Shadows of Yesterday
CHAPTER EIGHT: IT'S AN UPHILL SLOPE
"Congratulations ta all of ya for successfully findin' your roommates and rooms...and it only took ya two fuckin' hours! Can ya hear my sarcasm?"
"I think they can, Duo."
"Oh, I know they can, Sam. Needless ta say, we have a lot of work ahead of us. Get some sleep, people...trainin' starts bright and early tomorrow mornin'."
WEEK ONE
CLANGCLANGCLANGCLANGCLANG.
"WAKE UP, WAKE UP, C'MON YA IDIOTS MOVE IT, TRAININ' STARTS IN AN HOUR! IF YA WANT BREAKFAST AND/OR A SHOWER I SUGGEST YA MOVE, OTHERWISE YA WON'T FIND THEM IN TIME! WE'VE GOT A LONG DAY AHEAD OF US, MOVE OR I'LL SIC DOROTHY ON YA! YA PEOPLE ARE LIKE MOLASSES, I SWEAR, 4:30 IN THE MORNING IS NOT THAT FUCKIN' EARLY! "
"...Duo."
"WHAT, SAM!"
"...why do you have a megaphone?"
"BECAUSE IT'S AWESOME! GOD FUCKIN' DAMNIT, MOVE, YA SLUGS!"
"Just because you're used to waking up on a dime at all hours of the day, Duo, doesn't mean they are. Cut them some slack!"
"We're trainin' them ta be soldiers, Sam, there's no room for slack. G got me up at 3:30 every mornin' when he was trainin' me, this is slack by comparison. 'Sides, this is on the scientist's orders. Ya think I'd really be gettin' them up at 4:30 otherwise? But nooo, 4:30 they said, so I'm havin' fun while doin' it."
"...you're going to make them all hate us."
"I think that was accomplished the moment Dorothy graced them with her presence."
"...true."
"Welcome all, ta the first day of trainin'! Six months from now ya will be awesome, top-notch black-ops agents with fantastic ninja skills, but right now, ya suck! INTRODUCIN', your first teacher of the day, so nicely gracin' us with her presence at 5:30 in the mornin'—Lucrezia Noin!"
"...Duo Maxwell, you are a dead man. What the hell was the idea of dumping a bucket of water on me?"
"Aww, c'mon Noin..."
"I have to agree, Duo."
"Thank you, Sam—"
"—I mean, you could have done so much better than a bucket of water. Bullhorn, yes?"
"Success! I have officially corrupted ya, Sam Tahary!"
"...we're doomed."
Sam sighed. It was only the first day, and already things were turning into a three ring circus. First Duo just had to go and wake up everyone—including him, Dorothy, Noin, Howard, and the Scientists—with a megaphone. A very, very loud megaphone.
What he and by extension, Duo, had forgotten however, was that while they may not be as well-trained as they would be six months from now, these people were still Preventer's agents. And you didn't become a Preventer's field agent by looking pretty or flattery to your superiors. It took some skill.
So once they all finally grasped the situation, the trainees were actually rather quick to rouse, shower—because Duo had forgotten that the showers were in fact connected to the dorms in the middle of his megaphone-induced rant—and made their way to the mess hall.
Sam had taken subtle pity on a few who were rather lost and pointed them in the right direction. No one ever said he had to be cruel to the trainees, after all.
A little kindness would probably go a long ways towards them not hating him and Duo at the end of the long, dark tunnel that would be these next six months.
A long, dark tunnel that was looking longer and darker with every second that passed...
Noin, at least, was a good sport and took everything in stride, starting the lesson with no more than a dark glare at Duo and Sam and a mouthed promise of 'camera' which made them pale before turning to address the recruits.
The two of them were rather proud that only a few of said recruits were yawning, and even those were doing it subtly.
"All right, as Duo here said, welcome to the first day of training. In case any of you have forgotten from yesterday, and from Duo introducing me two minutes ago, I'm Lucrezia Noin. Feel free to call me Noin, I will hurt you if you call me Lucrezia. Now, I've had several longggg talks with the Scientists on how to go about training you lot, because they're the ones that have experience with this sort of thing. We—and by extension, Duo and Sam—have all come to a general agreement."
And she grinned at them, that scary shark grin that Une was so fond of and Duo and Sam were beginning to see the awesomeness of.
"You will all be redoing basic training. From scratch, from the ground up, until we deem you ready for the big guns."
Cue uproar. No one is happy to be told that they will be completely redoing something from the beginning.
"OI, SHUT UP!" Duo and Sam yelled in tandem over the noise, which surprisingly brought it down to manageable levels once more.
"If you had bothered to listen further to Noin," Sam told them in a very condescending tone.
"Ya might have heard her explain exactly why ya will be going through basic trainin' again," Duo finished.
Noin flashed them a grateful smile. "Thanks, you two." She turned back to the recruits. "Now, as I was saying, you will be redoing basic Preventer's training. However, I mean basic in the loosest sense of the word. You all went through the six months of Preventer's basic training. I'm sure you all have fond memories of it. However,"
There was that shark smile again.
"That is nothing compared to what the next month you'll bring to you. Take all of that training, that training that took you sixth months to complete, multiply it by ten and compact it into one measly month. Are you getting the picture now?"
Indeed they were. Pale faces could be seen throughout the room, minds going through flashbacks and coming up with conclusions as to just what horrors they would be facing.
Duo stepped forward, wanting to get a word in before people started panicking again. "Ya have ta realize this, ya people are good already. Ya had ta, have ta have been for us ta have chosen you. As ordinary Preventer's agents ya were the best of the best, or had the potential ta be. But what we're askin' ya ta be is beyond that. We're askin' ya ta be the elite. The best of the best, the highest there is ta offer. And before ya can be trained ta be that, ya have ta have bodies that can take what it will take ta become that. Ya were, are, the best. Now we're goin' ta make ya better. And that involves startin' from scratch."
Sam stepped forward as well, hiding his awe at his friend's speech. If there was one thing he was jealous of, it was Duo's ability to come up with speeches on the spot, and speeches that worked.
Of course, the fool hadn't realized yet that he too had that ability, and quite a good amount of it too.
"If if makes you feel any better at all," he told the crowd of recruits, smiling slightly as he saw a few familiar faces in them, faces that he hadn't taken the time to acknowledge the day before. Namely Caleb Adara and Lily Tanner, whom he noted with a secretive smirk, were standing right next to each other. "You remember how we told you yesterday that we're going to be going through a large amount of this training with you? Well, this is one of those things. Duo and I will be suffering right along with you for the next month. Though," he finished musingly, glancing at the other standing beside him. "I'm not sure exactly how much Duo here will be suffering, per say."
He grinned. "Stud muffin, he is."
There was a moment of almost shocked dead silence, and then Sam found a braided man wrapped around his neck like a python, wailing about how his baby was all grown up and was using his own humor against him.
Sam, for his part, merely shifted his weight to the other foot and rolled his eyes.
"Why he calls me his baby I will never know," he told the recruits with a long-suffering look. "I'm three years older than you, you bastard!" he hissed at the still wailing man.
FLASH.
Both instantly stiffened, hearing Noin's maniacal laughter behind them.
"Noin," Sam said.
"We are not even goin' ta ask where ya keep those things anymore," Duo continued, finally disentangling himself from Sam's neck.
"We don't want to know," they chorused.
Noin giggled evilly as she tucked the camera back to wherever it came from. "No, boys, you don't. Now, while you are pondering the mysteries of where I hide a camera when I am wearing nothing more than sweatpants, a t-shirt, and sneakers, go join your recruits. It's time for this lesson to start."
They rolled their eyes and went over to stand with the large group of recruits, noting with small, pleased smiles that a small circle actually didn't clear itself around them.
Noin stood in front of them and smirked. "So, this is how it's going to go for the next month," she told all of them, and watched as everyone's attention immediately snapped to her.
"You will be here at five-thirty, every morning unless I say otherwise, and I will not say otherwise very often. For today I will be running you through everything you are expected to do upon arrival, but after today you are expected to do it on your own. That will include stretching, running, and basic exercises such as sit-ups, pull-ups, jumping-jacks, push-ups, etc. Then we'll go into whatever plan I have for the day. It depends on what I and the Scientists decide you need that day. Duo and Sam," here she smirked. "Have no pull whatsoever except for suggestions, which we don't necessarily have to take."
"After my class you'll report to whatever class you have next on the schedules that should have been in your dorms this morning. Yes, this month will be focused on basic training, but that doesn't mean we'll be completely ignoring everything else. Basic training isn't just physical, it's also weapons and tactics and stealth and everything else. This is everything you went through in basic training, intensified and condensed. A final note before we start, your schedules are subject to change at any time depending on what we judge your levels to be. We won't expect you to attend entire classes on subjects you've mastered; we'll just expect you to keep those skills sharp. Any questions?"
Surprisingly, no one had any questions. Though she had to glare at Duo when it looked like he might raise his hand just for fun.
"Right, then let's get started! First off, stretching...we don't want you to hurt yourselves, you know..."
"At least not that badly."
"Shut up, Duo."
"Shuttin' up."
The first week was hell. There was absolutely no other way to describe it.
It was a unanimous decision by all of the teachers—including Duo and Sam—at the end of day one that the first week would be spent on nothing but physical prowess before they moved on to anything else.
Sam had fond memories of his original Preventer's training, because even a desk jockey needed to know what he was doing, but they were a pale shadow compared to this.
He decided that Noin was evil incarnated, the devil's right-hand woman, the Queen of the Bitches, before day two was even out.
Even Duo had to agree with him. Despite being in top condition from fighting in two wars—and he had at least tried to stay in shape afterwards—it had been a long time since he'd had any actual, regimented training.
So he was better than most; that didn't mean he wasn't cursing Noin and all of her ancestors by the end of day three.
Let's not even go into how the rest of the recruits were feeling. Suffice to say—their days went like this.
