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Vanguard
Scene 5:
Chain
A/n: I'd like to thank Trav, my quality control advisor
I wonder where he's been?
It had been years since Bianca had seen her papa. It felt like it, anyways. She's not actually quite sure how long it's been, but she can tell things have changed.
A lot.
"How long were we there?" She asks, looking out the window of the car they were riding in.
The car alone looked like it was something pulled from the future. Sleek lines, polished black paint, and bright white lights, it was a far cry from the chunkier cars of her time. Not to mention all the wide assortment of lights that seemed to be everywhere.
Her papa furrowed his brow for a moment.
"About…50 years." He admitted slowly
Bianca's eyes went wide.
50 years
Gone
Wasted in that…place.
It sounds, at face value, insane. Unbelievable. The work of some stupid book. But…
She can't deny how different the world looks now.
Despite how unbelievable it is, something in the back of her mind can't truly deny it.
Her brother, thank the lord, was resting in the backseat. He fell asleep not five minutes after getting into the car. Taking advantage of this, Bianca spits out a string of Spanish curses.
"Language." Her papa chastises.
Bianca frowns, looking away. He may technically be her papa, but…he wasn't there. He's been gone for so long she doesn't feel like he has the right to say things like that, not when he wasn't the one who really raised her.
Unfortunately for her, her papa is more observant than she gives him credit for.
"Bianca…" He begins with a sigh.
"I'm sorry."
Her frown grew into a stubborn scowl. "Sorry doesn't bring mama back."
"I know." He nodded solemnly.
"Sorry doesn't make up for when you left us."
"I know."
"Sorry doesn't make up for throwing us in some weird funhouse of a hotel."
"I know."
Sparing a moment to glance at the girl, he continued with a heavy sigh, conveying more thoughts and feelings than it had any right to. "I know, Bianca, I know."
"I'm not trying to make excuses, but there have been things going on you couldn't even begin to imagine." He explained
"I think I have a guess." She shot back.
He almost snorted at that, but he caught the sharp look in her eye, the intelligent and bitter glint in her oh so familiar black iris.
"Oh?" He challenges instead.
Let's see where this goes he thinks.
"You're a wizard."
He blinks.
…huh
"Or something similar." She continues, waving a hand in dismissal.
At the questioning look in his eye, she continues.
"That hotel we were at was obviously weird. We spent 50 years there but we're not any older, and it certainly didn't feel like 50 years. Sure, it could have been some kind of sciency thing, but I doubt it." She explains.
"But that's just the hotel, you wouldn't have to be a wizard for that to be a thing. As for you, yourself, you've always felt…weird. Weird things happen around you, animals never like being near you, babies cry, a bunch of other tiny things. But that's just the little stuff."
"The bigger stuff is how you always just seemed to…appear…in the house. It always felt like you were just there. One time I think I saw you just…walk out of the shadows. Another time you brought mama a bunch of beautiful flowers in a vase."
"Ones that never seemed to actually die."
Her papa has the courtesy to at least look away at that.
"Especially when you seemingly pull them out of nowhere, vase and all."
He cursed under his breath.
He had hoped that she would have been too young at the time to really remember or appreciate that scene.
"Then there's mama." She sighed, leaning back in the chair. "She was struck by lightning."
"By themselves, not much to think about, but taken together…?"
She gave him a look filled with far more clarity and intent than rightly belonged to a 14-year-old girl. "She was killed by some rival wizard, wasn't she? They couldn't strike at you, so they got mama instead."
His telling silence was all she needed.
She looked away and hummed in thought.
"There's also a bunch of other stuff to consider." She said, raising another point. "One of the theories is that you're some kind of vampire or something."
He quirked a silent brow at that.
"You're unusually pale like you just never see the sun, but you don't look like the type to just huddle inside all the time. There's always something about you that feels…inhuman. No, beyond human. The way you just seem to appear and disappear usually when it's dark out, not to mention how unnaturally stealthy you are, are other signs." She rattled up, ticking off a finger for each one.
"Honestly, I really had my doubts until the hotel. Even that points to you being some kind of vampire-esque thing, maybe like a lord or something. You have actual flunkies and everywhere you go everyone just seems to act like you're the boss or something." She continued.
