Never Had A Chance
He was in pain.
Why was he in pain?
His head was pounding. Every part of his body ached but he couldn't understand why.
He knew he wasn't at his apartment. It didn't sound right. Or smell right.
He could smell damp and there was this incessant dripping that was getting on his nerves.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
It was also cold as if there was a draft coming from somewhere.
He wasn't in a hospital; again it didn't sound or smell right. There was no 'hospital' smell.
He felt someone was in the room with him. He could hear them walking, they were trying to be soft footed but he could hear them. Every so often they would pause and then continue pacing.
He was sitting in a chair, a metal chair, his shoulders were hurting.
His wrists were tied to the back of the chair, his ankles to the front. He tried to struggle to see if there were any weak points but they used zip ties.
He knew he had to open his eyes, if he could, to see who had captured him.
"Well, well, well, looks who's finally awake, you can stop pretending to be unconscious!"
He couldn't believe it. It couldn't be, could it? Why? What was he missing? This had to be a nightmare, right? That's the only thing that made sense. His mind must be playing a trick on him. His blood ran cold at hearing that voice, a voice he thought he would never hear again.
He opened his eyes, or tried to, the right one was able to open halfway while the other was swollen shut. It was a good thing he couldn't remember the beating he obviously had. Even though he could barely make out the person standing in front of him he knew exactly who he was looking at.
His mind wasn't playing tricks on him, he did hear correctly. Right in front of him was Shepard. Technically his mother-in-law he supposed in some sick way.
"Why are you here? I thought you'd be long gone by now, why did you come back?" he asked, his voice was hoarse but she understood, that smirk appeared on her face.
He always hated that smirk.
"Well, is that anyway to speak to your mother in law? There's only one way to get what I want and that's why you're here!"
He was so confused, what did she want with him?
"Can you explain that to me once more?" Kurt asked
"It's not so hard to understand, I want Remi!"
"What does that have to do with me?" he asked in a confused tone "Anyway, she was with you, so why are you looking for her?"
"Seriously? I thought you were supposed to be smart. I lost Remi on purpose, I wanted to see what was left of my team myself and when I saw with my own eyes that my legacy was dismantled I thought it would be good to get rid of the reason for this."
"Remi? Remi is the reason why you're free. She broke you out of a blacksite, she's been loyal to you and now you want to kill her, why?"
His heart was pounding, this woman standing in front of him was going to kill his wife, her daughter and for what?
"All of this is Remi's fault! Everything! If it wasn't for her then phase two would have been a success but she had to fall for you. She turned Roman against me. If it wasn't for her, I would never have been in that blacksite in the first place!"
"She's your daughter!"
"Oh please, I should have left her in that orphanage; it was the best place for her…"
"How can you say that?"
"Very easily! She's always been so ungrateful. I took her and her brother out of that hellhole and what thanks did I get?"
"Why did you take them? You could have left them to be brought back here and adopted…"
"Oh please, people want babies not two half grown children!"
"But…"
"But nothing, Crawford was a visionary. His idea was brilliant, training orphans to be killer soldiers. They would have no loyalty to a country, it was such a brilliant idea, and people didn't need orphans around. No one would notice them gone; we'd just say they were adopted…"
He felt bile come up his throat at what he was hearing.
"Why do you hate Remi so much?"
"Oh please, you and your precious Remi, yes, I know that you're in love with her just like your precious Jane. I wonder who you love the most? Jane? Or Remi?"
He deliberately kept his mouth shut, how she discovered that he in deed loved no loves Remi, he didn't know. It was a much as a shock to him to discover and admit he had feelings, deep feelings for Remi. Jane and Remi were not two separate people. Jane was the one that didn't have the horrible memories from her past, which was a godsend but Remi had all those painful memories from when she was a child happy with her parents to when they died and her time in that sorry excuse for an orphanage to her time with Shepard and everything that entailed. Remi was a good person at heart, he saw it several times, and she would claim she was pretending to be Jane but that didn't fool him. She really loved spending time with Bethany and Avery. Her pure joy when she was able to bake chocolate chips cookies from scratch. And the way she empathised with those who needed it. There was no doubt in his mind that Remi was a good person and that was only allowed to come out when she was surrounded by people who didn't try and manipulate her. She saw with her own eyes that the team, he, Reade, Patterson and even Rich had their hearts in the right places, they weren't perfect but they did the best they could. He was angry when he realised she was pretending to be Jane but all the odd behaviour made sense after that. When he managed to calm down he saw her for the compassionate person she was. He kept his feelings to himself since the charade was up she didn't feel the need to pretend anymore and she didn't hide her hatred of him. He thought it was more of Shepard's view than that of her own. Shepard only wanted him to be a key cog for phase two not to get involved with her daughter no that was for a man like Oscar…
"Hello! Earth to Kurt, where did you just go?"
