a/n: okay, hi everyone! sorry, just here to say a few things then we'll get to the story :P first of all, this is written a bit funnily with the POVs because it's basically a modified RP between myself and my friend danay (i don't know how to credit her because she doesn't have a account, but she's amazing, just trust me!) she did nathan's, luigi's and a few other characters that'll come in later, and i did resa, all the grilo, and amber :D it is just being done for fun so some things might be off, but i'm pretty proud of it so far, so i'm trying to edit it and get it all right :) i might go back and add more reactions or something, i dunno
anyway we just wanted to do a repo rp that focused on her favorite and my second favorite character, nathan, but we wanted all the other characters in it as well :P
please stick with it! it starts out kind of oddly/slowly because we were just trying to get it going (the first half or so is what we call the "soup-and-lies" stage, you'll see why) but it does get cooler, and it DOES have a pretty awesome plot, i promise!
The first thing he felt was a sensation of falling, with his heart caught in his throat and as he tumbled head-over-heels into nothingness. The second thing he remembered was pain. It trapped him in a barren wasteland outside the realm of time. Physical pain was only part of it, although if he even existed in a physical sense anymore he wasn't sure. By the time he awoke, he could only be sure of three things:
One; he was still alive.
Two; there was a woman attending him, and she wasn't Shilo.
Three; he didn't know who 'Shilo' was.
The woman was pressing buttons on an IV machine that was next to his bed. A tube snaked from the machine into his arm, feeding him hydrated nutrients and protein. He watched her for a minute before he remembered how to speak.
"Am I in a hospital?" he mumbled, voice thick and scratchy from disuse.
Resa lifted her visor and grinned down excitedly at the man who was beginning to move. "Finally awake, I see! I hope you're feeling better."
Her heart was pounding; Nathan Wallace, the man she knew nothing about except his name and occupation, who'd been comatose though stable for weeks, was waking up. It was brilliant! She'd finally meet him! She felt like she knew him already, like he was her friend even though she'd only seen his face.
When Pavi Largo had strode down to her lab, telling her that the Genterns responsible for show cleanup would be bringing her some bodies later to see what organs she could salvage, she'd never imagined she'd find a pulse on one of them. Rotti Largo was far gone, and she was sorry for that because he'd always been kind to her, but the Repo Man's heart still beat. Faintly, weakly, but the pulse was there. It had been hard to bring him back and Resa had had to work diligently for hours before he stabilized. She'd stolen a slightly used lung and to replace his and had to use GeneCo equipment to grow some ruined tissue, but she'd done it. Afterwards she'd sat with him, watching his chest move up and down again and waiting for him to awaken. It'd been a while before she realized she couldn't just keep him there indefinitely.
Even though Mr. Largo was dead, the warrant for Nathan's life stood. Resa wasn't sure if his children, now in charge of the company, would even care if the Repo Man still lived, but she decided to be safe. Packing him in with some portable emergency life support, she carefully zipped a body bag around him and got some lower number Genterns to load him in a transport truck.
"Research," she'd explained to the driver. "He was in an advanced stage of a supposedly extinct disease. I need to take some samples."
As a SurGEN, she was allowed to take bodies back to her house under appropriate circumstances - but she doubted a living and wanted Repo Man would be appropriate. She babbled away to the driver, and he sat there silently. You've got to stop talking, he'll be suspicious, she kept telling herself. She was so nervous, she couldn't stop.
But it worked. GeneCo had assumed Nathan had been harvested and dumped, and Resa had a patient. And now he was awake. And she was ecstatic.
"Are you hungry?" she asked eagerly. "I have food here."
Nathan (for that was his name – it occurred to him as the sleepiness started to wear off) tried to sit up and he was struck with a sudden feeling of urgency, as if he had to be somewhere.
"No, thanks ... I-" He settled for propping himself up on one elbow, "I think something bad happened. What I mean is ... I think I got shot. But I can't remember." An image flashed before his eyes of a man pointing a pistol at him, but it disintegrated almost instantly. He turned to look at the woman beside his bed, who was now watching him with concern in her warm eyes. He decided she was attractive, in a self-conscious, weird kind of way. Nathan was about to ask her why he was here when he noticed a dull throbbing in his leg. He pulled back the covers to see a gnarled scar slashed in his skin across the back of his knee. He gasped. "What is this from?" he asked her, alarmed. "Why am I here? Was I in an accident?" The pain increased as the drowsiness he was feeling wore off completely and panic set in. "Please tell me, I can't remember anything!"
