It was hard to get back into season 1 for this. Season 2 is great so far, but very different. I can't believe we've had so much John whump though, and emotional h/c, it's great. And we got an actual mention of sensory overload in afterMath!
I headcanon John's tracking power as a kind of enhanced synesthesia, so his senses are interconnected and he can see things he hears or smells. I hope I managed to make that clear in this part. Tell me what you think!
Waiting for Marcos and Esme's report, John tries harder to focus his senses on the transport bus, to determine who's there. He needs to know if Sonya and Clarice and the Struckers are safe, and how many mutants are going to need to be saved and brought back to Headquarters. The footsteps are too hard to count, too shallow on the concrete floor, and his power doesn't allow him to see more than his ears can actually pick up. Even his connected senses can't pull visions out of nowhere.
He can smell, just barely, what he thinks is Clarice grapefruit shampoo, but that might just be Lorna beside him, because they've been sharing a bottle of shampoo since Clarice got to Headquarters. The rest of the prisoners he can't distinguish, and he has enough time to wonder what the absence of the smell he knows best means for Sonya.
But the group is too close together, too uniform in their scrubs, their prison soap and their hesitant steps. When all hell breaks lose, he can hear nothing but the shots and the cries and the running, and he shudders.
Several Sentinel Services agents are down before John can even start reacting, pull himself back from the sudden memories of war and fallen brothers and automatic guns. He tries to make sense of what is happening, but everything is confused, the agents are acting erratically. John winces and recoils at the image of an agent shooting himself in the head and loses control for a moment, his senses overwhelmed.
"Something's happening," he manages to say, but by now the others already know. Marcos's running, limping footsteps echo from the same direction as the shooting and John concentrates on him for a moment, centering himself on what needs to be done. Esme is not with him. Where is she? There. Right in the middle of the carnage. What is she doing?
"They're killing them!" Marcos shouts. "They're shooting everyone."
And immediately, now that his senses have been given the information they lacked, John can see it all. Esme's glowing eyes, Turner on the ground, people coming out of the prisoners' bus. Two Esmes. What? No, that's not right, Esme is over there. Three of them? And, coming out of the bus, Clarice's distinctive scent, Andy Strucker's awkward gait, Lauren's shorter frame.
Sonya isn't with them.
"Who is 'they'?" Lorna asks pressingly.
John starts and realizes he still hasn't moved. He's been standing there, useless and petrified, during the minute or so the shooting lasted.
"Esme," he answers instead of Marcos. "And...her sisters?"
They cart everyone back to Headquarters, the new refugees and their friends alike, and they don't have time for talking on the way. John drives, even though he really shouldn't, still shaken from his loss of control. But he needs his mind off the fact that Sonya isn't there.
Because he already knows what it means.
Clarice stands in front of him when he urges everyone inside, and his eyes wander to the droplets of blood on her uniform. For one instant, he sees it, the gun and Sonya falling and the pink smoke escaping her. His knees nearly buckle, but he shakes himself and turns away.
Between them, Clarice and Lauren explain, haltingly, what happened. They're tearful and shivering and still terrified, with the crazed look in their eyes that John has seen too many times on people who've just gone through hell. He wants to tell them to rest, that this can wait, but it can't.
Andy stands aside, seemingly unaffected, but John can see his hands turn into fists at his sides, his nails digging hard into his palms.
He dearly hopes that Caitlin and Reed can help the children work through this, because he certainly can't.
John stalls. He isn't the kind of person who reacts emotionally, right away, with tears or screams or anger. He can see it all with clear eyes, for now, mapping in his head what this will mean for the Underground, for all of them−and yes, for himself. They'll have to deal with what Esme and her sisters have done, probably alienating the Sentinel Services even further. They'll have to break the news of Sonya's death to everyone, especially the children she's always taken such good care of. He'll have to do his best to help Clarice come back from this, and pray that Lauren and Andy will be alright. He can already see a future without Sonya at his side.
Or can he?
There's a hand on his arm, and he realizes he's zoned out for a moment.
"I'm sorry," Clarice tells him, looking straight at him with her big, green eyes full of tears.
John looks away, unable to sustain her gaze, and finds himself speechless when he goes to tell her it's alright.
It's not.
Sonya's dead.
It's really not.
But it hasn't sunk in yet, not on the level of his outer emotions, so he just nods and steps away. There are too many things to do. He can't afford to break.
He spends a long time sitting cross-legged on his camp bed, in the small room Marcos and Sonya ganged up on him to convince him to keep, when he tried to give it away to refugees. It doesn't feel like it matters as much anymore, that he hasn't been able to sleep more than a few minutes at a time in weeks.
He stays motionless until the others start stirring, wide awake, his mind blank and full of inconsequential thoughts and frozen and blazing. He doesn't realize how tense his body is until he tries to get up and sways instead, his muscles seized up.
