A/N: Hey hey hey! Okay, straight down to buisiness.
This is the chapter you have been waiting for.
You have PM'd me, sent reviews begging me for it, and I delivered. Hallelujah! It will happen over a few chapters, but this is the first! The road to recovery will be long and bumpy, but well, it's the road to recovery, so why would the end not be worth it? ;)
P.S. Watch out for that little star-eyed-wavy-arms guy between the paragraphs! ;~~(*)o(*)~~; (that guy is for you, Kai. Thought he could use some hands! ;))
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Kids Next Door Mission...
Operation: F.O.R.G.E.T.
Fragments
Of
Recovery
Gradually
Enable
Team
Chapter 17 – Breaking Through
Amanda sighed as she walked home that day. It was mid-afternoon, and the sun hung behind her, lengthening her shadow as she walked. She didn't feel like walking. She didn't want to do anything. She just couldn't take being alone any more.
Her team had been totally wiped out since the start of the month.
She was the last one left. The only one. The only numbuh left. The rest ignored her completely. Pointedly. Like they were trying to insult her. They were as good as teens now. As good as nobody to her.
Amanda had had a run-in with the one who called himself Colter, the one who was making this all happen. He was armed with guns, syringes, spray bottles. Amanda managed to get away without being caught, the only thing she hadn't avoided was inhaling a bit of that dizzying yellow gas. But she wasn't hurt or kidnapped or turned into an adult on the spot, and was thankful and just a little bit proud of herself for that. At the time. Then, once the dreams started showing up, she gradually realised that the aim of the attack was not to capture, not to injure, but just to implant.
To infect.
The yellow gas was what did it. At the scene it had only left her slightly disoriented and a bit wobbly on her feet, but now she had a few clues as to what was for. What it did to you.
The dreams had started about two weeks ago. Three days before the last remaining teammate she had left turned for good, joined the others.
One night, she had gone to bed, like usual. Read way later than she should have, like usual, and fallen asleep, all like usual. But the nightmare started as soon as she let her lids fall shut. Like the shutter on a camera, they blinked black, and there it was. The treehouse. Only, not her treehouse. At least, it looked nothing like her treehouse. Instead of the thick, healthy green foliage, there were sharp, jagged sticks emerging from every bough, thorns scattered, deadly along creeping vines, they all seeped toward her.
All found her.
She ran, but the ground under her moved like a conveyer belt, running in the opposite direction, taking her closer to it, the gaping mouth, the planks of what used to be her favourite lookout point now ready to swallow her whole. The floor of the kitchen stuck down like fangs, waiting to pierce flesh.
And then, she had woken, mid-scream, sweaty, and gasping for breath like she'd been dunked underwater.
They had just gotten worse from there. Out came the friends, the people she knew so well, first being tortured, running away with her, then, they switched, just left, and now, they were the ones doing the torturing. They were the ones hunting her. Amanda was a girl with a strong will, but every now and then, at this Moonbase announcement or that district meeting, she had become snappy, almost mad at her fellow operatives -should she even say that anymore? Fellow operatives? She felt like just her now, just Amanda. She thought of herself as Amanda now, not number... numbuh 676. She almost forgot her number -no, wait, numbuh- sometimes now- and she was getting worse every day, worse with every dream. In the dreams, the recent ones anyway, the place she was running to, the place that came to mind when she started trying to escape her former teammates tight grasp, was... somewhere. Somewhere.. with teenagers. It was difficult to say, even more difficult to realise as it actually happened, but Amanda felt more comfortable when she was crowded with high school students or the parents that came to pick up their children from school than she did sitting in a classroom full of kids her own age.
And that was when, in the middle of the path, Amanda realised what was happening.
She was turning. Switching, ditching, flipping, the KND operatives had many names for the process now, but she knew she was going. Who knows how long it would be before she was completely out? Before she forgot how great it was to feel smaller than everyone, yet stronger at the same time? How long until best friends and little sisters turned into stupid, snot-nosed brats? It would only take days. Maybe the realisation of what was happening would slow down the process a bit. Amanda hoped so.
