Author's Note:So, here it is - my first foray into the world of PoI. Set some months after S3 ended, AU for S4. I wrote this some months back, published it, and accidentally deleted it, so here it is again. I hope you all like it, please feel free to send reviews, comments, criticism or just a friendly PM!
Disclaimer: I don't own PoI. All mistakes are my own.
She stared at the sink, at the potpourri smelling of artificial flowers, at the sticks of wood soaking in their sticky perfumed water, at the big mirror where her face was staring back at her.
A makeup girl. How ironically fitting for someone in hiding. I create masks I have to wear myself.
Sarah Spencer sat on one of the vanity bar stools in the bathroom of the expensive, glitzy cosmetics store she had been working at for three months now. Her pretty face with the long eyelashes and the dark, wavy hair that fell loosely over her shoulders and over her ears had certainly been extra incentive for the owners to hire her. Besides, her credentials had been impeccable - having ostensibly worked in Paris, she had been the first choice for her employers. And not an inch of her perfectly made up face showed the disgust she felt for the whole boredom and superficiality that was selling cosmetics. At first, she had almost - almost - enjoyed the break from the exhaustion and the strain on her still irregularly beating heart; nowadays she already was ready to pull a Shaw - no, Mercer, she mentally corrected herself and shoot someone, something, just to prove she was still truly alive.
But then again, the voice of Her, of Sarah's God, of the God she trusted with her life, spoke softly into her ear, right behind the scar that had already begun to fade a bit. Making everything bearable again because then she knew it was the right thing to sit still and sell some more of Dior's new nail polish. She was just sleeping, she wasn't dead. Just waiting for the moment where her God would tell her it was time to rise again and fight the entity that was Samaritan. Her enemy, and the enemy of her God. She still had a purpose, and this was the lifeline she held on to.
Sarah wondered briefly if she was still as good at shooting as she had been when she was still practiced. Knowing that Samaritan was watching her movements even if it didn't know who she really was, she hadn't dared touch a gun. She still had one, of course, in a safe she had enhanced with extra security, but actually doing something with it was out of the question right now. The same thing went for computers. She had to play dumb at work when the other girls started fussing about the checkout system not working; she had to trade her high powered, Linux running laptop with all the tools a woman of her former profession had needed for a sleek MacBook without any of the programs she wanted to get her hands on again. She missed the coding, the sound of her fingers steadily drumming on the keyboard, the way the numbers and letters came together so beautifully at first in her head and then on her screen. Nowadays it was just the impatient tapping of her high-heeled shoe against the marble floors and the squeals of the women when she plastered their faces with 40 dollar foundation. She hated it, and hated them, even if She told Sarah they were nothing else than others victims of Samaritan, unbeknownst to themselves. They were hard to understand, with their little dogs and the expensive dresses, with their naïveté and simple worldview, as ironic as it sounded. Sarah knew she had moved beyond what was accepted as normalcy long ago, making it even more difficult to really keep up this facade well enough to fool an all-knowing AI. Nevertheless, I know I can do it if She tells me I can.
Sarah thought back to the day it had all...-yes what? Ended? Began? - the day she had watched the only three people she had ever felt just a faint trace of a connection with, much like a far away WLAN access point, turn and leave, while She had told her that this was the right, the only way for all of them. Sarah had been shocked at how much she had felt when she had realized that this was it. It had been partly anger at the fact that it wouldn't have had to be that way at all, that she could've continued her existence as the woman she had always liked to be, the woman that was her true self as far as she could see - if there hadn't been a fork in the road.
A fork, the outcome of which had been decided by free will, and not by Her. The two vigilantes had not killed the Senator, and killed the last chance of stopping Samaritan before its birth. And She hadn't been able to do anything, because there still was a free will, and that realization scared Sarah in its implication. The reason for the horror Greer extended onto us is that we have a free will. It was shocking indeed. And Her power only went so far because of that little fact. Sarah wondered why she even thought about this. Her life had consisted of more or less criminal acts, she had hacked, lied and killed her way through the world. She had relied on herself and computers, not people; she hadn't thought about the consequences on others. So why now? Why was she here, pondering free will when all she knew was how to survive? Why didn't she just push this thought into the heap of all the scornful thoughts she held about people and their insufficiency?
She knew it had something to do with Cyrus Wells. The encounter with him had shaken her more than she'd let on - first, it had shown her that she wasn't infallible, even with Her behind the scene, pulling the strings; second, it had reminded her of what she was, a killer who had taken people away from others (not that she had ever really thought or cared about this), and third: Wells' belief that there was a plan was something that had made her take a long hard look at what she was doing right then and now. She had never really believed there was a plan, or had she? It all went back to the question of a free will, or rather the lack of it.
"I wish I was a sociopath; it would make what I do a lot easier." The words echoed in her mind. It was true, she had never been devoid of emotion. Just good at hiding it to the outside world, after Hanna, after she had clicked Transfer Money when she'd been seated in that dingy little room, anger flooding through her as she thought about the creep that had taken her best friend. She had always felt like a shell though, there were just those spikes of..feelings that perforated her thick skin. Things like Cyrus Wells. Things like the face John Reese had made when the woman he had felt for so strongly was killed without Her preventing it. It was those things that made her belief in people to be bad code, a liability, stronger, and yet it made it clear to her that she was...just one of them. The Machine couldn't make Sarah's own humanity go away.
It was at that thought that she stood up, giving herself a last stare in the mirror.
She would do her best to help Her, and that was the most important thing, even being part of the bad code. She might not even be who she once was, but she still believed in Her and in the ultimate goal, and she was willing to risk everything - as she had always done. She wouldn't go out without a fight. She was ready.