Then she snapped her fingers, figuring out another piece of the puzzle. "That's it!" She exclaims.
"You have this…presence that just hovers around you. It's like you're the sun, radiating awe-inspiring power. It's like it changes the world just by being there." She explained.
There was a moment of silence as she waited for his response.
"…vampire?" he finally said.
"Probably not." She shrugged, "I certainly haven't felt like sucking anyone's blood or anything."
"But," She began, "We are different. Me and Nico have your deathly pale skin, and we aren't affected by your presence as much as the others were. Sure, I can feel it, but I saw a couple in that hotel look like they were having heart attacks like your sheer existence almost snuffed them out."
"Plus there's the fact that I always feel safer in the shadows like it's….some kind of cool blanket keeping me safe." She added.
"So." She perked up,
"How warm am I?"
Her papa was silent for a tense minute. Bianca wasn't 100% sure she was right about what he was, but she was sure she was right about what he wasn't. Her papa was not just some normal human. He had power, he had a presence, and he had enemies.
Her mother getting killed before her eyes told her that much.
Finally, after sitting in a car filled with enough tension to play it like a piano, he opened his mouth.
"Damn."
"That's not a temperature." She shot back lazily
He responded with a half-hearted and unamused glare. She returned it with a cheeky grin oozing the pleasure of victory.
He sighed.
He thought he might have been doing a bit much of that these days.
He also had the sneaking suspicion that that wasn't going to stop anytime soon.
It was probably going to get worse.
"Well?" She challenged.
Yup.
Definitely worse.
"…Warm enough." He grudgingly admitted.
On the one hand, he was damn proud of his daughter for being this intelligent.
On the other, he would have preferred it if she didn't prove this to him by shattering his world view regarding his own children, and how much he thought he was getting by them.
He would have also have preferred it if she hadn't inherited his damn smirk of victory. It was easy to see, now, why it pissed people off so much.
Alright he told himself, think Hades, how are you going to explain this shit to her without her brain melting.
Or her hating you forever
There was another moment of silence as he mulled over what to actually say, and how to approach this. He considered strategy after strategy. Cunning and subtlety were some of the many tools in his trade, and yet this solution seemed to escape him.
Finally, he sighed once more and decided to with something old and reliable, if potentially volatile.
Blunt honesty. "I am Hades."
"And you, are a demigod."
In a particular bar of no particular note whatsoever in East Germany
"Tadaa"
The young woman seated at the table startled, not expecting the arrival. She wore a hooded leather jacket with a thick grey shirt button-up shirt underneath, black gloves, and jeans with hiking boots. She was young, in her early teens, with chocolate brown eyes and matching hair. Her eyes and fingers twitched about as if at any moment she expected the whole world to turn on her.
On the dark oak table, a man placed a certain hexagonal jeweled box with various carvings on it. The box was about the size and shape of a normal jewelry box, but the carvings held a strange, exotic, and cryptic air. As if they told a story in a language only the dead had left to speak.
"You ok?" The man questioned.
The man also had brown eyes and hair, but was in his mid-late 30's. He wore a brown long-coat over his white shirt, tan pants, and black boots. He stood with a lax and casual posture, at least, to the normal observer. Trained eyes noticed that whatever he did, one hand was always near his side, right within reaching distance of the gun proudly holstered on his belt. It spoke of a man confident in his abilities, but untrusting of the world around him.
The young woman scowled, glancing up at the man with sharp eyes, "How do you always get the jump on me?" She asked her voice carrying a clear accent of an Englishwoman.
"Lots of experience, sweetheart." The man responded with an American accent with bare hints of a southern drawl adding a hint of flavor to the otherwise plain accent.
The young woman simply grumbled, making the man grin all the more.
"Maybe one day you'll catch me." He remarks.
The woman sighs, before glancing at the box. "Was it hard to get?"
"Eh…" The man thinks.
Monsters shrieking in pain as round after round punctures their scaled hide. The scent of blood and golden age gunpowder filling the air.
"Not really." He shrugs.
"And you?"
She smirks herself, pulling out her own box. While the one in the man's hands had sapphire overtones, this one had ruby ones. "Tadaa" She mocks.
