This is a two-shot story that I am doing for Aikio Hatate. I got a PM from them, wanting to see a story from Ian's POV about the first time that he sees Wanda. So here you go! For you! I hope that I did it justice! : )
Disclaimer: I do not own The Host or any of its characters; they belong to the lovely Stephenie Meyer. I do however, own the plot. Some of the dialogue is taken directly from "The Host", pages 119-127, but it was only used for creative purposes.
Ian POV
Kyle and I were on patrol that night when we first saw it. We had just switched off with Brandt and Aaron when Kyle first spotted something moving on the horizon.
"Ian, what is that?" he asked me, looking through the pair of binoculars that we used to scope out the landscape around us.
"What is what?" I asked him and he pointed off in the distance towards something but I couldn't see anything, so I stole the binoculars off of him and took a look through them.
Sure enough, there was something moving out in the distance. It was definitely a human as it was walking on two legs, but it looked sort of drunk and tired by the way that it seemed to be dragging itself along the ground very slowly.
"Do you think it's human?" I asked Kyle, just to see what he thought.
"I don't know. I would guess so, I mean, what Soul would be wandering alone all the way out here in the desert?"
I didn't have an answer for that one. I kept looking through and then I saw it fall towards the ground, seeming to give up its search for whatever it was looking for.
"It fell over," I reported. "Do we go get Jeb or someone?"
"I dunno, do you think we should?" he asked and I rolled my eyes.
"You know, Kyle that boulder over there is almost smarter than you," I told him and he punched my shoulder.
"Just for that little remark Ian, you can go and find Jeb, ya jackass," he said to me, taking the binoculars from my hands and looking through them once again.
"Fine," I said, turning and walking away from our post and went back down into the caves.
I went to look in the most likely place to find Jeb; the kitchens, and sure enough he was sitting at a table with Sharon and Maggie. I didn't want to discuss this in front of everyone, so I had to get him by himself.
"Ian!" he called out, spotting me. "Aren't you supposed to be out with Kyle right now?"
"Um, yes actually I was, I just wanted to talk to you about something first, actually," I told him and the three of them looked up at me expectantly. "Alone," I clarified and he shook his head, crossing his arms.
"Nope. You got something to say, you can say it here."
I sighed and walked all the way over to the table, sliding in beside Jeb; he would make this more difficult than it needed to be. That was just Jeb's style.
"We spotted something," I told him in a low voice and he immediately bent closer, nodding for me to continue. "It's a few miles out and we think that it might be a human or something. It's probably not in too good shape, because it's fallen over and it's the middle of the night; something could get it," I explained and he made to stand up.
"Well, I'll just have to go and investigate, won't I?" Jeb said, pushing me out of the booth and standing up.
"Jeb, how do you know that it's one of us?" Maggie asked him.
"I don't," he answered simply. "But if it is, I need to go and collect it before it dies or summing eats it."
"And what if it's not human?" she countered and he shrugged.
"Take my gun," he replied before jogging off and out of the kitchens.
I shook my head and followed him out and back to Kyle. Jeb tipped his hat to us before taking off and walking away in the direction that we pointed him in with another pair of binoculars. We watched him until we couldn't see him without our binocs and then Kyle and I fought over who got to use them. We watched his retreating back for a very long time before Jeb reached the thing, flashed the light at it and then crouched down beside it, it looked like he was talking to it before he stood up and turned back towards our direction.
"He's coming back," Kyle said, still looking through them. "But he's left something with it. I wonder what he's doing," he mused and I elbowed him for my turn with them.
"Who knows, it's Jeb," I replied, taking them from him and looking through only to see that Jeb was on his way back. I focussed back on the figure, but couldn't make out much more than a blurry, black image on the ground.
Kyle and I sat down and waited for Jeb to return, and I just about fell asleep in the process; I hated night patrol. I heard the stamping of feet and some whistling, and felt the thud as Kyle hit my arm, which effectively woke me out of my drowsy state, so I stood up and stretched as Jeb came and stood beside me.
