She was off the clock, had taken the day in order to do a bit
of a mental reset in order to properly focus on the jobs at
hand when she would clock in for another shift. The funny
thing about the "hero" business, is that you don't need a job
or powers to be a GOOD person.
The sound of wailing had caught her attention, the tears of
a child had caused her to drop everything & make this her
priority. The poor thing had lost sight of her mother, being
too distracted in her OWN little world to realize that she had
continued walking on without her.
Raven lowers herself to the girl's level, an ever-so-sweet
smile on her face as she speaks softly, wanting to soothe her
& stop those tears from falling from precious eyes. She wouldn't
leave her, not for even a MOMENT... Making sure they stayed
in the same spot so that the girl's mother would have an easier
time finding them.
She asks the girl what things she likes, distracting her from her
distress by focusing on her interests, things that brought her
happiness. The way her eyes light up when Raven shows interest
in a particular one, that smile growing WIDER on the girls face with
time.
This... This was what she wanted in life.
She isn't sure how long it takes, maybe ten to fifteen minutes just
comforting & distracting this little girl before her mother finally finds
them, Raven couldn't imagine the relief that must be rushing through
her system as she approaches. The way the little girl runs up to her
mother, the excitement & happiness in her tone as she clings to her
as if she's AFRAID she'll disappear again. It almost makes her think
of her own mother...
The mother thanks her profusely for keeping an eye on her, all of
which she waves off & assures her that she was happy to look after
such a sweet girl. There is a warmth in her that spreads at the sight
of them reunited, that TUGS at the corners of her lips as she watches
them walk away together.
It was the smallest things that made a difference. That make people
smile, that make them feel safe. Heroism is a ridiculous concept, but
kindness was something she believed in wholeheartedly.
Nick's head buzzed like a hornet's nest when he crept out of Anna's bedroom that morning just after sunrise. He usually liked to go into a job with a clear head, but it was easier said than done for a case like this.
His thoughts pulled back to Anna Winden every other step: The worry on her face, the defeat, the loneliness. Nick could tell himself all he wanted that he was investigating the new Mayor for the sake of Diamond City, but deep down he knew it was for Anna. It was for her peace of mind. It was for his own seething, bleeding heart.
Because the synth detective wasn't about to be pushed out of his home again by a newcomer. He wasn't going to watch the woman he loved torment herself in waiting for Robert House's next moves. Nick would act before the other shoe dropped-- he'd protect her, protect them.
Like you protected Jenny, huh.
The thought nearly tripped him up on the stairway up the stands to the Mayor's office, the flash of memory so overpowering it almost knocked him off his feet. Blood on the pavement. A trial on TV. It smelled like sea water and sewage. Blood on the pavement. Blood on the pavement.
Nick was in a meeting room. He was sifting through a file cabinet for a terminal password. House hadn't been here long enough to start putting things to paper, but it was long enough to keep digital logs. The detective knew House was a synth-- he'd seen the guy crawl out of an Institute replicator-- but nobody else would buy that from him without any hard proof. And even then, after the Institute went down, he'd have to further prove the guy was a synth with ill-intentions.
Nick Valentine almost missed when just being a synth was enough to get you kicked. The irony wasn't lost on him: in fact, the irony was a slug in the gut. What kind of man are you, Nicky?
Absentia-- the password. Bingo. Nick didn't have time to celebrate when he heard the rattling of a door. He'd given DC security the slip so far, but the clock was ticking again.
Was that House's voice? Shit.
Yellow eyes turned to the door: House's personal terminal was just further down the hall to the right. But if the man himself were there... he'd only have a couple seconds to get to that terminal, and the exit was in the opposite direction. That wasn't even counting the time it'd take to parse through the terminal's data. He'd be relying on luck that House would meander around a bit before heading back to his office.
So that's what Nick did. He crept down to the Mayor's office and bolted to that terminal--
BLOOD ON THE PAVEMENT.