"Does it really matter?"
"True!"
"So explain to me why you can't stand your own daughter? She's risked everything for you!"
"Oh please, she only loves herself. She's so selfish. It was always about her and Roman. I saved them and that meant nothing. Those two loved each other and they wouldn't let anyone in, not even me!"
"Are you kidding me? That's why you hate her? They went through hell and they got through it together! She probably thought that it was too good to be true to believe that you would take her and Roman in from the goodness of your heart and she was right!"
"Well, I made sure she was never happy!"
"What do you mean?" Kurt asked he thought that her turn of phrase was foreboding and he didn't think that he was going to like what he was going to hear.
"Well, when it was apparent that she wasn't going to love me, I made sure that she worked hard for everything. I made her work so hard that she was too tired to do anything else. All I had to do was make sure she knew that Roman wasn't as strong as her and he may even get hurt if he tried some of the …training that she was doing. It made her work so much harder so I took it easy on Roman."
"Why would you do that?"
"Divide and conquer! So Roman would love me more than his precious sister of course but it didn't work. He would do anything for her just like she would do for him. Then she thought she could be happy, she got pregnant and thought she'd be a brilliant mom, it was so funny to watch. It was even better to see her wake up to the fact that she wasn't going to be happy…"
He didn't like the tone she was using or where this was going.
"What did you do?" he whispered
"Well, the silly girl thought she was in love. She and the idiot boy who got her pregnant were going to set up home together and Roman was going to live with them, so obviously I had to stop that…"
"By…?" he dreaded to hear what she was going to say but he had to know he had to know how much the woman he loved suffered in her short life.
"Well, she just happened to walk in on me and her boyfriend together, all boys want the same thing, you're all dogs, offer some no strings sex and they'll do whatever you want. He was so eager it was pathetic."
She ran a finger down his cheek and he tried to move away, she got the message.
"You deliberately set out to ruin her relationship?" he asked incredulously
"Of course, Remi didn't deserve to be happy, what right does she have to be happy and start a family after everything that I've done for her and her brother?"
Oh my, he thought his childhood was the worst but he was wrong, they both had horrible childhoods.
"Then once she gave birth I gave the baby away…"
"Why? She would have made a great mother, she is a great mother!"
"She didn't deserve to be a mom. She was there to do my biding. She would have focussed only on the brat. If I wanted her to produce babies I would have left her where I found her! So I gave the baby away, good riddance!"
"She loved that baby."
"I don't care; she should have loved me, especially after everything that I did!"
"You're sick, really sick…and jealous!"
"Then she had the audacity to leave and join the marines? I don't think so. She made a new family. She stayed in contact with Roman of course and he wanted to share everything about his brave heroic sister. I listened of course. Not once did she write to me, not once, always to her precious Roman but never to me!"
"You took her baby away as well as slept with its father just to mess with her, why would she keep in contact?"
"She volunteered for all the dangerous missions for the hazard pay and because she thought she was doing the right thing, hah! More fool her!
"You didn't have anything to do with the strike on her team did you?"
"No, I didn't but only because I didn't think of it. I was happy when it happened. Where was her new family then? Oh yeah, dead! They were of no use to her anymore. She came back to me. She was mad, spitting mad. She found out that it was an American strike and it wasn't friendly fire but a deliberate act to wipe out her team. I used her anger to my own advantage and it was easy to do. Oscar and I laughed about it!"
He felt sick. He must have lost what little colour he had, he wanted to throw up.
