Clairis Program pt. 1
Synopsis: Ghost is in charge of squad 141, which makes him the shiny new owner of the multi-billion dollar weapon, Clairis Program, designed to predict the future. However, he has trouble seeing the weapon beneath the woman. Instead of using her, he finds himself protecting her. (Leon Kennedy will be making a guest appearance later just because I can)
Words: 2k
Simon’s wide frame fills the chair he leans back in. He has just come from physical training, and although his guests are dressed in their fancy Sunday bests, he is covered in dirt, sweat, and his infamous balaclava. His eyes are dead as he surveys the interlopers before him.
One is a middle-aged yes-man that had come around a few times before on orders above both of their heads, and the other was a young woman who had a disturbingly vacant look in her eye and a shiny, polished, metallic collar around her neck. It almost seemed like a gaudy accessory, but Simon knew better.
“You see, we really need your mission to be successful,” the yuppie comments vaguely, stressing the importance of what wasn’t said.
“And the girl ‘ere is to make sure of that?” Simon asks, but there is no curiosity in his tone.
He stares at the fragile wisp of a woman before him, almost pretty if her features weren’t so marred by neglect, and she stared right back. There was something in her eyes - not defiance, not boldness, but almost a childlike presence. As if there is something in front of her and she doesn’t have the acquired good sense in looking away yet.
“Shes not ‘a girl’,” Yuppie tells Simon, “she is a multi-billion dollar precog weapon manufactured and leased to you to ensure that this mission is a success. You tell her what you want to know, you take her collar off, and she finds out for you. Think of it like the butterfly effect - she can test every variability of next moves until she finds the best one.”
Simon’s eyes wander to the woman’s collar.
“What about the collar?” he asks.
“Knowing about that is frankly above your pay grade, Mr. Riley.”
Simon’s hazel eyes snap back to Yuppie. “Leutenant,” he corrects without an ounce of courtesy. He believes it's best to keep these types in check.
Yuppie hesitates, accurately sensing the danger in a false step. There must be a reason he was sent to do all the diplomatic work for multinational higher ups, and this was probably it - the ability to sense and step around danger.
“And this is the headgear that accompanies the tool,” Yuppie instructs, pointing to the open briefcase previously placed on Simon’s desk.
Simon’s hooded eyes slip across the room to survey ‘the tool’. She is simply still staring at him, her expression pleasant, her demeanor docile.
“If you place her headgear on while she’s working, and wear your accompanying headgear, you can see what she sees. I warn you ahead of time, it is disorienting and jarring, and most people can’t stand it for more than a few minutes. That explains why she is…” Yuppie looks at the woman, “like this.”
She doesn’t bother getting offended, and offers a gentle smile when both men look at her.
“But if you ever doubt her reliability or believe she means to deceive you, you can always verify what she is seeing. Like this,” Yuppie says and reaches for the equipment.
Before his hand can make contact, Simon pushes the gaping briefcase closed. The snap echoes through the makeshift office and makes Yuppie jump.
“I signed your contract. I have officially seized control. You have no rights to her anymore,” Simon says.
Yuppie starts. Closes his mouth. His eyes nervously flicker back and forth between Simon, who has shifted his gaze back to the woman, and the woman, who is staring pleasantly back at him.
Yuppie lets out a long breath. “You’ll figure it out,” he concedes before backing out of the room, hurrying to his jet to get out of the sand-ridden makeshift barrack in enemy territory.
When it’s just the two of them, she lazily turns her gaze back to Simon. A silly, slow grin spreads across her face.
“I hate that guy,” she tells him.
He blinks long eyelashes at her and lets out a long, tapered sigh. He can’t remember when he signed up to be a babysitter.
“You and me, both,” he grunts out.
She remains standing almost disturbingly straight. She makes no motion to move other than the curious tilt to her head. She searches him, looking actively confused.
“I wonder, Mr. Ghost, are we friends yet?” she wonders aloud, her voice all high notes and gentleness.
“I don’t have friends.” He said it as if that meant he couldn't have friends. Or maybe, just wouldn't.
“We will be,” she assures him. Her voice is the soft twinkling of blowing wind-chimes, but it does not waver in its certainty.
He instantly knows she’s seen something about it in the possibilities of the future.
“You work for me,” he corrects her.
“I don’t work for you, Mr. Ghost,” she says with delirium dancing in her eyes. He wonders where she heard his nickname before. If it was government officials talking about him, or something shared between them in a future he’s never seen. “You own me. Think of me as a tool for you to use.”
Simon Ghost Riley is no stranger to using people. To doing cruel, merciless things to people. To being the one who has to do the dark things that would make other men pray to God for forgiveness. But the thought of using her seems criminal. She seemed so close to death already, barely anything more than one failing brain cell and a bag of bruises.
But, like it was her job to work for him, he had to work for others. And they demanded things.
“Find something for me,” he commands quietly across the room.
