Which meant they had at least a few people in their group with half a brain, despite how animalistic Loki had observed most of the humans behaving. It seemed the worst depravities of human nature had only grown more bestial in the months since law enforcement and the regular military ceased to operate in this part of the country.
Loki again found himself thankful that they would be leaving this island soon.
Beyond the swamp-like weather, the periodic flooding and electrical storms, he found the descent into madness ultimately depressing to witness.
He could feel relief on the human woman, too.
Then again, his light had become more tied into hers over the past hour, rather than less. He found his light drawing deeper into hers still...more and more with each passing minute it seemed, until now it was almost uncomfortably so...but he didn’t seem to be able to do much about that, either.
The other seers had noticed, he knew.
A few of them gave him glances that Loki knew he was not meant to intercept. He saw them looking between his light and that of the human woman, too, and could feel side conversations he was not supposed to hear, either.
Loki tried to pretend he didn’t see those looks or hear those murmurs, but again, he knew he could not hide what his light was doing, not in this small of a construct.
Luckily, most of them seemed to find it amusing more than anything.
Only Illeg and Jax seemed less amused...and Anale, to a lesser degree.
Loki knew that all three of them were close to Dante, and that at least part of their reaction stemmed from a desire to protect their young cousin. He knew they would do their best to protect the woman who had given birth to Dante, as a result...even if that woman was a full adult in human years, being in her early- to mid-thirties at minimum.
Loki grew uncomfortably aware of the female human’s eyes more and more on him, too. He knew that might be his fault. She could not help but react to his light’s interest in hers. Of course, if she had felt differently about him, it would have caused a different reaction in both of them, but as it was, he found himself looking at her too often, and more often than not, he found her returning those looks.
Truthfully, a part of his mind was already contemplating how he might find some way to talk to her. Alone, that is, without the others around.
He remembered what Tarsi’s cake had told him, all of those months ago.
It prophesied a love interest for him, during these dark days. He had not been gifted with a glimpse of her, of this love of his, but he had definitely felt her to be human. He had been turned on by the vision...he had, in fact, spent most of the night kissing the Bridge’s human aunt, he had been so turned on by it...but he had not felt with any confidence that he had yet met the woman whose light he tasted in that vision.
Now, his hunger wanted to confuse him on that point, too.
Even now, as he tried to think about how best to approach D.C. from the air, how close they should get before finding another mode of transportation into the city itself, Loki’s eyes found an excuse to look in her direction, again and again. Under the pretext of looking at the runways, at the buildings behind where she stood, even at the sky, his eyes lingered on her long, jagged-cut dark hair and noted her body as slim-hipped and muscular, but wiry. She had medium-length legs, and they looked strong and toned under the black jeans she wore.
Even apart from those strange, silver rings, her clothes interested him, too––somewhat dated, dark-colored human-styled clothes with which he was only passingly familiar, including those dark stretch jeans and a black and white band t-shirt from a New York rock band. She had dressed herself in front of him in that back room of the residential apartments where they found her. Loki looked away, of course, along with the rest of the seers, but he had been aware of her, the whole time she covered herself, even as he pretended he wasn’t.
He had felt her aware of him too, even then.
She had been deeply embarrassed to be found this way, he felt. Embarrassed and sad and fearful that they would tell her daughter.
Even then, in those first few moments of contact with her, while listening to Anale explain to her in English who they were, why they were here, Loki himself had only wanted to comfort her in some way. He had wanted to reassure her that none of them judged her, that they would not betray anything to her daughter that she did not want known.
Loki found himself remembering Vikram describing her over the comm, too, right before they had gone into that warlord’s den of an apartment complex near Prospect Park. Vikram sent them images of Dante’s mother, in addition to the verbal description, although Vikram had been forced to steal the former off of Dante’s network queue. For the same reason perhaps, none of those images had been clear or recent, since Dante herself had pilfered what she could of her mother off hacks of government security files, not having any of her own. Dante had lost all of her personal files, of course, when Jon and Wreg were forced to abduct her off that street in Manhattan to save her life from Shadow.
Vikram told Loki that Dante herself described her mother as “kind of a middle-aged rocker type chick, like old lady cool,” which both Holo and Jax found extremely funny.
The woman Loki looked at now didn’t strike him as old in any way, though, or as particularly humorous in terms of either her light or her physicality. Even for a human, she was still quite young...which was neither here nor there to Loki himself, but he found it interesting, in terms of how her daughter seemed to view her. He wondered if it had something to do with her having given birth, or if there was some other reason.
She still wore the remnants of the dark eye make up she had been wearing when they found her in that back room in the apartment complex, too.
Noticing that got him remembering what else she had been wearing––and not wearing––when they broke into that petty warlord’s fortress. A mere flicker of that memory brought a denser pulse of guilt, but also a hotter wave of pain that wanted to take over Loki’s light. The latter caused his tongue to thicken right before he glanced at her again.
