Not to mention, that guy that was in her life earlier this year—the one who turned out to be bad news exactly like I expected—is back in town and back in her life. That’s part of what we were fighting about. I don’t think she should be spending time with him, but she was all, “it’ll be fine, he has an idea that could really help Dad,” which I find incredibly suspicious.
I know this goes against a whole slew of sub rules, but if anyone has any real, concrete proof that That Place is doing something illegal, please PM me.
onmyown
I know this is going to make me sound like Chuck, but I really don’t think this is a good idea. There’s a reason that we don’t mention That Place by name, that we don’t use the real word for what we are on this sub. There are a lot of powerful people out there who would not want you digging up this information.
thatsahumanperson
I just want to keep my sister safe, man.
chuckxavier
Then you should try to stop her from whatever you think she’s going to do.
franklinsteinsmonster
they haven’t posted yet but I bet n/lokilover would have some stuff!
theneonthorn
they’ve been banned. turns out they weren’t actually Unusual themselves—not the first creepy person to try to invade our space and I’m certain they won’t be the last.
theneonthorn
you all know I have a personal no PM rule for myself, but I’ll just say: every whisper you’ve heard about That Place is true.
tacotacotaco
I’m going to message you—I have some positive insight, actually, which I know puts me in the minority.
thatsahumanperson
I’ll take it.
MAY 28TH, 2017
My hands are shaking as I write this. I can’t believe I just did something so crazy, so reckless. In real life.
It wasn’t a dream. It feels like a dream, like something I conjured out of thin air, but every inch of it was real. I’m still processing it, still trying to understand everything that happened, want to write it down so that I remember every moment, not because it was good, because it wasn’t, but because it was important. I know something changed inside of me tonight, permanently, and that’s worth making permanent note of.
It all started with a text from Damien.
I’m going back there tonight. Dr. Sharpe has set up her lab and it’ll just be a skeleton crew with the long weekend.
I wanted to pretend I didn’t know what he was talking about, wanted to pretend that I was going to listen to Aaron and not do something incredibly stupid, that I wasn’t still thinking about the idea of some magical cure being in the halls of the AM but I just couldn’t.
So I went. And it was incredibly stupid.
I’m not even sure I could write down exactly what happened—or if it would be smart to. I mean … I just committed a crime. I’m not even sure how. Damien was confident, saying he’d done this before, but that had been with his ability. I didn’t know how he planned to break in when he couldn’t get everything he wanted.
It started with Damien picking me up outside our diner in a car that did not at all reflect his personality (a boring, tan sedan), parking it in the middle of nowhere, walking a mile to the facility, and then sneaking down to a service entrance Damien was sure would be easy to break into.
“This is your master plan?” I hissed. “Just … picking a lock?”
“This exit was totally clear when I broke Mark out. And that was a holiday weekend too, so it’s the same guard rotation.”
I tried not to pass out from nerves as Damien struggled to pick the lock.
“Haven’t you done this before?”
“Not since I was thirteen,” he muttered and then, to my enormous surprise, the door actually opened. We were in.
Walking around it in the middle of the night, with most of the personnel gone, felt like walking inside of a dream. I trailed behind Damien who, despite having spent less time conscious and wandering the halls of the AM than me, seemed to know it like the back of his hand. I realized that it’s probably because he had studied the blueprints when he broke Mark out—he had done this before. But he had had his power then, and had gotten in and out with very little trouble.
This time it wasn’t so simple.
We found Dr. Sharpe’s office and spent fifteen frantic minutes rifling through her cabinets until we found what we needed—her notes on the serum. That had been the plan: we would take the notes, break out the Atypicals who were trapped, and then figure out how to get the serum to someone who could make a medicine to help both my dad and Blaze. The AM had backups to be sure, would certainly make their own serum and use it to help people, but we couldn’t trust that they would do it. We had to take matters into our own hands.
So. Goddamn. Stupid.
As we were on our way out of the lab, the file clutched in my hand, still unopened—I was too terrified to look, even though I knew I might not understand it, I just feared opening that folder and seeing big letters saying THERE’S NO WAY TO HELP HIM, GIVE UP ALL HOPE. So I just clutched it in my hands as we ran as silently as possible down the hall, making our way down to the basement.
But then, we turned a corner, and Owen was suddenly ten feet in front of us. Some kind of veteran-break-in instinct kicked in for Damien and he immediately disappeared into some shadows while I stood frozen, a complete deer in the headlights.
Owen stopped in his tracks, a deer in the headlights all his own.
“… Rose?”
“Owen!” I yelped, wondering if I could play this off somehow. “Agent—Agent Green, I mean.”
“Director Green, actually,” he mumbled. “What … what are you doing here?”
“Director?” Damien’s voice hissed from the shadows and I tried not to react, instead repeating his question out loud as cover.
“Yes, it’s … it’s very recent,” Owen said absentmindedly as he took a hesitant step toward me, like he was still trying to figure out if this was all a dream. I could relate.