Wake up. Shower. Eat. Train. Train. Train. Eat. Train. Train. Train. Eat. Train. Sleep.
Rinse and repeat.
And don't forget the fact that along with Noin, they also had to go to training with Dorothy, Howard, and the Scientists.
Of which Howard was only the slightest bit forgiving, and even then not that much.
...and then there was Dorothy.
There was really nothing to be said about Dorothy. Why could you say about a woman who was absolutely fucking nuts?
(In the oh-so-articulate words of Duo and Sam and 99% of the recruits after day two, their first lesson with the psycho blonde.)
However, what scared them even more was that other 1%—the two recruits who got along absolutely swimmingly with Dorothy.
Duo and Sam weren't even quite sure what their names were—hey, it's hard to remember fifty some people when you only met them for ten, fifteen minutes tops—and had instead stuck them with the moniker 'Dorothy's Minions,' which they—and by extension, Dorothy—took a little too well for their liking.
Everyone in the headquarters had learned to steer well clear of the Interrogation chambers when those three locked themselves inside and things started exploding and maniacal laughter started floating out, lest they be captured by the Three Psychos and used as test subjects.
The first week passed in a haze of exercise, pain, and more reality checks on just how limited their bodies really were than anyone cared to count. Sleep was coveted—those that hadn't before very quickly learned how to forcibly fall asleep. Five spare minutes during the day was a miracle—most meals featured several people asleep at the tables, not even bothering to eat.
That lasted until day four, when they were all given a resounding tongue lashing by the Scientists on the importance of keeping their bodies rested (kind of impossible) and well-fed, or they would be feeling even more pain in very short order.
However, as the week moved into its later days, the recruits slowly but surely began to feel the difference it was making.
It wasn't very much—they had only been at it for a week. But sore muscles that had been gained at the
beginning of the week slowly began to heal, deep exhaustion became routine, and they found themselves able to go just a little bit farther each day in their training.
Ergo—instead of gasping in a death rattle by the end of 15 out of 30 laps, they managed to make it to maybe 16 or 17 before asphyxia set in.
Except for Duo. He had taken one look at Noin the first day, with G standing right behind her, grinning a really, really creepy grin—how can an old man grinning not be creepy?—and taken off down the track like a bat out of hell.
"You have 10 minutes, 02!" G called after him, cackling gleefully.
He was back in 9, panting and glaring for all he was worth.
"You've gotten slower, 02," was G's only comment, said so completely blasé that Sam was there a split second later, holding his friend back from murdering the mushroom-headed geezer.
"Arrghh! You—you—lemme go, Sam, I'm gonna kill the geezer! Damnit, G, when I get through with ya there will be nothing left, ya hear me! Not even your stupid mushroom hair! FUCKIN' HELL, TAHARY, LET ME GO!"
Sam sighed heavily and looked at Noin with a long suffering look as he struggled to contain the braided man who was like a snake. "Help me," he mouthed.
Damn bitch laughed at him. And took a picture. Where the hell was she keeping that thing?
He seriously considered letting Duo go, but then the insults coming out of his mouth got decidedly more...creative.
Sam paled and held on tighter.
He didn't know if that was possible and didn't want to know if it was possible.
He just didn't want Duo be arrested for violating several articles of the Geneva convention. Possibly all of them.
It was going to be a longggggg six months.
MONTH ONE
All good things and even bad things come to an end eventually and the base woke come Monday morning to realize that the Week from Hell was finally over—
—and the Month from Hell was only just beginning.
Having made it through the first week, the recruits finally discovered just what had had Duo cackling all week—discovered that the Scientists and Noin had in fact, been going easy on them.
"Keep running!" Noin yelled at them as she breezed by on the track, turning around to run backwards and grin smugly at them all. "You don't get to go to lunch until you finish all fifty laps!"
A loud groan rose from the group of running—not jogging, running—recruits, but they didn't pick up their pace. Noin raised an eyebrow.
"Did I mention that the pudding is in limited supply today?" she called out.
...sadly, this was indeed the motivation needed to get them to run faster.
"It's puddin'," Duo said by way of explanation later while eating some of the aforementioned substance in the division cafeteria—chocolate—as though that explained everything.
Funnily enough, it almost did.
"Anndddd...kick! Punch! Strike! Dodge! Sweep! Chop! Kick! Drop! Sweep! Up! Punch! HOLD!"
The group froze as Master O barked out his last order, hardly daring to breath—let alone move—as the intimidating man began moving among the rows of recruits, correcting stance, form, and technique.
"Hold your arm higher, it will allow you more downward force with your next move—you there, feet farther apart, otherwise your opponent will easily overbalance you..."
They had quickly discovered that the only time Master O was even remotely talkative was when speaking of martial arts. Usually to correct them.
He suddenly noticed something rather odd.
"You!" he barked at one of the recruits, noticing the flinch and making a mental note to tell the other Scientists they needed to work on reaction to loud noises. "Relax. What is your name?"
The man breathed as sigh of relief as he relaxed out of the uncomfortable pose, though he still stood straight. "Caleb Adara, Master O."
On the other side of the room, Duo perked up and subtly twisted his head, trying to see over the heads of the other recruits to the one he remembered very clearly from the interviews and that Master O had obviously taken an interest in.
"Have you had previous instruction in hand-to-hand combat, outside of Preventer's training?"
Caleb nodded. "I've been in lessons since I was young, sir, in multiple disciplines. I have a black belt in judo and taekwondo, and a third degree black belt in karate, along with first-hand experience in several forms of street fighting.
On the other side of the room, Duo's—and Sam's—jaw dropped. Duo tried furiously to remember Caleb's file, trying to remember if there was anything mentioned about his skill in martial arts.
Now that he thought about it, hadn't there been a mention near the end of the file? Just a blurb, but still there?
Damn had this man been underestimated. Duo made a mental note not to do it again.
Master O looked at Caleb thoughtfully. "Continue," he said finally. "But I would like to see you spar against 02 later."
(It was commonly accepted now that the Scientists did not call Duo anything but 02.)
Caleb nodded, slightly relieved. He thought he was going to be yelled at..."Yes sir," he replied, and fell easily back into position.
O stepped back. "Again!" he called out. "Anddd...kick! Strike! Punch..."
"Duo Maxwell! Samuel Tahary! The point is to improve your aim by hitting the goddamn targets with the paintball guns, NOT EACH OTHER. What if those were real guns, which thankfully, we decided not to trust you with?"
The two men froze, expressions on their faces like that of a child caught with their hand in the cookie jar. The rest of the small class snickered at them, without remorse.
Due to the need to get through everything in a month, the group of fifty odd people had been split into 'classes' of approximately ten, which rotated through the different teachers as the day wore on for training in the different skills.
Despite best efforts to separate them, Sam and Duo had still managed to end up in the same group and refused not to be in the same group.
Thus the current predicament in their guns and ammunitions training, in which Noin had also taken charge. It had been decided to use paintball guns in order to more accurately judge their aiming skills, as in real life combat they wouldn't be aiming for single stationary targets. They'd be aiming at multiple targets, always changing and shifting, and it would be nearly impossible to tell whose bullet caused the fatal blow.
And so, paintball guns. Which all of the recruits, not just Sam and Duo, were having farrrr too much fun with.
Well, actually, Sam was glaring at Noin rather fierce and annoyed-like.
"Don't. Call. Me. That!" he hissed, and advanced slowly on the rather nervous looking woman, paintball gun in hand.
At least, until Duo put a hand on his shoulder and whispered something in his ear. His eyes widened, and then he smirked.
Before anyone could blink, Sam had whirled around and shot every single one of the moving targets, perfect kill-shot for each.
He turned back around slowly, and resisted the urge to blow invisible smoke from the barrel of the gun. "I think I pass," he growled, and stalked out of the room.
The sudden dead silence was broken by Duo's quiet chuckling.
"Did I mention that Sam hates bein' called by his full name? And that's he's an inhumanly good shot for bein' a desk jockey?"
"I think you failed to mention that," Noin replied faintly, and made a mental note—along with the other nine who were there—to not piss off Sam.
Ergo—never call him Samuel. Ever.
As Duo discovered the one time he did, Sam Tahary has a sadistic revenge streak a mile wide. Several miles wide.
...but that's a story for another time.
The recruits were just disappointed they didn't get to see their commanding officers go at each other with paintball guns.
The base was dark and deathly silent. But not quite dead...shadowed figures snuck through the darkened hallways, or at least tried to sneak.
A loud cackle echoed through the hallways and caused a collective flinch, especially from those closest to it.
Duo Maxwell, master of stealth and scaring the bejeezus out of anyone unfortunate enough to cross his path, was on the move somewhere in their sector.
They were doomed, but they were still going to try.
In the same sector, Sam rolled his eyes as he slid silently along a wall, cocking an ear for any suspicious movement.
"Overdramatic much, Duo?" he murmured.
"Not when it works," a dark voice said directly behind him, and he leapt a mile high, a strangled yelp emerging from his throat—strangled because Duo had clapped his hand over his mouth.
"Oi, Tahary, shut up! This is a stealth exercise in case you've forgotten, ya dope!"
Sam nodded his assent and the hand was removed from his mouth. "How's it going?" he asked, barely audible.
He caught a glimpse of Duo's Cheshire grin in the darkness, white against the shadows. "Pretty well, actually. I think most of them have gotten used ta my random cacklin'. And some of them have some pretty decent skills, after all. The others...well they'll get there, eventually. You're not half-bad yourself, Tahary, actually. Might not have seen ya if not for your little insult ta my awesomeness back there. "
Sam rolled his eyes again. "I'd like to think so, considering how much G's been drilling this crap into our heads for the last week. If I had a nickel for every time he told me, 'don't even breathe, Tahary!' I'd be a very rich dead man."
"Don't know about the rich part, but you certainly got the 'dead' part right," a voice with a soft southern accent drawled behind them, and both men stiffened as they felt the touch of knives to their necks.
