Chapter Twenty
Reeling from the sight of Thomas' panic-stricken face superimposed over Orion's ghoulish countenance, Nadia fell into the most restless bout of unconsciousness she had ever experienced. She saw her friend writhing in pain a dozen times; each time silenced in a new way at the hands of a silent, unsympathetic Orion while she remained just out of reach. On the final time, in an act of frustration, she threw herself at the figure of her tormentor. Instead of her intended target, however, she felt herself collide with something hard and coarse.
Groaning, she opened one eye and found her cheek pressed against a carpeted floor; she felt the weight of her legs pressing her nose into the rough material and realized she had toppled out of bed. Scrambling upright, she found herself glaring suspiciously at her room. She had no idea how she had gotten there. Everything was just as she had left it: her purse upon her bedside table, strategically placed so it shielded her from the display of her alarm clock; her dresser, neatly closed because the bulk of her clean laundry was folded on top of it; her closet, her mirror, even the curtains over her bedroom window, lit from behind by the early morning sun, were arranged just the way they had been every other day since she had bought them. Could it all really have been a dream?
Still feeling like she was adrift in some surreal half-reality, Nadia went to examine the rest of her apartment, not even bothering to change out of her pyjamas. Checking the bathroom momentarily, a thought occurred to her: Thomas! Almost sprinting down the hall, she slid barefoot across the carpet, not even paying attention to the burning sensation the friction brought with it. She could hardly believe her eyes when she saw her blonde-haired friend stretched out on the couch, idly scratching at his side in a dead sleep. She reached out a hand to touch him, as if afraid he was not real; but the warmth of his skin and the faint chuckle he gave upon feeling the tickle of fingers on his foot pushed those doubts aside. Releasing the young man's toes, she staggered toward her kitchen. She needed coffee; potent, bitter coffee. She had been on one hell of a ride, and she had no desire to ever repeat it again. A good, strong jolt was called for.
Fumbling through her cupboards, she found the jar and set the machine to work its magic, taking a bowl for her cereal out into the dining room. A piece of paper caught her eye, neatly folded and sitting on the table. Placing her dish down, she frowned and picked it up, rubbing at her sleep-addled eyes to get them to focus on the white sheet of paper. Seeing the words swimming into sharper relief, she froze as she read them.
"That would have been nice." She found herself reading it aloud, as if her brain was trying to digest the meaning of it through sound as well as sight. Turning it over to see if there was more, she felt fresh ice in her veins. "Look again...?"
Feeling her heart beginning to crash in her chest anew, she spun on her heels to face the couch; Thomas was gone and in his place sat Orion in all of his grisly, tattered glory. His neutral expression, even devoid of hostility or ill intent the way it was, did absolutely nothing to make Nadia feel better.
Nodding slowly, she smiled bitterly. "I knew that it couldn't have been a dream. I guess I wanted to believe what I saw when I woke up just a little too much."
The man adjusted his position to a cross-legged one, still upon the couch, and she saw that he was presently barefoot. Speaking, she heard his voice for the first time; a measured, nearly emotionless deadpan that spoke in a contraction-less manner that reminded her vaguely of someone who was new to the English language. Despite this, he had no discernible accent and apparently a fluent mastery of his words. "You would not be the first to wish their dreams were reality, Nadia Lawson."
Even Nadia was mildly surprised by the acid she felt seeping into her tone. "Oh, so now you know how to talk. My, my, aren't we a fast learner."
He seemed unaffected by her tone; but then, perhaps he simply did not care. "I assure you, the ability is not a new one. I trust you are more comfortable and able to talk here than at our location yesterday afternoon?"
She rolled her eyes, snorting derisively. "Oh, sure; because seeing my best friend asleep on the couch, only to have you psych me out, again, is going to make me comfortable."
Orion again seemed unmoved by her irritation. "I could just as easily have left you in the parking garage until you woke, Miss Lawson. However, it is my policy to investigate those who know of me. You wished to speak with me. I am present; you may."
Nadia heard her coffee machine beep and held up a hand. Retrieving her ready-made jolt, she straddled the chair nearest her 'guest', taking a sip before resting her mug on the back of the seat. "Yeah, I did. Honestly, right now it's about all I can do to look at you."
"Perhaps you do not trust me?"
She laughed before she could get a hold of herself. "Now there's an understatement! Why wouldn't I trust you, Mr. Orion, hmm? Could it be because you've been pretending to be someone you're not for the two weeks I've known you? Or could it be because you let me care about you just so you could scare me half to death for no reason?"
"Orion is not my surname," was the initial response from the crimson-eyed man. "And I would ask that you control yourself. Your attitude does you no credit. I understand that you are upset, but I have not deceived you. Nor have I done you any intentional wrong. In actual fact, I barely know you any better than you would a figure in a dream."
She glared at him incredulously. "What the hell are you talking about? Are you seriously trying to tell me that I have no reason to be angry with you?"