The flash of memory nearly bowled him over. He was on a Boston street outside of Joe's Spuckies, yellow tape, yellow tape, blood on--
There were footsteps echoing down the hall, nearly outside the door. Nick had only just plugged in the password: data scrolled on the screen. Institute records.
Footsteps stopped outside the door. Valentine was trapped with only one exit now unless he wanted to make a stand: the window. A gap in the repurposed iron of the mayor's office, glassed off, slightly ajar. It fed out into the railing of the upper stands after a drop, but he had to copy the data.
No time.
By the time the door opened, Nick was already out the window, dropping in a freefall to the railing of the upper stands. He hit awkwardly, the sudden shock to his ankles enough to throw some bolts out of place. He dropped into a roll to try and absorb some of the damage, and came out on his hands and knees, nearly toppling down the stairs down to the market. He only slipped a couple steps, winced at the way his knee popped on impact, but stopped his momentum before he took any real damage.
Nick righted himself, grasping the railing, eyes closing for a moment.
No data. No proof. He'd seen it himself: Institute blueprints. But without a copy, who would believe him? Piper wouldn't run a story entirely on speculation. Anna would get no solace knowing they couldn't prove jack.
Nick lit up a cigarette as he started back to his office where Anna was waiting, his pace slow enough to not jostle his joints too much... and to bide time so he could think of a good way to say 'I beefed it.'
But as he finally rounded the corner of his alleyway, he could see that Anna wasn't alone.
Charlotte Shepard’s vitals played brightly in Garrus’ visor even as he was hauled onto a stretcher and buckled down to the shuttle trying to make a break for the Normandy. Even past frantic calls from Liara to assess the damage to his lungs and his head-- how many fingers am I holding up-- Garrus you’re bleeding-- his signs of life mingled with hers on an LED screen suspended in space.
Failing. Heart skipped. Oxygen low. His visor flickered as Garrus tasted too much blood in his mouth and the shuttle violently lurched.
Even on the Normandy that was where his focus was, dim and faltering like the lights in his visor. “No. No--”
Everything spun, hazy and surreal. Familiar faces. Evac, now. Back to the relay. Air support. Where’s the Commander?
She made it. She made it.
But Garrus had those vitals tagged. He could swear he heard her breath laboring in his ear again as his cheek hit something soft. Emergency surgery. Get that armor off, it’s crushing his lungs.
“I have to see-- don’t put me under.” A pop, a groan of metal. Garrus could breathe again. He was hacking again, iron raw in his throat.
Her heart monitor blipped still.
And the power went out-- all of it, all at once, a violent lurch in the void of space and sudden terrible blackness. He’d died. He’d died with her.
He heard his own heart break. Garrus was alive.
Two days later he put her name up on the wall.
Garrus had been nearly silent until they got clearance to land closer to the Crucible’s crash site, once a city now rubble and death. Made free anyway. Even then he wasn’t the one to suggest they go looking for signs of life there; it was all of them, quietly but assuredly, grasping to the last straws of hope.
But it was Garrus that saw the faintest flicker in his visor, only just barely coming back on line after days of tinkering.
His heart skipped. His breath stopped in his throat.
It was a trick of an EMP field, a misfiring signal, a faulty piece of a system barely standing-- but what if it wasn’t?
At least Chakwas was smart enough to not fight him as he took to the rubble with the rest of the ground team; his recovery would be long after the severe concussions and the shattered ribs, but a pared down set of armor provided a makeshift brace long enough to attempt a search. Even as those vitals went quiet again, Garrus was on the ground rummaging with the rest of the cleanup team.
Another flicker. His chest ached.
Another.
North-- he had to walk North, out under a tattered piece of what had once been walkway. It was like a game-- a blip, a step, silence. She’d told him about it. Hot and cold.