"So do we get bonus points for finding and successfully sneaking up on the Commanders themselves?" asked another voice, this from the one currently holding Duo hostage.
Duo frowned; the second voice sounded nearly the same as the first, only it was distinctly...feminine.
"Sophie and Steven McDonald, is that you two?" he asked, referring to the pair of fraternal twins that he and Sam had asked to join upon first sight of the devilish smirk the two seemed to wear on default.
(Of course they performed a proper interview, just to make sure the two didn't have a legitimate reason for that smirk...like a secret cache of dead bodies...)
"One and only, Boss," Steven replied from behind Sam. "Well, two and only, but you get the gist. So, bonus points, no?"
Duo sighed. "Yeah, yeah, bonus points, ya rascals! Now can ya please remove the knives from our jugulars?"
"Sure thing, Boss!" Sophia chirped cheerfully, and Sam breathed a sigh of relief as the blade vanished from his neck, hearing Duo do the same.
Devil twins and knives: NOT a good combination.
"How'd you two sneak up on us anyways? Tahary there I can understand, but—"
"Oi! I take offense to that!" Sam yelped.
"Oh, stuff it, Sam. Ya know it's true."
"Well, Boss, it might have something to do with the fact that, you know, you two were gossiping like a couple of school girls with no regard for your surroundings."
"Very quiet school girls, of course, but to these well trained ears..." Sophia finished.
Duo rolled his eyes. "Haha, very funny ya two. And what did we tell ya about callin' us boss?"
"That you love it and that we should even go farther by calling you "your holy omnipotence of awesomeness?"
Sam and Duo blinked. "As much as that would be rather cool," Sam told him exasperatedly. "It would be kind of a mouthful in battle...and we told you not to call us boss."
"Sure thing, Boss," Sophia quipped.
Duo slapped a palm to his face. "I give up," he muttered. "Whatever, you two, you've got your bonus points and your jollies, now scat. We're still in the middle of a stealth exercise."
"Scatting!" they chorused, and vanished into the shadows, mischievous chuckles echoing behind them.
"Those two are going to be the death of us," Sam whispered, poking his head around the corner to make sure no one else was nearby.
"That they are. Now let's go, Tahary, we've got us some nooblets ta find and face ta save."
"Now, there really is no proper way to interrogate people so long as you get the information you're looking for...of course, I am rather partial to the violent course of action, including—"
"Dorothy Catalonia, you teach a single one of them—besides your minions because I know they're already too far gone to save from your clutches—how to use torture, I will personally see to it that your head is displayed on a pike above Preventer's HQ for all to see, and I will feel no remorse whatsoever."
"...hypocrisy doesn't suit you, Mr. Maxwell."
"Catalonia, I am deadly serious. I am perfectly willing to brave your Chamber of Terror to find an axe."
"Mr. Taharrryyyy..."
"Switzerland. But I agree."
"...can I at least teach them how to properly threaten torture?"
"..."
The end of the first month was marked by very little. An increase in training, more variety in classes, higher expectations, another red x on the mental—and some non-mental—calendars of the recruits, a slight decrease in the number of idiocy-related injuries Sally was forced to treat and...the loss of their first recruit.
Duo and Sam were passing one of the rare 'free hours'—because they all needed free time else they would go insane and then where would the division be?—in what they had deemed 'their office'—in reality a box-like room that they put two desks and the swivel chairs from Conference Room 1-C—just chatting about anything and everything, when there was a knock on the door.
"Come in!" Duo called, twirling animatedly in the swivel chair to face the door.
The knob turned and the door opened, revealing a nervous looking young man with brown hair and brown eyes, who twisted the hem of his shirt in his hands as he stepped into the room.
Duo frowned. He remembered this man, but couldn't quite put a name to the face...
"Robert Hewitt?" Sam asked, and the light bulb went on over Duo's head. That was his name!
"Yes, sir," the now-named Robert mumbled, and that frown spread to Sam's face.
"Sit down, Robert," Sam told him gently. "We're really not going to bite. Use one of the awesome swivel chairs that we filched just for this purpose."
Robert chuckled as he sat down, though the sound was quiet and weak.
"So what can we do for ya, Robert?' Duo asked after the man had settled into the chair. "This obviously isn't a social call, the way you're actin'."
"No," Robert agreed, quietly, staring at his lap. "No, it's not...Commander Maxwell, Commander Tahary..."
"Duo and Sam," Sam corrected him. "Like we said during your interview, Robert." He was beginning to get a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach.
Robert shook his head. "Familiarity...no, sirs. I highly doubt you'll want my familiarity...not after this."
Duo was sensing it too, now. "And what exactly is 'this,' Robert?" he asked softly.
"I...I don't think I can do this anymore," Robert said, after a pause. "I...just don't think I'm cut out for this, after all."
Sam and Duo exchanged a glance.
"We wouldn't have chosen you if you didn't think you were cut out for this, Robert," Duo told him, completely serious. "And you've done well in the last month...even better than we expected most of you to do. Why do you think you can't do this?"
Robert shook his head again. "It's not that I can't do this...I'm pretty sure that if I were to stick it out these six months, I'd do fine, maybe even be one of the better agents, and I'd probably be assigned to a team and spend the rest of my career performing high-risk, high-paying missions. But...after this month, going through what we've been through, listening to the Scientists and Miss Noin and especially you, Commander Maxwell, the few stories you've told us about the war and what it was like, being this kind of agent...I don't think that's what I want for my life."
"Did we scare you off?" Sam asked.
"No, of course not...just made me realize what I was already thinking somewhere in the back of my mind. My job as a preventer's agent before...it may not have been the highest paying, or the most exciting, I might not have gotten to do much...but I was happy being able to do what I was able to do. I don't want to be elite...I just want to be normal. As normal as a Preventer's agent can be."
Sam glanced at Duo again. They had discussed the possibility...but they honestly weren't sure what they were supposed to do in this situation.
Duo paused for a long moment, looking thoughtful. "...all right," he said finally. "I...I understand where you're coming from, Robert. We'll release you from your duties as a member of the division and inform Une that she's to give you your former position back, if not a higher one due to your recompletion of the Preventer's training at an even higher level."
"Thank you for giving us a chance," Sam told him, mentally nodding at what Duo had told the man. It made sense.
Robert nodded gratefully at them. "Of course. And thank you, sirs, for everything. Giving me a chance, accepting my decision...and giving me the training you did. I'll be able to do what I want to do that much better because of it. I wish you and the rest of the division the best of luck."
"Best of luck to you as well, Robert," Duo told him. "Wherever you decide to go and whatever you decide to do with your life."
"I'll be out within the hour, sirs," Robert told them, standing. "Again, thank you for everything."
He held his hand out, and both Sam and Duo shook it firmly. After giving them one sharp nod, Rlobert turned to leave. However, just before he went out the door, Duo called after him.
"Robert?"
Robert turned. "Yes, sir?" he asked.
"Remember this, if nothing else—
"—this division doesn't exist," Sam finished.
Robert grinned and gave them both a sharp salute. "What division, sirs?" he asked, and vanished out the door.
Duo sighed and leaned back in his chair, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his palms. "Crazy month," he muttered.
"The craziest," Sam agreed, also flopping back to stare at the ceiling.
"...we gotta tell Noin and the others, ya know."
"Later."
"...yeah...crazy month."
"Agreed."
"...only five more to go."
"Don't remind me."
MONTH TWO
A high pitched shrieking ringing woke the entirety of the base on day three of the second month and made Lily Tanner shriek and nearly bash her brains out on the white porcelain floor of the showers.
After a moment of hopeless confusion, she fell easily into what she termed 'battle mode' from years of experience in the wars. Whether this was a drill or not—which it likely was—something was up.
She toweled off in less than twenty seconds and was dressed in t-shirt and sweats in another twenty. She threw her soaking hair into a ponytail as she ran into her dorm, where her other four roommates were running around mostly like headless chickens.
"Oi!" she barked, mentally wincing. Oh yeah—full battle mode. Damn she thought she had conquered that after the last time she scared her flighty husband half to death. Thankfully, though, they listened.
"Get dressed and grab your guns," she told them, grabbing her own as she did and making sure it was loaded. After a couple of weeks of target practice, most of the recruits had been trusted—or retrusted, in a lot of their cases—to use guns and not shoot someone because they snuck up on them or the like. She had never been more thankful the day she was allowed to pick hers up again.
Recognizing that Lily was the calmest of them and least likely to get them killed if this was real, the two men and two women that made up her dorm room quickly complied.
(No one there was particularly modest anymore, after a few...exercises that the Scientists had made them perform, citing that they couldn't be halfway across the base from their team if something happened.)
"What do you think is happening?" Sasha Trafalger whispered as she slid into place beside Lily at the door.
"Probably some sort of drill," Lily whispered back, gesturing sharply at the other three to hurry up even as she cracked the door and glance up and down the hallway, checking for threats. "Duo and Sam seem like the type to plan something like this without warning...and even if they didn't, Noin and the Scientists probably would. Even so, we should treat this like it's real...on the small off-chance that it is, though I highly doubt it considering no one knows we exist and we're currently three stories beneath the Preventer's HQ. Are you three ready yet?" she snapped quietly at the others.
"Yes," Garrett Hartley hissed as he too joined them, along with Nick Stonekey and Sophia McDonald.
"Let's go," Lily whispered and gestured for them to move out into the hallway. "Sophia, you're best at stealth, scout ahead. Garrett, take the rear; Nick and Sasha, flank on the sides. Let's move towards the main atrium, that's probably our best bet."
They all moved to comply without a word; sometimes, the best form of assent is silent obedience.
Lily was hyperaware, head snapping to every sound, as they began to slowly weave their way through the maze of hallways towards the atrium.
They were maybe halfway there when Lily saw Sophia's hand snap up straight up ahead, telling them to stop. A moment later, she knew why; she could hear voices.
