Timeline note: So, Chloe's been at Division for two months. Everything from Chloe taking the helmet to her talking to Nikita, yada yada all happens within a two week period before she gets there. I disclaim!
XXXXXX
Chloe tossed and turned restlessly, trapped in her dream. Suddenly she sat up straight in her bed, awake instantly, breathless and sweating profusely.
Chloe tried to calm herself down. The nightmares were getting worse as time went on, and she was desperately waiting for the day she could escape Division. The cold atmosphere, the lack of color, the loneliness . . . it was getting to her.
She tried to block the images from her mind—flashes of pain, of terrified running, of the other images she'd seen with Dr. Fate's helmet—they were getting to her. She couldn't sleep, which was putting her even more on edge, which others were beginning to notice.
This would probably all be easier if she could lean on Alex, but she couldn't. Not in the least because Alex obviously didn't trust her—which wasn't all an act so that they didn't get too heavily linked together.
It was too damn bad though, because Alex was stuck with her. Chloe smiled at that, shaking her head free of the last of her nightmares, trying to focus on the positives in her life.
Chloe felt better when she reminded herself of all that she was fighting for.
XXXX
Two months ago
The dark-haired woman sighed, putting away the mask carefully. She'd gotten Alex into Division, now it was up to Alex. She could only hope that she'd trained the young woman well enough.
Nikita's thoughts her were interrupted by the entrance of someone, she could feel the movement behind her, which surprised her because no one should have been able to get this far without triggering one of the alarms Nikita had set up. Nikita grabbed her gun, turning around quickly to face the petite blond who stood at the door across the large, open room.
The girl smiled, lifting up her hands, "No gun. Promise. Not that you have any reason to believe me, of course," she acknowledged. The blond woman began to walk closer, taking a bit of a tour of the room. "You're good at covering your tracks. Nikita, right?"
Nikita quirked her head to the side, "And here I am, without a name to put to your face. Who are you?"
"You can call me Chloe. Sullivan, actually, if you're in the mood for a background check." Chloe laughed at that, as if she'd made some sort of inside joke that Nikita just wasn't privy too. Which, indeed, she had. There wasn't much to be found on her.
"Chloe, I'll tell you right now that it's surprising that I haven't shot you already. Give me a good reason why I shouldn't give up on this whole self-control thing."
Chloe smiled slightly, "I can help you."
"With what?" Nikita asked suspiciously. Chloe could have easily been a Division agent sent to trick her, then kill her at the first opportunity. Or worse, capture her, and deliver her for a torture session. Nikita fought off a shudder. Amanda could be excruciatingly detail-oriented.
"This . . . Division, is it?" Chloe hesitated, and then continued at Nikita's nod. "One aspect of it is involved with the hunting down and kidnapping of superheroes, torturing them into submission."
"Superheroes?" Nikita asked in disbelief. "You mean like those kids in costumes, who think they're saving the world?"
Chloe's smile disappeared. "They're not pretending, Nikita. They really do make a difference. Anyway, the world is changing, and there's a bill to force all superheroes into public view that's going to pass, sadly. With that, this secret government group will be able to do whatever they want. I can't stop that, but I can make sure to take them down before they do too much harm."
Nikita was beginning to believe Chloe—if only because it sounded so far-fetched, it was almost plausible.
"That still doesn't answer my question," Nikita lowered her gun, but still kept it at the ready. She couldn't be too careful. "Why are you here?"
"Because those people are the same ones you're trying to take down. My point is, of course, I'm in."
Nikita had dozens of questions, but she settled for the simplest. "How do you know all of this?"
Chloe smiled. "A little helmet told me."
Nikita looked at Chloe as if she were crazy. She was beginning to wonder if the problem with the woman in front of her weren't a bit more . . . psychological.
Chloe laughed nervously, realizing she'd confused Nikita, "Sorry, got a little ahead of myself. I want to help you, and in return you'll be helping me."
"Why should I trust you?" Nikita demanded.
Chloe had been waiting for this question, "Because I can help. And, honestly, if I weren't trustworthy, your friend Alex would be dead already. I'm not working for Division. I'm just a friendly little neighborhood superhero-helper." Chloe smiled at her description of what she did. It was accurate.