Time seemed to speed up as Garrus shoved rubble aside, as the blips became more frequent, as he called out behind him. “I’ve got something--”
SHE WAKES to the feeling of breath on her cheek. It rustles the hair that lays in a fan over her face, shielding her fluttering lids and long lashes from the dark room. Her eyes flutter open first, and for a moment she wonders if it’s Georgie, come to wake her in pursuit of a midnight snack. It wouldn’t be the first time -- though Iskra would be remiss to admit it. A hand rises from beneath her plush blanket to rub at her eyes, pushing away thick raven curls; she was dreaming something wonderful, and something that she now, frustratingly, cannot remember. Brows furrowed, she rolls onto her back, entirely prepared to ward off Georgie’s advances ( because on the first night back, she would like to sleep peacefully, thank you very much ), but instead is met with a very different face entirely.
A face that she has only seen of late while crying into throw pillows and fixing smeared mascara. A face that she has only seen of late at the bottom of champagne bottles and in the smoke of cigarettes. A face that she spent an entire break trying to escape -- but also trying to find again.
Because to the two of them, there is no such thing as death. Only convenient disappearances to avoid trouble; only promises of ghosting away to live a life of decadence incognito; only dramatics, lies, and pretense.
But Octavia is very much dead. And she is also very much here, with a thin trickle of blood trailing along the curvature of her cheekbone. From her hairline to her chin, it drips, drips, drips -- and then disappears before hitting Iskra’s duvet. Her lips move quickly, and her eyes are wide, as if she were desperate to get a secret out before it sticks to the tip of her tongue. But no sound comes from her lips; only silence. She hangs, suspended, over the bed, her hair a hanging curtain about Iskra’s face.
Iskra, who is rigid beneath her blanket, arms pinned to her sides, her mouth wrenched open into an ugly, horrible, silent scream. She can feel tears streaming steadily from the corners of her eyes, soaking the pillow beneath her head; she can imagine Octavia telling her not to cry, that it’ll ruin her makeup, that they can scream it out later. And she can feel a scream, lodged within her throat, crawling along the length of her tongue to perch underneath her jaw.
Not real, not real, not real. But Iskra Gill is never afraid in her dreams. Fear is for reality.
She shakes, though she cannot seem to move her arms, her legs. She can barely breathe, barely blink, as Octavia silently mutters over her, drawing closer and closer to Iskra’s face. She can almost smell her perfume, can almost feel the blood drip, drip, dripping onto her skin, onto the sheets, onto the pillow. And it is very much blood that drips from her dearest friend’s perfect face -- there is no avoiding that.
And there is no pretending here, with the vision before her now. Dead.
A sound no more than a squeak escapes Iskra’s clenched, dry throat, and at once Octavia’s face freezes. She pauses, as if sorry that she has startled her friend, sorry that she is floating, and translucent, and dripping ghostly blood onto fresh-washed sheets. Octavia blinks, visibly examining Iskra’s face, watching as her wrenched-open lips quiver, and the tears wet the hair on either side of her face. And then she draws closer, closer, until her face is all that Iskra can see. The scream thrashes beneath her tongue, but she bites down on it, clamping her jaw shut only to regret the pitiful wobble of her lower lip.
And then -- Octavia speaks.
“Listen,” she says, “Listen, Iskra.”
Iskra nods, though she wasn’t asked for a response. She listens.
“Behind every powerful man is a more powerful woman,” Octavia says, “That's how it happened to me."
She disappears before Iskra can scream, or speak, or cry. She vanishes at once, and Iskra feels all sound, all breath, return to her chest. With a yelp, she reaches up and balls a bit of blanket into her fist, shoving it into her mouth. Biting down upon its soft fabric, she flips onto her stomach, buries her face in the mountain of pillows upon which she sleeps, and screams.
And she finds, once she quiets, that what she feels most is not fear, not anger, ( well, perhaps a little of both ) but regret. For what is the point of seeing a ghost, if even in a dream, if you cannot tell them that you miss them?
But ... behind every powerful man is a more powerful woman. Discomfort thrashes in the pit of her stomach, settling heavily as soon as her voice runs hoarse in the pillows. A powerful man, and a powerful woman.
