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A fist clenched tight to the kite-tail of a dream
Topic Started: Sep 25 2016, 04:57 PM (34 Views)
shyriann

Shadow checked her backpack for the twenty-fourth time. It was important to get everything right. It was finally happening, she’d been making plans and searching for clues for two years, and it was finally happening. Tomorrow, they’d be in the Amazon Jungle and within reach of Sweets. She wasn’t sure she had everything she needed… she didn’t really know what the hell she might need, actually… but she was trusting that the list her new friend had given her was good. The most important things were, of course, the Sat-Comm and the slender blonde girl in the box.

The urge to go and dig up the box, to claw it open and run her fingers through those blonde curls one last time made her chest clench. It had been the hardest thing she’d ever done, putting Alice into a cold metal casket to be traded to god-knows-whom in exchange for two numbers on the word of a person she’d never actually met. But Alice… Alice wasn’t real. Alice hadn’t really loved her because Alice wasn’t really a person. She was what was left when you took the person out, just like when she herself got lost in the alleyways when no one was paying attention. Sweets had been family, back before everything got broken, and that was real. She had to take the chance.

She would have asked Simon, but Simon was never around anymore. He’d been still and quiet at first, and she might not have known anything was different except that she could see him, like tiny lightning streaks of cool blue hovering just behind her own aura of crimson-tinged emptiness. When he’d finally woken up and said hello, what she was seeing suddenly made sense. When he was away being a thought in the Matrix, the blue faded until it was just a tiny flicker near her skin, and the lightning didn’t come back until he did. She was glad for the indicator. It kept her from talking to herself, and so far she’d managed to avoid him coming back to find Saru dripping in gore. But most of the time he was gone, off by himself because he didn’t need her to go with him to keep safe anymore, and so she’d asked Howitzer for help to get Alice in the box.



She hadn’t meant to lie to him about Howitzer.




She didn’t want him to know what had happened to Howitzer, so she just said the first thing that came to mind, and then followed each question with more off the cuff lies until he stopped questioning her. The fact that he had believed her so easily hurt a little. Even when Howitzer had actually hit her, she’d put him down and left him there to sleep and explain himself when he woke up. You didn’t kill family just because they hurt you.
Howitzer had come with them to Nim’s lab, where they’d met the others, but he’d been distant for months before that and when they’d left the lab he’d admitted that his heart wasn’t in it any more.

Shadow understood. It had been more than two years. He’d moved on. He didn’t know that she still kept watch over him, like she used to do with all of them before. She’d watched him from a distance to make sure he was okay, and for the most part, he was. The beginning had been hard, like it was for all of them. James had still been sleeping his digital dreams, Alice didn’t understand that all their friends were gone and Shadow didn’t know how to take care of her, and Howitzer had lost himself in some of the same bars where James used to numb himself. They’d gone on for months like that, healing in their own ways back to some semblance of self. And then there had been the girl.

She was pretty and kind, and she called him Matt while she laughed at his jokes. They spent more and more time together, and after a while his smile hadn’t been forced. Shadow had watched the light come back to his eyes and his aura in the presence of this woman. Her cooking took the hollow out of his cheeks, and her kisses put color into them. And after that last mission into the lab, he’d come to Shadow to confess.
He hadn’t meant for it to happen, he said, but he was in love with her. He wanted Sweets to be okay, and he was sure she and Simon could find her, and he would do whatever he could to help right now, but Rachel was moving back to Boston, and he was going with her. His real SIN was still active, and he had an outstanding warrant that he had to face that might mean some months in prison, but he was going to go with her, and face the music, and she knew about his past and loved him anyways, and he was ready to start over. Shadow hadn’t known anyone could say so much without taking a breath.

But she had understood. She nodded her understanding and asked him if he would help her with Alice.

He hadn’t asked any questions. He just helped her measure out the sedative, caught Alice when she collapsed, and laid her gently in the box. He had laid one heavy hand on her shoulder as she cried while she closed it, and then held her tight as she turned her face to sob into his stomach. He’d looked almost frightened when she finally pulled away, and told her that the plans weren’t concrete, he could still go with them, he was sorry he hadn’t realized what they still had left to do. She just shook her head and stretched up to kiss him on the cheek. Go have a real life, she’d whispered. Go be real. One of us needs to be real.

And so he had. Looking over his shoulder guiltily, he’d still gone as she asked, and got the girl and rode off into the sunset. She needed to believe that he would serve his time and earn his freedom, and buy a little house and have a couple of fat babies. That was the picture she held close when the reality of all that they faced threatened to overwhelm her and swallow her whole into its maw of raving insanity.

Simon… he wouldn’t have understood. He would have been angry that Howitzer didn’t stay to help, that he’d given up on her, given up on them, that he’d gotten the prize that all of them had spent their lives trying to earn.

It was always lonely now. Howitzer was gone, and Simon was always away, and Alice slept in her metal box. She had nothing again, except dreams of a dark haired little girl with Howitzer’s eyes, running across a yard to a mini-van with a little dog chasing behind. It was a nice dream, a good dream. The kind of dream that keeps you solid when you want to dissolve and float away. It was her dream, and she would protect it just as hard as she protected the people she loved.

So she’d lied. She hadn’t meant to, it just tumbled out, and the rest followed one after another until Simon believed the worst of her, but Howitzer was free to live his life with Rachel and maybe if she was really lucky, someday he’d send her a picture of some fat babies that she would never have.
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