"Good deal." He nods respectfully.
She found herself surprisingly liking him and his company. He was undeniably skilled, cool under pressure, and actually respected her and her hard earned skills. Respect was a two-way street, and this man gave more than enough to have earned hers.
Granted, it was only their third time working together, but they had only met a year ago during that thing in Siberia. Apparently he'd stumbled onto the same thing, and unlike the others that had done so, he actually didn't want to kill her.
Surprisingly enough, he'd actually helped her get out of that frosted hell alive.
At first, they had just been vaguely in contact with each other. But then there was the second time they met, in which he, in no uncertain terms, saved her life. After that, it was clear he had far more experience than her, skill wise, but less experience in the subject material. After that, they had ended up coming together to work on a different big discovery.
Which lead them to where they were today, at this table in Germany.
"So what do they say?" he asked.
"Cayde, I know you think highly of my skills, but I can't just magically discern what everything means about them in an instant." She responds, exasperated.
"Yeah yeah." Cayde holds his hands up surrender, actually sitting down in the chair.
"But…" She begins.
"But?" he says, curiosity peaked,
"I can tell there's supposed to be a third box." She answers with an eager grin.
"Oh?"
"You see the markings here and here?" she says, gesturing to certain marks on the boxes.
The marks resembled a hexagon with a different mark in them and two lines on one side. The blue box held what looked like a wavy shape. The red one had what kind of looked like some kind of crack.
"Yes?"
"These marks refer to the elements, the waves being water, and the canyon being earth." She explained,
"The land and the sea?" Cayde guessed.
She nodded "Yes, and there's one last part to that, isn't there?"
"The sky." Cayde realized.
"Exactly." she smiled,
"The other evidence is the shape of the boxes themselves. They're hexagons, one of the few that can fit together in an interlocking pattern. Looking at the designs here." She began, arranging the boxes, "You can see that the carvings seem to flow into, or at the very least, allude to a third box."
"Huh." Cayde nodded appreciatively, "Good work."
The young woman preened at the compliment, feeling a swelling a pride.
"Thank you." She said graciously "I'll need time to look over these more to find some clues about where the third box is, and how they play into everything, with two of them it should be relatively easy to compare the two and build off that."
"Any idea what's at the end of this rainbow?" He asked, curious.
"Not entirely sure." She confessed.
"Something about…the power, no, blessing? Of the elements?" She said, scrutinizing the carvings.
"Really?" Cayde drawled. She could see the gears turning in his head as his mind became alight with the possibilities.
"Maybe." She shrugged, "It's a very ancient dialect, and it's going to take some time for me to actually parse together what it really says."
"For all I know it could be leading to a key to start the end of the world."
He blinked
"Lets…not do that."
"Yeah, that'd be bad." She agreed quickly, putting both boxes in her bag.
"Glad we can agree." He grinned, standing up, "Now how 'bout we get outta here?"
She blinks, "We?"
"Yes, we, as in the two of us head back to your place." He repeated, "Come on, I'll walk you home."
Her mind momentarily blanked out for a moment, before she scowled. "I can handle myself." She ground out, rising to her feet.
"Oh, I know, I know." He comforted her,
"I just want to keep you company, it's a dark and cold night out there. What kind of gentleman would I be if a let a young girl like yourself walk home alone." He said, turning up the charm while ambling over to her side.
All it managed to do was make her all the angrier, she thought he was different, she thought he was-
"There are three men with guns inside this room with an unusual amount of interest in us." He whispered in her ear as he snaked his arm around her shoulders, all sense of joviality and charm gone from his voice
Her eyes went wide. She resisted the urge to panic and whip her head around trying to find them. Instead she tried to use her peripheral vision to spot them. She managed to find two, but the third must have been outside her sightlines. Each one tried not to make their interest obvious, but they were clearly more muscle than subtle. The also happened to be packing heat.
Discrete, but not discrete enough.
The momentary gleam coming from the shadows of their jackets was enough to prove his point.
"And I noticed more suspicious individuals on my way here." He continued.
"Shit." She cursed under breath. She struggled not to put her hand on the handle of Roth's gun holstered under her coat.
