A/N: Small change up some of the dialogue and time passage.
Oliver lost count of how much time he'd spent in re-processing after the second week. He woke up every day in a pen with his friends and other strangers, he ate breakfast when it was served to him, he was allowed to go to the bathroom when he asked to, and he went for questioning once every handful of days, as did his friends and the hundreds of other prisoners in the compound with them. For some, sessions lasted all day long. For others, people never came back at all…
Oliver had been hiding both his inhalers in his pen ever since his and the others' escape attempt, but soon they both dry, so for the last few days he'd been back to wheezing and counting his remaining breaths again.
One afternoon, or evening, or night —who knew?— the six of them were doing their usual routine of going around in circles over strategies in getting through re-processing.
"At least we know the Commonwealth is real, right?" Yumiko said, sitting at their table. The rest of them gave tired nods. They believed it, really, but after so long waiting it still felt like Level Two of processing was an unreachable dream.
Ezekiel got up to go find a trooper to take him to the toilet.
"I love that it was a wallet-sized photo of you on the wall," Princess says, "think about it, it means it was in your brother's wallet, which means he kept the wallet on him in the apocalypse, possibly for ten-plus years, and who does that? He sounds awesome."
Oliver, Quan, and Yumiko stared blearily at her.
"And also what you said," Princess added. "So, any of us come up with anything?"
For the past few weeks they'd tried many strategies to get to Level Two. Admitting Alexandria existed was still off the table, of course, but there were other ways they were getting balls rolling, or they were supposed to be, at least. Blackmailing Livits was still proving useful. He was working behind the scenes to get someone involved in speeding up their reprocessing. At least that's what he told them. And they'd learned a lot about the Commonwealth from him, too.
"They have structure, laws. Someone here's in charge, and I'm going to speak to that person."
"That's your new plan?" Quan asked. "Pulling some white-people shit and talking to the manager? No offence," he added to Eugene and Oliver. Oliver smirked.
"None taken," Eugene said. "Although, I will admit, the problematic strategy certainly worked wonders for my mother in her prime, often at the expense of many unfortunate baristas. Still, perhaps Yumiko is onto something."
Yumiko nodded her head. "Thank you. What's more, I have a plan. See, I remembered something last night. The wall of the lost? The sign above it. I forgot all about it, but Garcia mentioned the wall yesterday when I was chatting to him, so I asked about it, pretending I'd never seen it, of course, and he mentioned it's for helping relatives of the Commonwealth get in touch with their lost ones faster. Remember? 'Flag for expedited assessment and admittance to the Commonwealth'. That means me. If I show the right person my face, and they match me to that photo, we can get in…"
"And how are you going to do that?" Quan asked. "Tell the manager we manipulated a trooper, half-escaped, saw the wall, and now, in spite of that, expect expedited admittance into their town? That's nuts, Yumi, even for us."
"Well, obviously I'll skip out the blackmail and escape attempt. Cold as ice. Demand results." She looked at the four of their doubtful faces and landed on Oliver for the longest. "What?"
"Nothing," Oliver said. "It's just... it's your brother. You sure you can keep your cool like that?"
"Yeah, I was a lawyer. It comes naturally." None of them looked convinced. Yumiko sighed. "Look, I love my brother. But I hadn't seen him in a really long time before all of this, and I assumed... It doesn't matter. I'll be fine as long as I can speak to—"
"Shh!" Princess hissed.
"Act cool," Quan muttered.
A guard walked past. They all found their porridge fascinating until she'd gone away.
"That was her, from the night we almost got out," Princess said, hitting Quan's knee repeatedly, to which he grunted and had to protect himself with his palm until she'd calmed down. "Sorry, Q-Chee. Nervous."
"Q...Chee?" Oliver murmured, squinting.
Princess ignored him. "Did you see how she was looking at us? She's been doing it for weeks now. She knows."
"We're fine," Yumiko insisted. "No one knows we tried to leave, or believe me, it would have come up in re-processing at some point already."
