Sing me a song

"Hey babe, you ok?"

"I'm better than just ok." Elena rushed to the now opened door, and swung her open arms over Tool's neck, who hugged her back just as fervently. The embrace was quickly broke by Elena, as she painfully realized that it was too soon to be forcing herself so much.

Tool's face quickly reflected concern to which Elena simply raised her hand.

"A simple hug isn't gonna take me down." A shy smile graced her lips that sent a painful jolt from a healed dislocated jaw.. She raised her hand quickly to her jaw and Tool inspected the healed wound sign.

"Everything looks like it going to be just fine." He concluded.

A of relief washed over Tool's concerned brow as he stretched his arm towards Elena.

"Mind if we have a talk, just the two of us, before the guys interrupt us?"

She smiled and grabbed his arm. "Lead the way."

Slowly, both of them walked towards the end of the hall, straight into Tool's personal armory.

From the outside the room looked just as non-descriptive as the rest of Tool's shop. Not one person would ever suspect of all the debriefings, strategies and the connections that were made in that building. Governments have been toppled, persons of interest been saved and more than a few son of bitches had been sent with a one way ticket straight to hell.

The room was filled to the brink with guns, heavy machinery and knives. Not an inch was wasted, wall to wall, covered in the most expensive and detailed weaponry conceivable. Elena looked around almost as if she was in a candy store. She inhaled the lingering gun powder in the air, traced the cold metal of the guns and looked at the glistening blades of Tool's wide collection of knives.

"You know very well that we're not here for you to play with my toys." Tool's voice came from behind her; he had watched her as she gravitated towards the many weapons, some new, some old and a few he had just acquired during her absence. She turned around and smiled at him. She was at the end of the room by the grenades, and he was standing just by the door, leaning against a decrepit army green desk.

"Not yet, anyways" she answered back, playfully.

"Focus on a full recovery first, babe." He said humorlessly.

"Sure thing." She answered as she walked back over him.

Once she had already absorbed all the little details, Tool extended a chair for her. He sheepishly sat on the desk in front of her.

"You know the drill, hun."

Elena slowly slithered into the chair and laid her head back.

"Ok. We were cornered…"

"No. We all know that, what I mean is, after Christmas cleared that bridge."

Tool crossed his arms over his white T shirt and stared at Elena. She looked away and then smiled.

"There's really no fooling you." She said under her breath with some detachment.

"No man with a pulse, and no amount of tears have done so." He said feeling pretty satisfied and proud all at once. He tipped his cowboy hat and pressured her to go on.

"They knew we were there. They wanted what we were looking for, they wanted us to find it, so they could snatch it away from us." Her voice had lost all resemblance of detachment.

"That's impossible." He argued.

"The commanding officer requested our package by code name. Now, I don't mean to point any fingers, but that screams leakage, and let's be honest, that is some serious and specific intel. Once I told him I'd rather share my bed with him, it was lights out for me." She shrugged her shoulders as she felt the impotence starting to gnaw at her guts.

"Lee, had the only surviving copy, you made damn sure about that. What next?" Tool recalled the events that had been reported post-op.

After Elena had obtained the copy, she fried the compound's mainframe and to certify that had the only surviving coping, she directed all the input towards the main PC. She blew up the whole floor, but that was her, just adding her touch. There would be no way anyone else could get their hands on a copy, of any kind, just one of the many benefits their service included.

"I woke up, and they tried to persuade me to share my Intel. These weren't your average grunts, they knew ways, intimate and painful ways, to extract any information they wanted."

Elena's voice cracked and a macabre silence was set between both Tool and her. She looked away and he kept his eyes on her. It wasn't clear what was worse, her inability to stop recalling those awful memories or the fact that she had to share them. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and spilled her guts out.

"I don't know what happened, Tool! One moment I'm awake, the next I'm being tortured, then I'm dancing in a ball gown, and then cut back to torture. I'm with you having a kick, then back to torture! I couldn't tell reality apart! I couldn't fight back!"

Elena couldn't fight back anymore. She held her head in her hands, and felt Tool rushing towards her. She started to punch him, trying to keep him away from her. At first she tried backing away from him but he wouldn't let go and kept holding her until bitter streams of tears wouldn't stop from pouring from her eyes, her breathing uneven, and temblors taking her prisoner. All her hellish torture finally took a toll on her. He tried comforting her, but he knew damn well, that there wasn't much to do.

"We got you. We got your back."

Her unsteadiness was slowly drifting away as her crying was dying down and her temblors stopped as well.

"Look at me. Look!"

Elena looked up to Tool who stared her down, decidedly.

"Those sons of bitches are gonna regret all they did to you. They're going to pay, and they're going to pay big time. You can count on that."

"I know so." And a fire was pressing on, inside her.

"Listen, sweetheart."

Tool's concern over her couldn't be dissipated so easily. He looked at her bandages, at the rope burns that went through her neck and at the different marks that would lay hidden in her arms.

"Seeing you like this wasn't easy, hearing you screaming our names asking us to put a bullet through your head. We had to put you to sleep just so you could let a doctor get near you. We resorted to taking turns while you slept. You were in the worst state possible, didn't even recognized me."

Tool gestured to his chest and a painful and sorrow look to up to his face. Elena and tried muttering some sort of excise

"Tool, I…"

"What I really mean, is this, what you want? Before we get down to the guys, is this the life that you want, sweetheart? I have an identity for you and enough money for three lifetimes over, nothing that you don't deserve, just right next to that old Glock, the choice is yours. "

And just like that Elena heard a click and Tool was out of the room. She wasn't sure what she wanted to do. Did she still had the boldness, the courage and the drive to go back into this world? No hesitation, for one second and it surely meant the death of her and her teammates, did she still had the determination to get back into the business or had that woman died back in captivity?