Hours passed, she went home, barely touched dinner, then sent herself to bed at 6:30, claiming to feel sick.
She did feel sick. Sick to the head, sick to the stomach with the realisation of what she had been thinking, wanting to do after the dreams started taking hold.
She sat on her bed, staring at the wall, at nothing, really.
She could feel it. Like an itch at the back of her head. It was growing, consuming her. The more she pushed it back, the more powerfully and angrily it returned the shove. She fought, she wanted to anyway, but it just wouldn't work. The itch wasn't an itch anymore, it was a rash, a mark that couldn't be distinguished from her skin, something that was part of her, and she couldn't get it off.
It was going to happen. If she willed it not to happen, it would simply take over that part of her; that part that still held strong. And if she stopped trying... it was too easy for them either way. Just walk in, take my body, take my mind. It's not me anymore, but it's another in your army.
Amanda fell asleep, not wanting to let herself go, turn herself in, hand over to what she knew would happen, but at the same time not wanting to see another second of the fading light outside. The last rays of sunset reminded Amanda of the small part of her that was still just that. Part of her. But soon, she realised, night would fall, those last beams of light would lose the battle, and darkness would win once more.
2:03AM.
Amanda read the eerie green panels of her digital clock as she woke from another nightmare. Another... what could she call it? Another time to strengthen the grip that the 'other side' had on her.
That was it. That was just too much. She had to leave. She felt like escaping from herself. Leaving herself behind, and maybe hoping that the enemy would leave her alone, so she could return. Return to herself, that's what she needed to do.
Before becoming an agent in -what year was it when she graduated? Who was there when it happened? What was that day like? She strained to remember- Amanda had loved sector V. The first one. That, surprisingly, or not so surprisingly, was one of the only details of the KND she could readily remember. She loved them. They were all she wanted to be, all she aspired to. They felt like a childish dream. Wait, had she just said that? Had she really just used the word childish as a negative thing? She felt her stomach convulse as she realised she had.
The treehouse!
That's where she had to go. Sector V's treehouse. She had to go, needed to. Maybe it was the only thing that could keep her awake to what side she was truly on for just that little bit longer.
She stumbled from bed, walking into the bedpost and feeling it jab sharply at her chest, only making the rising sickness in the bed of her stomach churn. Ignoring that, she felt, fumbled her way to her desk, grabbed her flashlight, always kept close in case of, well, when the sick feeling was too much to bear.
She flipped it on, squinting until her eyes grew used to the light.
Out the window she went, clambering, shivering in the night air and onto the dewy grass below, the wet blades filling the gaps between her toes.
Walking along the streets at night was something that Amanda was pretty much used to. What with all the midnight trips to the candy store, and the.. had there been late-night missions?
As she was passing along house after house along the end of the street sector V's treehouse was on, a snag in the road caused her to trip, and the flashlight was thrown from her hand as she stuck out her palms to catch her fall. Unfortunately for Amanda, the beam of light the torch threw ended p aimed at a second-storey room in the house she was in front of. Extremely concious of the intensity of the light and what it might mean to her spontanious stroll at 2 AM, she scrabbled to retreive it and once again aim it down the sidewalk.
She kept on, flinching at every little noise, every little movement in the corner of her eye.
Once, when she was only a couple of doors away from the treehouse and the old, abandoned house it stood next to, she coul have sworn she saw someone lurking in the bushes behind her. But alas, when she turned around all she saw was the same thing she had been seeing the whole way there; bleak dark outlines of undefined shapes against the moonless sky.
Amanda was sure that no current sector V operative would be sleeping in there at that moment. Operatives had been warned against sleeping in their usual beds in their bases, as any operative who let their guard down in a place as obvious as their treehouse was a sitting duck. Today's sector V would all be curled up in their other beds; at their other homes, hoping not to be next.