Motioning for Garrett, Nick, and Sasha to stay where they were she moved up to join Sophia, listening to the whispers they could hear around the next corner.
"...hear...anything?"
"...no...mouse..."
"...drill? cruel...punishment..."
"need it...stealth..."
"keep going..."
Lily noticed Sophia's eyes widen out of the corner of her own, and turned to her to mouth, Who?
My twin! Sophia mouthed back, and Lily's eyes widened too before she gestured the woman forward.
"Steven!" Sophia hissed, poking her head around the corner. "Steven! Is that you?"
"Sophia?"
"Yes, you dolt! Is your team with you?"
"Yeah, all of them."
"Bring them all around here, my team's here too!"
Lily turned and motioned for the other three to join them, and a few moments later there were ten recruits in the hall, all trying to figure out what was going on while being as quiet as possible.
"Think it's a drill?" Steven asked Lily.
"Most likely, but we're not taking chances; we were heading for the atrium, what about you?"
"Same, it seemed most likely. Join forces?"
Lily briefly weighed the possible consequences of having too many people together at once before nodding. "Sure, it may increase our chances of being found but it also increases our chances of finding any finders before they find us. Who do you have?"
Steven glanced back towards where the rest of their groups were quietly conversing, sharing strategy. "Caleb Adara, Sara Reed, and Haley Beckett; we had Robert Hewitt but..."
"Ah," Lily made a small noise of agreement; Duo and Sam had announced at one of the meals earlier that week Robert Hewitt's decision to leave. No explanation had been given, and no one asked; they all knew that black-ops just wasn't for everyone.
"He hasn't been replaced, so we're just dealing as four people. Makes it a bit easier to sneak, actually, but easier to be snuck up on...the guy was a whiz at stealth."
"All right," she replied. "Well, we should probably keep moving, if this is a drill they're bound to have people prowling; it's best to stay on the move."
"Right," he whispered back, then a bit louder to the joined groups. "All right, everyone, we're going: same standard formation, just double up. Point, rear, flank—we have to keep moving..."
They organized quickly and began the trek towards the atrium once more. Lily jumped when Steven poked her shoulder a couple of hallways later, fixing him with an annoyed look.
What? her gaze seemed to ask. He had the decency to look sheepish, before he gestured questioningly at her hair—more specifically, at the fact that it was still dripping wet.
She rolled her eyes, before miming the act of sleeping, slicing a hand across her throat to indicate that she couldn't, and then fluttering her fingers in the air like rain to show that she had taken a shower. He nodded understanding and turned back to scanning the halls.
Unfortunately, in the dark, the base was even more like a maze than it was during the day, meaning that Lily had absolutely no idea where they were after a couple more hallways, only that they were heading in a vaguely central direction.
"Any idea where we are?" she breathed to Steven who was walking beside her, and leveled a glare at him when he smothered a snicker.
"Sorry," he breathed back. "Um, I do believe that if we go right next intersection and then take two lefts, we'll be in the atrium."
"Thanks," she muttered, and then went back to scanning the darkened hallways and rather pointedly ignoring him.
Sophia and Caleb, the two point scouts, were the first to reach the ledge that overlooked the atrium. (They were on the second floor.)
"Sophia, do you two see anything?" Lily called softly, the rest of the group waiting with bated breath as the two figures glances up and down and sideways and peered over the railing to the floor below.
Lily saw Sophia gesture for her to come forward and snuck out of the hallway to stand beside her at the railing.
"Down there," Sophia murmured, and Lily let a wide, scary grin spread across her face, because down below—
"I spy with my little eye," she sang softly. "Two commanders, one psycho, one sadist trainer, and legasp, no insane Scientists. We're in luck."
Gesturing the rest of the two groups forward, she murmured the plan to them. "Steven, take your group and sneak around the far staircase, you have fewer people so you have a better chance of getting there unheard and unseen. We'll take the near staircase, everyone try to get as close as possible; it looks like they're keeping a lookout so it's highly unlikely we'll be able to sneak up on them. Got it?"
Everyone nodded and they split, the two groups slinking off to their respective staircases.
Lily led the charge—er, creep—down the nearest staircase crouched low to avoid being seen over the railing, poking her head up every now and then to make sure they hadn't been seen.
They miraculously made it to the main floor unseen, but now came the problem of the fifteen feet of empty, open space between the stairs and the common area in the center.
"The shortest distance between two points is a straight line," she murmured, and, catching the eye of Steven across the atrium, also at the bottom of the staircase, gestured for all of them to move forward—
—wait, weren't there four people in the center only a minute earlier?
"Boo."
And then—"Shit, woman!"
Duo stood absolutely still and wide-eyed as he found a gun pointed at his forehead, courtesy of one Lily Tanner. A shriek echoed across the atrium as Sam completed his spooking of Steven's team, though much more successfully than Duo.
Lily's eyes widened, and she let her gun lower a fraction—only to find a gun pointed at her head as well. Then the rest of her team got their act together and aimed their guns at Duo—only to find themselves at gunpoint courtesy of Noin. On the opposite side of the room, the same took place with Sam and Dorothy, though Sam was eyeing the fork-browed woman with the suspicion that she actually would shoot the recruits.
Duo grinned brightly. "Ah, nothin' says 'black-ops recruits in trainin'' like a good old Mexican standoff, don't ya think? Congrats, people, your two teams are the only teams ta pass on the merit of the fact that ya are the only ones who have thus far made it here."
"The rest are apparently in the middle of being psychologically tormented by our ever-loveable Scientists, who knew they had such large sadistic streaks?" Sam called from the across the room.
"I did," Duo called back. "All right, guns away people, otherwise someone is actually goin' ta shoot someone in the head by accident."
Lily rolled her eyes and holstered her gun. "Don't pull crap like that with me, Commander Maxwell," she replied, sweet as an angel. "Or else I'll put a bullet in a much more unpleasant place than your head. Hair trigger, my dear sir—hair trigger."
"You're tellin' me," Duo replied, rolling his eyes right back. "Seriously, though, congrats ta all of ya, and thank ya, actually; this proves that we're doin' somethin' right."
"How did you get behind us, anyways?" Garrett asked curiously, even as the two groups converged in the middle of the room—Dorothy being given a wide berth, as she still looked like she harbored some intent to shoot them all quite gleefully.
Duo grinned maniacally. "Trade secret, man...that you'll learn in time. They didn't call me Shinigami for nothin' durin' the war, ya know. So, sit, sit, listen ta your fellow comrades be tormented while ya revel in the knowledge that ya are just that good."
"...or are we just that bad?" Sam asked, pondering, as they sat and began to snicker at the...interesting conversations coming through the radios.
"Tahary?"
"Yes, Duo?"
"Go stuff yourself in a toilet or somethin'."
"...I'll add it to my to-do list."
After the spectacular failure of a drill, stealth training was increased ten-fold and the recruits were warned that drills like that would keep happening, and that they would be every night if there wasn't improvement.
Suffice to say, there was improvement. Rapid improvement. Other than stealth training and more teamwork sessions, there was also an interesting few hours spent learning how to get in and out of full combat uniform in under thirty seconds—because if they could do that, any other outfit would be a piece of cake.
After another couple of drills, the vast majority of the teams were making it at least as far as the atrium (or whatever destination was assigned) and Duo, Sam and the others couldn't really fault them for not making it farther than that, because they had really grown to expect the arrival of the teams and when you have about fifty people trying to sneak up on the same place, it becomes...difficult.
However, the most exciting moment so far had come when Duo had finally snuck surface-side to break into Une's office and find the plans for their base, in hopes of finally finding a goddamned map.
He found a map. But even better than a map, he finally discovered the purpose of that strange metal ring in the middle of the main atrium. He had simply stared at the document in his hands, a gob smacked expression on his face, before letting out a whoop—uncaring that it would alert anyone on the floor to his presence—and literally sprinting for the elevators that would take him back to the base.
He could barely hold still as he waited for the elevator to descend the several stories beneath Preventer's HQ—unaware that his whoop had caught the attention of a small group of people that had been heading towards Une's office...
The doors opened and he practically tumbled into the atrium. "You!" he barked at a recruit who just happened to be passing through the room. "Find Tahary, Noin, Catalonia, and the Scientists—tell them ta get here now!"
"Yes sir!" the wide-eyed woman replied, and darted out one of the doors, presumably in the direction of whatever class she had been heading back to that would hold all the people that Duo was looking for.
Duo, meanwhile, stood in front of the metal ring with a gleeful grin on his face. "Oh the fun we shall have with this..." he muttered, rubbing his hands together like a mad scientist. "Now...how do I work this thing?"
Ten minutes later, when Sam and the others arrived, they found an exceedingly hyper Duo bouncing on the balls of his feet, standing in front of them metal ring and grinning like a fool.
"Duo Maxwell, what insanity have you perpetrated now?" Noin asked exasperatedly. "We were all—except the Scientists, no clue what they were doing—in the middle of Howards lesson on Mobile Suit technology and repairs to mechanical systems."
Duo rolled his eyes. "I'm so terribly sorry for tearin' ya away from such a rivetin' lecture, but I thought ya should know that not only did I find a fuckin' map for this base, finally, I have finally discovered the purpose of this ring-thing here!"
"Really?" Sam asked, curious, and actually quite relieved to be taken away from Howard's lecture. The man obviously knew what he was doing, but he seemed to forget that 99% of the rest of them had no clue what he was talking about. Sam wasn't even quite sure of the purpose of his lessons, seeing as Mobile Suits were at that point in time, illegal. "What is it, then?"
"Yes, 02, please enlighten us as to why you are acting more like a buffoon than usual," G said sarcastically.
Duo rolled his eyes. "Hold your horses, I'm gettin' there. I present ta ya..."
He leaned down and pressed a button on the side of the ring that none of them had noticed before.