“Rose…” he said. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
“I—I’m back,” I said. “For another round of the program. And I think I must have started sleepwalking when I’m dreamdiving because I don’t know how I got out here.”
I tried to laugh it off, but Owen took another step closer to me, peering owlishly through his wire-framed glasses at me. My laugh wilted and shriveled under the weight of his disappointment.
“No, no, you’re not,” he said. “First of all, I’d know. I actually care about your progress, Rose.”
“Owen—”
“And second of all, we don’t have any programs running right now,” he continued. “We’re overhauling the organization, which has meant limiting the long-term services we offer for a while. Which brings me, again, to my question: what. are. you. doing. here.”
“I…” I floundered, trying to come up with a plausible excuse for why I would be here, in the middle of the night, if I wasn’t doing a program, and then Owen’s eyes went down to the folder I was still holding.
“You’re not here alone, are you?” he asked, though it didn’t sound like a question.
“I just … I wanted some answers,” I said, clutching the file tighter. “And what you’re doing here, it’s—it’s not okay.”
“I know.” He sighed. I hadn’t really expected the moral high ground to work, but it turned out that Owen Green is exactly the person I thought he was. He’s pretty much the only one.
“But that still doesn’t explain what you’re doing here,” he said.
“All those people you have in the basement,” I said, digging into the righteous argument, “that’s not okay. They deserve to be set free.”
“I agree. And we’re going to do that. But we have to do it carefully.”
“What do you mean ‘we’?” I asked. “When—how—you’re the director now? What happened to Wadsworth?”
“A lot has chan
ged in the past month, Rose,” he said. “Joan and I—Dr. Bright—we’ve been working to stop what’s been going on here, to take over, fix things, and we finally did it.”
I just blinked, frozen in place, trying to process what he was telling me.
“We’re going to make this place better, Rose,” Owen went on, the belief shining out of his mouth so strongly for a moment I thought I could see it, that somehow I was in a dream.
“How?” I asked. “How could any place that experiments on people like this be a good thing?”
“It can’t,” he said simply. “That’s why we’re going to stop. Come back in a year—six months, even—and this tier will be gone. All these people will be safe and we’ll be starting something new here.”
“At least let us take Blaze,” I pleaded. “I want to trust you, really I do, but he’s Damien’s friend—”
“Who’s Blaze?” Owen asked, before doing a double take. “Wait, Damien—”
“The pyrokinetic,” I went on, brushing past the fact that I’d just revealed who I was here with. But I hadn’t heard any noise from the shadows behind me at this point, so I barreled forward. “The one who Dr. Sharpe is experimenting on.”
“Rose, how do you—” He took a step back, genuine surprise on his face. He looked at me for a moment, like he didn’t recognize me, before sighing heavily.
“Alex Chen.” He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Dr. Sharpe isn’t experimenting on him. I mean, she is—”
I scoffed.
“But she has his full consent,” Owen insisted, putting his glasses back on. “Alex is very, very sick and Dr. Sharpe has been helping him.”
“So you say—”
“We all are helping him. We’re building a custom space, just for him, somewhere he can be safe while we figure out how to fix him, how to stop his pain. When he gets here next month, he’s going to be coming into a state-of-the-art—”
“Wait, next month?” I asked. “Alex isn’t here yet?”
“No.” He shook his head, confused. “We don’t have a reinforced space for him yet, he’d burn the whole building down.”
“But Damien—”
Suddenly an alarm started blaring. We both spun around, looking for the source of the sound, and that was when I realized that Damien was gone. The shadows he had slunk into turned out to lead to an emergency exit stairway and he must have snuck down while Owen and I had been talking.
Owen looked between me and the shadows and he must have realized the same thing and that was when I realized he had known Damien was here all along.
“That must be Damien doing something incredibly foolish.” He grumbled at the empty doorway before turning back to me. “Listen, if someone else finds you here, I don’t know that I’ll be able to explain your presence away—”
“I thought you were the director now,” I hissed.
“Of this division, I am,” he said. “There are still people I have to answer to.”
“But Damien—”
“You need to get yourself out of here, let me worry about Damien.”
Given that I had just discovered that Damien had lied to me AGAIN and I had fallen for it AGAIN, I barely hesitated to follow Owen’s advice.
But just as I had turned on my heel, Owen called out to me.
“Rose!” I turned to look at him. He looked … so sad.
“That file you’re holding…” He gestured to it. “It doesn’t hold the answers you want. Not yet. We’re working on it and, when we have something, I will tell you. We’ll try whatever we can to help your father. You have my word.”
Another alarm started to sound then, so Owen didn’t say anything more, just nodded and waved me away with his hand. I ran.
I ran and ran and ran. I ran down the stairs and through the side exit and across the parking lot and into the woods surrounding the complex. I ran without looking back, in the vague direction of where we’d parked the car, but I had no idea if I was headed the right way. I just kept running.
Eventually I was running out of breath, realizing I was probably lost, and desperate to read the file all at once. I stopped in a clearing and tore it open.
