"Well. That didn't turn out as planned."
The usual levity is in Zoe's tone, but Nancy notices the tension that underscores it. Her hands go tighter around the steering wheel of the car she drove to Seattle-Tacoma. If Zoe isn't calm, then none of them should be. Sonny, pensively looking in the rear view side mirror, turns to look at her—she feels it—but Nancy doesn't dare avert her eyes from the road. Thanos could still be around. And with his track record, it's likely.
"Step on it, will you?" Zoe pipes up again from the back. "He's still unconscious."
"Nothing but superficial lacerations," Sonny murmurs. "There's that at least."
Nancy starts at the sound of his voice; she hadn't thought he'd been paying attention. "The unconsciousness indicates a concussion, though."
"Yeah, which is why—" Nancy hears rustling, presumably Zoe leaning forward in her seat. "How fast are you going? 55? Fuck that. The speed limit's 55."
"Right," Nancy replies evenly. As many laws as she's broken in her sleuthing, Nancy has always been uncomfortable with disobeying the rules of the road. That could easily result in somebody else getting hurt.
"65. Justin and I override anything the cops have to say."
"Yeah, but even if they stop us and let us go shortly afterward, it's still wasted time."
"It's less wasted time," Zoe argues. Successfully, Nancy has to admit.
So this time, she goes with the truth. "I really don't want an accident on my hands."
"This is not the time for caution. I need you to drive like an asshole right now."
"Kind of like you're driving me crazy like an asshole right now?" Nancy shoots back before she can stop herself. Arguing has always been her and Zoe's element, and it had never before been inappropriate—even during urgent tasks, such as when she was diffusing a bomb in Scotland.
Silence. Zoe's probably bristling. "Look, the only reason I'm not in the driver's seat is that I need to keep an eye on K2. Both eyes. Knowing him, he's probably going to try to find a way to die on me out of spite."
"Nobody's going to die," Sonny says firmly. Nancy sees his fists clench in her peripheral vision.
"Thanks for the optimism," Zoe replies, "and I share your confidence. As long as you stay away from boats from now on, we're all going to be fine."
He laughs for good measure.
Nancy bites back an instinctive rebuttal.
"So that girl," Sonny begins, voice shaking as he returns to that mindset. "What happened? How did she…" he trails off.
"I don't know if you're ever heard of the L-pill, but lots of spies have been using them since World War II. If they were captured, they had the option to die relatively painlessly before they were tortured. Our woman had one of them. She put a grenade in my purse, and when I caught her, she took the pill to avoid giving me information under duress."
"Shouldn't that bomb have killed us?" Nancy asks. "A normal explosive device would not have been hampered by the fountain."
"You're right. It wasn't a normal explosive device. It was a compression grenade, which is designed to avoid dispersing shrapnel so it wouldn't hurt Thanos and his buddies, who were also in proximity. Also, like I said, he doesn't have enough clout in this country to be able to kill bystanders and get away with it. In Greece, maybe. But not here."
For a second Nancy is silent as she takes this in. "Fine, but how does that tie into the phone message 'Hades in the city, watch your back?'"
"The phone was hacked," Sonny answers flatly. "That was supposed to bring us together. It didn't even really matter whether we knew it was hacked, since we still would have gathered if we did know, and that would have served their purposes just as well. In getting all of us at once."
Nancy meets Zoe's eyes through the rearview. "That true?"
"Yeah," she responds. "More or less. Especially with that wild goose chase Thanatos lead me on, bringing me right back to Seattle. They wanted me in an agitated state so I would be distracted from what they were doing. Luckily, I wasn't."
Sonny's eyes turn somber in the silence that follows. There's a question swimming in his eyes, Nancy sees as she glances over at him, but his face is conflicted. "What I can't figure out…" he begins, trailing off.
"Yeah?" Nancy prompts softly.
"Why didn't it actually deploy when all four of us weren't together?"
"Yeah." Nancy frowns, this question prompting another in her mind. "And why not when we were all at the airport?"
"One question at a time, please." Zoe turns and shoves Justin's shoulder for the seventh time in five minutes. "K2. Oi." When he doesn't respond, her lips tighten together and she returns her attention to Nancy. "Thanos and his associates use that airport a lot, as we know. Probably he didn't want to chance any destruction there because that would mean more security for everybody, including Thanos."
"Hmmm." Nancy's mind snaps back to the road.
"Drive faster, Nancy," Zoe repeats. "You're not going to cause any accidents by going over the speed limit. We're on the fucking freeway."
