You Will Be Alright, There's No One Like You in the Universe
Summary: Pre!Series | Pre!wipe Jane tells Ruggedly Handsome Man of her decision. Of her plan.
This is inspired by a few things, one my undying love for the werewolf who was taken away too soon, my love for (my personal head canon) of Jane's history with RHM, Jaimie's comment about Jane's soul and finally Muse's Invincible (from where the title is taken)
Characters: Ruggedly Handsome Man, Pre!wipe Jane (Taylor Shaw)
Pairing: Jane/RHM , implied Jane/Oscar, and implied Jane/Kurt
You Will Be Alright, There's No One Like You in the Universe
Follow through
Make your dreams come true
Don't give up the fight
You will be alright
'Cause there's no one like you in the universe
"You don't think I should do this," she says, whispers almost, and he's not sure if she's stating a fact or seeking an out for herself.
But that is not what their relationship has been their entire lives. So he shakes his head, a small smile playing on his lips.
"No, I think you should," he says, "I just don't want you to. There's a difference."
She bites her lips, chewing it mercilessly, she doesn't expect him to say more, not to dissuade her or encourage her, that's not who they are. "What other way is there?" She asks, silently begging for him to give her another option because as much as she believed in this, in the need to do this, she is scared. For the first time in a very long time, she is genuinely scared.
She has fought in wars, infiltrated enemy ranks, survived hand to hand combat with men twice her size, stared down death more times than she could count, but none had scared her like this.
She died. She had died and came back. She spent a year in a coma, and came back, stared death down and lived, but nothing had scared her like this plan does. Like finding out the truth has done.
The man next to her shakes his head. "I don't… I don't know any other way that would be as effective as this," he says.
"They need to pay," she muses, reminding herself, reminding him of why this needs to be done, "they have to pay… for what they did to us… what they did to all the others."
"And they will," he says, nodding his head.
"We should get started soon," she says, "we need a team, people we can trust."
He nods. Trust. That is a rare commodity in their world, in their lives. If it came to him, there is only one person he does trust, one person he can honestly say he blindly and fully trust, and it is this woman next to him, the woman he met when he was ten years old, the woman who died two years ago and then woke up with a war chest of secrets, about her life, about his, memories and pasts that were stolen from them. And there she is now, planning a suicide mission to seek revenge on those who had done that to them.
A team they can trust… Well, he knew she already had at least one person in mind.
Don't be afraid
What your mind conceives
You should make a stand
Stand up for what you believe
And tonight
We can truly say
Together we're invincible
"Have you told Oscar yet?" he asks. He's blunt about it, not one to waste time or avoid the obvious questions.
She shakes her head. "Not yet," she admits.
He lets out a sound, somewhere between a huff and a grunt and she rolls her eyes, not even her death, or coma, or return to life could have changed the way the two men felt about each other. There was no animosity there, not at all. In fact, after their initial meeting, the first penis measuring contest as she likes to call it, they have learned to have respect for one another, for what the other man is capable of, the other man's skill set, but there was still something there. Oscar was her fiance, the man she loves, and the man by her side would always be her best friend, her confidante, her partner. She figured they would never become best friends.
"You need to tell him," he tells her as though she doesn't already know, "before you start assembling the team, before you start anything, you need to tell him. He won't like it if we wait any longer."
"I know," she sighs, and then as though to lighten the mood, she teases, "since when do you worry about Oscar's feelings?"
He rolls his eyes at her comment, "this has nothing to do with his feelings, but we need him on board with this, from the beginning, and you might need to work on convincing him."
"He'll be on board, you don't need to worry about it," she says.
"I'm not," he says wistfully, looking away for a moment until he adds, "he loves you."
Her head snaps towards him, taken aback by his comment, but he doesn't flinch. "I'm not worried because I know he loves you, that he will do absolutely anything for you, go as far as he needs to keep you safe."
He turns to her, scratching his beard, he adds, "but that's why I'm worried, because he loves you. How far will he go? When you do this, you won't be you anymore, there's going to be a whole new woman, and how will he deal with that? The woman he loves will no longer exist, and I don't know how he will react to that, how he will continue to stay on track with the mission. Will he still be in love with you? Or will he be able to let go?"
She hears his words, lets them sink in as she starts to realize just what it is she will be asking of Oscar. "I'll still be me," she whispers.
"No, you won't," he argues, "you won't be you anymore. You won't be the woman who woke up from a coma, and you won't be the woman you were before you died, and you won't be that little girl they erased all these years ago. You'll be someone new, someone different. All these past versions of you will cease to exist. You do understand that, right?" he turns to her fully, gazing into her eyes, urging her to understand just how paramount this is.
"Is this a price you're willing to pay? Forget about me, forget about Oscar, forget about everything and just focus on you. Are you willing to lose yourself for this?" he implores.
And when she answers him, her voice is the steadiest he's ever heard it, the most confident he's ever heard it. "They took my life away from me, not once, not twice but three times. I was a five year old child when they took me, ripped me away from my family. The messed with my head, flooded my body with drugs, they took away my mother from me, from my memories, and when they were done erasing every aspect of my life, they trained me to be a killing machine. I was just eight years old when I carried a gun for the firs time," she says, and he knows. He knows exactly what she's saying, exactly what she's feeling because they did the same thing to him too.
"And then, when they thought I was ready, they did it again. They erased it all and threw me into the world to become another puppet they can string along. The navy seal training, the faketraining, joining Orion, making think it was my choice, making me believe that it is not what they had designed me to become and then when I'd finished the job they needed me to… they kill me, like an old rag, they throw me away."
"At least this time, when I wake up with no memories, with my past erased, again, it will be my choice, my doing, my mission," she states, "and they will pay for what they've done… what they're still doing."
