Title: Choices and Chances: Chapter Fifteen
Author: Stormhawk
Chapter Word Count: 2125
Notes: Nope
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Stef ran down the hall, and then stopped at part of the wall. She banged on it, and the brickwork slid along to reveal a vault with a keypad attached, she typed in a code and it popped open.
She pulled out her gun and attached a silencer from the vault, and pocketed the extra clips and one miniscule bomb about the size of a large marble that she was pretty sure exploded on impact and then continued down the hall.
"Smith?" Stef called as loud as she dared, not wanting to attract any of the guards, "damn it, where the hell are you?"
"He would be on the bottom dungeon level," a cultured voice called through the small, barred hole in one of the cells as she ran past it.
Stef's eyes went wide and she ran back over to the cell, standing on her tiptoes so that she could see through the hole she stared at he occupant. "Persephone?" she asked disbelief. "What the...? What are you doing down here?"
She gave a humorless chuckle and walked over to the door, "I've been a bad girl," she said in a sarcastic tone, "my husband sent me down here for the day to think about what I did wrong."
"Stand back," Stef said and shot the hinges of the heavy door. Thanks to the silencer, no one was the wiser. She pulled the door away and held out her hand to help the other program across the felled door.
"Thank you," the older lady said quietly.
"What did you do? Or what does he think you did?"
"He caught me talking in my sleep about another man." She closed her eyes, "a man better than he could ever be," she whispered.
"Divorce him, for your own sake, divorce him."
"You've said that many times," Perse said quietly.
Not in this timeline, Stef thought to herself. "No I haven't."
"I'm empathic, I not so much read your mind as sense what you're sending off. The first time I saw you, I saw someone who had tried to understand me, I did not know how that was possible, but I just know it is. I saw someone who was sad for me, you have no idea who glad that made me. That someone actually took notice of me."
"So why don't you just take off with this other man of yours?"
"Because I do not wish to be a monster again," she said quietly.
"A monster?"
"I am from the first world, Vorateu's world. But when we came here, we were changed, we became monsters. Some accepted this, most had to learn to accept it. I was a vampire, I had to drink blood to survive, but I cried after every life I took so that I could survive."
"What's this got to do with the royal jerk?"
"He changed me back to this, back to who I was before coming to this world. He allowed me to be free of the monster I had become. But after we married, he told me that if I ever divorced him or left him, he would change me back. I could not live like that again, no matter how much I despise this life I have no. It is the lessor of two evils."
"I'm sorry Perse, I never knew."
"You need to go help Smith before its too late. If it isn't already."
"Are you going to be all right?"
"I will be fine, I can look after myself." Stef nodded and ran toward the stairs to the lower basement level.
In his cell, Smith was contemplating a great number of things, high on his list was what the Mainframe was going to do once it found out what he had done. Even if he didn't tell it, it would find out soon enough after The Merovingian hacked ever agent on the planet.
He heard someone outside his cell and looked up, a head bobbed into view. "You're a hard man to get a hold of, you know that? Could have at least left a forwarding address," Stef said, he assumed with smile, but all he could see was her eyes and forehead.
"How did you get here?" Smith asked, not bothering to get up from the floor.
"I don't think that's important right now, but we have to get out of here before the evil French guy finds us."
"Stef...I'm an idiot, I'm such a fool," he said, saying out loud what he had been thinking ever since the deception had been revealed.
"That I know," she said as she stared through the bars at him. "You're also a jerk."
He shook his head shamefully, "I made a choice, I choice I regret, a wrong choice."
"Which choice are you regretting Smith?" she asked him quietly as she leant against the cell door.
"I regret it in hindsight, I didn't regret it at the time. Choosing Ivy over you I mean."
"Only in hindsight?"
"I loved her Stef, I loved her. I chose her, I don't regret that."
"So why then in hindsight?"
"Because she wasn't my Ivy, it was a shapeshifter who had changed to look like her. Ivy really is dead, but I wanted so much to have another chance with her that I took The Merovingian's bait like a blind fish. I thought I had really been given a second chance, I couldn't let anyone stand in the way."
"And if Stevie had been there, who would you have chosen?"
There was a moment of silence, "I would have chosen Stevie."
"...I'm on the bottom of the list."
He walked over to the bars and looked out at her. "Stef, I love you, but if you had lived ten years thinking Darth was dead, wouldn't you give anything for a second chance with him? To say everything you didn't say before? To do everything that you didn't before, to want to make the moment last forever in case it was a dream?" He paused, "I could never replace you but I wanted so badly just to..."
"I understand. I do. I'm just pissed off all a whole bunch of people so I'm taking some things out of proportion." She smirked to herself, she hadn't actually said who she was pissed at, or what she was taking out of proportion, and it seemed to work.