𝚃𝙷𝙴𝚈 𝙿𝚄𝚃 𝙰 𝙱𝙻𝙰𝚂𝚃𝙴𝚁 in your hand when you’re eighteen and tell you to kill with it. for a purpose they say. for the good of the republic. to answer a call the jedi are blind to while they sit in their temples and evaluate a threat that’s already at their door. your friends and your family give you a hero’s farewell and hail you off to war, and you never see them again; the first casualty in a long list of heroic incentives, and far from the last. for the first time you feel the warped rush of space lurch your heart into your throat. it’s different than the tropospheric flying you’ve done before, zipping and whirring on an airspeeder through the mountains of aldera, and soon you get a taste for it, become as addicted as you do to the cheap cigarras you share with your new comrades-in-arms. you’ve always had a pension for addiction.
honor is the next sacrifice. there’s no honor in killing, not in the way they’d depicted on the posters, drilled into your skull visions of medals and glory during training. it’s brutal and far quicker to snuff out a life than you anticipated, and you throw up all over your boots the first time you do it, even if your victim was just some faceless mandalorian who’d tried to gut you like a nerf with a vibroblade. between the bile and the sweat you feel the captain pat you on the back and tell you that you’ll get over it. you do , and you get good at it. addicted to it. the higher ups take notice. nice aim, good kill, well done jaq. you allow yourself to take pride in that, because you’ve never really been good at anything before. just a boy from alderaan with a penchant for slicing things you shouldn’t, but now you have this. even if this leaves you thinking about your victims on a cold military issued cot in the middle of some war ravaged city that won’t have a name by the time it’s over, blurring the lines between what’s real and what’s not because sometimes you feel something deeper than empathy when you put a smoking bolt between their eyes. like you’re at the other end of the blaster.
you convince yourself it doesn’t matter, become numb to it, take up a juvenile card game to bond with your fellow soldiers over a glass of juma, exhausted and brow beaten in between the fighting and the rocket bleached skies. they die and you live. hate and vengeance replace mercy and justice because you’re feeding off a never ending cycle of death and destruction. the mandalorians slaughter innocents by the millions and still the jedi do nothing. it makes them just as guilty.
and then it’s over. revan the butcher is so much easier to process confined to a holo, a whispered name passed around war camps and smoldering fires. you’re taller than most, don’t have to crane all that significantly to make them out over the sea of soldiers, all vying for just one glimpse of the catalyst who’d instigated the end of the mandalorian siege, who’d broken the republic’s shackles and led you all to victory. a savior. their hold on the large mass that’s congregated is transfixing, and you burn with devotion, with a determination to chase this figure into the very blackest depths of the galaxy. prior allegiances be damned. you’re loyal to revan, not the republic, loyal to the jedi who’d joined their cause, not the ones that hid and did nothing. you can separate friend from foe, and your only ally stands before you now, commanding your allegiance to the sith. so you follow, and the last sacrifice you make is yourself.
this isn’t quite how you expected your date to go . you suppose you should’ve been more prepared for this , the onslaught of fans calling out your name --- there were just so many of them , and in that moment your popularity became something invasive . with akira you’ve become a different boy , one who at least slightly drops his act of the celebrity , the ace detective . but you can’t be that boy to anyone else --- not to all your fans . and so you dragged akira with you into a nearby café , seating yourself facing away from the window . ❛ akira , i apologize , i --- i just forget how easily recognizable i am sometimes , i suppose . ❜ i feel like we’re a world away from everyone else when i’m with you / i feel more like myself with you than i’ve ever felt in front of a camera / i don’t want everyone’s eyes on me , not really --- only yours . all things you could’ve said , wanted to say --- but you didn’t .
