A/N: Hello again my fellow readers :D Here's the next chapter, and it's a bit more of an interlude between battles (but never the less is important). So read on.
On a side note, I have to say that the season premiere on friday was awesome :D
Chapter Fifteen: Defector
She didn't wait to take refuge beneath the shroud of trees on the island, even if their cover was marginal at best. Her safety was in jeopardy so long as she remained on Liberty Island, and that was a prospect she would rather not entertain. Were her wrists not bound she would have considered swimming across, but the handcuffs would impede her mobility and navigating the rough waters would have been nearly impossible.
So she was forced to consider more creative ideas, and those were not easy to engineer; every logical scenario that she constructed was then ruled out either due to safety issues or simple impossibility. The idea of possibly being recaptured played circus tricks with her mind, teetering on tightropes of panic.
She was keeping to the shadows as much as possible, not so much as a precaution but out of necessity. She knew that beyond the tree line was a territory ripe with security. She looked over her current attire; it was nothing short of displeasing. The gown was a sickly white, peppered with tiny polka dots, tainted with the disease of poor design. When she turned her wrists at a certain angle she could see a few dark splotches creeping to life beneath her skin; they were long and uneven, like slugs coloured of mocha.
She swallowed. The crook of her left arm itched, faint twinges of pain pricking her nerves.
The marks on her wrist were not the only ones she was going to have by the end of the day. She held no particular respect for battle wounds, but if these were the proof that would allow her to explain the ordeal she endured, then she'd gladly show them. In the matter of a madman and a vendetta, a little personal sacrifice was hardly something she would squabble over.
There was a brush of something against her arm and she instinctively reached for her hip, her fingers slipping through empty space.
The absence of a gun at her side was certainly more than disconcerting.
She turned sharply, hands rising in defence as she made eye contact with the aggressor. She knew the face, the short brown hair and eyes tiny like a dragonfly's. She never forgot a face.
"You," she hissed, her lips pressing together in a tight line.
"Indeed," said James Beatty. "It is me, Olivia Dunham."
"If you've come to take me back you're gonna have a hell of a time trying," she spat, hands curling into fists.
He raised his hands, palms open to her and said calmly. "Not in the slightest. I'm not quite audacious enough to try and bring in someone like you on my own."
"Then what do you want?"'
"I simply wish to help you, Olivia," he answered.
She scoffed. "You expect me to believe that?" she said as she raised a closed fist. "I don't think so."
He raised his hands a little higher. "One puppet can have many strings," he said, his voice climbing in pitch.
She paused. "And what does that make you now? A double agent?" She pursed her lips slightly and shook her head. "No, you're not here to help me."
She continued through the trees.
It was only a few moments later that she heard the distinct swish of grass beside her and Beatty was walking next to her.
"Olivia, stop," he said.
She kept walking, only stopping when Beatty stepped in front of her, his beady green eyes bubbling.
"Listen Olivia, you clearly don't belong here. Whatever the Secretary wants with you, I doubt that it's good news."
His hand reached into a small pack sitting at his hip and she tensed. He raised a hand slowly, palm open again and returned the other hand with a bundle of clothing.
"These were in a storage locker," he said. "As I recall, they were yours when you were brought here."
"Not that I don't appreciate it," she said and raised her hands to show him the cuffs, "but being bound doesn't make your offer as appealing as it could be."
He reached into his pocket and his tongue stuck out for a moment in a comical gesture; had Olivia been in a better mood she may have elicited a greater reaction than raising an eyebrow.
After a moment Beatty smiled and tugged a silver key from his pocket.
"Alright," she said with a smile, "so you've got the key. I'm still not convinced that this isn't some sort of contingency devised by the Secretary."
"First of all, it's not," he said as he motioned for her wrist, which she held back from him. "Second of all, why of all people would he send me?"
"You have a generally calm demeanour. People trust that. Plus, you've interrogated me; you're a face I know."
"But if I'm a face you know from inside, then you wouldn't trust me anyways."
