Disclaimer: I do not own Sliders.
So . . . vampires are an actual thing here.
As much as she might have been inclined to dismiss the stranger who approached her in the middle of the concert out of hand, he has both told and now shown her the evidence. She has to admit that it is pretty compelling.
This is weird - even by their not so standard standards of normal. She has seen a lot of things, but there is something about this one that throws her (what she had begun to believe was becoming a rather unflappable) response to new situations all off kilter.
Vampires are something that are accepted as existing -an oft ignored until it cannot be ignored any longer acceptance if she is understanding correctly - here. She is still struggling with that. (She is not sure why - after all, they have been following a man who is literally injecting syringes full of other people's bodily fluids into himself for a fair bit of time now. Is it really all that different of a concept?)
The arsenal that she is seeing being unloaded from the trunk of the car is certainly a testament to someone taking this seriously. And to think, she used to balk at the thought of people running around armed. She is not balking any longer. Anything that is going to add distance between her and the blood sucking monstrosities is getting her seal of approval today. (The fangs on that security guard are something she does not want to see on anyone from up close.)
She tries not to think about what could have happened if Van Elsinger had left her to her own devices. She does not want to dwell on how well she would have fit what seems to be their victim profile - a girl on her own with no one to ask any questions if she disappeared. She will take the man's word for it that the lead singer was focusing in on her from the stage. She thought the eye contact was a little lingering, but she also thought that was probably just an illusion of the staging. Now, she's not sure that she was not being studied as a potential target. (There is no denying the number of young women who have attended one of their shows solo and not been seen again - at least not alive. Even her cursory research has turned up a couple of bodies - that was why she was there in the first place after all. Who could have guessed that they would have landed on a world where puncture wounds to the neck would lead to someone other than Rickman?) She had obviously been there on her own, and she had obviously been intrigued by the music. She probably looked like a viable target.
It does not matter how much she tells herself that it is not actually like that (that she does have people who care and would have come looking for her). She cannot shake the sense of loneliness that has dogged her steps since they lost the Professor. It sounds so trite to phrase it that way - lost the Professor as if they misplaced him somewhere and will stumble across or pick him up later. He is not lost; he is gone, and something broke in the rest of them when he went. That is an inescapable fact; her new reality is defined by the unnamed something wrong that is overshadowing the three surviving members of their once quartet.
She misses her family - not the one that she left behind on her version of Earth (although she does miss them as well, but she is used to missing them) but the one that traveled from earth to earth with her - the one that she trusted to have her back even if whatever it was that necessitated that was her own doing. She trusted them. She could depend on them. They had built something solid and reliable and she aches with the knowledge that that has ended.
They are not the same. They are not them any longer even allowing for grief and the absence of the man who had come to function in the stead of a father. Something else is wrong (as if that is not enough in and of itself). She does not know how to fix it. She can't even define what it is that has gone wrong, so how could she even begin to unravel the damage? She does not know what to do, but she is afraid to give it time - afraid that their relationships are eroding faster than whatever it is that is causing this stumbling block between them will break down on its own.
She wishes she could just foist all of the blame off on Maggie and be done with it. But as much as she and Maggie cannot seem to get on, she knows it is something more than simply their new addition's presence (not that the other woman's attitude is helping matters any because it most definitely is not).
The unfortunateness of the timing is not Maggie's fault, but her inability to let the rest of them function without commentary most assuredly is. She hates that there is an outsider standing around judging while her family finds their way through their grief. She hates that the other woman seems to have shoved her way into a place in their group dynamic without letting it evolve organically. In a different set of circumstances, she could have appreciated having someone else around to commiserate with over the times when the guys were being obtuse and did not understand why universe hopping without some basic supplies was a bigger deal for her than it was for them. She could have learned to deal with the abrasiveness and the inability to understand that goals were great and all but you still had to live the moments as well (sliding itself would probably knock the rough edges off of that one sooner over later - it tended to do that). Circumstances, however, were not different.
There just was not time for all of that - not when it felt as if Maggie had been grafted on to replace the Professor as if they were not supposed to feel bereft at the difference. Maybe that is all in her head. Maybe it is just her. Maybe she is being a big baby (the way it so often feels that Maggie is implying) who is going about her grieving all wrong and is jealous that she is no longer the sole feminine influence in the group, or maybe she has been letting other people get under her skin too much lately and it is mucking up all of her thinking.
All she really knows is that it feels like her world is coming apart at the seams and no one else seems to see it. She has had her down moments over the years that they have been sliding (they all have), but she has never felt as if she was nothing more than extra baggage the others are forced to carry along the way she does when Maggie starts in on her. She hates that she feels as if she is drowning in this insecurity. She hates that she is not certain enough in herself to be able to brush off all of the little things that no longer feel like little things that can be brushed aside.
She used to have a place here with her created family; it has suddenly gotten difficult for her to remember what that place used to be.
She feels her fingers tighten involuntarily. There is something comforting about the molded plastic within her grip - perhaps it is the knowledge that it allows her to defend herself from a distance. If there is one lesson that has demonstrated that it is going to beat itself into Wade Welles's head in the course of all of the adventuring they have been doing for the last nearly three years, then it is the fact that letting any of the people they encounter on their travels get too close to her is always going to end up with someone getting hurt.
This is just a more extreme version of that, right?
She is tired of hurting.
The man beside her waves her toward the door. The sun is fully risen now, and he insists that this will be the best time to thin out the numbers. This is not her fight, but that has never stopped them before. She can't just walk away with the knowledge that people are being murdered. This is nothing that she ever dreamed that she would be doing, but it feels good to have a purpose (temporary and strange a one as it may be).
She shifts the paintball gun to a more manageable angle and nods in response to the questioning look she is receiving. She's with him. She will have his back for the duration of this project. She spares a moment to wonder if any of them will realize that she never came back to the hotel room but shakes it off as quickly as it comes. She'll catch up with them later and explain . . . or, considering the circumstances, maybe she won't try to explain at all.
Watching yet another bolt from the crossbow of her companion sink into the chest of a figure laid out in a coffin, she realizes that she doesn't even know what she would say.