"What? You thought Oscar loved her? Oh please! I told him everything that he needed to know to bed her. She was so lost when she came back that she was desperate for a connection to someone and low and behold Oscar just happened to be there. We laughed about it when she was on one of her many reconnaissance missions of you. We would spend quite a bit of time in bed laughing at how gullible she was. He said she was a terrible lay; he had to think of me every time he was with her just to be able to get it up. Do you agree that she was terrible in bed?"
Shepard stepped back as Kurt struggled against his ties to try and do some damage to her for insulting Remi.
"I'm going to kill you! Don't you dare talk about Remi like that! How could you?"
"How could I what? Use Remi? Very easily in fact. Oscar was doing his bit for the mission by sleeping with her. We all sacrificed a lot for this but then she had to go and fall for you, that was the beginning of the end."
"She's worth a hundred of you!"
"Awwww, isn't that sweet, your love for her coming out. You know, I thought for a split second that I should sleep with you…"
She noticed his look of disgust.
"…it would have been the best time of your life but I know from research that you prefer the boring type. Your days of one night stands were long gone unless they were with former girlfriends. But I knew as soon as Remi/ Jane whatever you want to call her, whenever she entered your orbit, you wouldn't sleep with a complete stranger if she was on your mind. The last boy scout! I would have loved to have seen her face when she found out, she would forgive you anything, like having a child with a former girlfriend, but never that, sleeping with her mom, no, never. It's a pity. I think it would have destroyed her and that would have been worth it. I even thought about drugging you and having your team find us in bed together but no one who knows you would believe that, I considered photo shopping us together but your Patterson would have seen through that in milliseconds. I'll just have to make do with killing you in front of her!"
"What makes you think that she'll even come here?"
"Because she loves you just as much as you love her! It's so pathetic!"
"What makes you say that?"
"You're still alive aren't you? That tells me all I need to know!"
"SHEPARD YOU NEED TO LET HIM GO! I'm here; this is between you and me!" Remi said
"AWWWW, my darling daughter has arrived. Are you not going to show yourself?"
Remi walked forward with her gun raised at Shepard.
Kurt tried to turn when he heard the approaching footsteps but he was limited in his movements. Eventually Remi came into his peripheral vision. He was in the middle and Shepard on one side while Remi was on the other. Even though his eyesight wasn't great he could tell that Remi was upset and if he didn't know any better, she heard the majority of the conversation between himself and her so called mother, the woman she sacrificed a lot for. She was trying to be stoic but he could read her, he could see her pain.
"Well, well, well, look what we have here. Dear Remi, you have one last chance to prove yourself to me, kill Kurt right here right now and we can reform our group."
"Why would I trust you?"
"Now is that anyway to talk to your mother?"
"You're no mother! You've manipulated me and Roman from the moment you met us. You made us into terrorists!"
"Oh please! One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter! We need to reset the country; you can be by my side as I do it!"
"Never! You are through with manipulating me…"
Kurt and Remi both watched as Shepard began to laugh, an evil laugh. Remi was avoiding looking at him she wouldn't meet his eyes.
"Oh my you still don't get it do you? I'm going to kill both of you and you're going to watch the other die, a bullet wound to the stomach would not only be painful it will take you a long time to die and you'll suffer every moment! But don't worry; I'll make sure I won't make the same mistakes with my next adoptive daughter, Bethany…"
Shepard didn't say another word after that as she had a bullet to the brain. Remi didn't hesitate. There was no way Shepard was going to kidnap and brainwash Bethany. There was silence in the room. Neither Remi nor Kurt, not that he could, moved, they just stared at the body on the floor. Shepard's eyes were still open with a look of shock in them.
"Remi, thank you! If she took Bethany…"
"I would never let her hurt a hair on Bethany's head, never!"
"Thank you! Can you untie me please?"
"No!"
"No? Why?" Kurt was confused
"You'll want me to stay but I can't, not after everything I've done. Even if you could forgive me, I put Bethany in danger I will never forgive myself for that!"
"Remi…"
"Kurt, I'm sorry."
He watched as she took his cell from the table, unlocked it and typed something. She then brought the cell to him and placed it in his pocket.
"Patterson and or the team should be on their way to help you. I need to go. Take care Weller. Be happy."
She cupped his cheek and after a second's hesitation placed a soft kiss to his lips and then another one to his forehead.
He watched as she walked out.
"REMI! REMI!