Disclaimer: I don't own Carmen; she owns me.

Okay, so this is the first carmenfic I ever wrote, EVER, when I was sixteen, around 1997. It caused a civil war in the ancient Carmen fandom and disappeared into the night. I now repost it for posterity, and because everyone else has their 'Carmen Origin' story up, so me too.

***Mortal Athena****

Chpt. 1. Darkening Skies

June 15, 1985

The wind stung at her cheeks, making her feel cold on that warm June day. The red 57' Chevy was tearing down some desert highway, Carmen no longer cared which one it was. She had no destination, she had no past. The apocalypse of her life was now, the world turned upside down. Everything she ever knew, ever had, ever believed in was gone, pulled out from under her. The American dream.

Hah!

It had been so close, but now everything lay in ruins on the floor.

After a time the worn ex-Acme agent climbed out of the car she had been in for the past day. She had been driving since last evening, mindlessly, out into nowhere. At last her body's cry for sleep had made itself heard in her crowded mind and Carmen stopped at a run-down, one-star motel.

Sullenly she pulled the suitcase up the metal staircase and went into the dingy room. 'What was the point?' she asked herself.

She fell back on the lumpy bed to stare at the water stains on the ceiling. She glanced at her hand. The ring was still there, warm and golden. Carmen took it off and looked at it. There was only one thing left for her now. She took a set of wooden rosary beads from her tan trench coat pocket and slipped the ring onto it. She then went over to the beaten suitcase in the corner and opened it, searching around until she found what she was looking for, a little bottle of aspirin.

"Take two with water." Carmen read aloud through her tears and took out the entire contents of the bottle, seven pills, and swallowed them all.

"Not this time I'm afraid" She whispered softly as she laid back down on the bed. She fingered the crucifix and ring longingly as she waited for death to take her.

Soon it would all go away...

January 5,1983; Acme

"Oh really? Well then that's what we're going to have to do. Good bye." Carmen hung up the phone. Another day, another day. She surveyed the room of brick, watching over the others, of what remained of them. She was happy to be on a case that did not involve killers. If she could pick and choose, she would never deal with any of them, but that wasn't for her to decide.

'My family', Carmen thought contently. There was Sophia Marikalokorovski, Prof. Fortuno, Nigel Reeves, Irene Winters, and the late Nathan Whitney. They had been the elite detectives that had adopted a then 14 year-old Carmen into their ring. Carmen was 15 when Nathan died in front of her; shot in the heart, but she had been trained over time to accept these things, for that was the price of freedom.

Nathan had been 19.

Then there were the higher ups; her favorite being the wispy Amanda Willis, and her partner Suhara Same. And the 'chief'.

'My 'father'. The father of pandemonium itself.' She thought. The others insisted that the AI was the way of the future, but to Carmen he seemed more a hyper version of HAL9000. Still, he insisted she was his daughter and secretly it gave her a hint of comfort.

A tall man with wispy blond-brown hair and hazel eyes walked towards her.

"Nigel." Carmen said demurely, delighted to see him.

"Carmen." he said, mimicking her sultry tone as he put his arms around her. As a rule Carmen did not like to be touched, but she didn't care with Nigel.

They were on their way out when the computerized voice of the chief called out to her.

"Umm, Carmen, Nigel, I need to speak to you two alone for a moment?"

Carmen braced herself for what she believed to be the inevitable.

Another death in the force. Another funeral. Funeral after funeral Carmen had went to, man after man dying in the line of duty. How many had she lost? Could she count them on her hands? Carmen began to sink into herself.

"Carmen!"

"What? Oh, I'm so sorry, chief"

"We all are, Carmen, but there is nothing we could have done."

"No. I meant... Could you repeat what you just told Nigel?"

"Oh my. Umm Carmen. Sophia is...Umm..."

"Dead?"

"Yeah."

Again and again.

The funeral was small. Carmen kept back the tears, as always. It was easier now that she had Nigel beside her, holding her, easing the pain.

"She'll come back as something wonderful." Carmen said firmly as she pushed the pain into the corner of her heart. What was the use of crying? What did it get her? Nothing. Emotion was for the weak, not for her.

'Death comes to all of us and will come in good time, but until then I am an agent of the government, as was Sophia, and so be it that we die. One has to deal with it.'

Carmen looked indignantly at those crying.

'They blame their country as always. It is an easy scapegoat. They believe that she could have been saved but that they just didn't care enough to double check their timing. Ach! Don't they have any faith in this country?'

Nigel was staring at her and remembered she had just made a Buddhist reference.

"Come again, Carmen?"

Nigel was looking at her curiously.

"I'm a Buddhist" Carmen replied without tone, staring ahead.

"I always thought you where Christian, Carmen. You always celebrated Christmas."

"It is a lovely holiday."

She looked at her devout Anglican lover and added, "I have no troubles with Christianity, but they spoke of such a vengeful God at the orphanage that I never fully took it in. Suhara raised me after I came to Acme in the Zen practice and it's given me peace, so that is what I am."

Nigel left the conversation as it was.

"Terribly sad, isn't it?" asked Ronnie Goldberg as it was their turn to pay respects. Carmen didn't say a word. Sophia had been a quiet soul when she was alive; so shy with a soft smile. She had the essence of that now; her pale blond hair arranged gently around her cold face, the white pallor settling under Carmen's skin. Only half the casket open. The other half of her body had been shot to pieces.

She turned away, violently pushing the pain back even further, denying to herself that she had felt anything. Her face was a mask, as frozen as Sophia's, never to display any trace of the turmoil buried deeper than her conscious dared to go. She left the funeral early. There was work to be done and a country to protect.

"Carmen, does Buddhism... help you with these things?"

"In a way, yes."

"I love you, Carmen"

Carmen hesitated. 'Why must he move so fast? I don't especially like this romantic routine, but it wouldn't hurt to tell him what I feel, would it?'

"I love you too...Nigel?"

"Yes?"

They were sitting on the pea-green sofa in the main room at about one in the morning. All but a few bare bulbs were burning near the file cabinets and the Mr. Coffee. The old green and white linoleum floor was peeling and the plaster walls crumbling. No renovation work had been done for Acme since the Lipset days; the government not sparing any of its tax revenues even fix the clock in the far corner, which had told the time, 2:16 for as long as Carmen could remember. The room looked so lonely in the shadows cast by the bare bulbs, engulfing the two detectives and the crack in the far window made the room feel even colder.

Carmen involuntarily settled deeper into Nigel. In response he put his arm around her. It was the only comfort she knew.

"Sometimes I wonder if justice is worth this price, Nigel."

Nigel looked a little taken back.

"What's this? Carmen is questioning these wasted deaths at last? In all the years I've known you, Sandiego, never once have you questioned the law."

"I'm not questioning the law itself," Carmen replied sharply, "I've just never seen so many die as agents anywhere else in the world. The first was Nathan, then Sophia. Then there are the others. Do I have to name them? Of course I do, for who else will."

Nigel noticed a bitterness in Carmen's voice that was growing with every word.

"They never have them in the obituaries, Nigel. You die here and then you no longer exist. Quiet funeral. Then forgotten. For what? The drug lords we chase get acquitted by using lawyers that they buy with the drug money they take out of the corpses they sit upon!"

Carmen was now screaming at the night, for the first time breaking free of the coldness of duty, for an instant becoming human.

But only for an instant.

Nigel was completely taken off guard and with such a look upon his face that Carmen could only stare back at him.

The fortress was cracking, though neither of them knew it yet...