"Oh, God..." Resa whispered, rushing to comfort him at the bedside. Shock, she'd expected, relapse, maybe, but never had she even considered amnesia. She'd have to tell him everything ... but not at once. He was in a delicate state at the moment and any kind of stress could send him into a relapse. She'd have to choose what she said carefully. Everything had been in the papers, but maybe if she told him a different name, when he finally saw them he wouldn't make the connection. Besides, weeks had passed. The only part of the event still being talked about was Rotti's death. If she kept quiet and kept him there ... he should be all right.
"Your name is Nathan Williams," she said, and mentally slapped herself. It was too close to Wallace. But it was the first name she'd thought of. "You seem to be suffering acute amnesia, which isn't surprising considering what you've been through. You used to be a GeneCo employee, but you were ... deployed."
"Shot, you mean," he said, wildly. She chuckled, even though it wasn't extremely appropriate.
"Yeah. Shot. You caught a slice in the back of the leg as well, but it wasn't deep enough to hit any major tendons, thankfully, and it's healing well." Resa cleared her throat. "My name is Resa Donnell. I'm a SurGEN at GeneCo, and you're in my house. My lab, specifically." She forced him back on the pillows again, and increased his diluted Zydrate solution drip. Just enough to hold back the pain, not enough to make him lose his head. "What do you remember, Nathan?"
A thrill went through her at the realization that she was actually talking to her comatose patient. His voice was deliciously gravelly and thick and dark.
"Not much." He lay back and shut his eyes for a moment, concentrating. "I remember GeneCo. I remember working..." an image of his hands ripping out human organs made him hesitate, "...with precision. And there was a girl," he said with conviction. The image brought a surprising rush of feeling to Nathan: grief and compassion chief amongst them.
At the mention of his daughter, Resa gained a flicker of hope before feeling it flit away.
Nathan looked suspiciously at Resa. "Why did you bring me back here? What have you to gain by saving a 'deployed' GeneCo employee?"
She bit her lip and looked away, then smiled at him. "I don't know. But aren't you glad I did?"
The look he gave her suggested he was looking for a more in-depth answer. She sighed.
"If I told you the real answer, you'd hate me," she said, only slightly joking. "And I don't think you know me well enough to hate me yet."
Nathan studied her carefully. "Are you one of those SurGENs that takes their work home with them? Am I about to become a science fair project?"
She grinned. "I'm a little old for the science fair scene. Hanging around little kids isn't a good way to become an established SurGEN." Nathan chuckled at this and looked slightly pained. Resa tried to be more serious again so he wouldn't hurt himself. "But yes, I do take my work home with me, and yes, you are a new project."
Honestly, as a SurGEN, she'd always viewed the GeneCo repo men a bit romantically. She'd paid off her debts so she had nothing to worry about, and even though she wasn't allowed to resign from GeneCo she loved her job and wouldn't even leave if she'd been able.
She shook her head to clear it and smiled her bright beam again, showing the gap in her front teeth. "Really, though, you must be starving. Let me make you something. What do you like?"
"Well," Nathan relaxed, feeling less alarmed than he was a minute ago. It could have been because of the upped dosage of Zydrate in his veins, but right now he didn't care. "Maybe some soup would be nice," he suggested.
"Perfect," grinned Resa. It was almost the only thing she knew how to make well.
When she left he looked around at his surroundings, taking in the peeling floral wallpaper on the walls, the pale peach carpet, and lace drapes. Not something he would pick out himself, but he didn't intend to stay here long anyway. He closed his eyes and lay still, concentrating all his willpower on recalling something, anything, to help him put the pieces together. His mind was impossibly clouded, and it seemed like the more he strained, the less he could recall. He was so involved in this mental tug-of-war that he jumped when Resa spoke up from the doorway.
"Don't struggle to remember," she called after watching the man make faces for a minute. "You'll only make it worse. It'll come back naturally, and it will come back. I promise."
She was back ten minutes later with a bowl of her mother's favorite borscht and two cups of strong tea. She set it on the table beside Nathan, as he'd fallen asleep.
"Odd," she chuckled to his sleeping form. "You'd think after three weeks of nothing but sleep you'd be bouncing off the walls."
Resa checked his vital signs, all normal, before sitting in the armchair beside the bed and picking up her cup. She sipped lightly at the hot liquid, watching the man's eyes twitch beneath his lids. Funny, she thought, how much older than her he was, and he was still better-looking. Resa was approaching her thirty-fourth birthday, and it was approaching fast. She'd never given much thought to age, but since her sister had died two years before of aggressive cancer she was counting the days.