"A hologram projector," he said proudly, and they all watched with wide eyes as pixilated light began to swirl above the ring before coalescing into a three-dimensional image of the Earth.
"What on Earth..." Dorothy murmured.
"It's more advanced than any hologram technology I've seen," Duo told them. "There's some sort of magnetic field, allowing manipulation of the image."
He reached out to demonstrate, and they all watched as the Earth spun and rotated and zoomed in and out beneath Duo's 'touch.'
"Imagine the possibilities," J said, stepping forward to examine the image and poke at it with his claw. "This would allow for tracking of targets, of our own agents on missions, real time tracking of any situations we need to keep our eyes on...this is a huge asset."
"Way ta state the obvious, J," Duo replied, rolling his eyes. "For now, of course, we don't really have a use for it. But that's a good thing, because we can spend the next five months figurin' out just what makes this thing tick and just how much we can do with it, and then we'll be able ta use it properly when this division finally goes live."
"Wicked," Sam breathed, staring at the floating image. Then another thought occurred to him. "Hey, Duo, you said you found a map, right?"
"Yeah?"
"Couldn't we figure out a way to program that into this?"
"Probably," Duo replied, turning evaluative eyes on the hologram.
"Well, as interesting as this is, I do believe we should be heading back to Howard's lecture," Noin said, sighing audibly. "Duo, you already know everything he's talking about, stay here with Sam and start tinkering with that projector, you and I can teach Sam about Mobile Doll systems and stuff later, in terms that Mr. Desk Jockey here can understand."
"Hey!" Sam protested, though it was halfhearted at best.
Duo grinned. "Will do, Noin," he told her, then turned with a wicked grin to Sam. "Now, Sam, Mobile Suits and Dolls are nothin' like the little dolls ya used ta play with as a small child...they are big and made of metal, and will crush ya like an ant...your Barbie dolls wouldn't stand a chance."
Noin and Dorothy snickered as they backed away—unsurprisingly, the Scientists were already gone.
"Maxwell," Sam growled, glaring at the braided man.
"Yes, Sam?" Duo sang, rocking on the balls of his feet.
"You—you...nevermind. I give up."
"Always the best choice. Now get over here, we've got a hologram thingy ta crack and a map ta scrutinize before Une discovers it's missin'."
"We have offices?"
"We have a rec room?"
"There are bathrooms over there?"
"What's that hallway, there?"
"...Duo, I think that's a sewage pipeline..."
"Oh...well, in my defense, that's a rather large sewage pipeline...is this map drawn ta scale?"
Unfortunately, the discovery of the missing plans was the catalyst needed for Une to do what she had been planning to do for a month and a half now—visit the division.
It's funny how easily you forget people even when they're just a few stories below your feet.
It was with great trepidation that Une stepped into the elevator and turned the key, and began the descent to the division HQ.
Garrett Hartley was the first to know that Une was visiting their headquarters. Having just gotten out of Dorothy and Duo's joint session on how to properly avoid interrogation by an enemy—Garrett had discovered he had a natural affinity for the same talent Duo possessed; twisting the truth without lying—he was just passing through the top level of atrium when he happened to glance down and see the familiar bun-haired form of the Commander step out of the elevator.
He paled. "Oh shit," he whispered—and promptly turned and sprinted back the way he had come.
Une looked up when she heard a door slam above her, but saw nothing, and so shrugged and continued on her way, heading towards the large gymnasium that she knew most of the recruits were likely to be in.
Because of course Lady Une knew the division like the back of her damned hand, while she left the division itself to sweat it out for a month and a half without a map.
"DUO! SAM!" Garrett yelled as he slammed back into the room, catching the two who were helping Dorothy to clean up from the earlier lesson completely off guard.
Duo looked at the man who had come skidding to a halt in front of them—noting with pride that he was not panting—in confusion. "Garrett? What is it?"
"Une," the man said, and Sam snapped up where he was gathering some papers off the floor. (Dorothy could be rather...passionate when it came to her favorite subject.) "What? Une?"
"What about Une, Garrett?" Duo asked.
"She's here! Heading this direction!"
Duo's eyes widened. "Oh shit," he said quite succinctly, unknowingly echoing Garrett from earlier. "Shit, shit, shit...this must be one of those surprise visits she was talkin' about. Oh shit."
"Really, Duo, you haven't seen me for a month and a half and that's all you can say? 'Oh shit?'"
Too late.
Duo whirled to face the door and the highly amused woman standing just inside it, while behind him Sam stood sort of...frozen, Garrett backed away, and Dorothy snickered.
Oh she did love a good confrontation.
"Uh...hi, Lady Une, how ya doin'?" Duo asked sheepishly, rubbing the back of his neck with his hand.
She raised an eyebrow. "Oh, I'm doing fine, Duo, absolutely dandy. Did you know I discovered that someone had broken into my office and stolen several top secret documents?"
Duo's eyes widened in false innocence, and behind him Sam too doubled over with snickers. "Really? Whoever would do such a terrible thing, M'lady?"
The other eyebrow joined the first. "Oh, I'm not sure, but I do believe I have an idea," Lady Une replied as she stalked closer, causing Duo to gulp. "In fact, I do believe he's standing right in front of me. Long brown hair in a braid, violet eyes, fondness for wearing black? You wouldn't happen to know him, would you?"
Duo faked pondering. "Hm...that description does ring a bell..."
Une rolled her eyes. "I know it was you Duo—congratulations on being the first and only person to successfully break into my office and actually get away with something. My only question; why exactly did you feel the need to steal the plans and information for your own division when you could have just asked?"
"Because it was more fun?" he offered. Une slapped a hand to her face.
"Of course..." she muttered. "Only you, Duo, only you."
"Would you expect anything else?" Sam asked, stepping up to stand beside Duo. Behind them, a scary smile from Dorothy had Garrett helping her with the rest of the cleanup, not wanting to incur the wrath of the psychotic blonde.
"No...and I actually thank you for that, Duo, because it finally gave me a reason to do what I had been meaning to do for a while...check on the progress of the division."
"Really? Well, what ya see here is the aftermath of one of our interrogation classes, this one for when you're the one under interrogation, but if you'll step this way for a couple of minutes and into our—"
Glare. "Ahem."
"Newly discovered offices, we'll give ya an update on how our lovely little division is farin'. Dorothy, Garrett, you good here?"
"Just fine, Mr. Maxwell!" Dorothy sang cheerfully. "I'm sure Mr. Hartley here doesn't mind helping with the rest of the cleanup, do you Mr. Hartley?"
She turned wide, deceptively innocent eyes on the other man.
"N-no, o-of course n-not," he stuttered, and Duo clapped his hands.
"Perfect! Now, if you'll be so kind, M'Lady?"
And he and Sam vanished out the door along with Lady Une...leaving one terrified Garrett to the mercies of Dorothy Catalonia.
Pity him.
"Was that really a wise decision?" Une asked as they walked away from the large gymnasium.
Sam shrugged. "Eh, he'll live. Dorothy has yet to actually physically hurt anyone, though as for psychologically..."
"Ask us no questions and we'll tell ya no lies," Duo inserted, grinning widely. "Did ya know that two of the recruits actually like Dorothy?"
Une raised an eyebrow again. "Really? Who are these people that I missed this obvious discrepancy in their psych evaluations?" she asked sarcastically.
"We call them 'The Minions,'" Sam told her. "Duo, does anyone actually know their names?"
Duo shrugged. "No idea. I suppose we should...but that's an endeavor for another time. And here we have our newly discovered offices!"
Another sarcastic glare that caused more raised eyebrows. "And what have I done to deserve such animosity?" Une asked.
Duo rolled his eyes. "Denied us a map of this place for a fuckin' month and a half. Our office before the discovery of this hallway—"
He gestured down the long hallway only recently discovered, which had approximately twenty offices lining it. They would later be occupied by the official teams, but for now they were only occupied by Duo and Sam.
"—was a tiny hole in the wall with a table and the swivel chairs ya may or may not have noticed missin' from Conference Room 1-C."
Une rolled her eyes right back. "Excuse me for believing you capable of the mental capacity to figure out the layout of an underground structure that only extends so far."
"Whatever...anyways, in, in, don't be shy, into our humble abode."
Une stifled a chuckle as Duo shooed her into the room like a busy housewife and by the looks of Sam, he was holding back his laughter as well.
"And we even managed ta get the swivel chairs in here!" Duo exclaimed excitedly, as Une looked around. It had been quite a while since she had been down here—in fact, the last time she had seen these rooms in particular was after their completion, over a year ago.
Two desks, one on either side of the room, the front of each facing the center, each already covered in person knick-knacks and paperwork; two swivel chairs, obviously the ones filched from the conference room; four filing cabinets, two for each desk; three bookshelves, one for each desk and one in between, and a low table in the center with a couple of chairs scattered around it. All in all, a nice office.
"So, Lady Une," Sam asked her as they all took a seat around the low table. "What would you like to know?"
"Well, just how is everything going in general, mostly. You've been down here for a month and a half and I've heard barely a peep except for Robert Hewitt who decided to leave. Is everyone doing all right with the training? Getting along with our a bit-more-than-eccentric instructors? Are you actually going to be ready by the end of six months?"
Both men sat back to ponder for a few moments. "...it's goin' pretty well," Duo finally said, slowly, and Sam nodded, adding,
"Of course, nothing's perfect because nothing's ever perfect—we've had our fair share of mistakes, I'm sure you've heard from Sally about the injuries she's had to treat which thankfully have started to decline, there've been a couple of 'oh shit' moments where we honestly weren't sure we'd be ready by the end of six months—"
"But these people have been provin' us wrong time and time again," Duo finished. "They honestly want ta be a part of this, just not for the pay or the thrill. We've have our own scary moments, ourselves, wonderin' if we would make it through this because we've heard the complaints about the trainin' and even made them ourselves...but again, they've declined now that we're really gettin' into this."