Finally, she was there. Rickety, old, almost haunting, the gigantic structure towered above her, seeming almost to sway in the unfriendly night air.
She jumped the fence, not taking her eyes off the treehouse. Walked the final stretch of the backyard, and finally stopped at the foot of the tree. It took her a while to find the entrance, but soon enough she located the little button that opened up the trunk of the tree like an elevator, and she stepped in, silently, unceremoniously, like it was no big deal. But it was, to her.
Amanda didn't really remember what had happened after that. She had images, flashes of being in there, all the equipment still hanging there ready to use. The new sector V, as it seemed, had left most of the original 'important' rooms; the main area, the original operatives' rooms, a couple of the better lookouts and aircraft hulls, and had taken to using the lesser rooms and small add-ons for their own operations. It was like the whole treehouse was a monument, a tribute to those five operatives who had done so much for the organisation.
Then, there was the crying, crying helplessly out on the balcony, exposed to the chill of the night. She knew she was done for. She knew that this would be the last time she would look up at the full moon and and think; How amazing are we? How unbelievably, amazingly, giantly... Then, she was asleep. Simple as that. And, for the first time in weeks, the nightmares didn't follow her.
Amanda awoke an hour later, to the sound of someone behind her. She knew where she was, it was one of those Kids Next Door treehouses. She didn't care. But she didn't want to be found. So, she swung over the side of the rail onto a swaying branch and began the long climb down.
Why do those kids put these things in such hard to reach places? she wondered.
I could end up messing up my hair with all this climbing.
~(*)~
Abby was asleep. Peaceful, having another dream. Her. Her, and Hoagie. Playing on a playground. Kuki, and Wally and Nigel were there too. On a playground. What was that supposed to mean? Teenagers, in the middle of the night, she should add, on a child's playground. But before she could find out what happened next, she was awoken by a bright light outside her window. She sat up groggily, swung her legs over the side of her bed, an pulled back the curtain cautiously. There, she saw the girl. The same girl she had found running around the high school about a week ago. The girl she was meant to find and ask about that very incident.
Abby's first though was that she was being a bit dumb, out there, tripped over for lack of light on the pavement at -what was the time?- Two-fifteen in the morning. But then it hit her. That time she had turned up in the hallways, her and Kuki had thought that she might have been dared, pressured into skipping class. What if it was happening again? Abby could imagine it. The girl, scared and eager to gain acceptance, as the other, mean kids taunted and tested their power over her.
Betcha you don't have the guts to go out there.
Come on, it's not that bad!
Are you a baby or something?
Of course she'd do it. And that made Abby mad. At the other kids. She had to talk to the girl. So she got out of bed, grabbed the jacket that was hanging from the handle to her closet, and tiptoed downstairs to the front door.
~~(*)~~
Once Abby had been following her for a little while, not wanting to scare her, waiting for a good time to speak up, she realised that this girl wasn't just out there so she could say she'd been out there. She was walking to get somewhere, not just wandering aimlessly and and thinking about how long she'd have to be out there before she was cool enough to be accepted.
So, Abby kept low, overtaken by curiousity, and followed behind her.
One time the girl almost noticed her. She turned around barely slower than Abby could get behind the nearest tree.
Too close. But Abby felt a shot of adrenalin as she fought to keep her breathing silent. She loved that feeling.
The girl kept walking, until she found a house. The one the local kids kept calling 'The ghost house' for some reason. The question of why this little girl might want to be here at any time, let alone the middle of the night, only fed Abby's determination to find out, so she kept up a silent march behind her.
There was a treehouse. In the backyard of the old house. A treehouse the size of... nothing she'd ever seen. It was huge, had a trunk as wide as a truck, and branches longer than a school bus. Massive.
But what was more, it was made of some strange things. She swore she could see the front of a ship nestled somewhere in there, something that looked like a telescope bigger than anything Abby thought possible, even an opening big enough to land an aircraft on. It was surreal. Impossible. Yet there it was, right in front of her.
