Of Mice and Eagles
Dark Puck
Another Matrixverse one-shot, in which a Potential not unlike the Oracle's discovered a wounded Agent...
Katherine Sanocetari was rollerblading home from school when a flash of light caught her eyes. Kate stopped, looking in the direction the light had come from, and saw a suited man lying half-in and half-out of a ditch. She could see, even from where she was, that he had a deep, bloody wound on his neck.
Horrified, she attempted to run to him until she remembered she was wearing rollerblades. She rolled her way over to him and crash-stopped in the ditch, ignoring her stinging palms as she stared at the man, checking to see if he was alive even as she reached into her backpack for a sanitising agent.
He was alive, but apparently unconscious; Kate could see the bloodstains on his shirt, as well as some splashes of blood leading towards the woods. Those, however, were not her concern; saving this man's life was.
She laid her hands against the wound on his neck, hoping to staunch the blood flow; she couldn't help but notice that his breathing was odd – it wasn't like a normal person. It was closer to an air pump. His skin was also odd: ice-cold on the surface, but the blood under her hands was hot, so hot it nearly burned.
Then his eyes snapped open.
She jumped, but kept her hands where they were as his eyes flicked over her. He opened his mouth and emitted a noise like a fax-machine, making the girl flinch, then his brow tightened, and he tried again: "… human… anomaly… system rep…" The effort exhausted him, and he fell silent, simply watching her.
Kate made a soothing noise, trying to indicate she only wanted to help him, and noticed something in his left ear. Apparently, whatever had caused the neck wound she was attempting to staunch had also cut the coiled cord of an earpiece of some sort; one end went to the bit of plastic in his ear, the other dangled off his collar.
The way he was looking at her reminded her of a documentary she'd seen once on eagles – he was watching her like the eagle with a broken wing had watched the camera…
Without warning, the pump in his chest stopped.
Terrified, Kate pushed with her mind, somehow thinking that maybe, if she just believed it, she could save him. She didn't want him to die, she wouldn't let him die.
The man twitched in response to her mental push, that odd fax machine-like sound spilling from his mouth, but both suddenly stopped, cut short. At her second push, however, his entire body galvanised, arching off the bed of dead leaves, and she felt the flow of blood under her hands cease. His body slumped back down, the pump in his chest humming again, then falling into a rhythm similar to human breathing.
Keeping her hands on his neck, Kate peered forward, trying to see if he was all right. He stared blindly toward the sky, then one hand shot up and seized Kate's wrist, the power in that one hand grinding tendon and nerve against bone. Kate cried out in startled fear and pain as his eyes snapped into focus on her face.
"You. Human," he said. "What have you done?"
Terrified and in pain, Kate stammered, "I-I don't know…"
In a motion so fast she would never be able to figure out how he had done it, the man was on his feet, pulling her upright as well. He turned his head, cricked his neck – testing the place that was wounded – then turned his cold predator's gaze down on her. "You have repaired me."
Kate cringed away from his gaze, convinced she was about to die. What else could a mouse expect from an eagle after helping it?
Then he let go of her wrist, giving her an enigmatic look, and turned and strode off into the woods. Stunned, Kate fell to her knees, watching him vanish so fast an afterimage of him seemed to linger in the air.
When her legs were back in working order, she couldn't get home fast enough.