"They're starting to get used to the fact that this is what they're going to have to go through to be a part of this," Sam told her. "Everyone has gotten stronger, faster, smarter...not that they all weren't before, but now they're taking it to the level it needs to be for this to be the division you want it to be."
Une smiled. "Good. So I'm guessing that means there aren't any real issues with the instructors?"
Duo rolled his eyes. "Anyone who doesn't have issues with those people is crazy. But we're dealin' with it. Sam and I still have yet ta discover where Noin keeps her cameras. Dorothy scares the shit out of everyone and has great fun doin' it. The Scientists are crotchety old men who see machines rather than humans and scare the shit out of everyone again. Howard could be speakin' tongues for all these people understand his lessons about mechanics. But we're dealin' with it."
"We really are," Sam said quickly, seeing the skepticism on Une's face. "Lady Une, you have to remember, a lot of these people are soldiers or have at least been partially trained as soldiers. You don't do that kind of thing without becoming used to insanity—a lot of them are barely fazed by Dorothy and the Scientists anymore. Noin's sole goal in life seems to be to torment solely us. And Howard...well, he's gotten better. Plus Noin, Dorothy, and Duo have been translating his lectures into useable English," he grinned.
"Basically we're one big ragged jigsaw puzzle," Duo commented. "We don't fix together the best but we'll figure it out eventually. Plus whoever said perfection was good?" he asked rhetorically.
A fleeting shadow crossed over his face at the implications of that statement but quickly vanished.
Anddddd there was the scary shark smile. "Well, since everything seems to be going so well," Une said slowly. "I'm sure you boys wouldn't mind taking time out of your busy schedules to give me a detailed progress report for each recruit so I can update their files?"
They groaned, she smirked, and they settled down for a long, long afternoon of filing paperwork.
Une left with the promise to return in a couple more weeks to again check their progress, and a set of approximately fifty newly updated files.
Duo and Sam were left with that scary promise and some exceedingly sore hands from writing and typing, but the knowledge of just how far they and every single person in the division had come in just under two months.
Of course, later that week, when they were all sprinting for their lives from the explosives room where one of the less...explosively-inclined recruits had managed to set a bomb to explode rather than defuse, or when Scott Johanning managed to shatter a target pretty much to pieces with bullets and still not hit any fatal spots, or when Sophia McDonald somehow managed to twist into what should have been an anatomically impossible position while trying to perform a roundhouse kick, theyconceded that they might have just quite a bit farther to go.
But, as the second month came to a close, and Haley Beckett lasted against Duo in a hand-to-hand fight for 8 minutes 36 seconds—which, as he told her, was a full 36 seconds longer than anyone ever lasted (even the other pilots, though he didn't mention that)—and Caleb Adara managed to spin on the fly and pin the tail end of Duo's braid to the wall with a well-aimed knife while only managing to split hairs, thoroughly surprising the man who had still been a good eighteen feet away attempting to sneak up on him, and many other recruits kept shocking their commanders and trainers over and over again, they realized it might not be quite as far as they thought.
...only four months to go.
MONTH THREE
The third month began, and Duo and Sam breathed a sigh of relief that it began with relatively little chaos—at least, as little chaos as could be associated with the training of a top secret black ops division. The first week passed...and then the second...and everything was going so perfectly well that all of the trainers were starting to become more paranoid than usual, waiting for something to happen.
Just...something.
"All right, everybody—remember the golden rule of this class; "Ask me no questions and I'll tell ya no lies." Once ya pass out of this room these are your skills, we have absolutely nothin' ta do with them and if anyone asks, ya don't remember where ya got them. If anyone asks Une she will say, "I have no idea." I know nothin'. You know nothin'. Well, you know somethin', but we have nothin' ta do with it—"
"Duo, I think they get the idea. Get to the point."
"I'm gettin' there, Tahary. Anyways; welcome one, welcome all, ta hackin' 101. Ya didn't just hear me say that. Tahary, take a seat, you're a student in this too unfortunately."
"Unfortunately I am," Sam replied resignedly, and took a seat next to one Stacey Letterman in the front row. "Please don't be like Howard, Duo; speak recognizable English, yeah?"
Duo rolled his eyes as the group of recruits snickered. "I will do my best ta reduce myself ta your plebeian level, Samuel."
The glare and promise of a painful, torturous death conveyed solely through Sam's eyes—and some rather crude hand signs—was so worth it.
"All right, first off, basic hackin' terminology...what, ya thought you'd be hackin' Preventer's core computer on the first day? Ya have ta start somewhere, and the basics are it. Any of ya have any hackin' experience? C'mon don't be shy, no one here's gonna tell...really? Wow. Goody-goody two shoes, we have...all right. As black ops, you're likely goin' ta have use hackin' in a lot of different situations...gettin' info that you're sent ta retrieve, destroyin' computer systems, getting' into and out of places...like if ya get captured and they're idiotic enough ta use electronic number pad locks...but honestly, that's only if you're really lucky."
"Helix this is Shinigami, do ya copy? Over"
"Shinigami this is Helix; I read you loud and clear. Over."
"Right Helix, open her up."
Sam grinned and flicked the button on the radio to the first setting. "All right, Beta Team this is Alpha Team; you're clear to go. Confuse the hell out of us, people."
Duo sighed as he leaned back to listen to the chatter that began to echo over the radio waves. This was the eighth one of these they'd done in the last hour; communications tests. Each dorm room was set the challenge to come up with their own chatter language and use it in a conversation with the trainers listening in and trying to crack it; at the end of it each member of the team would have to translate the conversation on their own and the translations would have to be basically the same.
"Beta Team this is Angel; I'm skating the rails in paradise. Trajectory?"
"Angel this is Vixen; trajectory to paradise—Pluto."
"Angel this is Janus; trajectory to paradise—Noctilucent."
Duo blinked. Noctilucent—what the hell? Across the base, Sam did the same. In fact, what the hell was this entire conversation?
"Angel this is Scamp; trajectory to Paradise—Vigilant."
"Angel this is Muse; trajectory to Paradise—Lassitude."
"Scatter the skies; break the walls. Stay."
Duo chose that moment to break in. "Beta, you're good; all of ya, write down your translations and get them ta us, then please explain what the hell just happened."
Laughter broke over the line, Lily Tanner's giggles the loudest of them all, and Duo reaffirmed his earlier determination; that woman was evil.
But damn, they were good, he reflected later as he looked over the matching translations of the conversation; vagueness and opposites, always a good combination. And evidentially noctilucent referred to a type of cloud.
Who knew?
The third week began, and with it came an incident that in all honesty had been a long time coming—or to be more accurate, not the incident itself but the realization it caused.
No one was quite sure what happened, but someone said something and another said something back and before anyone knew what was going on it has escalated into a full out brawl between two of the recruits on the atrium floor.
Duo had just happened to be passing by when he heard the noise, and upon bursting into the atrium found a ragged ring of recruits surround two brawling figures on the floor.
"OI!" he barked, putting as much menace into it as he could. "WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON IN HERE?"
The ring broke and scattered, leaving the two fighters to swiftly disentangle themselves, though not without throwing a few more insults and one or two jabs of fists to ribs.
Duo literally stalked into the middle of the group of people to stand directly between the two combatants, in full Shinigami mode and completely aware of how much he was scaring them. His glare was as cold as ice, his voice when he spoke absolutely frigid.
"Arthur Finn," he hissed, glaring at the other man who immediately looked down at the floor, flushing to the tips of his ears, a rather ugly contrast with his blonde hair. "And Caleb Adara," he hissed again, even more darkly if that was even possible. Both men were look rather roughed up, with several marks that were sure to blossom into nasty bruises, though as far as he could tell nothing was broken, which he counted as a blessing considering the training they had; he was lucky they hadn't actually killed each other before he stepped in.
"Mind telling me just what exactly—actually, you know what, don't tell me. I can already tell it was something stupid. I would, however, like you to tell me what possessed you to brawl it out in the middle of the atrium like barbarians rather than acting like the civilized human beings you are, the black ops agents in training that you are. Do either of you have anything to say for yourselves?"
"No sir," Arthur murmured. "I apologize for allowing it to get out of hand."
"I apologize as well," Caleb murmured. "It won't happen again."
"You're damn right it won't," Duo snarled. "I have half a mind to...never mind. I'm not actually going to do it. But really you two—Arthur, I don't know you that well, but I remember you as level headed, calm, and rational, if nothing else. Caleb—"
He shook his head. "I expect much, much better of you Caleb. Is this not the second chance you were looking for? This is just the kind of thing that destroys second chances. You're damn lucky I've had the chance to get to know you over the last few months or you might have just destroyed yours for good."
Caleb hung his head. He was well aware of that fact. This type of idiocy is just what had gotten him demoted in his earlier Preventer's days and kept him from moving back up again. He had been so, so determined not to let it happen again. He wanted to prove that he was worthy of the second chance Duo and Sam had given him.
Lily Tanner was watching from the small crowd that had not dispersed yet, and she frowned as she watched the scene in front of her. Yes, the two men had been idiots, fighting over something inane that she honestly already couldn't even remember. But somehow...this went deeper than that. She could tell.
"Duo," she said softly, stepping forward, wincing internally as he turned that ice cold gaze on her. She made a mental note to never, ever piss him off.
"Tanner," he said coolly.
"With all due respect, sir," she said, gulping slightly as she took the metaphorical plunge. "Yes, what they did is inexcusable...however, they cannot really be blamed for it. Sir, we've been down here for over two months. Like you said, yes there have been letters, phone calls, emails, vid calls...but we've been trapped in an essentially confined area with the same people for an extended amount of time, and that's not even counting the fact that all of us are naturally high strung. I think this is just a prime example of all that tension exploding. Again, with all due respect...we need a break, sir."
Duo blinked—and blinked again. Then slumped as all the fire and anger abruptly went out of him.
"Fuck," he swore. "We are such fuckin' idiots."