"And if that's the price I have to pay, then it's a price I'm going to have to pay."
He nods, solemnly, and he doesn't need to say anything else, because he knows that if he were in her place, he would do the same thing. Hell, he would take her place right now if he could, but they both know, it has to be her.
"You need to start your training soon," he finally says, returning to the logical, the pragmatic, "I've seen you lately, your reflexes are off, your timing's messed up. You can't go out there if you're not at the top of your game."
She nods, of course he right, but still, the smirk returns to her lips, "well, let's see you wake up from a coma and still have your reflexes unchanged then."
Do it on your own
It makes no difference to me
What you leave behind
What you choose to be
And whatever they say
Your soul's unbreakable
"That's him?" he sits next to her on a park bench watching two men and woman, FBI agents across the park. They don't venture into the city much, the risks are too high. In the past eight months he thinks they've left their secluded cabin a total of four times. There was too much to be done, planning, researching, training… hiding.
She nods, brining her cup of coffee to her lips and taking a sip. She doesn't say anything, just watches from a safe distance. Watches Special Agent Kurt Weller of the FBI.
The bearded man next to her doesn't remember much of their childhood, just the memories they allowed him to keep, they filtered for him. But he does remember her, the green eyed girl who for some reason had clung to him on her first day. She had found comfort in him, maybe because he had been kind and protective in a world that offered nothing more than nightmares and fears, or maybe because, now he thinks as he watches from across the park, somewhere, in her subconscious he reminded her of a blue eyed boy who'd watched over her, a blue eyed boy she was no longer supposed to remember.
For months they have been working on finding the right man or woman to be their hook, the person on the inside they can send her to. They have researched hundreds and hundreds of possible candidates.
For months, she has also been searching, secretly, for that blue eyed boy who occasionally showed up in her dreams. The boy she has never told anyone about, not until this morning when she told the man sitting next to her now that they need to get to Manhattan, and that there was something she needed to tell him.
"Appropriate that he's an FBI agent," he says, the words rolling off his tongue in a more sarcastic note that he intended.
He turns to her, "what are you hoping for here? That he's suddenly going to remember the five year old girl he lived next to twenty five years ago?" he asks, and when she doesn't respond, he has more questions to shake her conviction. "What makes you think it's even him? You were in a coma, for years your brain has been tampered with, these memories you think you have… they might not even be real."
When she had woken from her coma, with a jigsaw puzzle of memories and lives, she had thought she had gone crazy. But one name had stuck, Taylor Shaw, a name she was sure she had never heard of before. So she investigated, and investigated, and infiltrated secret government files and documents until she found out the truth. The whole truth. She was Taylor Shaw. She was a five year old girl from Clearfield, Pennsylvania who was abducted and assumed dead for over twenty years. Nothing about that name had sounded familiar, nothing from the newspaper clippings looked familiar. Nothing. It was like reading a story about a complete stranger not her own history. But that was not the only truth she had discovered. She had also found out she was not the only child who was taken, that her best friend was also one of those children. She found out the truth about Orion.
She must have studied the Taylor Shaw files for months on end, so much so that she had started seeing the blue eyed boy in her dreams.
"It is him," she simply says.
"And so what? We drop you on his door step in hope that he will remember you? In hope that he will believe you? That he will want to fight this war with you?" He asks.
"Something like that," she shrugs.
"It was twenty five years ago! He might not even remember you… her!" he says.
"He has spent his entire life looking for Taylor Shaw," she says.
"You're not five years old anymore," he counters, "he cannot possible recognize you."
"Well we'll have to make him recognize me… somehow," she says.
"You're talking about this like it's a done deal. Like we've decided that it's going to be him." he says.
She grab the file that had been sitting between them since they got there. "This is his file, his case history, medical and psych reports, look at it," she says, "of course this is not a done deal, we make decisions together, but my vote goes to him, I'm telling you this from now and it is not because of some damn romanticized story, some infantile fantasy," she is angry at his accusations, at his implications.
He takes the file but doesn't open it, just places it on his lap. "What is it you're hoping for with this?" he asks honestly.
She takes a moment, turning to watch the agents again, "I'm… she's going to wake up with no memories whatsoever, no name, no place in the world. She will be taken in as a piece of evidence, tossed around from lab to lab, from interrogation to interrogation. No friends, no family, nothing. I just cannot imagine that kind of feeling, trauma, what kind of emotional or psychological state she will be in. No one will treat her as a human being, nothing more than a mystery, a puzzle…" she pulls the beanie tighter over her head, "I just want to give her someone who will care, who will see her beyond the case, beyond the puzzles, who won't just be a suit working her case, but who will be there for her… someone who…"
"And you think he will be that person?" he asks, interrupting her as she sees her discomfort.
"If the memories I have are real, if he's still that boy… then, yes, that's what I'm hoping for," she admits, "and if they're not, if there just illusions, drug induced fantasies, then at least he is a competent agent with no skeletons in his closet. He is upstanding and good at his job."
He nods, finally opening the file, coming face to face with Special Agent Kurt Weller, he turns back to her. "She… You are going to be okay. You may not going to remember us, your family, your friends, but we will remember you, and we will always be here, watching over you, protecting you."
She doesn't turn to meet his gaze, fixing her eyes on the agent across the park. She just nods. She may know that now, but she knows she won't know it then, and she just hopes she is putting her faith in the right man because she knows that she is going to need someone like the blue eyed boy in her dreams to survive this. To come out victorious in this battle.
During the struggle
They will pull us down
But please, please
Let's use this chance
To turn things around
And tonight
We can truly say
Together we're invincible