"Is that all?" Nikita asked wryly.
Chloe sighed, "No, but I don't have a lot of time. I need to get into Division to implement my plan—which I'll tell you about as soon as you put the gun down."
Nikita thought carefully. On one hand, she wanted to trust this woman—who seemed like she could be telling the truth. On the other hand . . . she could end up dead, or worse, if this Chloe woman ended up being less than savory.
Nikita decided at that moment, knowing what her decision was in an instant. She set her gun down in its case on the table where it had been before she'd grabbed it at Chloe's intrusion.
She had nothing to lose.
XXXX
When Alex found out about Chloe's inclusion in their takedown of Division, her initial reaction had been dismay. And she'd been more than a little annoyed.
Why would Nikita trust this random woman with such an important mission? Nikita had never been able to give her a good answer to that, except to say that upon getting to know her, she'd seen something familiar in her. They were kindred spirits, it seemed. Whatever that was supposed to mean, Alex had barely been able to keep herself from snorting with disdain.
Upon reading that message from Nikita, Alex had really tried not to laugh. That was ridiculous. Alex had compromised though, choosing not to outright reject Chloe, and to instead just focus on her own problems and her own tasks. Over the past two months, she'd done her best to essentially ignore Chloe.
Honestly, just keeping on-task with all of the things that Division threw at her, while still funneling information back to Nikita was exhausting. Being a double-agent was not nearly as easy as Sydney Bristow from that show Alias had made it seem.
Beyond all of the daily stresses, there was also Thom. And she couldn't stop thinking about him for some reason. This situation they were in way terrible. Because even if she weren't secretly trying to take down the very entity that his loyalty belonged to completely, they wouldn't have been able to be together.
It was painful. It hurt her to see him, it hurt her to remember the kiss she'd shared with him, it—she shook herself free of that train of thought.
She didn't have time for this. She looked back down at her computer screen.
She asked, yet again, it Nikita trusted Chloe. Her response was the same as it always was.
'Yes. And you need to.'
Alex sighed, telling Nikita she needed to sign off.
What she needed to go do was pummel something. That almost always made her feel better.
XXXX
Two months ago
Chloe stared at the helmet for a brief moment, hesitating only long enough to remind herself why it was so important.
She pulled it out, feeling it rush towards her, enveloping her in a golden, warm sort of light, and she lost all sense of self.
Images rushed through her mind—of people places she didn't know. At least, she hadn't, but now she did.
Somber tones filled her mind—a place . . . Division, it was called.
Black ops. Government agency, soon to be given the job of enforcing . . . an anti-hero bill. The world was going to change rapidly. Chloe could feel the darkness circling through everything, looking for weakness.
Chloe would have gasped if she'd had the frame of mind. She saw Oliver reveal to the world that he was the Green Arrow, she saw him be tortured, along with other heroes.
She saw people—Nikita, Michael, Alex, Birkhoff, strangers. And now, not. Suddenly, she knew them.
Random facts, flashes of what seemed to be past, present and future flashed at an intense speed, though she somehow seemed to grasp onto threads as they began to overwhelm her mind.
Everything started to fit into a pattern.
And she knew what she had to do—an intense feeling of urgency filled her.
Chloe passed out.
XXXX
Chloe quickly set out to win over Nikita, not wasting time. First she updated Nikita's security system, making it even more unlikely that anyone would be capable of tracing her through her tech, or that they'd be able to sneak up on her like Chloe had. Nikita, knowing quite a bit about such things herself, had been impressed. It had helped Chloe break through Nikita's outer shell, somewhat.
After Nikita took her out on a mission and Chloe had actually ended up saving Nikita's life, Nikita had taken to her. It didn't, of course, hurt that she'd done her own research about her current houseguest, and everything had checked out.
But more than that, Chloe'd been brutally honest with Nikita. She shared more of her own past than she'd intended to, somehow knowing that it was the right thing to do.
She spoke of Jimmy—a loss with which Nikita had sympathized. Nikita had her own past—which she'd been surprisingly open about, after hearing Chloe's backstory.