He looked back up abruptly. "All right, all of ya, get out of here. Go do...somethin'. You two—" He pointed at Caleb and Arthur. "Go topside and get Sally ta look ya over, and then stay there until I come ta get ya. I am goin' ta go have a talk with my esteemed colleagues."
They were gone faster than you could say "Shinigami is a'coming."
Sam was flopped on his bunk, reading a graphic novel, when Duo burst in. He sat bolt upright, nearly slamming his head against the bunk above him, as the door abruptly hit the wall with a crack.
"Duo, what—"
He was cut off as the other man grabbed him by the wrist and dragged him off of the bed and out into the hall, without a word. He, of course, struggled.
"Duo, what the hell are you doing? Where are we going?"
"Ta have a talk with Noin, Dorothy, Howard, and the Scientists. Sam, we've been absolute idiots."
"Okay, we've been idiots. Now can you please let go of my wrist and explain exactly why we've been idiots."
Duo shook his head, but let go of his wrist. "In a minute. You grab the Scientists," he told Sam, and shove him unceremoniously towards the door of the office they had just passed—the office the Scientists had claimed a couple of weeks earlier—Sam stumbling and then blinking at the door.
He knocked, and after hearing the voice of J telling him to come in poked his head through the doorframe.
"Tahary?" S asked, being the one closest to the door.
"Meeting in our office," Sam told them. "Dunno what it's about, but according to Duo we've been 'idiots.'"
He backed out after being sure that they were going to follow, though G was muttering something that sounded particularly like he was going to perform some rather violent and inappropriate acts with Duo's braid.
Duo had apparently already grabbed Dorothy and Noin from their office—again only recently claimed—because they were already in Duo and Sam's office when Sam got there, the scientists trailing behind. Howard had joined them at some point, probably from the communications room.
"All right, Duo," Sam said exasperatedly, flopping into one of the chairs—as far from the Scientists as he could get, of course. "Now that we're all here, will you please explain your suddenly lowered opinion of our intelligence?"
"Yes, 02, please explain," J said darkly, waving his prosthetic arm threateningly.
Duo leveled them all with a perfectly calm stare. "I have just come from the atrium, where I just finished reaming out one Arthur Finn and Caleb Adara for getting into an all-out fistfight brawl in the middle of the floor."
"What?" Noin exclaimed.
"Exactly my reaction when I saw what was happening," Duo told her. "I, of course, proceeded to thoroughly chastise them, and was really just getting ready to go into the riot act when Lily Tanner, one of the spectators, brought up an interesting point, at which point I sent everyone on their way, sent the two idiots up to Sally to get looked over and told them to stay there until I go up, and headed here. Lily's point, while it doesn't excuse what happened, is so true it's almost painful; Sam, Noin, Dorothy, Howard, Scientists...we've been down here for over two months."
He paused, and then sighed at the looks of confusion he was getting. "Two months," he emphasized again. "Two months living below ground, going through grueling training, limited contact with the outside world, and none of us have seen daylight for at least that long. Everything's finally reached a boiling point, and this brawl was only the tip of the iceberg. We need to let them out; a day, maybe two, but they need out. Hell, I need out. There's only so long a person can go before they start going absolutely stir crazy."
The room was silent in the face of sudden realization.
"...damn, you're right, Duo," Noin finally said. "We have been idiots."
Dorothy cocked her head. "So it really isn't my fault, Mr. Maxwell, Mr. Tahary, that I've had more urges to squash the recruits like insects in the last few weeks than I normally do?" she asked, perfectly innocent.
Sam looked slightly green. "Yeah, Dorothy, I suppose it isn't," he said faintly, while mentally smacking himself. Noin was right—they were idiots!
"I haven't been helping, have I?" Howard asked, and elaborated when Duo looked at him in confusion. "Duo. Hawaiian shirts. Sunglasses. Stories about space and everything. Reminding them of everything they don't have right now."
Duo nodded, making a noncommittal noise. "True, true..." he muttered.
G, however, was grinning rather scarily, along with the rest of scientists. "We were wondering when you were going to realize this, 02, Tahary," he commented, and grinned even wider when Duo's head snapped up.
"Ya bastards!" Duo snapped. "Ya knew!"
H rolled his eyes. "Of course, 02, it's not that hard to see," he told him exasperatedly.
"Why didn't you say anything?" Sam asked them, not really angry, just curious.
"It's your job to know these things, Tahary," J told him. "We're just here as trainers. After these six months, we'll likely vanish back into relative obscurity again and go back to our lives of experimenting and inventing and staying out of the public eye. You, however, are going to be the commanders of this division; you have to know what makes your recruits tick, you have to know how much they can take, you have to know when they've had enough, and you have to be able to deal with it. So the question is—and no one help them here—what are you going to do about it?"
Both Duo and Sam sunk back, pondering, while the others watched. And they both came to the same conclusion, pretty much at the same time.
"Day off," they said, simultaneously. Duo elaborated first. "For a day, maybe two, no holds barred—we just let them out. Everyone go topside—not all fifty at once, of course—and just let them go."
"We can't give them all enough time to go home, of course," Sam added. "A lot of them live across the world or in the colonies. But we can give them time to go out, see the sun and get fresh air again, go shopping, eat something other than the almost-hospital-like fare we serve, dress in normal clothes, get exercise that isn't regimented, get a couple of drinks—if anyone comes back drunk, they'll get smacked, see family and friends if they live in or near Sanq—etc., etc., etc." he trailed off.
Duo nodded. "Basically, we give them time ta forget about what they're becomin' for just a bit."
G nodded and gave them a brief clap of his hands. "Very good 02, Tahary. You do have some brains in your thick skulls."
They wisely didn't comment on that insult.
"It's Thursday, right?" Noin asked, looking contemplatively at the ceiling. "How about we tell them tomorrow, give them time in the communications center to contact any friends and family that may be in town, and then give them Saturday and Sunday off?"
"That's perfect," Sam nodded in agreement.
"One exception, though," Duo added, and rolled his eyes at the looks of confusion. "Finn and Adara. Yeah, they may have been the catalyst that made us realize our idiocy, but they steal have ta deal with the consequences. I say they have ta wait another two weeks before they can head topside for a break, and they only get one day instead of two."
"That works," Noin told him. "And before we forget, let's make this a monthly thing, even after training is done; weekend off once a month. During training, it will be everyone on the same weekend, but once we go live we should let them choose one weekend a month to take off. Any other vacations than that can just go through normal Preventer's process."
"Right," Duo said, standing and stretching his hands above his head. "Well, now that we've got that settled, I've got two brawlin' idiots ta go with. Sam, ya comin'?"
"Sure, Duo," Sam replied, standing as well to follow the braided man.
"See you all later," they tossed over their shoulders in chorus, and vanished from the office, leaving behind three contemplative adults and five contemplative geezers.
"Do you really think they can do this?" Noin asked softly.
G snorted. "Even if they can't, they will anyways. 02 is tenacious like that, and so is Tahary, as we're discovering."
"Kid'll make it through anything," Howard agreed. "And pull along his friends for the ride."
"They're doing the best they can," Dorothy said in a rare moment of seriousness. "And that's really...all we can ask of them, is it not?"
Needless to say, Arthur and Caleb were not happy when Duo and Sam told them what would be happening—after swearing them to secrecy of course, since the rest of the division would be finding out about the break the day after—but they were resigned to their fate; they had been idiots. And that wasn't even counting the lecture they got from Sally for their idiocy.
"Really, you two, what the hell were you thinking? I can't be patching up your scrapes and bruises from your testosterone fueled battles all the time; what are you going to do in three months when you're black-ops agents and you're coming into me with broken bones and internal bleeding and concussions and organ damage and what have you? Let's put it this way—if I see you up here any time in the next few months unless it's legitimate damage taken from training, I will personally see to it that you undergo a full physical exam, and I'll throw in another psych evaluation just for kicks. Now get your asses back down there and don't let me see them again unless you're dead or dying; even better, don't let me see them again. I don't want to see your scrawny asses."
And so they left feeling like tiny, chastised children, followed by their snickering commanders—and felt even more like shit the next day when the break was announced to the cheering mess hall, and for the rest of the day as everyone chattered around them and still managed to work twice as hard as usual.
The third Saturday of the third month saw a sight that had not been seen in just under three months—people emerging from the depths of the base in casual clothes and with bright grins on their faces. Slowly, in small, fluctuating groups, they took the long awaited ride in the elevator to topside.
Duo and Sam were in the last group out, having waited for everyone else to go out to make sure everything went off without a hitch—like no one getting suspicious about the groups of people emerging from the elevator, people that hadn't been seen in months. Thankfully Une was topside, having been informed of the impending influx of people, steering people away from that particular elevator. (She put out-of-order signs on it on every floor except the one her office was on.)
Duo and Sam were both practically bouncing with excitement as the elevator slowly—or at least, slowly to them—began to ascend towards the surface. Duo was the only one who had been up at all in the last few months, and that was only the one time he snuck up to steal the map.
The doors opened with the same anti-climatic ding, and they both doubled over in laughter.
"Hi Lady Une bye Lady Une!" they chorused as they bounced past the bun-haired woman almost faster than she could see.
Lady Une just blinked. "Duo!" she called after him, but she was too late—they were already gone. She sighed before turning to head back to her office—she wasn't even going to try.
"Ah, Conference Room 1-C," Duo sighed as they passed by the aforementioned room. "Such fond memories we have..."
"Very fond," Sam added, snickering. "So, what do you want to do with our few days of freedom?"
"Well, how about first we check your apartment ta make sure ya haven't been robbed or evicted, and then we go out and get a couple of drinks ta celebrate the fact that we're almost halfway there?"
Sam blinked. He had honestly completely forgotten about his apartment, craphole that it was. "Good idea," he replied, mentally calculating overdue rent. Shit.
Duo snickered. "Ya forgot, didn't ya?" he teased.