He startles, when he goes to leave and he sees Sonya leaning on the door frame, almost as clearly as if she was really there. She stood there just before they left for their last mission. Her scent lingers, the echoes of her steps, the music of her voice.
Not her laugh. John doesn't remember the last time he heard her laugh. The last time he laughed.
This war has taken too much away from them.
And now it has taken Sonya.
John goes through the next two days on auto-pilot.
He can go through the motions of what needs to be done for the Underground and for the station, but that's it. He walks away from any conversation that even touches on emotions, which leaves him talking to no one but Sage. Marcos, Lorna and Clarice keep trying, but he just can't handle anything else right now.
He watches his people fall apart, and does nothing to prevent it. They argue in circles about what Esme and her sisters did, and they seem to have forgotten all about Sonya already. John breaks fights, and one look from him is enough to get people to behave.
After that, they avoid his eyes.
He lies awake at night, and he hears Clarice's sharp intakes of breath when she wakes up from another nightmare, Lauren's moans in her sleep, Andy's footsteps as he paces their room.
There is no avoiding the places where Sonya has been. Even if his own memories would leave him alone, the furniture and the walls have their own memories he can't escape.
He doesn't even have the emotional space to hate his mutation for it.
"Lorna and I want to do a memorial for Sonya," Marcos says on the second night, joining him at his desk upstairs. "Like we did for−" His voice breaks.
John nods, keeping his face carefully neutral. "When?"
Whatever his own feelings on the matter are, it's a good idea. It will help everyone to have the chance to say goodbye.
"Tomorrow morning? We thought you might want to..." Marcos makes a vague gesture. Give a speech, his eyes says. Organize it. John looks away and bites his lip.
"No," he says slowly. "I...I can't. But I'll be there."
"Alright," Marcos nods sadly. "John, if you need−"
John walks away, not even bothering to pretend he hasn't heard him. His friends' concern is something he can't even think about right now.
Marcos doesn't follow.
John lays his bouquet of wild leaves down, and he can't make a sound. Lorna and Marcos have found the right words, for Sonya, for the morale of their little family, but they're not his. John's words have died with Sonya.
She came into his life at the wrong time. There never seemed to be a right time for them, between his grief for Pulse and leading the Underground. She chose to wait until he was ready, and he wasn't ready soon enough.
And now she's gone.
The memorial barely feels like it's for her. Her body is still somewhere are the Trask lab, if they haven't burned it yet. They did something similar once, for Pulse and the others who died in that relocation center, and this doesn't feel any more real to John.
The memories, though, the memories of the places around him, mixed with his own, those feel real. The flashes of Sonya's flaming hair, the echoes of her voice, the whiffs of her scent.
Sonya's hair smelled like amber and bergamot, like summer.
The forest smells like damp leaves and pines and fall.
John tries to keep in the tears, and fails.
He can't flee forever.
Clarice watches him from afar. She can see his withdrawal from Headquarters's everyday life, only doing the bare minimum to keep things afloat, and she frankly doesn't feel like doing anymore than that herself. She doesn't have any real responsibilities here, so she spends a lot of time staring at the walls.
It's funny how just two days in the hands of Trask Industries weight on her more than the months she spent in detention. The detention center was terrifying, and humiliating, and dehumanizing. Trask was traumatizing.
Clarice thinks it might be because now she has something to fight for other than herself. She was alone in the detention center. She had no one to think about, nothing to protect. But now she has this little light in her heart, the knowledge that there are people out there she cares about. John. Marcos. She has friends, almost a family, for the first time in forever.
And beside the tiny glimmer of hope, there's the weight of her failures. Getting the Strucker kids caught, caged like animals and forced to comply. Letting Sonya die in front of her, when she should have fought harder, should have ignored the gun in her face and not let her die for nothing.
She watches John withdraw from everyone, from her most of all, and she can't help thinking she deserves it.
She's finally found a home, of sorts, but what if she's cursed? She got Denise and Carl killed, she drove away everyone who came in her life since she ran from the foster home, and now Sonya…
"All I know is I can't lose any more friends," John tells her when she speaks to him for the first time in two days. Clarice doesn't know what to answer.
He's lost two lovers, two people so important to him, in under a week. How is he still standing? She can barely look at him.
Later, that night, Clarice finds him in Sonya's old room. The door is ajar, so she opens it before thinking it through, and he's there, sitting on the floor, his back against the wall, holding one of Sonya's shirts.
She didn't think she'd see him crying again, given how much he tries to look strong in front of everybody. But he's biting hard on his fist, tears running down his cheeks.
Clarice hesitates, thinks about closing the door and pretending she was never here, but he's already heard her. Their eyes meet, and John scrambles to stand and dry his face angrily.
"Sorry, I was, uh−" Clarice starts. "I was looking for you, actually."
John clears his throat, turning away.
"I wanted to clear the room," he says, his voice rough. "There are so many people here now...we need the space."