"I don't have a solid fix on the number of guys, but, well, it ain't great." He confessed, walking slowly to the door. To everyone else, it looked as if two friends were just casually walking towards the door.
"If I had to guess, they're going to ambush us either when we step outside the door or when they think we've gone to sleep."
"But probably when we step outside the door." She grit her teeth.
"Oh come on, Lara." He joked, ruffling her long brown hair, "It'll be fine, ya little scamp."
She really couldn't understand how he could be so calm during times like this, when certain death for someone was only moments away.
But she appreciated it all the same.
"I'm not a scamp." She scowled, her heart rate falling back to normal levels.
"Psh, you're a baby." He scoffed.
"I'm 21."
"Exactly."
"You're insufferable."
"I thought I was charming."
With each word out of their mouths, Lara managed to look more and more calm, her excess nerves relaxing. With each step towards the door, however, her anticipation grew, her hands twitching at what she knew was going to happen.
"Well apparently you've been lied to all your life." She quipped with a flat glare.
"That stings, Lara, that stings." He said, clutching his heart in mock pain.
Her fingers wrap around the doorknob.
"You know what they say about the truth." She remarks with a ghost of a smirk.
She pulls the old wooden door open.
"I think it's all about…" He began
They walked through the opening
"…Perspective."
And they were gone.
200 meters away, in an empty alley, two figures suddenly appeared.
The brown haired girl fell to her knees, sucking in precious breath.
The man in a brown long coat, however, looked down at her with a faintly amused look.
"You gonna be ok down there?" He smirked
"Yeah," She coughed, "I'll be fine."
They had just teleported, something Lara already knew Cayde could do. Cayde certainly didn't open with being able to perform feats like that, but things ended up falling into place such that he used it to save their hide more than once from what should have been inevitable doom.
The first time had been quite the shock.
"WHAT THE BLOODY HELL WAS THAT!" She shrieked, standing over the small pool once known as "breakfast"
"Uh...what?" Cayde responded, trying to act as if nothing had happened.
"We were in the tunnel-then the rocks were falling-and the light-and then we're suddenly here!" She rambled in a series of half sentences, her mind racing.
"...I don't know what you're talking about."
Click
Suddenly Cayde found himself face to face with a barrel of a chrome-plated M1911, and more worryingly, the unamused girl standing behind it.
"Ok," Cayde hedged, trying not to piss her off, "Maybe something happened."
"Maybe."
She scowled
"We teleported." She ground out, "Or something similar enough that it makes no difference."
"How."
"Ah…" Cayde stalled, rubbing his chin.
"Magic?"
Lara stared, her eyes narrowing dangerously. Her aim didn't waiver an inch, her gun disturbingly steady.
It wouldn't really kill him, but that wasn't really the point.
"Magic?" She said skeptically.
"Yes." He nodded "Magic"
"And I!" He began theatrically.
"Am a Warlock." He bowed.
She blinked.
"A Warlock." She replied, nonplussed.
"Yep." He said, popping the p.
There was another tense moment.
Click
"Fine." She sighed, holstering her gun.
He blinked.
"Fine?"
"Mhm."
"So...you're just ok with me being a Warlock?" He asked, not quite believing how well this was going.
"No, I am not." She scowled. "I don't believe in magic."
"It doesn't really matter whether it was magic or not, the fact is you just moved the two of us through several meters and more than over a dozen tons of solid rock." She explained, "And while I might not believe in magic, I do believe in the unexplained, in the things that seem impossible."
"Last year, for example, I had to fight through a small army of undead ghost warriors to save my best friend from the god-queen that was trying to possess her."
"…" He stared
"I hate it when that happens"
"Still haven't gotten used to that." She groaned.
She doubted she ever would.
"If you took me up on that offer we could fix that plenty quickly." He pointed out.
"…no thanks." She replied.
"You teleporting me nonstop for several hours a day just to 'get it out of my system' doesn't exactly sound like my idea of a good time."
The sound of metal sliding against leather, before a tell-tale click bought her attention, causing her to look up.
"How about getting the guys that tried to ambush us?" The man smiled, holding up his a black and white revolver with a stylized ace of spades decorating it.