Gods. She probably wouldn’t thank him for his being turned on by her enslavement, whether she had negotiated the terms of that enslavement or not.
Avoiding her wide, dark eyes, whose stare didn’t exactly help his concentration, Loki looked away, back towards the Chinook and to Preela.
“Approach?” he said, adjusting the rifle strap on his shoulder. He cleared his throat, his voice toneless. “What do you recommend?”
He’d already told Preela and Rex where they were going, too.
He felt the female human’s light, curious in his, and his pain worsened...enough that he saw Preela flinch visibly, right before she glanced at Rex, and then at Jax, who stood on the other side of Loki. Jax just shrugged, a faint smile touching his lips, even as he gave Loki a wary look. Rex grinned openly, though, leering in interest at the small, muscular, dark-skinned woman standing between Holo and Illeg just outside of their tighter circle.
“Got a hard-on for our cargo, eh, Captain?” Rex grinned, using Prexci, the seer tongue, presumably so the human wouldn’t understand. “You can sit in the back. None of us will bother you if you want to fuck her brains out, all the way to the next drop...”
Loki ignored that too, looking instead at Preela.
“What do you think?” he repeated politely. “In terms of approach?”
He felt the human woman behind him tensing, and blew a warm pulse of light at her in reassurance. He did it without thought, without questioning whether it was appropriate that the others see it, but once he had, he felt the woman’s light wrap even more deeply into his. He felt flickers of that uncertainty in her again...fear of the unknown, mostly, fear of not knowing them, of not knowing if she could trust them. He felt her reminding herself that they had treated her gently, that no one had hurt her...so far, at least...trying to reassure herself she wasn’t crazy to risk going with them, if it might bring her to her daughter.
; She couldn’t have understood Rex, but still Loki fought to restrain himself from stepping between the two of them, of using his light to reassure her that no harm would come to her.
He found himself deciding he wouldn’t leave Rex alone with her, either.
He avoided saying her name still, he noticed, or even thinking it.
He knew her name, though. It was Gina.
Gina Vasquez.
His pain worsened briefly, even as he forced his mind off the woman he could now feel almost tangibly where she stood behind him. She wanted to touch him; he could feel that, too. He wanted Holo away from her, almost as much as Rex, and briefly, he had to fight his own light until he controlled it again.
The others were all looking at him now, and a few of them wore wary expressions, even woven into their amusement.
Illeg muttered something to Holo, but Loki only caught a few words.
“...the fuck happened?” Holo muttered. “Did I miss something?”
“...Fixated...need to watch him with her...”
“Gods,” Ontari muttered. “When? When we found her?”
“No one knows––” Jax said, even as Illeg talked over him.
“––I don’t know. Does it matter?” she muttered.
“Happened fast, though,” Jax muttered, maybe not to be outdone.
Loki did not look directly at any of them, but just stood there, letting them feel over his light. He understood their concern. He accepted it, along with their scrutiny. He likely would have had a similar reaction, if the situation had occurred with one of them in relation to a civilian passenger who they had the collective responsibility to protect.
They had to know they could trust him with her. They had to know he was not going to do something crazy, something that might jeopardize the mission.
A few seconds after they finished scanning his light, Anale tried to break the tension, but Loki heard a thread of nerves in her voice, too.
“Cap’n’s gone off the deep end,” she said. She gave Loki a good-natured punch in the arm. “Pull it together, brother. Or hell, ask her for it. Do we need to get you drunk?”
“Don’t tell him to ask her!” Illeg frowned. “Gods, Ana...we’re in the middle of an op!”
“Not to mention that the Bridge would kill us...if Dante didn’t do it herself,” Jax muttered.
“He might need to ask her,” Ontari muttered. “Dugra a’ kitre...look at him.”
“We can’t talk about this here,” Mika said. “Shut up, all of you. You’re all just making him worse, talking about him fucking her...can’t you see that?”
Jax broke out into a nervous laugh.
Anale only shrugged towards Mika, unapologetic. Her eyes remained fixed on Loki’s face.
“You all right brother?” she asked him again.
Loki shook his head, feeling his face get warmer.
He knew most of that was not from embarrassment, either.
“I’m fine,” he said tonelessly.
When the silence deepened, Loki took a step towards the Chinook, not looking at any of them as he aimed his feet for the open hatch into the main hold.
“We should leave now,” he said simply.
Without waiting for any of them to answer, he grabbed hold of the metal handle on the outside of the Chinook’s open forward hatch. Placing a foot on the second step of the descended metal staircase, he yanked himself up, without looking back to see if any of them were following him. Even so, he felt the exchanged looks between the seers he left outside as he made his way deeper into the row of seats behind the cockpit.
He kept his mind blank to that, too...as much as he could, anyway.
He had an operation to plan.