"Well, what's the verdict?" I asked him and he looked at me.
"Is it a parasite?" Kyle asked before Jeb answered my question.
"Nope, I checked. It's one of us, for sure. But you know the drill. We need to gather a team just in case it decides not to abide by our rules. We can't have it running off to get caught by a bunch of worms and bringing them down here."
"Right Jeb," I answered, starting to head back in the direction of the caves.
"I've got my gun, no need to worry about that," Jeb said and I nodded as I turned around to run back inside. "Oh, and one more thing!" he called out and I stopped.
"Don't bother Jared."
"What?" I asked, not entirely sure that I'd hear correctly.
"You heard me," he said, sitting down to wait. "He's been through enough; he needs his rest after that last raid." He then turned and whispered something to Kyle but I didn't think anything of it.
"Alright," I said, agreeing with him, even though I was a little confused at his last request I took off running, not wanting to keep Jeb waiting while we gathered everything.
As soon as I ran inside the cave entrance, I nearly smacked right into Maggie as she was lurking around the entranceway. I stopped abruptly, but apparently Kyle didn't notice as he continued to plow right into my back.
"What the hell?" he shouted, giving me another shove before continuing on. I heard some choice curse words flooding out from under his breath as he ran by but I ignored it; by that point in my life I was well used to his mannerisms.
"Any particular reason why you're lurking around inside the door Maggie?" I asked, shaking my head at Kyle before I looked over at her.
"Because I don't trust Jeb with this job; he's too damn caring sometimes. I suspect that since the pair of you just came careening in here like bats out of hell that you're going after that thing," she continued and I nodded once. "I'm coming with you."
"Maggie," I sighed but she interrupted me before I could even get going.
"Whatever you say I'm just going to ignore, so keep it to yourself. I'm going out there right now and you all can do whatever Jeb told you to do. We'll be waiting," she said before turning and walking out of the entrance.
Since I basically had no say in the matter I continued on towards the main part of our caves and heard Kyle's voice calling out to some people. I listened for a second until I could confirm which direction it was coming from and I followed the noise until I found him with a bunch of others in the storage cave.
"Need help?" I called out, seeing that they were gathering supplies, but I wasn't sure what they were.
"What are you....?" I asked, seeing Kyle turn with a sharp object in his hand. "Is that a knife?"
"It is," he replied and kept walking. I saw Brandt, Aaron, Wes and another woman that I hadn't really talked to and didn't know her name. When they walked by me I noticed the various clubs, knives and other things that looked dangerously like weapons in their arms.
"What do we need all of these for?"I asked, running to catch up with Kyle. "I thought that Jeb said she was human?"
"Apparently it is, but he told me go get some supplies as necessary precautions," he explained as we all hurried along the passageway. It was never a really good idea to keep Jeb waiting at any time, but this was important so he'd be even less patient than normal.
When we got back outside Jeb instructed everyone to take a weapon so that we could be on our way. I took a club looking thing from Wes, but felt slightly bad about taking it; I knew that this was protocol, but it still scared the crap out of whoever was actually out there.
"Kyle? Which one are you taking?" Jeb asked.
"The big knife," he answered almost immediately, rolling it around carefully in his hands and I rolled my eyes.
"You know that you're not actually going to use that thing, right?" I said and he shrugged with a glint in his eye that I didn't trust one bit.
"You never know when the time might arise, Ian," he simply responded cryptically as they handed out the rest of the weapons to everyone else.
"All right everyone, let's set out. I trust that you've got someone to look out for us while we're gone?" Jeb asked Kyle and he nodded over towards Andy who was standing near the door. I hadn't noticed him come out with us, but he was holding a bat as well.
"All right, but I still don't want any funny business, kay? And remember that this is my place, so whatever goes on out there is by my rules" Jeb finished, eyeing Maggie, but she squared her shoulders and began to walk out and away from the rest of us.