"That is correct."
Taking a long draught from her mug, she drained it to the bottom before throwing it over her shoulder, not even wincing as it shattered against the dining room's tiled floor. "All right, I'll bite. What does that even mean? How could it not have been deliberate?"
"It was not I who you knew; it was Thomas Carmichael."
"But you are T-," she paused momentarily, finding it hard to force the name out. "Him," she finished lamely.
He shook his head slowly and Nadia felt herself bristling at his emotionless, know-it-all attitude; she hated that he knew more about this than she did, it meant she had to talk to him before she could throw him out. "I am not."
Nodding slowly, she stood and moved to the living room, dragging her chair behind her as loudly as possible. Spinning it so it faced her unwanted company, she sat and folded one leg over the other. "Start making sense. Now."
"I am making sense, Miss Lawson. Thomas Carmichael was a facade; a programmed automaton, if you will. I put him in control and let his free will guide my body while I slept."
Nadia snorted. "You sleep walk?"
"That is not what I meant. I do not make a habit of spending a great deal of time as myself; therefore, I need to place another consciousness at the helm, so to speak."
She pinched the bridge of her nose before speaking again. "So let me get this straight; you 'created' Thomas, on some level, stuck him in the driver's seat and went to take a freaking nap?"
He nodded slowly, though his neutral expression continued to vex her. "In essence that is not incorrect. You wished to speak with me and went so far as to hide a hint for my finding upon a televised news broadcast; it was enough to rouse me."
She took a moment just to stare at the man on her couch; if it weren't for those awful rubies stuck into his face, she would think he was utterly insane for even trying to pass this off as logical. Now she was just wondering if she was the one who had lost it. "Okay, new topic. I'm not sure I can process all of this right now. I need to know I can trust you before I tell you anything; but you had better believe that I'll be supervising you from the moment you wake up in the morning. I'm not having you slip off on me if I can help it."
"As you wish. What would you like to talk about?"
She giggled semi-hysterically. "How should I know? I'm sitting in my living room talking to a man who changes his appearance at will and apparently enjoys leaving complete strangers in control of his body; I'm genuinely starting to think I'm
hallucinating all of this. Any time now, I'll be waking up to find myself in a padded room."
He looked at her as if he was not sure what she meant. Like all of this was normal, somehow. "You are not insane, Miss Lawson."
Nadia laughed again. "Oh, well, thanks for reassuring me, I feel so much better now that the utterly impossible figment of my imagination is on my side about this."
"There is no need for that tone, Miss Lawson."
She stood, placing one foot on her coffee table to berate him from a standing position. “Oh there's need, all right! You're sitting there telling me that my friend, the one I was crushing on hard enough to actually bring it up with my parents, was not you concocting a false identity; he was real. Except he isn't, because he's still you. And considering you have some kind of multiple personality thing going, that's arguably worse!"
Taking a deep breath, she felt more pent-up frustration still working its way up from her chest; not time to stop yelling yet. "Yesterday the worst thing I had to worry about was whether or not Thomas would ever look at me as a woman instead of as a friend; that and whether or not Burgess would find a way to shoot me, but that's beside the point!"
Feeling her rant giving way, she sank back into her chair and buried her face in her hands; she had not burst into tears, but neither would she give the red-eyed freak across from her the satisfaction of seeing how close she had come to it.
"You have my sympathies, Miss Lawson. I know how it feels to unfairly lose one so close to your heart. But I will not apologize for something that I am not at fault for."
The almost human response startled her enough to drop her hands, just to see if it had really been Orion who had spoken. Watching him for a moment, she sighed. "You know, it's funny. If I had found you during my initial investigation I would have been ecstatic. A genuine shape-shifter in our modern day. Who would have guessed? Now I would rather just have yesterday back."
"Time is an unforgiving thing, Miss Lawson. It never allows us to reclaim the past."
She nodded miserably, before taking a steadying breath. "All right Orion; here's the deal. I'm going to ask you something. If you give me a straight answer, I'll trust you, at least enough to fill you in on what needs doing around here. After that, you decide whether you help me get it done so you can go back to whatever it is you do, or whether I need to follow you for months pestering you to do it first. And don't think I won't, either."
He blinked at her for a moment before regaining his emotionless composure. "Very well, Miss Lawson; ask."
She nodded, pointing at his forehead; or what she could see of it past the dark tangles of his hair, anyway. "Okay. How is it that you're unharmed? Thomas banged his head on cement yesterday. Badly enough that he was bleeding. There isn't a mark on you."
Orion's mouth tweaked into a slight smirk. "You have sharp eyes, Miss Lawson. Sharp eyes and an inquisitive mind. I am somewhat impressed."
She smiled thinly, giving approximately not a single care for his assessment of her talents. "How nice. Answer the question."
"It is rather simple, Miss Lawson. Thomas' injury is not mine."