She frowned, "Do we have to kill them?"
He sighed
"I suppose we don't have to," He conceded.
"Then let's not." She frowned, "Unlike you, I don't have magic powers."
She still didn't know too much about the man. He said he was a warlock, but he rarely elaborated on the matter. Every time one of them mentioned it, however, it always looked like Cayde was trying to suppress a grin or a snicker, which he occasionally failed, like it the term was some kind of inside joke.
He had referred to two colleges on a few occasions, but she'd never met them. Didn't even know what they looked like. She just knew it was one man and one woman. Two people he respected, but not to the point of revering them.
Not if his rather crude jokes were any indication.
"It's not like a lack of magic has stopped you before." Cayde pointed out.
"Which brings me to my second point." She said, getting up.
"Which is?"
"That I'd prefer not to kill if I didn't have to."
"Ah." He nodded in sudden understanding
It was things like this that worried her, despite the man's jovial appearance.
Cayde, as far as she could tell, had something of a code. He didn't enjoy killing his fellow man, but he didn't seem to mind it. He wasn't callus enough for her to call him a murderous psychopath or anything, but that code wasn't terribly forgiving.
Simply put, if someone tried to kill him, he'd kill them back. No mercy, no hesitation, and no regret. If they surrendered, sure, he'd let them live. If they didn't try to kill him, he'd show mercy. But the instant they crossed that line, their lives became forfeit.
And that's not even what worried her most of all.
She shook these thoughts from her head, instead thinking about how to leave town without spilling more blood than was absolutely necessary.
"We can just go, right?" She asked
Cayde rolled his neck, thinking about it for a moment.
"…Yeah, I think we can manage that." He said.
"Then let's give the nonviolent option a shot." She enunciated.
"Ok." He shrugged.
"We can try it."
"I can understand that Athens was, as you put it, 'the birthplace of democracy'"
"So you admit that I'm right." She grinned.
"I didn't say that." He stopped her with a voice full of patience and a raised hand. "But western culture is far more than just democracy, the United States especially."
"I suppose, but you can't deny that ancient Greece is the grandfather of western culture." She Argued.
"I can admit that the west can trace several roots back to Greece." He conceded.
"But," He cautioned, wiping off the smirk growing on her face "To put Greece on such a pedestal would mean diminishing the efforts of the other civilizations."
You say that like they really matter. She thought, displeasure running through her.
She didn't say it, but the barest hint of a frown was all he needed.
"Carol, you're a history scholar, particularly of Greece," He pointed out, "You can't honestly tell me you've forgotten about the Persians."
She didn't sneer in naked disgust, barely, but she did curse out what she considered barbaric curs quite emphatically in her head.
"Then there are the Romans, the Germanic tribes and nations…" He continued. She grit her teeth, externally working her hardest to display an air of scholarly consideration and poise. Internally, however, was a much different story.
I ought to smite him for what he's said she seethed. Perhaps turn him into a seal. See how he likes that.
"Not to mention the impact that the Abrahamic religions caused."
Oh, he did not!
"Carol?" He snapped her out of her thoughts, giving her a look equal parts confusion and concern.
"I'm fine, Philip," She smiled, "You've made some…thought provoking points."
He frowned, but didn't say anything else. Despite her practically flawless external demeanor, she got the sense that Philip wasn't exactly buying it, for some reason.
"I'm not trying to dismiss the contributions of Greece to the world." He said, "It's just that focusing solely on their contributions while ignoring the others seems…shortsighted."
There was no malice in his voice as he spoke, no sense of real superiority. Instead, he treated her like she was a peer, someone on his level.
She hated that.
How dare he assume himself to be on my level, all the while spewing out these insults! She raged.
She wasn't terribly used to someone pointing these things out. Sure, some people had, in the past, brought such things to her attention when she was disguised as a human, mingling with the mortals. But whenever they did, they were always these scrawny, head in the clouds, weak-willed fools that made it easy for her to dismiss. Some, she admitted, were proper respectable academics.
But none of them had even a wit of true backbone when she truly applied pressure to them.
Except Philip.
Most damnably of all he didn't even seem to notice when she tried to subtly influence him.