"John… No one's gonna blame you if you don't do it today."
"I know," John says. But he opens another drawer of the tiny dresser and takes out a couple of silk scarves. He takes a shaky breath, as if to steady himself, and freezes.
Clarice watches him closely enough to see his gaze go unfocused, like when he's using his tracking ability. After just a second, he closes his eyes tightly and shakes his head.
"John, what is it?" she asks.
"It just...it still smells like her."
On a hunch, Clarice does what she hasn't dared to do until now. She walks up to him and hugs him, hard. He did that for her when she was mourning for her foster parents, but John is so closed off about his feelings that she never felt it was her place to return the gesture. But if she doesn't, who will? Sonya is gone, Marcos and Lorna are too caught up in their own problems, and she doesn't think John is that close to anyone else. It's the price of taking on the role of leader.
"I'm sorry," she murmurs.
"It takes me back, every time," John says, returning her hug carefully, like she's a piece of fragile china.
It takes Clarice a moment to understand that he's not speaking figuratively. His senses are deeply connected with his tracking powers, and the smell must be giving him actual flashbacks of Sonya's life here.
She can't imagine it. Losing the woman he loves and literally seeing her everywhere, knowing everything she's touched. Every mutation has downsides−she witnessed an other one of his earlier when he got overwhelmed by the noise in the bank−but this seems like such a burden.
They separate from each other with an awkward sort of embarrassment. It's not the first time they've hugged, but it feels...different, somehow.
John sits down on Sonya's bed, beside the small pile of clothes he made, and pulls Clarice down with him.
"How are you holding up?" he asks.
Clarice wants to laugh in bitterness. It's the third time she'd found him crying today, mourning for his lover and friend, and here he is asking her how she is. As if he cares about her. As if she deserves it.
And she finds that she can't say she's fine.
"I'll be alright," she says instead.
John sees through the evasion like clear glass. "You did the best you could out there. You were all very brave."
"Sonya was the one who was brave," Clarice says. "She died because she told Lauren and Andy not to give him what he wanted. I didn't… If I'd said something, maybe..."
John takes her arm and forces her to turn and look at him.
"Maybe you'd be dead too," he says forcefully. "Don't do this to yourself, Clarice. It's wasn't your fault."
"But she died for nothing! Campbell got what he wanted anyway. And I didn't do anything."
John shakes his head. "No, no, this, what you're feeling, it's called survivor's guilt. You can't let it grow, Clarice. Believe me, I know how this feels. But you can't give in to this."
Clarice almost retorts, almost snaps back that he doesn't know, that he can't know, but she realizes who she's talking to. John knows.
"I've been there," he confirms quietly when she doesn't say anything. "It can destroy you. Sonya's death isn't on you, Clarice. Campbell pulled that trigger. Don't blame yourself for what you did or didn't do."
Clarice tries to use John's words, the strength he gave her without even knowing it, the next day to talk to Lauren. She tries not to feel like a failure when Lauren leaves anyway.
When they go rescue the Struckers in Fairburn, she knows Lauren heard her, that she's going to be okay. She's going to fight.
Clarice will fight, too, for what she believes in. For her friends. For her family. She joined the Underground to get justice for her murdered foster parents, but it's so much more than that now. She will fight for those who still live, and who deserve a better world.
John takes things back in hand, steps up when he's needed. He doesn't cry again, because there's no more time for mourning. His connected senses still catch Sonya's traces all the time, but he knows how to hide that, how to function through it.
John got used, once, to being triggered at the most unexpected moment by a smell, a noise, a shape. Pulse's traces faded, eventually, until there was nothing left of him. The worst of John's pain faded with them. He doesn't know if sniffing furniture and clothes for the last hint of his scent was a healthy way to grieve, but it got him through the darkness.
And now he's got to do it all over again. For Pulse, who is only present in his dreams now. For Sonya, who is here in every room, like a ghost he can't shake.
He falls asleep in Sonya's room, and it's like holding her, almost. She's so present it's almost overwhelming. John wakes up gasping, unable to breathe, and she's smiling at him from above. But when he tries to touch her, there's nothing but air.
In the end, he doesn't have time to get used to Sonya's scent lingering all over the bank. They leave for Charlotte just two days after the memorial, and when they come back, Headquarters is gone.
It's a little like losing her a second time. He has nothing left of her now. The few personal belongings of hers he would have kept have been destroyed with the bank, along with his own.
All he has is memories. Amber and bergamot, summer smells, in the last of the fall colors.
As everything falls apart, it's what he tries to hang onto. That, and Clarice's small hand in his, squeezing hard as they watch their friends walk away.
This is the last part of this series to be set in season one. The next one, Taste, is set in between the seasons, and is about halfway written. I wrote something that was supposed to be Sight, and turned into a monster (7500 words so far) with not much to do with sight, so I'll probably write something else.
See you soon!