"This is making me paranoid," Eugene said. "I'm going to go and look for Ezekiel."
He got up and left.
Yumiko was back to running strategy-circles again, so Princess, Quan, and Oliver sat in silence to listen. Yumiko explained how Clark and Evans were good at their jobs, which meant they were probably some kind of researchers before. If the Commonwealth was as large and organised as said, there would be a bureaucracy that it worked for.
"Their jobs are to assess threats for their community. They're asking who we are because someone above them has decided that that's a good baseline position from which to judge us," Yumiko explained. "So they poke around the dusty corners of our brains, test our sense of boundaries with queries about our toileting habits. She raked you over the coals for your two dollar bill," she added to Princess, who still looked utterly furious for having it confiscated, "which makes me believe that if they have a currency it's the U.S. dollar, and that they need to strictly control the amount in circulation."
"Why control the money," Princess said. "Why not make their own money."
"I bet it's a psychological tactic," Yumiko said, "people miss the old world. They'll fall in line easier if things remind them of the old days."
"So, they want to understand what we're capable of, whether we can be useful in their community, or if we'd just be a waste on resources," Oliver summarised.
"Bingo. Only, the truth of it is, they need to justify their existence, too," Yumiko said. "It's a hard pill to swallow when you realise how much more valuable someone who can haul the trash and keep the streets free from disease is, than someone who only knows how to write endless lists of questions."
"I get what you're saying," Quan said. "Let them know they need us. Cool. Then let's do this. Get us some of that expedited processing—"
Eugene bustled over clumsily, scraping their table a few inches to the left as he sat. Oliver caught his elbow between the leg and his chair and gasped from the shot of pain.
"Ezekiel's gone." Eugene was panting. Sweat trickled down his face. "In anticipation of your next question, I looked everywhere, asked around. No one's saying anything." He looked around the table, wide-eyed. "Someone took him."
Oliver felt the anxiety spread across their table, numbing the pain in his arm.
"Livits must've admitted to what we did, or been found out, and Zeke's just the first domino to fall," Eugene goes on shakily. "In anticipation of your follow-up query, I don't know how I know. I only know that I'm freaking out! It's probably 'cause he told off the big guy. Mercer looks like he could hold a grudge for this long, right? Oh, God. Why'd he tell off Goddamn Mercer? We should talk to them. We should talk to them. We can come clean about who we are and where we're really from."
"Eugene," Yumiko hissed, "for the last time, do not talk to their law enforcement. Or if you find yourself in a situation where you have to, you stick to the story."
Quan nodded. "Okay, Yumi. How do we get this thing started?"
Yumiko's eyes went to another trooper passing by. Without consulting any of them, she got up and marched over with her fists balled.
"Wait, what? Be cool. Ice!" Princess reminded. "Ice!"
Yumiko stopped at the fence, smacking it to get the trooper's attention. When they faced her, she unloaded: "You've got one of our people? What have you done with him? I demand to know where he's been taken!"
"Ma'am, calm down. I don't know where your friend is."
"Then there's no reason for us to continue this conversation. I'd like to speak to somebody who can actually give me answers. Who do you report to?"
"You... wanna speak to my supervisor?"
"That's right!" Princess yelled from their table, waving her finger. "We wanna talk to the manager!"
Inside the re-processing building, two sets of guards watched them from each end of the corridor while the four of them sat along a bench and waited over an hour for Yumiko to finish speaking to Clark and Evans. The most progression they'd seen was that Mercer had brought a single cup of coffee. They still hadn't seen or heard from Ezekiel. Princess had finally given up beating anxious bruises into Quan's thigh and had instead moved on to tapping her toes.
"Can you stop?" Eugene asked her. "You're taking my nerves over the edge to a proverbial eleven on a scale of ten."
"I can't help it. We've been waiting and waiting, and now I have to pee really, really bad. I shouldn't have mentioned it. Be right back."
"No! No! No more splitting up!"
"Eugene. If that fine-ass dude in the orange suit just walked in with a coffee, things must be going good for Yumiko, right? She must have brought up her brother. Maybe she'll be out by the time I'm back."