We all followed in line behind her and Wes fell into step with me. I really liked Wes; since I had arrived he'd been really nice to me, and he'd also helped me deal with Kyle on more than one occasion.
"Why do you really think that he's made us all carry these weapons if he was sure that the person was a human?" he asked and I shook my head.
"Maybe because it's Jeb and he's a little crazy?" I offered and he laughed a little before Maggie turned around and frowned at us. He quickly sobered up and we picked up the pace a little to keep up.
The rest of the walk out to where Jeb had left the person seemed to take ages to me; we were all very silent and it reminded me slightly of a funeral procession. There seemed to be an unspoken taboo over the group, but it was rightfully so; we had no idea if it was actually alone or if there were others waiting for us out in the desert. That was a chance that we had to take in order to go and get some people though.
We walked for a good hour and a bit before we arrived at the place where it was laying on the ground, it was just before dawn and there was a glow of red in the sky over the mountains in the horizon. I loved to go outside the caves in the morning and watch the sunrise, but I was usually on patrol or just by myself; not about to figure out if we should take someone back to the caves or not.
Jeb instructed us to stay quiet and follow him so that we didn't startle her or anything; I could see up close that it was definitely a girl and she was sitting up and holding something up to her face. Once we got closer I could see that it was Jeb's metal canteen that she dropped to the ground. The sound of it hitting the dirt clanged for a minute before Kyle spoke up.
"Why'd you give it water, Jeb?" he actually seemed quite angry about that fact and I glared at him, shaking my head. I didn't get why he would be angry until the girl on the ground turned to face us once she'd heart Kyle; then I was a bit angry too.
Silver eyes. This girl had silver eyes just like every other soul that had taken over our planet and forced us remaining rebels to live underground and out of the world that we knew. Jeb lied to us.
It was my natural instinct to glare down at the soul and my grip tightened on the wooden bar in my hand until I could feel my knuckles straining against the skin over them. How dare he lie to us about something this important; something that could potentially put all of our lives in danger in a heartbeat? He wasn't usually this careless and I was really angered, not at the soul that seemed to be cowering on the dirt in front of us, but at Jeb's judgement.
Out of the corner of my eye I noticed that beside me Kyle had stepped forwards towards it and said something, to which Jeb probably replied to, but I kept my eyes on the soul in front of us. As she heard Kyle's voice cut through the hot air, she flinched away from him and honestly looked petrified of him. It was understandable, as Kyle probably had murder written on his face, but it didn't mean that I had to like the way it looked so scared. I vaguely heart Jeb mention that the situation with her was complicated and I had to butt in before Kyle did something even more stupid. Looking away from her I glared at Jeb.
"How?" I asked, feeling the soul's eyes on me, but I refused to look in its direction. I wanted an answer from Jeb and I didn't want to stick around with this soul for too much longer.
He explained that is his niece; or was, as Kyle pointed out and I couldn't help but to agree. There was no way that his niece was inside there still, so there was no point in having any further conversations about it; we needed to get rid of it before others showed up looking for it. It we worked fast enough, we could get it down to Doc and have it dealt with in the next hour.
My musings were interrupted by two very loud clicks from the gun as Jeb cocked it. I looked over in shock to see Jeb pointing it at my brother, who had clearly started in on the soul again; one quick look at the way the soul was sitting there with her eyes closed, almost yearning for death to come confirmed that.
"Jeb, what are you doing?" I asked incredulously, really fearing that Jeb had gone crazy with the appearance of this girl and that he was really going to shoot him over this. He had joked about it a number of times since we'd arrived and threatened him plenty, but he had never actually cocked the damned thing and pointed it at Kyle. I instantly felt very protective of my older brother.
The feeling disappeared almost as quickly as it came as Kyle turned on Jeb and I was nervous for him then. I could see the rage in Kyle's face; hell, I could feel the rage rolling off of him in waves and knew that he was really, really pissed off about this. If there was something that Kyle couldn't handle it was lying. Add in the fact that Jeb had lied to him about the appearance of a soul and I knew that he would blow a gasket, and soon. Still, Jeb didn't flinch at Kyle's outburst and kept the gun pointed directly at him.