the two of you sip at hot coffee now , and once again you look at him apologetically . there’s a smile , though --- a hint of one , at the very least . ❛ i’m sure it must be tiring going out with me sometimes , with how much attention i draw . ❜ akira’s head is tilted at a slight angle , sunlight hitting its glasses , a glare hiding his eyes . you laugh , ❛ if i had glasses like you , perhaps i’d be harder to recognize . ❜ akira’s face lights up at that , and you raise an eyebrow , wondering what it is he’s thinking . and then it tells you bluntly , come with me , pulling you behind him by the wrist ; you protest , w - wait a second ! but you follow him regardless . you’d follow him anywhere , after all --- not that you’d tell him that .
it drags you out the side door of the café , behind the building in a secluded area . the two of you need to avoid attention , after all --- it isn’t the first time you’ve hid in alleys from the invasive gaze of your fanbase . ❛ what , were you worried about us being bothered in the café too ? i can understand that , bu--- ❜ it cuts you off , a finger pressed to your lips with a smile , and takes your face in his hands .
and he kisses you . he kisses you , and you feel yourself tense before you finally kiss it back . he tastes like coffee , he tastes bitter and yet you can’t think of anything sweeter ; there’s nothing in this world sweeter than him , or the way he holds your face like it’s something delicate , or the way he kisses you as if there’s too much love inside him and all of it is poured into one action . you’ve never been loved like this , not that you can remember , at least . it’s overwhelming , but you never want to lose what you’re feeling right now . ( you will , though --- you already know you will . )
you don’t know how long it kisses you for . it feels like a lifetime , yet when he pulls away you feel like it was too short . you’re left flustered , a dumbfounded look on your face . he smiles at you , that cute , crooked grin of his , and then he takes off his glasses , placing them on your face . you blink stupidly , and then he begins to muss up your hair , horribly . ❛ hey ! ❜ you push his hands off , but the damage is done . you open your phone’s front camera , your expression unreadable as you stare at yourself . you’re unrecognizable . you realize then that was the point of this , but you frown anyways . he laughs , then kisses you again , tells you that you look handsome as ever . you can’t stand him .
“It is a pleasure to stand here on this stage tonight, speaking to you all. This is the first year I have been to the White House Correspondents Dinner, and I hope that it will not be my last. I know that my presence here has aroused skepticism in some of you. I am not a man unfamiliar with controversy; debate does not frighten me. It is easy to paint our opponents as the “bad guy”, to further divide ourselves from those that are not like us. I will admit, in my younger years, I was guilty of the very same. But in the wake of tragedy, Americans cannot afford to point fingers at one another.
We are one nation, under God, indivisible. That line is in our own Pledge of Allegiance; it makes me proud to be an American today in 2019. It makes me proud, to solute those thirteen stripes and fifty stars. It’s easy to forget, with over two-hundred years between us and the founding fathers, that collective American spirit that won us our freedom in a time of tyranny. We have faced much more since then -- war, tragedy, loss, recession. But we have always fought, and come out on the other side stronger.
Look at The Greatest Generation; they experienced The Great Depression, World War II, and still built a life and a family for themselves. We descend from those people, we descend from those colonists that threw their tea in the Boston Harbor. Americans are a strong, capable people. The rest of the world may doubt that -- we as a nation may doubt that, in an age of smart phones and safe spaces. I never have, and I never will.
Losing President Wright was, of course, a monumental loss.Only five presidents have been assassinated while in office, in other two-hundred years of history ... we are living through history today. Our children, fifteen, twenty years down the line will look at this period of time as we looked at the nation after JFK’s assassination. We are living through history, every single day of our lives. We are writing a legacy that future generations will look to one day, when we hand this beautiful country off to them and say, ‘Go, make something great of this land.
It is up to you fine ladies and gentleman, joining me here tonight, what that legacy will be. But not only those that are fortunate enough here to sit at this dinner with me -- America’s blue collar, tired man, just coming home from work this hour. He has a say. So does his neighbor, and his wife. That is what makes me a proud American today: the anticipation of what we as a people will leave as a future for our children.
Thank you, ladies and gentleman, and enjoy the evening.”