"Fine," she snaps.
The speedometer needle leaps 45 degrees to the right, and Zoe finally sits back in her seat. "As for why we weren't close together when the grenade deployed, Sonny, I can only guess. Maybe the detonation timer was overridden by the woman who bumped into us with the reasoning that offing Nancy and me was better than offing nobody at all. After all, we're the individuals who pose the most danger to Thanos."
"That does make sense," Nancy puts in. Her eyes go instinctively to Sonny, who is turning a shade of artichoke that would be aesthetically pleasing anywhere else but on a person's face. Flinching, she redirects her gaze to the only other conscious person in the car. But Zoe is firmly looking at Justin's limp body curled in the fetal position against the window, and she's going a very similar color. "Right," Nancy says to herself.
"I think he got hit with water more than chunks of the fountain, since there are hardly any marks on him." Zoe changes the subject.
"That's great," Nancy continues to muse. "But why'd Thanos stop there?"
"You mean, why did he not try to get to us in the dust and confusion that resulted? I don't know, and honestly, that's the only thing about this that really disturbs me aside from Justin Van Winkle here."
"Justin Van Winkle?" A groggy voice mutters. "But I'm not the one who's always complaining about needing more sleep, am I, Infinitum?"
"Well, good. You're finally up." Zoe shifts around in her seat to glare at him head-on. "What the actual fuck, K2? Don't you know what 'Get back?' means? I guess I was wrong to assume that you understand English even though it's your native language. Should've taken your word for it when you claimed you weren't good at languages."
"Hello to you too," Justin replies mildly before sitting up. "I say, where are we?"
"On our way to the hospital, thanks to your poor decision-making skills."
"In my defense, it looked like you needed help with that captive woman there."
"Not any more. She's dead."
"Oh." The soft amusement rising on his face falls abruptly again. "That's always my least favorite part of the job."
"Hence why I've never given you, nor expect or want you to take, an L-pill," Zoe replies grimly. "I've never liked them, either. It's not a good way to work. Having one of those things to pop before getting tortured is a safety curtain that prevents spies from developing resilience. Secrets get revealed under torture all the time in espionage. Swapping the lives and potential work of good spies for something that happens all the time is a bad trade."
"I hate hospitals, you know."
"Too bad, so sad." Zoe's voice, normally buoyant, is now sardonically flat. "You're going. And I'm one hundred percent not listening to any protests you have on the matter."
"I hate hospitals," Justin repeats.
"You have a concussion."
"I hate hospitals."
"Don't be petulant."
"If it's for my sake, then I have every right to refuse."
"Not when you're working with me."
"Infinitum, now is not the time to cross me."
"Wrong, K2. Now is not the time to cross me."
A few tense seconds pass. Then Zoe, as if sensing she was too harsh, adds: "It's just for a checkup. Won't take long."
"It'll take hours," he replies bitterly.
"Not if you say you have chest pain."
"I've put up with loads of your rubbish over the years, Zoe, but this is my head injury, I'm planting my foot down, and Nancy, please turn this car around."
"Don't listen to him," Zoe commands Nancy before returning to Justin. "Hello?! Head injury! Ergo, bad judgment. I'd rebuke you for acting nuts if you were relatively in your right mind. And FYI it's difficult not to since insanity is your general disposition anyway. And," she leans back and crosses her arms smugly, "good luck getting Nancy to stop this car."
Nancy, having actively analyzed the situation since Justin's return to consciousness, now enters the conversation. "He's awake now, and the unconsciousness was the main concern. I've been hit in the head many times, so speaking from experience, he's probably okay."
"Nancy," Zoe's voice rises, "if you stop this car, so help me, you are on your own to deal with Thanos."
"That suits me fine." Nancy glowers at the dividing line. "Better than being locked up in that safe house not able to breathe until you tell me it's okay."
"Peace," Sonny says quietly. The calm authoritativeness in his voice keeps them all from speaking further, although the air stays dank with tension.
Another minute passes, and Nancy pulls up to the entrance of the hospital. "I'll worry about parking," she says to Zoe.
Zoe nods her thanks and ushers Justin out of the car.
Nancy continues to drive around, looking for a spot.
Sonny says nothing, even when she finds one and shifts into park.
Both face forward.
"Are you mad at me for the whole boat thing?" Sonny finally asks.
It's an odd question, a loaded one for sure. Feeling annoyance jolt through her, Nancy opens her mouth to say something sarcastic, something punitive, after the day they've all had.