"I'll go with you," Oliver said, following her along the drywall corridor. "I need the bathroom, too. Plus, it's only splitting up a little if we stay in pairs, right?"
Eugene didn't have anything to say about that. He just sat there, trembling.
"I'll look after him," Quan said.
"Thanks," Oliver said uneasily. "See you in a sec."
He went to Princess, who was talking in Spanish to one of the guards. He said something back to her that made her bite her fist. "You have toilet paper?" she asked him.
The trooper nodded.
"Well, shit! I'm excited!"
It was an enthralling concept. In the main processing compound, all they had were rooms with holes in the floor and a water facet to one side with a bar of thin home-made soap. These toilets must've been specifically used for troopers and auditors.
Oliver and Princess went through the door. They both found the men's and women's bathrooms respectively and agreed to meet each other back outside. Oliver guessed he finished before Princess, because when he left the bathroom, she wasn't there yet. A trooper met him and ushered him towards a door Oliver hadn't used before.
"I have to wait for my friend." He pointed vaguely to the women's room beside him. "She's just in there."
"No one's in there."
Oliver watched the trooper, frowning.
"Come with me. This way."
"Err…" He coughed. "I think I'll just go back to my friends..."
"What friends?"
Oliver felt his stomach drop. He tried to step around the trooper to look into the corridor, but the trooper stepped into his way and pointed to the other door.
"I need you to come with me. Now."
To Oliver's confusion, he was taken to an infirmary, where he was left alone in a small room for several minutes. It had a metal bed, bedside table, a sitting chair, and a bookshelf with magazines and leaflets. He saw it get dark through the shutter-gaps in the window, wondering anxiously if he and the others had been found out and were in the beginning stages of a slow and bizarre form of torture. The anxiety had triggered his asthma to flare up so badly that he quickly lost the energy to pound on the door to be let out, so he just sat there on the bed, fidgeting and wheezing.
A doctor came by a few minutes later.
She had a package in her hands and a notepad under her arm. "Sorry this took so long, Mr. de Luca. It's a complicated process to organise medical deliveries in and out of the city. Your and your friends prescriptions arrived here as soon as possible."
"Where are they?" He coughed. "My friends."
"Oh, I don't know. I'm just here to deal with you right now. Okay?" She opened the package and pulled an odd-looking inhaler from inside.
Oliver held his ground, ready for another interrogation. He knew she was going to use the inhaler as leverage. He knew he also wasn't going to give up a thing. So yes, he was going to suffocate to death, but at the very least he wasn't going to grovel and rat out his friends while doing it.
However, to his shock, the doctor handed the inhaler over.
Oliver blinked.
"You know how to use it, don't you?" she asked.
"I..."
"Well?" she insisted.
He looked at it again, not sure, now he thought about it. The inhaler wasn't the usual L-shaped, blue applicator. It was a smaller cartridge, the applicator clear and round, with no brand labels or barcodes, just a handwritten serial number on one side, a doctors signature, and an expiration date: '04/2024'. On the other side was a symbol of a circle, and within it, a large C encompassed by a sword and shield with a flame on top, and the words, 'The Commonwealth' engraved underneath on a drawn scroll.
The doctor showed Oliver how to use it.
He took a single dose, carefully.
It was colder than he expected, and it tasted… fresh. He had forgotten what an in-date inhaler was supposed to taste like. And the relief. Oh, fuck, the relief. Oliver could have sang. He only didn't because his breath was too precious.
He was given a few minutes to catch his breath, then the doctor signed off something on her notepad, and left the room. Several minutes later, Oliver had begun pacing anxiously, full of energy and air again. He jumped when the door opened. Mercer entered this time, Princess, Yumiko, and Quan in tow. They rushed in and crowded Oliver in hugs. Oliver hugged them back, shutting his eyes and squeezing.
"Holy fuck," he said. "What happened to you? Where is Zeke, and Euge?"
"Zeke is fine. We've just been to see him," Yumiko said. "They're taking care of him, too."