Nikita felt her own guilt about the death of her fiancé Daniel—who had died because, simply, he'd had the horrid luck of loving her, and having her love him. Chloe had realized that Nikita was still horribly in pain over that, and had reached out physically, hesitating before dropping her hand down.
Nikita had grabbed onto it though, squeezing. "If you turn out to be lying about all of this, I will kill you in the most painful way possible." It had been said breezily, with a seriousness that Chloe understood as a warning.
Chloe didn't know why Nikita seemed to just accept her into the fold. But she was thankful for it—trusting in the weird feelings she got, which seemed to tell her exactly what to do and what to say.
The real moment of bonding, however, happened when Chloe told Nikita about Oliver.
When she'd explained how hard it had been to open up to him, but that he'd somehow gotten inside of her, making her fall in love with him . . . it had made Nikita smile—albeit sadly.
Chloe knew she'd won Nikita over at that moment, that now it was only a matter of time before they'd get the ball rolling.
Chloe told Nikita about Dr. Fate's helmet, and was shocked by the simple way with which Nikita seemed to accept it as fact.
Nikita, upon Chloe musing about that, had smiled. "I've seen some strange things in my line of work, Chloe."
Chloe had smiled back, and had started to tell her about what she'd seen. She hesitated when she started to discuss a man from her visions. "I know things, but I'm not even sure about most of what I know. I saw you with someone. A man, Michael?"
Nikita's face showed her pain plainly, as if she didn't even know how to hide it.
Chloe, seeing this, realized something important. "You love him."
Nikita had looked up sharply from her hands at that, "I—"
Chloe had smiled wryly, "You can lie if you want, but it's all over your face. And when I saw you two in my visions . . . I felt something."
"It's complicated."
"I know," and she did. Michael and Nikita were enemies—and with their dark and twisty past, something Nikita had shared in part with Chloe, chances were that one of them would end up killing the other. "I'm so sorry."
Nikita had smiled sadly at that, "I am too. But enough of this. We need to discuss the extraction plan."
Chloe wasn't in the least bit caught off-guard by the sudden shift in topics. "You'll call in Oliver, telling him to bring the league, when I give you the signal. We—we can do this. We have to." She assured herself as much as she assured Nikita with that statement. The worry and the stress were beginning to weigh on her.
"It makes it so much more important," Nikita mused, "Realizing that it's not just about taking down a rogue agency, or about getting revenge."
Chloe sighed. "True." Chloe hesitated before continuing, "Division isn't as rogue as you think, Nikita. For the most part, there's just enough gray and dark area that the official governmental authorities pretend they don't know what's going on. Partially, of course, because they're being blackmailed, and partially because they can still use it to do their dirty work."
"That doesn't surprise me," Nikita replied.
"We need—we need to succeed."
"We will. Failure isn't an option," Nikita said firmly.
XXXX
Present
Chloe hated flirting with Birkhoff—it made her feel dirty. It wasn't that he was a creepy guy, well, particularly anyway. It just felt wrong.
But it was a necessary evil, she reminded herself. She would have rather read a hundred flirty emails between Oliver and Dinah(something that would have annoyed her immensely), or have been strung up outside like Christmas lights, just swaying in the wind . . . but apparently that wasn't what fate had in store for her.
"So, you have access to a lot of content, right?" Chloe asked casually.
"Yup," Birkhoff was like a peacock, proudly showing off his feathers. He leaned back in his chair, stretching out comfortably. "Everything."
"Everything?" Chloe asked skeptically.
"Well, not everything everything. But you know what I mean."
Chloe fought to not roll her eyes and laugh. "What about—everything that happens inside of Division. I mean, I'm sure a lot of secrets are contained within these walls . . . they must be pretty guarded."
"Oh, they're all linked in. I'm just not supposed to look at any of it."
"Really?"
"Really," Birkhoff replied, completely uninterested in the idea.
And that, Chloe realized, was why she and Alex hadn't gotten caught.
Chloe had gotten what she'd wanted though—the knowledge that somewhere in Division she could find everything she needed, because with her knowledge of Birkhoff's pet technology, she could bypass any security system.
Percy's office.
