Mmm...nope, still don't own. Darn. Call this the end of Episode 11, Episode 12 to commence as soon as I figure out what happens next. Darn it, I knew it wasn't going to end this easily! Edit: Thanks, wtchcool, for pointing out my spelling error. (I really, really ought to have someone besides me doing the beta'ing...)
As the smokey dark enveloped Dana, she felt rather than saw Vince - her Vince, alive! - barrel past a startled Fleming to her and her son. She grabbed hold of him like he'd instructed her, holding tight to Trip. She'd done a disappearing act with the Cape once before, but that experience was nothing like this one; a whirlwind of jerking motion, the certain knowledge that at some point she had been airborne, and her arms aching like nothing else as she clung to her two men. The Cape - Vince! - must have gotten out of the zip ties, because she felt his arm around her, holding her tight as they vanished out of the gym.
Max Malini's arm supported her elbow as their forward motion suddenly ceased. "It's nice to meet you again, Mrs. Faraday," he greeted her in a low voice. "And you too, young man." He smiled at Trip. "I implore you both to keep your voices down; we're not quite in the clear."
Nowhere remotely like it, it seemed. Dana could hear shocked exclamations from the Ark enforcers, and Fleming bellowing his rage and promising the moon to anyone who could recapture them. The voices were muffled and somehow underneath her.
"Where are we?" she whispered as loud as she dared, looking around at a dim, almost alien world of pipes and wires and boxy silver things that her eye eventually distinguished as ducts.
"In the ceiling." Vince's breath tickled her ear as he hugged her from behind, supporting her. His scent surrounded her, and she let herself feel safe in his arms. He anticipated her question and said, "Max got into your car back at Trolley Park - without telling me," this seemed to be aimed at the black man, who shrugged unrepentantly, "and evidently figured he would be on hand if he was needed."
"Which I was," Max interjected. "I'm glad you saw the signs."
Vince snorted quietly. "'Kozmo' is a little hard to miss, don't you think?" and Dana vaguely recollected having seen the word amongst the graffiti on the door. "When you set off the smoke bomb, Dana, all we had to do was grab the grappling hook and hold on."
Dana was about to ask, what grappling hook, but spotted it before she had to. More of a grappling anchor, it was hooked around one of the pipes overhead, with a long steel cable attached to it. The cable ran through a motor, which was evidently the reason they'd been pulled up so fast. A dark man and a leggy blonde crouched below it on the planks rigged between joists, what passed for their floor, holding a ceiling tile in place. The blonde waved her fingers and blew Dana a kiss. Unless the kiss was for Vince, in which case Dana was going to have to mar the other woman's beauty a bit. She leaned back into her husband a little bit more and felt him squeeze her a little bit harder. She was going to be furious with him... but not just yet, she decided. Trip had wandered off and was laying flat beside a small man, watching the scene below through a pinhole. The mechanized grappling hook wasn't the only machine up here in the attic, however. Dana's eyes flicked over half a dozen lumps that, when she squinted, resolved themselves into cameras, all aimed down through the floor. She would bet her yearly salary that they were all aimed straight at the dais. Vince's friends had been busy, it seemed.
The lawyer smiled at the big black man. "Thank you, Max," she murmured, and the magician nodded back at her, acknowledging her remark on all of its intended levels.
The little man beside Trip stood up. "That's it, let's go," he said. "Maximum noise for maximum cover." The three strangers, Max, and Vince worked together almost seamlessly and had all evidence of their sojourn in the ceiling noiselessly erased within minutes, escorting Dana and Trip along with an ease that belied both the danger and the difficulty of moving over a "floor" that, if stepped on wrong, would send them plunging into the middle of the Ark swarm thirty feet below. The others had to be circus folk, Dana had to swear. The woman especially; she made graceful leaps from beam to beam, balancing on one leg as often as not, and seemingly oblivious of the danger. It made Dana frankly jealous.
Until the coast was clear, they lingered in a maintenance area, a small room made smaller by the fact that there were seven people in it who weren't allowed to talk. Once again, Dana found her hand in the Cape's, and she held onto Vince as if he might be torn from her again if she ever let go.
Trip, on the other hand, wasn't looking at either of his parents. The small man whom Vince had briefly introduced as Rollo and the other man, called Ruvi, held the boy in thrall, demonstrating tricks and slight-of-hand before his astonished eyes. Raia, the woman, was a distracting presence in the corner of the room, doing stretches and various limbering moves that had Dana squirming. Were these the people that Vince had lived with all those months? It seemed so. She stole a sideways glance at her husband to see if he was watching the flexible circus woman, only to find that he was staring at her, hunger in his eyes. Dana smiled to herself.
What? Vince's expression asked, and Dana replied with a smile and a squeeze that said, I'm glad you're back. Vince squeezed back a promise, or what felt like a promise. Dana decided to take it as such and snuggled against his side. Her husband put his arm around her and she settled against him in the place that always felt like it had been created just for her.
Now that she had a few minutes to just think, for the first time since Fleming had first summoned her to his office, Dana found that she didn't know what to think. The small woman at the back of her brain kept fist pumping the air, screaming Vince is alive, he's alive! And another small woman kept trying to strangle the annoying bitch, screaming That means he deliberately let you think he was dead, you idiot! Dana did her best to ignore them both, but their argument wasn't being drowned out as easily as she hoped.