"No, and that's exactly why I don't trust you now," she said blankly.
"Look, all I want is to help," assured Beatty. "Just let me get those cuffs off you and we'll work our way forward from there."
She studied him for a moment; it was true that his attitude was charming and he seemed trustworthy. But she knew better than to rely on the weak evidence of aesthetics; a mirror was only worth the amount one could see in it. However, she had heard nothing else moving near them, not a single scuffle in the foliage, which meant that he had probably come alone. She sighed against her skepticism, pushing it away to a far corner of her mind as she held out her wrists for him.
He nodded softly and pressed the key into the lock on the cuffs, the metal grinding as he turned the key. With a soft clink the handcuffs tumbled to the ground, captured among the blades of the emerald grass.
"Alright," he said, "what now?"
"Now you get me off this island."
She had decided about twenty minutes ago that this man had some sort of knowledge of espionage as he navigated her to a boat without the slightest hint of a security alarm. The silence was everywhere; consuming, penetrating and downright eerie.
It wasn't much of a leap for her to draw the lines between the dots of her logic, pigments of understanding in her mind. It was simply a small jump over a murky puddle of ambiguity. But there were still questions, burning away on the pyre of her good intentions.
"Why?" she asked softly beneath the alcove of the boat they were using, leather upholstery sliced with jagged lines. The edges reminded her of teeth, sharp and razor-like.
He looked at her briefly, his hands never leaving the controls. His face was turned out to the choppy water when he answered.
"Why what?"
She turned her head slightly; there were clouds floating over them, pillows of discontent.
"Why betray Walternate for someone who isn't even from the same world as you?"
He looked at her again, his eyes stern and dark. They were too big to remind her of a dragonfly now.
"I don't think of it as betrayal. I consider it an act of morality."
"So what do you do when an order goes against those morals?"
She watched as he swallowed, the thick lump of his Adam's apple bobbing beneath his flesh.
"What do you do when faced with two ends of a gun? Do you choose the handle... or the end of the barrel?"
A knot twisted in her stomach, pushing against the spring of her stability as she registered his words. Was it really so easy to bend the back of one's moral code?
"What do you gain from helping?" she asked with a snap in her voice, the syllables crunching peanuts of air.
"A little peace of mind, is all," explained Beatty. "The Secretary may be doing what he thinks is right but what happens a few months – hell, a year down the road – when both universes start to really break apart? Then what will we have? If this universe is going to become a desolate wasteland, I don't want to stick around until it does."
"So you joined the Department of Defence to try and stop the destruction, to make your voice heard," she said, wrapping a blanket around her shoulders as the wind nipped at her body.
He looked back at her, and this time there was a thick darkness in his eyes, something so sorrowful that it sprouted icy pins in her spine and sent chills racing through her being.
His expression hardened, filling with a thick cement of annoyance.
"Not just my own," he said and reached for his back pocket, her eyes trailing his hand. She half-expected a little silver revolver to pop into his hand, ready to snap at her like a wolf. Instead he pulled a black wallet from his pocket, and handed it to her. She looked at it carefully, worn along the spine and made of what she was sure was leather.
"Open it," he said.
She flipped the wallet open, and next to his Show-Me was a picture of a woman with a young child; a little girl with brown hair no more than six. She briefly thought of Ella.
"Are they –"
"– My wife and daughter," he said. "They died in a Class-2 Vortex two years ago, and I joined the DOD a month later. I joined for them, and for all the other voices that never had the chance to get a say."
She tried to think of something reassuring or sympathetic to say to the man, but all she could manage were two words that could never do justice to his tragedy.
"...I'm sorry."
He nodded and turned back to the helm, both hands now back on the controls. The remainder of the trip was silent, and when he dropped her off at the docks in Manhatan, he gave her some parting words as she hopped over onto land.
"Hey, Olivia."
"Yeah?"
"Watch your back, alright?"
She nodded. Her eyes swept over her shoulder as he turned the boat away and disappeared into the gray veil of fog in the distance.
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