Maggie decided to put her two cents in then, not that any of us needed to hear it, but it was Maggie and she always had to speak and make sure that people could hear her.
"The doctor might be able to learn something from it," she pointed out and my eyes immediately flickered over towards the soul that was still lying in the dirt at our feet.
At the mention of taking her to see Doc, she seemed to cringe away from us, which I didn't think much of. Souls were basically designed to be afraid of us, at least that what I'd heard, which was part of the reason that we were in hiding still. The soul then looked right at Maggie and seemed to concentrate on her and I noticed a look of recognition flash across her face. Seconds later, it spoke for the very first time.
"Aunt Maggie? You're here? How? Is Sharon—" I looked at this creature incredulously as she started spewing out words and saw that her face looked kind of conflicted; like she was almost excited to recognize Maggie, but also upset that she was speaking to her at the same time. I frowned. This was not the kind of person that we wanted to have with us around the caves, I decided right then and there.
Maggie stepped forwards and in her own eloquent way put a stop to the soul's ramblings by slapping it across the face, and it seemed almost surprised that Maggie had done that. I think it was looking more towards the crowbar in Maggie's other hand, probably thinking that she would hit it with that, but not even Maggie was that mean. Not yet, anyways.
Maggie proceeded to scream at the creature and then at Jeb as I studied the soul again. It seemed upset that Maggie had hit it and I didn't understand it. I felt something hit my arm and I looked over at Wes who cocked his head to the side, questioning me. I nodded in response to his silent question, telling him that I was all right.
Kyle snorted in disgust beside me and I could see that he was torn between rushing forwards to chop its head off with his knife and staying in spot, for Jeb still had his gun pointed right at him.
"I don't see anyone," Jeb said to Maggie and she looked pissed at him. "Hey! Over here!" He started yelling out and I frantically began looking around to make sure that nothing popped out at us; Jeb really was crazy. I then immediately started to step back from him because the gun was no longer pointed at Kyle; he was waving it around in the air. My first thought was to run away from him, but I held my ground and he stopped eventually.
Maggie growled at response at him and he replied saying something about her being alone, which I didn't completely believe; though there was some truth behind his crazy words. If someone was following it, they would have come out here by now; Jeb had left it for a while when we gathered everyone and walked out to it.
"Should we kill it?" Kyle whisper floated over to me and I shook my head gently. "Why not?"
"Because it hasn't done anything to us," I answered, looking down at it and saw it looked as though it was far away and thinking about something.
"And if it does?" he asked again and I shrugged.
"Then we kill it," Brandt murmured over my other shoulder and I sighed. Brandt would want to be in on that; he was very violent, though not exactly to the extent of Kyle's psychotic ways. Kyle wasn't always like that though, I sighed again as I watched Jeb step towards it. It was just a coping mechanism that he'd adopted since this whole mess had started for us.
Kyle instinctively stepped forwards with Jeb to make sure that nothing happened to him, and my hand curled tighter around my club as Jeb argued with Maggie some more and then yanked it off of the ground. It wobbled for a second and I could hear a hiss go through the crowd of us as none of us like the fact that Jeb was showing it any sort of preference; it was a soul, who knew what it had up its sleeve.
I stepped up to Jeb, Kyle and the soul as he started talking about getting out of the heat; it was starting to heat up and I knew that meant he wanted to take it home with us.
"You can't just show it where we live, Jeb," I told him not to seem like I was mean or anything, I was just thinking realistically.
Maggie pointed out that it would probably be dead before it got a chance to tell anyone about us and the thought made my stomach turn. Jeb would unknowingly lead it to Doc, who would then proceed to kill it; not that me meant to by any means, that's just what happened to all of the souls that we brought back with us. In our efforts to save these humans trapped inside, we had killed dozens of people. Nothing about this soul seemed special; I just hated the thought of killing any of them, period. I definitely wasn't one of the violent ones of the bunch.