My God. I almost got Vince killed. Dana mentally glared at the third little woman in her subconscious, but that one wasn't going to be ignored.
What did that say about her character, that she would willingly trade the life of one person for another? It was for Trip. What kind of mother would I be if I didn't? What kind of person does that make me?
A human one.
Vince had said as much, back at the parking lot. Dana deconstructed the timeline in her mind: the Cape hadn't known Max was on the grounds until after they'd seen the graffiti. That meant that his capture - for keeps, not just the five minute binding he'd endured - was all but certain. And he'd made the decision to rescue Trip anyway.
He'd do anything for his son. If Dana hadn't already loved him, she would love him all the more for that. She'd chosen the right father for her baby.
If he'd do anything for Trip and me, why didn't he come back? The second little woman fought her way to the forefront and demanded Dana's attention. Dana remembered vividly the first weeks after the explosion. Every night, several times a night, Trip would sit straight up, screaming. After the first two nights, Dana had moved into Trip's room, so that she could soothe him back to sleep afterwards, only to be awakened by his screams a couple of hours later. She remembered all the times she'd curled up around Vince's photograph, clutching his clothing to her face so that she could breathe in the last, fading scent of him, and sobbing silently so that Trip wouldn't hear, and knowing that he probably did. He could have at least told us he was alive. He didn't have to pretend! He didn't have to lie to us!
Only... Only. If Dana had known Vince was alive, was without-a-doubt innocent, would she have been able to play the grieving widow of a media-convicted terrorist? Would she have been able to take the slights, the whispered mutters and the outright slurs on his name? She and Trip had moved out of their house, not only because she'd found the payments impossible on one income alone, but to get away from the cold glares of their neighbors. Could she have borne any of it if she'd known he was alive?
Part of her screamed that, of course she could have, if she'd only known...! But practical Dana knew better. No, she wouldn't have. And, knowing, she would have betrayed herself and Vince somehow. Fleming had only grabbed Trip because the Cape had rescued her. If he'd had any notion of who she actually was to the hated vigilante, she and Trip would have been snatched much sooner. Dana smacked the voice in her head down. Vince had been smart to keep himself from them. Well, as much as he could, anyway. The Cape had been making regular visits to Trip, she remembered. Gods. Their separation had to have been just as hard on him as it was on her; harder, maybe. She'd had Trip, after all. Who had Vince had?
A tear slid down her cheek. Most men in Vince's situation would probably have left town, tried to set up a life somewhere else. Her husband? He'd wanted so badly to stay in their lives, he'd brought a comic book character to life. Policeman-Vince wouldn't have been able to pull off a quarter of what Cape-Vince had done. And he'd done it for them. Oh, sure, he probably loved being the hero; he always had. But to be the Cape? That took some single-minded devotion. Or some good old-fashioned Faraday stubbornness.
Speaking of Faraday stubbornness... Her eyes rested on Trip, whose back was resolutely towards his parents. Come to think of it, he'd avoided looking at either of them since the rescue. Oh, Trip... This was going to be so fun to have to explain to him. Especially when, if Dana were being honest with herself, she hadn't quite logicked herself into completely forgiving her husband for his deception. Emotional Dana still felt betrayed, and nothing that Logical Dana could say was going to make that hurt go away any time soon, she realized. She heaved a sigh. It had hurt more when she'd believed Vince was dead, but it had been so much simpler, too. She imagined going into a bookstore and looking for a self-help book: My Husband Isn't Dead, He's a Superhero; How a Family is Supposed to Deal With It. Right.
And then something clicked in her mind and she felt the smile slip from her face. Oh. God. Her life as she'd known it was over. She couldn't go back, nor could Trip. Now that Fleming knew who Vince was, she'd never be safe again. Nor would her friends, or her parents, or...
Vince must have felt her tense because he stroked the back of her hand with his thumb. "What is it?" he murmured into her ear, barely a breath.
"My parents," she whispered back. "Vince, what if Fleming...?" She tried to sit up, but boot steps in the hallway outside their hideaway made her freeze. There was no door on that side, Max had assured them that the only way in was the way they had come, via the ceiling, but everyone held their breaths until the sounds had passed.
"We'll figure something out," he breathed into her ear once the coast was clear. "Fleming is going down. No one endangers my family and gets away with it."
Somehow, it was the most reassuring thing he could have said. Dana settled back in his arms, and smiled. Life had just gotten infinitely more complicated, but with Vince here, it was going to be okay.
Getting out of the abandoned office building was surprisingly easy, when it finally came time. They simply carried the video and escape equipment out the back when the Ark vehicles had finished loading in the front. A spitting-mad Fleming had driven off in a huff, frustrated by his minions' failure to find the Faradays. With regret, Dana abandoned her car in favor of the carnival folks' dark blue van; there would be no going back to her normal life now. Trip didn't even get to keep anything that wasn't in his school bags. Fortunately for his education, he'd been carrying several of his textbooks. Dana was pretty sure she knew how Trip would feel about that when he finally realized what it meant. Oh joy. Yet another fun conversation coming up. And home school. Yay.
Vince squeezed her hand as he helped her up into the van, and one of the dozens of knots in Dana's belly unfurled a bit. She wasn't alone anymore. No matter how hard this was going to be, she wasn't alone. Despite how dark it was in the back of the van, Dana could have sworn it was bright as day.
