When I woke up, I saw white.
Not surprising when you realize that for the millionth time (at least), you've ended up in the hospital or whatever counts as such wherever you happen to be.
"Oh good, I was getting worried."
I turned my head and there in front of me was Rand. "You look like shit." I said honestly. You'd think she hadn't gotten sleep in 3 days for... Oh.
She snorted. "Yeah, well, you look worse."
I raised a challenging eyebrow. Sure I felt weaker than a newborn baby, but I had a reputation to maintain! Or build. Whatever.
Part one of that consisted of me convincing myself that I had no one to measure up to in becoming a badass.
...
Still haven't gotten that part down.
But maybe the first steps can be put into place right now. Perhaps...
"Come here."
Rand nodded and leaned over. When she was close enough, I gave her the Gibbs Special.
A hard slap to the back of the head.
Rand jerked back. "What the hell was that for?!"
"For not getting enough sleep!" I waggled a finger at her for emphasis and tried to keep a smile off my face for a moment. Then I lunged forward and let the smile come out as bright as possible as I hugged her close. "And this is for staying around to give me a friendly face."
After an awkward moment or two, she began to hug me back.
A nurse cleared her throat and we split apart. Touching moment over, oh well.
Rand mumbled an apology before the nurse started to tear into her for keeping the nice woman (AKA, me) awake when she obviously needs her rest. I just gave her my best yell (really pitiful at the moment) to just shut up and leave her be since she's just as bad off as I am. That little interaction exhausted me and before we knew it, Rand was asleep on my snoring chest.
Hey! Mind outta the gutter!
"So, Cortanna..." The captain began. "Is there any reason I should be getting alerted to a security breach at 2 in the morning because you were looking for an AI designated ghost?"
The eyebrows on Cortana's hologram went straight to her hairline. "There was an alert?"
Parker nodded. "At 2 in the morning, which woke me up. Anything you wish to explain to me?" He prodded.
With a slightly guilty look on her face, probably from waking him up like that, she stated, "When I was watching Shego in the gunnery range, I was noticed by another program. I asked it's name and it gave me the moniker 'Ghost', before adding that it was everywhere, and nowhere. From there we had a very vague and disconcerting conversation. In all the hubub, I forgot about it entirely until afterwards."
"Hey Frank?"
She paused where she was to look at him, a couple of wires in her hands leading to the wiring next to the cockpit of a slightly odd Pelican. "Yeah Ghost?"
"Sorry about snappin' atchya earlier."
She shrugged. "No problem."
That, apparently, was not good enough for Ghost. "Well, it's just that, I didn't give you a good enough explanation. I'm not taking back my statement saying that I'm glad that she's dead. After all, as Beta, she couldn't really do much but fail. And it was even worse for the version of her that came out of the Epsilon unit, and even more so for all the copies that the Director made. I love her, and there's no way that I could ever wish that sort of pain onto her."
Frank nodded somberly. "Thanks for telling me. I understand." She leaned back over, which would've been really sexy if she'd been wearing anything more revealing than a full suit of armor like the MJOLNIR Mark VII that Spartan-117, AKA The Master Chief, wore almost constantly. She messed around with the wires for a bit longer before finally yanking something out. Then she stood up, put the thing she'd yanked into a pouch, and turned to Ghost with one question on her lips.
"Where to next?"
"Of course, Ghost never got to answer because right about then the entire universe died. Or, in the words of 'Washing-Tub' from Caboose's head, 'The whole world exploded AND everyone died AND the whole world exploded!' "
"Hey!"
In the room, all the children looked away from where their attention was raptly kept to the doorway where a tall woman in full military gear with butt-length black hair stood with a slightly reprimanding look on her face while looking at the current storyteller. She continued to speak. "The actual line is," At this point her face became extremely expressive to over-excentuate the emotions (just like in Caboose's head) while she tried to keep from busting out in a grin. " 'If you tell anyone I told you, the whole world would explode AND everyone would die AND the whole word could explode!' "
After a few seconds, the new arrival gave up and grinned at her friend. "So, what lies have you been telling them Gary?" She asked of the retired ONI operative.
The man with the solidly steel-colored hair smiled at her in a different way than he had been to the children. "Oh, just the story of how we met."
She turned to the children and spoke in a lowered, conspiratorial voice, "It's all lies! Believe nothing he says!"
That got her a lot of giggles from the kids, which was the point. So, they began to tell her the story the older man had been telling them.
After listening to the questions of the children for a few moments, she looked at the man questioningly. He picked up on her unasked question and answered. "Well, to be perfectly honest" he ignored her snort here. "I was just setting it up to make sure that you would actually tell your own story yourself."
"Well, let's be honest here, it's just a piece of history. All in the past. So why should I bother telling everybody about it?"
"Because of all the stories I know of that involve monsters and heros, yours is one that truly needs telling." He says with his most honest face.
She stares at him, studies him, and finally decides that he's not lying or messing with her head. He's really and truly being honest with her when he says that her story needs telling.
A new voice decides to chip in. "Besides it's not like you've got anything too traumatizing for them."
They all look at the newest arrival, a slightly shorter woman with shoulder-length (and fairly stylish) red hair who was smiling amusedly at everything that she saw in the room.
The woman with the black hair looked from the man to the other woman to the children and back. Then, after another few moments, she slumped a little and sighed in defeat. "Fine. I'll do it. But it's not the best story, I'll warn ya."
The children's smiles brightened the room by a few hundred megawatts as they hunkered down for the story.
"Well, it started like this."
A/N: Sorry about the long wait, and for the ending, but I reread the story after getting a bad review about it, and I thought about it. It's not really up to the sort of standards that I really have as a reader, which means that even if I manage to save it (not entirely likely with the way that I've set it up so far), then people won't really get the full enjoyment out of it. It's got the potential to be an amazing story, and I'm not going to waste it, so I'm going to start over, and hopefully the rewrite will be better than this was.
Still, I have a good start and a nice basis to begin, so it's not a hopeless endeavor. I just hope that you guys will like the rewrite just as much as a few of you have liked the original.
Well, I'm off to start the new one.