Now, in an academic sense, this could be considered cheating. Using brute force to make the opposing side surrender rather than use her wit.
But nobody ever said Athena wasn't a sore loser.
"Are saying that I'm shortsighted?" She questioned, her smile growing a dangerous edge.
"…no," He shook his head, seemingly not even noticing the subtle show of aggression.
"I think you're passionate about your field." He said after a moment of thought.
"Passionate?" she said.
"Yes." He nodded.
"I'm not going to pretend to know everything about all the world cultures, even the complete history of the west." He admitted, "But it seems to me that solely focusing on Greece is a blatant show of favoritism."
Then, the man that angered her so had the audacity to chuckle in the presence of her rage. "I happen to have a few favorites of my own."
"Oh?" She challenged with a raised brow.
"The Roman, Chinese, and British Empires, in particular." He listed.
Her brow twitched at the mention of Rome, a bitter rival in her eyes.
"I see." She murmured, attempting to stare him down.
He didn't so much as fidget.
Finally, Athena, wearing the disguise of Carol Agathe, sighed.
She let out a heavy, weighted, and purging sigh that pulled out the hottest emotions burning inside her.
I can always smite him later she told herself.
Taking a breath, she actually forced herself to consider his words. While her pride wouldn't allow her to admit he was right, per se, she could admit that he might not be purposefully insulting her to her very face, or that he was spouting incoherent nonsense.
He was also making it so hard for her to outright hate him. He wasn't ranting about it, he wasn't in her face about it. Instead, he was laying some points down in a calm and concise manner. It was…respectable.
Still infuriating though.
"As much fun as this little discussion has been, perhaps we should get some lunch?" In truth, she wasn't hungry. Still, she needed some time to cool down.
Philip may have been infuriating, but he wasn't infuriating enough for her to throw him away just yet. Not with how interesting he was, anyways.
"…sure." He finally nodded.
Even a matter as simple as whether or not to get lunch seemed to be something that he had to actually think about.
Why do I do this to myself?
A/n:
And I'm back.
I'm going to try and make this a bi-weekly thing. In that I post every other week.
Try
I make no promises on that.
Anyway, stuff is beginning to happen, and I'm making a couple more changes.
First off, Bianca. To be honest, when I started this, I couldn't really remember her character. Mostly because she spent most of her time being dead.
Then Trav informed me of what she was like man, I am not sorry for what I've done.
No offense to her...but she was an idiot.
maximum offense.
You can argue the reasons why she did what she did, which more or less lead to abandoning her brother and killing herself(which you can also argue) but it's irrelevant.
Because it's not happening here.
Honestly, I've completely redone Bianca's character based on what I thought would be fun/make sense in my mind. Which means, again, canon can kindly go fuck itself. I'm going to be (hopefully) making her a better character than she was in canon because A: vastly different circumstances, and B: because I couldn't live with making her character act like it did in canon.
She'll certainly live longer.
That said, Bianca is not the central goal of this fic. She'll be a character that is important and does things, but the world does not revolve around her.
On another note, that box Cayde got last chap? Well that's a thing now.
A rather important thing.
Whoops?
Also he made a friend.
And to round it out, Zavala and Athena.
Zavala is bringing up problems I have. The Greek gods, and large parts of the PJO verse in general, tended to act like the Ancient Greeks were the hottest shit until sliced bread. Which is...a bit narrow-minded.
Sure, they did things.
They did lots of things.
They even did important things.
But they did not do all the things.
They also, most certainly, do not get to be able to claim sole ownership of the torch of the west or however the hell that works. The idea that they have such a large claim to the US (and the west in general) because Ancient Greece did things irks me something fierce.
So, yeah, Zavala's accidentally calling Athena out on some of her shit, in that she should be smart enough to realize the world doesn't revolve around ancient Greece. At the same time, Zavala's accidentally blundered into triggering the shit out of Athena. Like, he doesn't even know how mad she is, or why. Which, to be fair, makes sense. As far as he's concerned, he's just having an intellectual discussion with an intelligent woman. Not the goddess Athena.
Regardless, we'll see more about how this all turns out later a couple weeks. Bye for now.