Jeb proceeded to blindfold it and lead all of us back to the caves. Kyle grumbled something about losing the opportunity to kill it for good before he reluctantly followed behind us.
"Kyle, you know that it wouldn't have been right to kill it out there," I said softly to him, trying to keep my voice down as we walked. "We needed to take it back to Doc to let him try and figure this out."
Kyle didn't respond to me; he only shook his head and began to walk faster. Brandt, Aaron and Wes followed him and they basically took off, leaving us in their dust. I didn't care; Kyle had been stupid lately, and with this latest development he would surely be unbearable about the soul, and I figured that it would mostly be because it wasn't Jodi who had stumbled upon us. In a way I was glad that I never had someone that I really cared about in my former life; that way I wasn't yearning for them like he was and I wasn't as angry as he was either.
Maggie broke the silence as the four of us kept walking through the desert.
"You aren't planning to tell him, are you?" she asked cryptically and frowned, not getting who she was referring to.
"He's got a right to know," Jeb replied and I knew then; he has asked me before not to tell Jared to come with us, so that meant that he had to know this soul in some way.
"It's an unkind thing you are doing, Jebediah," she said and I knew she was really mad at him when she used his real name like that; nobody called him that, ever.
"Life is unkind, Magnolia."
And it was true. Our lives had been cruelly torn apart right in front of our eyes, and those of us who called the caves our home were just the few lucky ones who could fight it. It was unkind that we had to be forced to live underground, far away from everything that we'd ever know, but we were surviving; we were survivors.
As we continued walking, I studied the soul that Jeb was guiding across the sand towards our home. Was she really connected to Jared in some way? I had known that he'd lost someone very close to him; he had told me that it was Jamie's sister, but he hadn't explained how he met up with them or what she meant to them. Hell, I didn't even know the girl's name; it was like a taboo between the two of them. It was clear that she meant a lot to him in the way that Jared looked out for Jamie and everything, but I wondered exactly who this soul was, or was pretending to be, at least.
She hadn't given us a name, but I knew that she was Jeb's niece from what he'd told us, but I still didn't get the connection between it and Jared. I was growing frustrated with the whole situation; the rising sun beating down on us didn't help me much either. The soul basically collapsed and Jeb helped it down, giving it some water and Maggie sighed very theatrically.
"Why are you doing this, Jeb?" I asked him, wanting answers now for his unexplainable behaviour. I was getting testy and I didn't like that one bit. "For Doc?" I continued when he didn't answer. "You could have just told Kyle that. You didn't have to pull a gun on him."
"Kyle needs a gun pulled on him more often," Jeb said and I rolled my eyes. It might have been true, but it didn't mean that I had to like that this man would have killed my brother back there in a heartbeat if he had tried anything.
"Please tell me this wasn't about sympathy," I tried another angle, looking directly at him. "After all you've seen..."
"After all I've seen, if I hadn't learned compassion, I wouldn't be worth much. But no, it was not about sympathy. If I had enough sympathy for this poor creature, I would have let her die."
I blanched at his explanation. He probably should have let her die; it would have saved a lot of trouble between all of us and nobody would have been upset.
"What then?" I asked, growing impatient with his answers that only seemed to skirt around my questions. I watched as he helped the soul to its feet and grew angrier as the moments rolled on and my question went unanswered.
"Curiosity," he finally said and I had to bite my tongue to keep from retorting to that comment. There was many things that I wanted to say to him, but I would do it later; I didn't want to get into a fight with Maggie, as I wasn't sure whose side she would take in my argument.
I shook my head and pushed on ahead of him and the soul, leading the way back towards the caves. By that point, I wanted to get as far away from Jeb as possible and give myself a chance to cool down, both literally and figuratively.
A/N: So, what did you think?
Review : )