Princess quickly explained that after using the bathroom earlier, she'd been taken to see Ezekiel in another room at the infirmary. Quan had joined her soon after, then Yumiko. Once Ezekiel went to sleep, they came to see him.
"They took Eugene for re-processing," Quan said.
"Why?" Oliver asked.
"We don't know," Yumiko said.
"Well, how did it go, talking to Clark and Evans?"
Yumiko shrugged. "We'll see, I suppose."
"We're staying here for tonight," Princess said. "Mercer agreed." She gave Mercer a little wink that he ignored, before he left the room. "It'll be okay."
Oliver rubbed the back of his neck. "I hope you're right..."
Oliver decided to let Ezekiel sleep, despite wanting to go and see him. He trusted what the others had said, that he was being taken care of. For the rest of the night, he and the others hung around the infirmary trying not to worry about Eugene. It was hard to know if he wouldn't give in to Mercer's questions, especially after being separated from everyone. Eventually, they started getting tired and sat down on the floor in the corridor outside Ezekiel's room for the night.
Oliver woke up when Quan, opposite him, began to snore. Yumiko shifted beside him, but remained asleep. Princess was picking her thumbnail, already awake. She noticed Oliver, too, and shuffled to sit beside him on the floor, shoulder to shoulder.
"Livits helped us out," she whispered. "Convinced Mercer to let us spend the night here with you and Zeke."
"You blackmailed him again?"
"No. We just talked. We're besties now."
"I thought Q-Chee was your 'bestie'."
"He is." She glanced across to him, smiling as he let out another snore. "And the rest of you."
"You can't have more than one best friend."
"Sure you can."
Oliver caught himself laughing, quietly.
"Anyway," Princess whispered, "I think Livits and Zell are going to come out. Together, I mean. Zell's been ready to for months but Livits has been afraid of ruining his rep, you know, if his trooper colleagues realise he's gay and all. But I told him, screw them if they don't accept him. If it's not going to ruin his career, and if Zell means enough to him, he shouldn't have to hide how he feels."
Oliver raised his eyebrows. Princess was kind of amazing.
She looked at him. "And don't worry, I'm sure Q-Chee will realise the same thing one day, too."
Oliver smiled at his lap. By now he wasn't even shocked that Princess had picked up on so much between his and Quan's dynamic. She could see through people like a window.
"Eh, I don't need him to," Oliver admitted. "I know it's his own thing he's gotta deal with."
Princess watched him curiously.
"We're still friends," he told her. "Maybe we could have been more than that, but… we wanted different things. We still got each others' backs, though. We're still 'besties'."
Princess smiled. "Different things?"
Oliver shrugged. The conversation was getting much too personal for his liking, so, to turn the tables, he asked, "I don't know, Princess, what things do you want from future love interests?" but unexpectedly, her answer was as transparent as the rest of her.
"Oh. I already know who my future husband's gonna be," she whispered, and gestured down the empty corridor.
"Mercer?" Oliver chuckled.
"Just watch. He'll come around on me. Just like the rest of you."
Oliver didn't doubt it, truly. Princess was easy to love. Oliver actually felt real hatred for whoever it was who once told her otherwise.
"I want someone to hold me," he admitted, gently. "No secrets, no hiding. I just want someone to take my hand, and tell me everything's gonna be okay. That's it. That's all I can think to ask for."
Princess stared at him.
"What?" Oliver asked, already embarrassed.
"Nothing," she said, and she placed her head on his shoulder so that her purple hair tickled his nose. She linked their arms. "Nothing at all. Just, thanks… for telling me that. Something tells me it was kinda a lot for you..." She sighed. "Buenas noches, Oliver."
Oliver rested his cheek on her head, smiling. "G'night, Princess..."
He woke up in the same position that he'd been in when he'd fallen asleep: On the floor, shoulder to shoulder with Princess, arms linked, her head on Oliver's shoulder, and his head rolled against the top of hers. Her goggles left marks in his chin when he sat up. The others were slouched on the floor across from them.
