.
“Put that down and we’ll talk.”
“You can call me Shannon sometimes, if you want to.” Didn’t she say that once? He never did, never got the chance, always foregoing with some silly nickname. The day he’d been gifted with her name was a frightening an admission. It meant that she trusted him and though he never voiced his own he knew that he’d never be able to see her as just another face in administration. There was a reason She condemned friendship, it was always bound to end some. It always made things difficult.
Atlas’ head pounds and once more the voice in head cries out, it’s lying. More than anything he wanted to fall into her web and believe that were true. Selfish, he thinks, to wish her a fate worse than death, to have her breath and live as she does now. For even though Pauling in all her familiar mannerism was here it was as though he were watching an intimation of someone trying to remember who they were prior. Nearly perfect and yet off. An act. He knew a thing or two about pretending. She’s close enough that a bullet would be difficult to miss and he does not lower the gun immediately. Eyes narrow at her own, nearly flinching at their newfound raw deadliness hardly contained. They’re too familiar.
“I must be out of my bloody mind.” He mutters. It takes everything for eye contact to be maintained but he concedes with a sigh, the gun placed down between the two, hands then splayed to show they were empty. Mistake. Where would they even begin?
“There. Start talking.” A pause. Manners ingrained in blood with who he was dealing with remembered a half muttered sorry. “Please.”
