doppelgängland ll Marla/Sherlock
((This AU takes place after Spyverse/Sherkhan Verse Marla has somehow restored Sherkhan's memory and helped him escape the AU prison he was being kept in. Starfleet is not happy and so devise a particularly cruel punishment for her (like his family/crew before, Khan was not able to take Marla with him as he escaped). This is what follows. For more information on the Sherkhan verse check out augment-detective's blog or my relationships page to get background info. This rp however is entirely AU from the Sherkhan storyline in the way that Marla is displaced from that reality and placed in an alternate one. Hopefully this will make more sense as you go on to read.))
Meticulously manicured nails wrapped about the burgeoning body of the fine china, but no heat radiated from its husky hull; no warmth kissed the pads of the palms that so cradled it. The waiter had long come and gone, and steam ceased to issue forth from the cap of the cup in a horrid mimicry of a devastating volcanic eruption on the brink of birth. How long in exact increments of measurement: seconds, minutes, hours…was inconclusive. In her catatonic state, Marla McGivers, had no care to count.
Stripped of her affiliation with Starfleet, she was reduced in essence to exiled ex-patriot. Herded into a situation of house arrest paraded in the packaging of an alternate reality; one in which those she would have sought to console her in the loss of her charge and shared grief of his passing (though well they understood this parting in different terms of farewell) knew nothing of her. The bonds of their formed former friendship having been shorn by the severe shears of Starfleet. Expunged from existence.
And all this, for unleashing the brightest Burning of the firmament to regain his place amongst the stars…
As punishment for these unpardonable offences of sedition and treason, she had been sentenced to a state of perpetual and constant inconsequence. Condemned to the constraints of her prior construction, she must mete out her days in penitence and anonymity or face certain extermination.
The one kindness they allowed was in tying her to a time stream where she would not be forced to share her prison with the mockery of a double in likeness, form and voice to the man she had smuggled from under their protective custody to freedom…forsaking her own in the process. Even the Federation were not so callous as that.
Still…solitude was a cruelty all its own. Left to languish in a bottomless well of recollection with no means of hauling herself out, no company to bide the time or while away the hours; life had been reduced to a quick succession…of busy nothings, wherein no color thrived nor light cast upon her. With an example of such living stretched out before her, she concluded that to be extinguished might be preferable to loitering in a lengthy Limbo.
Thankfully, the span of nearly two years had seemed to cure her of the irrational and embarrassing habit of seeing his visage on every street corner or city block she circulated; though it did nothing for the hollow ache in her gut, which seemed to persist despite the passage of time.
It had been months since her last misconception.
Hence, why spotting the meagerest shade of him against the grey gloom of London’s landscape had her hands seizing upon her cup with a force that could shatter the porcelain beneath her.
She forced her head to bow. To not seek in some stranger the semblance of a man long past caring of her outcome. That shock of raven ringlets, wild mop of a mane against the stark white of the stone of the coffee shop called up visions of another. The frame was so similar…No.
It is not him. He’s gone.
And he’s not coming back.
She had barely managed to calm her nerves and settle her frame into a stance of non-action when a merchant (a hunched old woman who had seen better days) offered the passing pedestrian some wares or other.
His answer was a brisk, succinct denial of any need she might sum up from the contents of her cart…in a tenor and tone that had no equal. That was solely the property of one man.
((Soundtrack: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znBYJz5D5To ))
She shot forward so suddenly in desperate denial of that familiarity, as the curve of his shoulder disappeared behind the edge of a building, that her thigh upset the wrought iron table with a distinctive clatter of distress. Mug tipped, overturned; to pour and soak the abandoned napkin left in the wake of her flight from the premises. (That scarf, the upturned collar, no no no no it can’t be) She had no thought to settling her bill, only the mindless pursuit on the coattails of possibility.
His strides were long and powerful; the sleek speed of a predator. Black Panther. Claws and teeth with which he could rip the very fabric of reality asunder. Out of bondage he would bring her. And faith would be restored.
But her jailers cruelty knew no bounds and no limitations.
She caught him as he turned down a side alley; impulsive white hand curled demandingly at the crook of his woolen clad elbow (god that blessed familiar fabric), tugging him around to face her with an exultant breathlessness.
She cut her cry off with such brutality she bit her tongue. Her touch jolted back swiftly as if scalded by a living furnace, body immediately overtaken by a violent tremor of horror as she stumbled away.
Despite the fresh wound on her tongue it felt numb and leaden in her mouth at the thought of the perfect replication of those specific cheek bones.
She turned and tried to stagger away but her vision was blurred and white noise rushed in an accelerated rise in the space between her ears.
Or the original blueprint the Federation had mirrored to place their protégé in.
Whatever, whoever he was…he was not the man she knew.
A shaky hand pressed to the brick of the alley as her knees buckled, but she kept her balance…barely.
It was his eyes that gave him away. They were eyes that had never seen the stars but through the lens of a high powered telescope. Eyes that did not recognize her. Though they held the same piercing hue they lacked…the length of years spent frozen on a bed of ice. That were vacant the visceral quality inherent in the once world power tyrant, even when he had been subdued by the fabrication of a false reality.
Bile rose in her throat as blood rushed to the roots of her hair.
Unbearable if she were forced to share her cell with this calculating Chameleon. This Changeling who was not her King.
Her voice was threadbare and frayed as she tried to keep her feet beneath her, “I’m sorry….