She yawns, instead.
"Was…" Sonny fidgets in his seat, still avoiding her eyes. "Was that a hypothetical yawn, as in 'I've seen danger worse than that,' or what?"
"No. I'm actually really tired. And not much else." Nancy turns her head away to hide the surprise on her face. Outside, the cars don't leave shadows under the clouds. A crying adolescent girl and her mother embrace before heading to the hospital entrance. Returning to her mind's affairs, Nancy devises a backup plan: be angry at herself for not being rightfully angry at Sonny.
But the anger never comes.
"My intentions were good, but that doesn't really matter much as I discovered when I was actually out in the water."
"I'm guessing you won't do it again." Nancy turns to look at him, weary glance meeting contrite.
"Nope. Not going through that nightmare again."
"Okay. And me being curious, what exactly were your intentions?" Nancy tries her best to keep the judgment out of her voice.
Sonny still winces. "Since the communication devices were compromised, I thought I had to get to Infinitum and K2 and tell them that without using aforementioned communication devices to do so."
"And why didn't you wake me up?"
He squirms, looking away again. "In my defense, it sounds really stupid now but it didn't before. You don't get a lot of sleep, and I was working from the gut priority to not wake you up."
For another minute or so, Nancy doesn't speak. She must consider her response carefully, something she's still not entirely used to. Being rash with her words has a greater and longer-lasting set of circumstances when depression is involved, something she found out the hard way with Sonny. "What I'm about to tell you isn't a commentary on your past actions as much as it's advice to take in the future. First of all, as you probably now know, for something this important you wake me up. When we're each isolated from one another—and this goes for Zoe and Justin, too—things become more dangerous since we have a further distance to go to communicate when the communications devices are out."
Sonny's face pales, and his lips tighten. "So I put us all in danger."
"No. You only put yourself in danger and—well, it isn't 'only,' obviously, since you're important, but—"
"It is 'only' if I put anybody in mortal danger because I don't deserve to live if everybody else around me doesn't." He laughs harshly.
The sound is foreign to Nancy, who fights the urge to recoil.
"Pacific Run, right?" Sonny continues. "George's injury? You remember."
"Let's leave Pacific Run out of this. All I'll say on that is that you correctly said you made sure that everybody was aware of the danger they'd be in if they competed. So that doesn't fit into your self-denigrating model, either. As for what happened today, I'm saying that under the right circumstances, if we're separated, it could be dangerous for each of us faring as individuals."
But her words aren't registering with him. Nancy can see it, and she can barely even see him now that he's shifting away from her. She doesn't know why; everything she's said thus far is unfailingly logical, and she doesn't get why it isn't helping and she doesn't get Sonny and the anger that hadn't come a second ago is coming full force now and she says, "Everything's okay, okay? Just calm down."
Sonny shakes his head, mumbles something, and hits the car door hard on his way out.
Nancy stays, sinking into bottomless despair.
Highline Medical Center is a real place, and you really need to go on the expressway to get there. I looked it up on Google Maps. (An excessive gesture, certainly, but it would've bothered the hell out of me if I hadn't looked it up.)
The end of this chapter-Sonny's connection of danger to his own actions-is heavily colored by a very scary personal event. Yesterday, I accidentally set some clothes in my room on fire with a candle. My family and I are all right, and we put it out before even having to call the fire department, but the thought that I could've burned our house down and seriously injured (or killed) my parents devastates and horrifies me. Needless to say, I'm tossing or giving away all of my candles and incense. Anyway, I thought that the culpability/great danger to others parallel would be a good addition to Sonny's depression-related arc.
Lastly, I'm a little less busy with writing assignments right now, so I'm trying to write one chapter a day until this thing is done. Two reasons: one, I'm leaving the country in a couple of weeks and want it done before then, and two, I've finished a post-story oneshot (with a surprise pairing!) that I'm itching to post, but I can't yet since it more or less ruins the ending for this story.
OT: the silliest phrase I've ever conceived but never written? "Sinking into the seven-layer bean dip of despair." (™ - lol just kidding; if you can figure out a legitimate use for this phrase, go for it!) Well, I suppose now it's written. But I'm glad I didn't sully the Microsoft Word file housing this chapter with it. xD
Okay, new proposal: now I want some seven-layer bean dip and whoever comes over and makes some for me will earn the rights to "sinking into the seven-layer bean dip of despair." And if the level of effort seems disproportionate to the prize, keep in mind that at least it's mildly alliterative.