Owen had been right. The notes were filled mostly with things I didn’t understand, but Dr. Sharpe’s personal notes were clear—she didn’t have the cure. I couldn’t tell if she was anywhere close to having the cure. I threw the file to the ground and wanted to scream, was about to let loose, let the AM security come and find me screaming bloody murder in the woods, when I heard a breathless voice say my name.
“Rose—”
I spun around to see Damien coming through the tree line, stopping when he was well inside the clearing, putting his hands on his knees and panting deeply.
“God, I’m out of shape,” he mumbled before straightening up. “Christ, I’m glad you’re okay—”
“You—” I growled, stepping toward him. “You lied to me! Again!”
I pushed him hard on the shoulders and he stumbled back, making no effort to resist me. It made me want to push him more, but I just paced around the clearing, afraid of what I might do if I let all my rage out at him. The energy in my balled-up fists traveled up my arms and flooded my eyes, transforming my kinetic anger into unwanted tears.
“Did you get the notes?” he asked, seemingly unfazed by my temper.
“Yes, I got the fucking notes,” I snapped.
“Well?” he demanded. “What do they say?”
“Who cares, Damien!” I shouted. “You lied to me, tricked me, again, Blaze was never there—”
“Oh, come on, Rose, you knew what you were getting into,” he said. “You know everything about me—”
I scoffed, thinking of his dreams that had felt real and still have no clear explanation, like the ones with dirt and decay and death.
“Okay, maybe not everything,” he said. “But you had all the important information. You know exactly who I am and what this was. And you had your own reasons for doing it. We didn’t need to be totally honest with each other about what those reasons were to work together.”
I laughed hollowly, paced back to stand in front of him.
“No, you manipulated me, Damien,” I said. “You might not have your ability anymore but you’re an expert at this—”
“Fuck you—”
“That’s your response to everything, isn’t it!” I yelled. “Fuck everyone else because nothing is ever your fault.” I laughed darkly. “God, I think I understand Mark a lot better now.”
“Don’t you dare talk about him,” Damien snarled, stepping toward me.
“So what were your reasons, huh?” I asked. “Because it wasn’t to get Blaze, who was never there, so what was it?”
“I wanted my own file, okay?” he snapped. “I wanted to know what they’d done to me, if there was any way to reverse it.”
“Why not just say that?”
“Because you’d never have helped me!” he cried. “If it had just been about me, you would have told me to fuck off.”
“You don’t know that,” I said. “I’ve been trying, Damien. Trying to be your friend, to give you a second chance. I wanted to help you!”
“But you turned on me the moment you found out the truth about me!”
“You pushed me away! Because that’s what you do,” I said. “No matter how many chances people give you, you just squander them. But it’s never your fault, right? I try to give you another chance and it’s somehow my fault for falling for it.”
“You’re Dorothy, right?” he sneered. “Always heading off to Oz, to the land of Technicolor magic? Well, I’m the tornado and you didn’t get down into the basement fast enough this time.”
“You might be the tornado, but I’m not Dorothy, I was wrong,” I snarled. “I’m the—I’m the Cowardly Lion, I always have been and I’ve just been trying to find a way to be brave, to protect the people I love—”
“And you thought breaking into a government institution was the way to do th
at?” he said. “Don’t act like you’re so perfect. Just because you’re off in your own little world doesn’t mean that you’re not responsible—”
“I know that, Damien!” I shouted. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
Silence settled between us, heavy and sharp, as we stood glowering at each other, gasping for breath.
“Why did you come back, Damien?” I asked wearily. “It wasn’t just to get your AM file—it can’t have been that important.”
“It is important,” he growled. “They had no right—no right to hold that information from me, to keep me in the dark.”
“I’m not saying they did,” I said, trying to keep my head cool. “But is that really all you wanted?”
“What I wanted is my business,” he grunted.
“Of course it is,” I mumbled.
“Just—” He sighed, running his hands through his hair, the bags under his eyes creeping back in from the healthier version of him that I’d seen ten days ago. “Rose, don’t be like me.”
“What?” I asked, getting whiplash from the hard turn.
“I can’t ever come back here, do you realize that?”
“Damien, despite how phenomenally stupid that was, we actually got away with it, Owen isn’t—they’re not going to come after us—”
“No, not—well, first of all, the AM can always come after you. Don’t forget that for a second.” He moved toward me like I couldn’t break him apart with my kneading arm, like he still had the power to influence me. Like he wasn’t scared. I didn’t flinch and I knew that bothered him and in that moment I think I hated him.
“You have to protect yourself, Rose.”
“Really?” I laughed, no joy inside of it. “You’re telling me to protect myself after you invited me along on some light crime?”
“I didn’t force you to be here,” he spat, his eyes wild. “You came here all on your own.”
“Because I thought it was important!” I shouted. “I thought that what you needed was going to help you, that it was going to help all the Atypicals that you say are locked up in that basement.”
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