She pushed back her dark hair and leaned over her patient to straighten the bedclothes. Floral. Everything was floral here. Her mother, the decorator, had loved flowers, and it showed. But she'd never been a happy woman. That showed, too. The cheeriest thing about the room was a darkened, dried bouquet of orchids and lotuses on the wall, too high for Resa to reach. She suddenly felt very sorry for Nathan, sorrier than before, at least, having to wake up for the first time in such a dreary, horrible room. The next time she went out, she vowed, Resa would pick flowers for it, real flowers. Bright flowers.
A moan behind her. She turned to see Nathan staring at her. "Oh, here's your soup," she said cheerily, trying to be happy for his sake. "It's beet, I hope you don't mind. They're rare, now, but my sister kept a little greenhouse." Suddenly she was worried. Not everyone liked beets. "I have other kinds too, though, I can make some up if you don't like it..."
"No, no this is fine. I love beets." Nathan lied, hoping to reassure her. She looked relieved. With Resa's help, he was able to sit up, although she wouldn't stop fussing with his pillows for a good few minutes. At the first taste he expected to have to pretend to like the soup, but it was surprisingly delicious. After just a few sips he felt warmth and energy returning to him, and he was able to properly assess his situation. He turned to Resa.
"I'm terribly sorry to impose on you like this. I hope I won't have to bother you too long; in fact I'm feeling better already. How much longer must I stay in bed?"
"Don't be ridiculous," Resa told him condescendingly. "I wouldn't have taken you here mostly dead if I didn't expect you to stay for a while! Drain my hospitality as much as you like." She grinned reassuringly at him again. "And I'm not sure about the bed thing yet. It'll be a few days, certainly; you did just come out of a coma, for Chrissake. Anyway, it's a nice bed, isn't it? Soft and everything."
Nathan still looked uncomfortable. Resa sighed.
"Look, I'm a doctor. I'm used to this kind of thing. Okay, well, not fugitives, exactly, but the whole patient-hanging-around-'til-they're-better thing. You're not my first project."
"Wait - fugitive?" Nathan caught her.
"Well, not exactly fugitive, more like a ... well, no, yeah, a fugitive. But they think you're dead. So that's good."
Nathan stared at her. "What did I do?" the man asked through a mouthful of soup.
She paused. Should she tell him he was a Repo Man? Would it be too much? Or did he already know? From what she could tell he was having flashes, bits of his memory back.
"They said you went rogue," she said safely. Actually, she didn't know exactly why he'd been declared rogue. He didn't seem dangerous in the least. "I heard from someone you refused to work on a client." She hesitated, wondering if she was saying too much. She was only repeating what Pavi Largo had happened to tell her. "It was Blind Mag. You remember her, don't you? A real shame, what happened."
Nathan paused. Blind Mag? It did sound familiar... "Her eyes," he blurted, "I remember her eyes. They were mechanical." He couldn't remember much after that though.
They talked for another hour before Resa told him she had to go to work. Nathan took that opportunity to try to think and assess his situation. He was in a house he didn't know, with a woman he didn't know, and he had no idea how he got there. He could remember bits and pieces of his past, gory pieces, so he didn't doubt when Resa told him he was a GeneCo employee. But there was so much missing.
He fell into a frustrated sleep, and his dreams were filled with troubling images of surgeries and blood. In one particular dream, he found himself ripping out a man's organs while his victim shrieked in terror. Afterwards, he used the man's emptied body as a puppet. Nathan had forced his entire arm in through a gaping hole in the corpse's stomach and began to ventriloquize the head as the lifeless eyes rolled in their sockets. He took those out a minute later. Then as he was packaging up the organs, he felt a hand on his shoulder. He slowly turned and came face to face with the corpse. Shadows deepened the empty eye sockets as blood trickled down the fleshy face. It turned its greasy head and grinned nightmarishly at him.
Nathan shot up in bed, his heart thudding violently in his chest. Sweat coated his face, and the sheets were mangled from his thrashing. He had accidentally ripped out the tube in his arm, and it lay limp and leaking on the floor.
"Damn it..." He took several deep breaths, wiping the sweat from his brow and looking around. "You're a middle-aged man," he said aloud, "You're too old to be scared of a silly dream." He tried to talk some sense into himself, but he couldn't push the haunting image from his mind. Nathan's stomach rumbled. He glanced at the clock, calculating that Resa still wouldn't be home for a good few hours. He couldn't risk going back to sleep with the nightmares still fresh in his memory, so he decided, against his better judgment, to do some exploring.