Usually, Abby thought, something this big and... well, strange would feel intimidating, scary even, in the dim light. But it wasn't. It was almost... inviting. Almost something she wanted to smile at and visit and- it was all crazy. But all real feelings she was really having. Crazily real. Unreal reality. She didn't know, couldn't explain, but still, it felt that way. So, she moved forward once more, this time not for the sake of the girl, but for her. Because she wanted to.
She watched the girl ascend to one of the many floors of the treehouse, through an evelator. An elevator. In the tree. And couldn't help but sneak out after her and try opening the thing herself. She found the button the other girl had used, carefully disguised as one of the contours of the tree, and watched in sheer amazment as half of the tree slid back, showing itself to be hollow.
The little pod of an elevator was smaller than was comfortable, and Abby wondered why whoever had created it had made it that way. It wasa mostly that it was cramped at the top, low-hanging and almost a little bit claustrophobic.
The shaft began moving as soon as she was in, having to crouch earlier to avoid being pressed up against the ceiling. She felt suddenly nervous. She assumed it was fear of what this was, or what could be up there. It just felt like she was extremely wary of what would happen once the little hatch opened. It felt like forever before it actually did. What she saw when she stepped out amazed her.
The place was... like nothing she'd ever recalled seeing before. A video screen big enough for a NASA control room, couches, big, mechanical doors, openings in the wall where rope bridges could be seen, swaying in the wind, providing an access, however rickety and unstable, to other parts of the huge dwelling. Just amazing. Treehouses were never meant to be this huge, this cool, this... easy to picture yourself living in.
Then, out of nowhere, a sudden wave of dizziness poured over her. She saw spots, a couple of formations, almost faces. She saw the moon, she saw glasses. Stumbling over to one of the couches in the middle of the room, she let herself fall nect to the back of it, on her knees now, head still a buzz. A voice -no, a few- filled her ears, though she could be quite sure that it was only her who was hearing it.
Numbuh 5! You're awake! Are you all right?
They got away, numbuh 5. They got you. You were hurt.
Are you alright?
Then, she replied, actually speaking this time, to herself, to the voices in her head.
'Yeah baby, numbuh 5 is alright.'
Before the room cleared, and her balance returned, she saw one image, one single picture in her mind; the moon.
Abby took a couple of steps at a time, stopping frequently to notice some new detail that she had missed before, or to make sure she was still on her feet. After a while, she grew more and more interested in the five big, metalic sliding doors in the corner, marked with the numbers one to five. What was behind them? She wanted to go, and held back at first, but then figured; what the heck? It wasn't like she was going to be shoved out of here. So, now peacefully interested, despite the little nagging voice at the back of her head that told her that one of those dizzy spells could hit her again, and the thought of the little girl all but gone, she stepped up to the door closest to her; the one marked 5. Now she just had to figure out how to open it.
~(*)~
Wally couldn't get to sleep. He didn't know why, but he just didn't feel tired. Okay, scratch that, he felt like he wanted to collapse. But still, he got that feeling that said that this would be just another sleepless night. Nothing he could do about it, so he just lay there, looking up at the ceiling. His duvet lay crumpled on the end of his bed, leaving him shivering slightly in just his boxer shorts and singlet.
Wally kept having nights like these, about once every month, always at about the same time. The last days of one month, or the first days of the next. He had figured out that these boring, tiring, loathsome nights fell on a full moon. Always a full moon. Wally didn't believe in all that hippe-psycic-magic crud, no. This.. maybe it was just co-incidence.
But what was weirder, is that on these nights, Wally had dreams. Not full-scale, images and voices, real-feeling dreams, but waking dreams, like visions and thoughts of voices, like he was playing a movie in his head.
Wally thought he was maybe going insane. Really. He worried about it often now. There were so many stories up there, stories he had no control over, that had so little to do with him, he felt like they had been wrongly placed in his head. But he felt connected to them. He just didn't know how. The stories had a mind of their own. And Wally was sure that this mind it hadwas insane. It was always focused on these five people, there were more regular characters, but it was always these five, no matter what.