"We can talk about it later, but are you going to get me out of this cell?"
"Hmm...I'll have to think about it."
"Stef..."
"Don't get mad at me or I'll leave you here. I'm sure that Mero will love to rip your coding apart."
"...he doesn't need to, I hacked through all of the security myself."
"And you did that why? You're going to get deleted for that."
"Because he threatened to let Carlson kill Ivy, and then let the wolves finish her off. I wasn't going to standby and let the exiles kill her a second time."
"Second time?" she asked she pulled off the lock and opened the door.
"Yes," he said. "It was The Merovingian who killed her, well not he specifically, but he ordered her death. It seems that all I ever bring to the ones I love is death. He had her killed just because she loved me. I am like a specter of death.""
"I'm sorry. I really am Smith."
Then she punched him in the face.
"What was that for?" he asked as he blocked a second punch.
"What the fuck do you think it was for?" she screamed as she delivered a second solid blow, "you left me in hell to die!"
"Stef..."
"And it's only in hindsight that you regret it?" she raged, "so if Ivy had of really been Ivy you wouldn't have given me a second thought?"
"I had to choose one of you. I chose."
"You chose wrong Smith. You chose very wrongly."
"You know would have done the same thing."
"You should have picked me. I would have helped you get her out of there, the same way I got into there in the first place. I could have helped you, don't you know that?"
"I guess I wasn't thinking properly."
"I don't think I can accept just that. I don't think I can forgive you this time."
"So why are you rescuing me?" he asked smugly.
"Because we are agents of the system, even if you aren't acting like one, that's the only reason Agent Smith. And I don't want to have to serve with a copy, you would let that happen, but I wouldn't."
"I wou..."
"Trust me," she said coldly, "you would."
"And you act like a system program all the time?" he asked pointedly. "What about Darth?"
"That was low," she said angrily. "That was so low."
"Well?" he asked, "what do you have to say to that?"
"I'm twenty-three, I'm supposed to be alive, I'm supposed to be human, I'm not supposed to be an immortal fighting a war. I understand Carol, at least partly, no human can become an agent without it affecting them on a deep level. I'm doing this and I don't even know what to do half the time. I look at the recruits, and sometimes I wish I could be one of them, at least they have the choice to go home, I can't ever do that. Why didn't you just let me die?"
He just stared at her.
"You never even gave me a choice! You decided this for me! This is what I have to be forever, and it's your fault."
"This isn't what you've said before."
"Yeah, but this is what I think about sometimes in the middle of the night, when I just wish I could be normal."
"You don't have that option."
"We don't have time for this," she said bitterly. "We have to get out of here."
"Which way is the exit?"
"I don't know."
"Then how did you get in? surely the entrance and exit are the same."
"That's flawed logic Agent Smith," Stef said as she angrily rolled her eyes. "There are a lot places where the entrance and exit are different."
"How did you get in here?"
"I came from the same place you came from, except a different way. The problem is, if we go back my way, we will just be back in the bowels of hell, which isn't an error shunt, but a programmed room tacked onto this place."
"How did you find that out?"
"Remember in that place, you could sometimes see people walking around? Well, they're exiles, Mero's prisoners, and that place was just a hunting ground."
"So you got what information you could out of them before killing them?"
"No." She stared coldly at him, this was going to take some delicate working and choice phrasing.
"Agent Mimosa, our job is to kill exiles."
"Agent Smith, do quit being a narc. My top priority is to get you out of here in one piece - even if I hate that piece. And if that involved tricking some traitorous ex-system programs, then so be it."
"But they..."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah, defied the system, I know that. Exile is the coward's choice, blah, blah. We've both defied the system, we both keep defying the system. What the he...what makes you or me different from an exile who's only crime is wanting to live?"
"The fact that you seem to be taking this rather personally does make me a little suspicious..."
"Yeah, it's just for today, one of them stopped me from becoming vamp food."
"Why?"
"Because he saw an unconscious program and didn't bother to check to see if she was agent or exile."
"That could have and should have been a fatal mistake."
"It almost seems to be that you didn't want to be rescued."
"I don't want someone I care about becoming a traitor or gaining sympathy for the enemy."
"Smith...just so that you know...not everything is black and white, not everything exists only in the extremes that you seem to take everything to. Just because I had to go and form a temporary 'I won't kill you if you help me' accord with them doesn't mean that I'm going to..."
"Perhaps we can finish this when we get out of here?"
"I'm not a traitor Smith, I'm really not."
"I know Stef, but it's written into me at a base level to be suspicious of anything that could be considered a traitorous statement."
"Well it's probably a good thing that I didn't say something like 'the Oracle is a nice old lady who insists on giving me cookies.'"
"Ha ha," he replied dryly as they ran down the corridor.