He mostly succeeded with that thought by the time the rest of them began to file up the same staircase. He had deposited his weight in a window seat on the starboard side of the helicopter, about ten rows deep into the thirty or so in the main hold. Loki watched in his peripheral vision as the other seers made their way through that same aisle, choosing seats throughout the body of the Chinook and talking to one another in low voices.
Loki only intervened once, clicking his fingers and waving a hand sharply towards the front of the plane. Rex had filed in after Holo and their human cargo, and seemed intent on sitting beside her for the duration of the flight.
“No,” was all Loki said.
He said it loudly, however.
After he spoke, Jax and Rex exchanged looks with Anale before all three of them burst into mutual laughter. Looking between them, Loki realized that, clearly, the attempt had been staged for his benefit, to see how he might react. Even after he determined that fact, Loki still watched Rex closely as he relinquished his seat. He continued to watch as the large-boned seer walked towards the back of the helicopter, moving his bulk awkwardly through the row of navy-blue, cloth-covered seats with their individual headsets and plastic armrests. The large seer winked at Loki as he passed, patting him on the arm, but Loki didn’t smile at that, either.
Instead he fought back another wave of pain, watching Holo seat himself next to the human woman.
Loki did want to sit with her. He knew it was not a good idea, and not only because every seer on the aircraft was now watching his eyes and light with amusement.
He wanted it, regardless.
Pushing the thought from his mind, Loki aimed his eyes out the oval window of the Chinook, fitting his headset over one ear as he replayed the message he had received from the Sword via Oli. He would figure out what to do about the woman later.
For now, he had work to do. The Sword had given him a job.
The thought sustained him through most of the next ninety minutes of flight.
THEY DROPPED DOWN right in the middle of the city, as it turned out, on the largest of several lawns belonging to what used to be one of the most heavily-guarded buildings in the world.
Loki contacted the carrier en route, telling them of his intentions once he got a good look at the current satellite feeds out of the D.C. Once he realized the place was almost totally abandoned, at least in terms of a real military presence by the humans, he requested permission for a direct assault, utilizing speed rather than stealth to minimize risk.
He knew from feeds, of course, that the United States government continued to function, out of some kind of bunker located in another area of the country.
He had heard a few rumors as to that location, and none of them were coastal.
Like Balidor and others among their higher-ranked seers, Loki believed those sites to be primarily underground, too, although the list of potential locations had grown somewhat in recent months, since the remaining human elite seemed to be employing a lot of seers at this time. They also seemed to be periodically changing locations to evade...
Well, whatever it was they felt they needed to evade.
Truthfully, Loki could no longer be certain what that was.
He supposed they felt hunted, just like all of them felt hunted in these days. But Loki, like Balidor and Varlan, with whom he had spoken about some of these details, also believed that the human leaders were being manipulated into a state of near-constant fear and paranoia by Shadow and his seers, as well.
Truthfully, in looking around what remained of Washington D.C. as they reduced altitude over the city, Loki found himself thinking that the humans might have been perfectly safe in remaining here, all things considered. By that, of course, he meant they would likely have been no less safe here than in most other parts of the continent...although he supposed that anonymity of location had its advantages, even in times such as this.
Further, being away from the coast increasingly had its advantages, as well.
Balidor had last told Loki that he suspected most of the government initially relocated to the old NORAD headquarters in Colorado. The Adhipan leader seemed to think it was possible they had moved on since that time, probably because NORAD itself was still relatively well-known, too, just like Langley and Wash
ington D.C.
Loki frowned out the window as the Chinook’s blades powered down, staring up at the walls of the famous human building’s South Portico and its high, white, ionic columns. He squinted past the anti-glare glass to the rooftop balconies, where secret service used to patrol above the two massive balconies below those upper floors.
He saw no one up there now.
Further, the place felt abandoned.
Loki’s own light told him as much, from the mostly dismantled constructs that had already begun to dissipate from lack of maintenance by construct seers. He could feel few people inside the building itself, and those he did feel had a haphazard energy to them, totally unlike the previous glimpses Loki had gotten of this place, when it housed a working government, and even more importantly in many respects, that government’s leader.
Now it felt hollowed out. Empty.
It did not help that Loki could see where organic-reinforced windows appeared to be missing on the upper and lower floors, particularly all throughout what he could glimpse of the East and West Wings. Loki knew that none of those windows had been glass.
They must have been broken manually out of the very walls, using some considerable amount of force. He knew that could possibly have occurred through the use of missiles, or some other military-grade ordnance, but he doubted it, given the lack of scorch marks on the outside of the building itself, apart from in a few, isolated locations. Those he did see looked more to be from fires than from explosions, anyway.
The quiet bothered Loki.
Then again, he did not intend for them to be here long.
The boss gave him very specific instructions. He also asked Loki to keep most of the particulars of any intel they found to himself, at least until he no longer could...but that would only be a concern in the event they were successful.
Loki found the Sword’s request for secrecy interesting, but hardly scandalous.
Allie's War Season Four Page 76