They resembled people he knew. Wally wasn't overly worried about that, aside from the fact that the five people that were the main characters seemed to be based around people he barely knew.
The first guy, the one in the red sweater; he looked like Nigel.
The second resembled Hoagie; not by looks but by personality. He could tell.
The third; obviously Kuki. Cute, bubbly, pretty, energetic, the very things Wally loved about her.
The fourth was the odd one out; the short, defiant blondie was Joey all over. The only one in the group for whom he could come up with a good reason for.
The other girl, the red hat one; well, she was Abby. She had the red hat and all. And the one who always knew what to say.
Strange. All he could say.
So, he drifted off into that half-concious state and waited indifferently to see what the next almost dream would be.
Numbuh 4, get up!
Yeah, you know full moons are always moonbase meeting nights!
We can't be late again because of you.
Aw, guys! Ah'm tired!
Well, sleep on the SCAMPER.
Ugh..stupid, cruddy mission noights...wish Ah could just go ta sleep...
A little boy, the Joey figure in Wally's head, dragged his feet as he left his "bed", which seemed to be in the middle of a boxing ring, for some strange reason. He didn't even wonder what a 'scamper' was; there were too many words that didn't make sense in these dreams.
Then, skipping scenes, as his head often did, Wally came onto this:
My fellow operatives, thank you for joining us here tonight.
Bored...
~(*)~
Abby was mesmerised, almost overwhelmed by this. Almost. She felt like she should be freaking out, wanting to leave, but part of her was strangely comfortable here. And that only worried the other part of her more. She felt sure she was asleep, but it was all too real to be a dream. She had looked at all four of the rooms, behind the sliding doors. All of them had been vastly different from one another, but still held a strange feeling of closeness, significance. The dizzy spells had returned, happening once in the hallway between the third and fourth rooms, and again just after she'd been through the last. Every time she heardd voices, and some of the time she responded, unable to control herself. It was like she was hallucinating. Should have been scary. Was almost eeirily unfrightening.
She then, after finding another of the limitless secret hallways that led here or there, ended up in a large, hollow room in the centre of the treehouse. It looked like something of a meeting room. A couple of couches aimed toward the middle, facing a small raised platform with a lectrum in the middle. Between the couches and the platform was a sort of pedestal, like something would be displayed on. Abby found herself studying this with curiousity, as if there was something actually on it.
And it happened again. Room spinning, head clouding, she fell back onto the couch closest to the metal cyllinder, letting the voices take hold.
Uh, hi guys. I know you're probably wondering why I'm back here, after all this time...
I thought you weren't allowed to come back, numbuh 1?
Yeah, well... I had to- warn you.
'Why are you here, Nigel? What is so bad that you had to come back? So bad that you had to break out of there and set the rest of those galactic kids on your tail?'Abby asked to no-one. To thin air. But to someone. Definitely someone. She got the feeling that she should know, know who or what or why, despite the fact that she didn't at all comprehend what was going on, let alone understand the question.
But soon, her vision returned, and she found she could control what she said once more.
She got up, heaving a deep, shuddering breath. She was tired. Exhausted. She wanted to go home. But her legs wouldn't move. She willed herself to get up but still, her body would not listen. It forced her to lie down on that couch, forced her eyes closed, and she couldn't help but obey. After all, she was tired... who would mind if she just...rested her eyes...just for a few minutes...
Then, black. Asleep. Soundly.
And that was when it started. When the old Abigail, the old numbuh 5, started fighting back.
A/N: So, are you liking what I'm doing with it? I had to re-use Amanda with that bit 'cuz she was one of the only operatives that I could afford to have turn. All the rest have other parts I need them to be there for. Alright, I guess that's all for now, already working on the next chapter! (hey, I'm just as excited as you, I don't know what's gonna happen next! Sometimes I just wing it, really.
I may write the story, but at times, the story has a mind of its own...
I should really do something about that...