Finally she moves. She sits criss-cross-applesauce on the sand floor.
“What do you want me to find?”
Simon takes her in with a pang. Her eyes are practically vacant - dark in color, but it's the haunting purple bruises of neglect and sleeplessness below them that are her most striking feature. They pop out at you even more than the wasteland that is her jagged bones and pale skin.
Simon lives in a bloodthirsty world. He, himself, is brutish. But he recognizes that she doesn’t belong there, and he physically feels the injustice that must have been pushed on this woman to force her into this lifestyle. She reminds him of all of the wives and sisters and mothers that face the cutthroat consequences of his lifestyle. It is almost painful to look into her eyes and face what he’s done, but he does so unflinchingly.
“Tell me how we win this mission,”
“Take my collar off and I’ll find your answer for you.”
They sound like words whispered by a demon - just pay this one small price and whatever you want is yours. But somehow, although he doesn’t trust her, he knows she’s not lying.
He takes the intricate key that had been placed on a string around his neck, pulls it over his head, and unlocks the necklace. It falls in a noisy heap in her lap. She cranes her neck to both sides, scratches an itch that had been trapped beneath the metal, and nods at the briefcase.
“Don’t you want to watch?” she asks.
He hesitates, drinking her in again. He sits on the edge of his desk and she sits on the floor beneath him. If someone were to walk in at that moment, it might look like a staring contest to them.
“No,” he says and then walks around the desk back to his paperwork. After sitting, and without looking up, he says, “let me know when you’ve got my answer.”
And then she closed her eyes. She sat still in that position for so long, the sun set. And even then, she continued to sit still for hours after the moon shined brightly in the sky, throwing lances of shimmering moonlight through the billowing curtain walls of the temporary office.
Simon had taken ample opportunity to watch her as she worked. To him, it looked like she was meditating, but her eyes flickered violently behind closed lids. When he tired of watching that, he observed the gentle slope of her nose, the outlines of potentially plump limps that have deflated with dehydration, and the contours of her shoulders that looked like a skeletal diagram.
He took turns focusing on his paperwork and then studying her, all the while the mystery of why he was so transfixed with her was lying mostly dormant in the back of his head. He was, after all, the master of pushing things down, and will undoubtedly do that with this, as well.
With his paperwork finished, he leans back in his chair with a huff and goes to scratch the back of his neck, but his motion is paused halfway through completion. He discovers, upon laying eyes upon the woman again, that her face and lap are covered in blood. It pours from her nose like two faucets had been turned on full blast.
His body is 220 pounds of corded muscle, and he uses its full potential to cross the room, gather her up, and carry her to the medical tent. He stands guard while medics treat her, his hooded eyes watching like a sentinel as they thread wires around her body and stare at beeping screens. And then, when the panic stops and the doctors tell them what they've found, he leaves only for one thing - to gather the collar from his office and clasp it back around her neck. With that accomplished, he has nothing left to do but sit by her side until her eyelids flutter open.
Even in semi-unconsciousness, her gaze slides lazily across the horizon of her lower lid until it settles upon him.
She isn’t lucid at first, but something like clarity begins to occupy her expression as she takes him until eventually a loopy grin decorates her face.
“Upset you broke your new toy on the first day?” she teases lightly, as if she doesn't have the force for anything more.
“You’re a person,” he commands, as if demanding that she acknowledge that. There was simply no room to argue. “I wouldn't let a member of my squad die.”
For the first time since meeting her, she seems reflective. Present.
“They talk about you differently. They call you heartless,” she tells him.
The government officials that trade her around like a baseball card, he doesn't doubt.
He grunts out a sound. He's indifferent to what they say about him.
“You're the one going to be ‘eartless. Doctors say pushing yourself like that’ll kill you.”
“Yes,” she confirms without hesitation. “One day.”
Simon’s jaw tics almost imperceptibly under his mask.
“Why’d you do it, then?”
She looked almost puzzled. “You asked me to.”
“I didn't know it’d kill you.”
“I’m now an active member of the military - it’s my job to die if you tell me to,” she breathlessly whispers. Her tone makes it sound like she's joking but she's dead serious.
Simon hesitates. Their staring match ensues as he wonders why he feels so protective over this decrepit woman, then deciding it doesn't matter.
When you feel that way about something, you protect it, whether it makes sense or not.
“Then here’s a new order for you - keep yourself out of danger.”
Her smile is cracked lips and unbridled joy. “If you say so.”
He leans back in his chair, feeling like he can finally relax.
“I think you mean to say ‘yes, sir’,” he corrects.
“Yes, Mr. Ghost,” she whispers as she tries to find a comfortable spot on the medical cot. She falls asleep almost instantly and Simon lets her.
Some sleep will do her right. Not to mention a couple of big meals and some sunlight. He doesn't know what she's been through, but it hasn't been kind to her.
And that thought made him determined to be different. He was going to make sure she knew kindness.