"I...no...yes, I did, now stop laughing you bastard, I have three month's rent to figure out how to pay!"
"Sorry, sorry...but, only you, Tahary, only you."
"Shut up!"
After spending five minutes acting like dumbstruck idiots in front of the building, staring at trees and sunlight—damn it really had been a long time—and cars and actual people like morons, and Duo's hiss of,
"How can we be black ops when it's turnin' us into fuckin' albinos, yeah?" when met with sunlight for the first time in several months and being forced to shield their eyes and back into the building for several minutes, they managed to catch a cab to Sam's apartment.
Sam proceeded to practically prostrate himself in front of his landlord with apologies, begging for a second chance and promising all the rent by the end of the week, only to have the extremely amused woman inform him that he hadn't missed a single payment.
Evidentially all of the recruits and the trainers—even Howard, Dorothy, Duo, and the Scientists—were being paid normal Preventer's salaries for their positions even while they were underground training, and Une had taken the liberty of shunting parts of those salaries each month to pay the rents of the several people who owned apartments and had likely forgotten about them.
Sam breathed a sigh of relief while silently cursing the name of Une, sadist that she was.
"So, alcohol?" Duo asked him as they walked away from the apartment building.
"Yeah," Sam replied. "Alcohol."
Damn two in the afternoon.
Apparently a bunch of the recruits had the same idea, because when they arrived at their usual bar—the one they had taken to frequenting in the month or two it took to get everything organized before they headed underground—they saw about ten of their people, already drinking and having a grand time.
"Duo! Sam!" a voice yelled at them, and the turned to see Noin waving at them from a seat at the bar. They picked their way across the bar, surprisingly full for two in the afternoon, carefully avoiding some of the more wild dancers, and took up seats next to her.
"Hey Noin!" Duo said cheerfully as he raised a hand to call the bartender over. "Had the same idea, looks like?"
The dark-haired woman rolled her eyes. "Who didn't? Damn, if there's one thing I've missed these last few months, it's a nice, cold beer after a long, tiring day."
"Amen to that," Sam replied, toasting an imaginary glass that quickly became reality as the bartender slid two glasses down the bar towards him and Duo. "It's been a long three months."
"Way long," Duo agreed, easily tossing back his drink. "Too bad one of our own stipulations on this jaunt was no gettin' drunk; I really want ta get sloshed right about now."
Noin reached out to pat his head like a condescending adult would a small child. "Poor baby. Price you pay for being responsible, though. Luckily for me, unlike you—or so I've heard—I can hold my liquor, so iI can get pleasantly buzzed off the amount of alcohol that would have you shrieking in pain the morning after."
"Screw ya, Noin," Duo said, rolling his eyes as he drank a second glass.
Sam smirked at him. "Have you already forgotten our first drunken foray, Duo?" he asked as he too downed his second drink. "I seem to remember that cowering beneath a table was involved..."
"Shut it, Tahary."
They fell silent and spent several minutes in companionable silence—as companionable as you could be in an extremely loud bar, anyways—and sat nursing their third drink.
It was, however, as he finished his third that Duo looked up suddenly and said, "We need a toast."
Sam looked up and blinked. "What?" he asked in confusion, and on his other side, Noin looked just as confused.
"A toast, ya morons! Noin, how many of our people are here?"
"Nine," she told him. "I kept count just in case someone does get drunk."
Duo stood and turned in a circle, obviously looking for someone. "Sasha!" he yelled after a moment, and across the bar Sasha Trafalgar looked up in confusion, before her eyes came to rest upon Duo and lit up.
"Yeah?" she called back.
"Find all of ours—there're nine—and bring them over here! We're havin' a toast!"
"All right!" Sasha yelled, and vanished into the crowd to search for the other recruits.
Duo turned back to the bar and hailed down the bartender. "We need...twelve of your cheapest alcohol," he told him, and let him go when he nodded. "Can't afford any more than that," he told Sam and Noin when they raised eyebrows at him. "Plus don't want him ta think I'm a drunkard or anythin'."
They rolled their eyes, and settled down to wait. About ten minutes later, after the drinks had already been delivered, Sasha materialized out of the crowd, dragging eight others after her.
"Here they are!" she chirruped, and Duo beamed.
"Great!" he crowed, leaping to his feet. "Everyone, gather round, grab a drink; we're havin' a toast!"
A muted cheer went up and everyone crowded forward to grab one of the glasses; once he was sure everyone had one, Duo raised his hand and they all fell quiet, a small orb of silence in the middle of the insanity of the bar.
"Sam, get your ass up here, you're doin' this thing too," Duo told the other man and waited as he scrambled up to stand beside him.
He raised his glass solemnly.
"Three months ago, we all descended into what one would perhaps call, 'the depths of hell.' Ta the ninth circle, some would say. And we'd say right back—"Only the ninth? I'm ashamed ya think so lowly of us!"
Laughter echoed throughout the small circle.
"We've all suffered a lot of pain and frustration over the last few months, and some just couldn't do it."
The memory of Robert Hewitt floated into the spaces between words for a moment, and the silence turned heavy, briefly. Duo glanced at Sam out of the corner of his eyes and gestured minutely with his glass; his turn at the plate. Sam pondered for a moment before he began to speak.
"But here we are, three months later, stronger, faster, wiser; all around better people, maybe not in the best of ways but hey, it's what we've decided to do. We may still have three months to go, three more long, grueling months, but we can stand here today and proudly say we've made it halfway, and we're not giving up until we make it to the end!"
"So...here's ta us and our division—"
"—whatever the hell you decide to call it!" Noin called out, and Duo laughed and nodded at her.
"Let's turn the world on their heads—in three months of course!" Duo finished, and raised his glass to the ceiling.
Their cheer echoed around the bar and there were a few minutes of helpless confusion as everyone tried to touch glasses with everyone else. Duo found himself squashed, wide-eyed, between a laughing Sasha and Sophia, for a few scary moments before he was shoved forward and barely managed to save himself from an unsavory meeting with the bar. He couldn't stop the almost scarily wide grin from spreading across his face as he watched the chaos.
His smile fell for a moment as he remembered the last time he had done this—with the pilots, right after Mariemaia, all of them just barely 18 and so barely legal to drink in Sanq. Even, Heero still recovering from his gunshot wound, had joined them—they were all just so damned happy they didn't have to fight anymore.
That was the first time he had gotten drunk—and he remembered everything that happened that night, despite what they thought.
Despite what they thought...I am no fool.
A hand on his shoulder drew him out of his melancholy thoughts, and he looked up to see Sam looking at him with a concerned look in his eyes.
"You okay, Duo?" he asked.
Duo nodded. "I'm fine," he replied, before resolutely turning to look at the people surrounding him.
He saw Steven and Lily laughing over a drink at the bar, smiles bright. He saw Sophia and Haley laughing and giggling at Nick, Garrett and Scott, who appeared to be engaged in some sort of game to balance a shot glass on their nose, while Sasha and Sara were talking with Noin.
These people, along with all the others, were his friends now; these were the people he could depend on, would fight with, would die with.
Not them. They had their chance.
Duo shared a look with Sam, a secret smile that spoke of their own strange bemusement at this whole situation. Both of them, looking back—whoever would have thought this was where'd they be right now?
But for some reason, they felt really good about themselves. Somehow, despite both of them being practically kids, one of them a soldier from fifteen and on his own for as long as he could remember, one a desk jockey who had never really done anything worth anything in his life—both running an almost black ops division full of fifty people almost as crazy and almost all of them older than they were—despite everything, they were thriving. Somehow, this was working.
It was a really, really good feeling.
...damn. -stares- Is it over? Is it really, truly OVER? -dancesanddies-
...so, I hope you're all happy. After five months of no inspiration and my damned muse catching a plane to Sweden or something, this chapter surviving on sentences, sometimes words, a week, I finally sat down and busted my ass for, I think, four days straight, to get this out to you. Unfortunately, as you can see, here we have what one would call "half the enchilada." Three months...and it still turned into this 39 page, 16,459 (18,131 according to FF) word monstrosity. I am not going to reiterate what my profile says quite clearly.
CHECK MY PROFILE. I PUT EVERYTHING THERE. EV. ER. Y. THING. Capsbolditalicsunderline—have I made my point? Good.
Mmhmm. So here we have THE TRAINING, PART ONE. Humor, pain, more humor, more pain, and a good dose of serious to balance it all out. I hope this was good for a few giggles; I most certainly hope it was worth the wait, and I can't believe I haven't bloody well apologized yet. I am so, so sorry it took me five months. Words cannot describe the guilt that caused. But...what's done is done is done and can't be undone, the chapter is here now and we're moving forward. My good news, and my present to you all for being absolute saints, is this tidbit;
Outline, baby. The entirety of SOY is now outlined in an approximately 3-4 page document on my flash drive. My real gift, however, is this—the pilots will officially appear in "Unrecognizable."
...what chapter that is, however, you'll just have to wait and see. ^^ (I can imagine the face plants now...) But, they do have a brief cameo in this chapter, for one sentence—can you find it?
The only scene I really feel needs explanation here—ask any questions you have, though—is the scene with the radio code. Translation:
Angel is Lily, Vixen is Sasha, Janus is Garrett, Scamp is Sophie, Muse is Nick. Basically, everything is vague and the exact opposite of what they're saying. Lily is sneaking around the restrooms. 'Trajectory' just refers to position. "Pluto" means she's in the atrium, "noctilucent" means he's on the lowest floor, "vigilant" means she's in the dorms, and "lassitude" means he's in the rec room. "Scatter the skies" means meet up, "break the walls" means take the most roundabout route, and "stay" means go or come. If you want to know why they mean these things, go ahead and ask.
Special shout-out to MorganxGarcia just for sheer awesomeness! If you like Criminal Minds—go read her stuff! PASTA!
Here's hoping to see you in the next few weeks with the next chapter, 'I See the Light'—ciao!
—Erin