A nurse came to give them and Ezekiel food. It was good to talk to him again. He was feeling better. At some point, Mercer entered the room.
Princess beamed at him. "Buenos dias, hermoso."
Mercer's lip furled, shoulders square. He really was beautiful, Oliver thought. He asked if they could see Eugene, to which Mercer motioned with his hand towards the door. Weary, they let themselves be escorted out of the room together. Only this time instead of being returned to the compound pens, they were taken outside the building.
Before Oliver even saw the sun, however, another black sack was shoved on over his head and the five of them were taken across the courtyard. They were made to climb up into what sounded like a carriage, by the snorting horse-noises and creaking leather reins up front.
"Eugene?" Ezekiel asked.
"He's not here," Quan said, when they didn't hear an answer.
The ride wasn't very long. Morning birds were noisy overhead. When the carriage stopped, they were each helped down. To Oliver's dismay, what sounded like another train freight door was slid open. He was pushed inside along with the rest of them. Although, when the sack was pulled off over his hair, the room was not dark and empty but well-furnished and full of people sitting at desks, working, by the looks. Princess blew her hair out of her face. Yumiko squinted around the room. Quan and Ezekiel gazed in confusion at a man at a typewriter. Oliver glanced across the room, and saw, sat on a chair by the wall, Eugene.
He stared wetly at them all, looking scared out of his mind. Princess called his name. He clambered over and began sobbing into her arms.
"It's okay, man," Ezekiel told him, patting his back. "Let it out."
Quan and Yumiko laugh. Oliver snorted.
"I thought..." Eugene blubbered. "Wh… Where'd they take you?"
"An infirmary," Ezekiel answered. "A medic steamed my face, gave me this nasty herbal cough syrup, and I slept."
"They spiked the cough syrup?"
"No, no," Ezekiel laughed. "These guys left went outside to see Oliver, the nurse took the lantern out of my room, and I fell asleep. Medic checked on me a couple of times, and then this morning they brought us all here."
"They gave me an inhaler." Oliver showed. "Look. It's new!"
"Thank God you're here," Yumiko said, gripping Eugene's shoulder. "We were worried."
A woman at one of the many desks came forward and handed Mercer a sheet of paper. He read it aloud: "Pursuant to Section One-Fourteen-A of the New Articles of Perpetual Union, in deference to traditions established by Article One, Section Eight of the Legacy Constitution and Article Fourteen of the Legacy UDHR, you have successfully completed initial processing in consideration for asylum and citizenship in these united townships."
He lowered the paper and looked at them all.
"When you walk through these doors, you'll be escorted to orientation..." He cast Ezekiel a snide glare. "...by a beat cop. Welcome to the Commonwealth." He stepped over to Ezekiel then, too, and said, annoyed, "I went to West Point, asshole."
He walked away.
"Wait, I'm confused," Quan said. "We're all really getting in, because your brother's—"
"Don't question it," Yumiko told him, while gripping Oliver's hand because it was the closes thing to her, he guessed. Princess noticed this and smiled. Yumiko took a steep breath. "We're in."
Mercer banged on the freight door. It slid open.
A woman stepped inside. She had long, dark hair and red, square glasses, and wore a flowing, floral summer dress with a handbag over her shoulder.
"Um, which one of you is Eugene?" she asked timidly.
He raised a trembling hand.
"Hi," she said to him. "I'm Stephanie."
Notes
It's official: Quan's new nickname is Q-Chee, short for Quantavius Chamberlain, which means he either must've told Princess his full name at some point or she heard him addressed by it from Clark or someone, but either way, Quan tolerates it, so obviously that means he and Princess are best friends, AND it rhymes with cutie, which… made me very happy. He's an asshole, but he is an asshole trying to better himself at least. His arc actually reminds me a little of Adam's arc in Sex Education.
Next one… oh boy… you have no idea how long I've waited… bruuuhhh… I am… excited. Might fizz out of my face if not careful. Small hint: Mr. Elevator Survivor…
As always,
Happy reading.