She sighed, rolling her head back to glare at the ceiling as if hoping for an answer from it. "Again with the trick answers. Do you ever not speak in riddles?"
He frowned slightly. "Perhaps you are not as clever as I had thought. It should be fairly obvious at this point that my facades and I are not one and the same. I do not change my appearance; I become someone new. Their bodies, their injuries, are not mine."
It was her turn to frown, though it was in thought. "But wouldn't that be awfully inconvenient? You would have to remember which 'bodies' were injured and which weren't. I mean, they can't heal if you don't spend time 'as' them, can you?"
The slightly amused smile returned as she verbally unravelled her train of thought. "They can and do, Miss Lawson. In fact, the injuries sustained by any form I am not currently using heal at an accelerated rate; it is those I sustain and do not 'change out of' that heal at a normal speed."
"That's... wow. So, say you broke your leg; shifting in a 'new' one, how long would it take the broken one to heal?"
He shook his head. "I cannot change parts of myself individually. It is all of me or none of me."
Nadia felt herself bristling as the memory of Thomas' panic and fear floated to mind all over again. "Don't give me that, not after pulling what you did in the garage with Thomas' face."
Orion looked at her with his usual measured, unsettling gaze. "I can control the speed at which I change and the order in which my various features make the transition; that is all that I did. You would never have believed that your companion had become someone else if I had not proven it beyond a shadow of a doubt."
She swallowed down her urge to argue with him, preferring more information sooner rather than later. "Fine, whatever. So; how long would it take the bone to heal?"
"Several days, perhaps a week depending on how severe the damage was. Mr. Carmichael's head injury was far less serious an injury, therefor it was mended within several hours."
She felt as though the wind had been knocked out of her. "That's impossible."
He smiled a thin, smug smile. "According to you, Miss Lawson, so am I."
Glaring at his amusement, she felt a smile of her own creep onto her face as a thought struck her. "Well, if you're so proud of your healing ability, sitting passenger-side when Burgess' thugs beat you senseless in that alley must have been a real treat."
Orion's face returned to neutrality. "I did not experience it. Neither do I enjoy pain, Miss Lawson. Might I point out that, in cases where I am expected to be injured, I must remain in the form that has been harmed. You may be able to imagine how much more painful an injury can be when it is within your power to mend it, but you cannot for the sake of appearance."
"There's a downside to everything, isn't there?" she replied, honestly not caring about the man's well-being just now. The wounds he had caused her were still too fresh for her compassion to reinstate itself.
Fixing her with his gaze, her guest sighed. "Perhaps it would be best if we moved onto the topic of what you wish my help with; you seem to be growing somewhat hostile in our present conversation."
Nadia snorted. "Hostile, huh? Yeah, I guess I am. Fine, down to business it is. Thomas and I had a somewhat unproductive trip to the I.D.I. building the other day; Burgess has some files hidden in there we need in order to put him behind bars. We were going to ask for you to get in touch with Black to help us out, but with your particular talent I would imagine this is right up your alley."
Orion tilted his head slightly, looking thoughtful and somehow strained at the same time. Taking a shaking breath, he asked his next question instead of remarking on whatever it was that was bothering him. "What manner of documents are you seeking?"
She shrugged. "Things to incriminate Icarus Development Incorporated in Burgess' criminal business, so they'll stop pulling strings to keep him a free man. We found some interesting items in Burgess' motel room, but we only took notes from it, so that doesn't really help us."
"Can your local authorities not search the building themselves?"
She shook her head, placing a hand on her hip as another flash of annoyance passed through her. "No, they can't. Burgess is the one under investigation, not the corporation itself. I imagine they could search his office, but there are probably a dozen other secure places in that building he could stash his personal files. Think you can manage lending someone else a hand, for a change?"
She felt a certain satisfaction as she saw the tell-tale ripples of aggravation passing through Orion's posture and expression. Swallowing it down with a deep breath, he stood and began to pace a little before responding. "Once you have obtained this evidence, how do you intend to make use of it? I imagine it is against normal protocol to use stolen evidence against the accused, is it not?"
Nadia shrugged. "I'll figure that out later, you don't need to worry about that."
Having been studying the man in an attempt to guess his mind, Nadia did a double-take when his suggestion sank in. "What? Are you seriously suggesting that we break into the police department?"
He shrugged; a gesture that seemed out of place on his stiff-shouldered frame. "Yes."
Feeling a fresh surge of anger coming from a new direction, she shook her head vehemently. "I'm not going to do that, Orion, not on your life. Especially not to plant evidence we shouldn't even have, it could get them in trouble!"
"It could also put Burgess away," he flatly pointed out.
She turned and stalked into the dining room. Feeling the hard, sharp edge of broken ceramic underfoot, she grated her teeth; she had forgotten about her discarded cup. The pain drove her anger to a head and she continued her march into the kitchen. Gripping the back of a chair, she felt herself unconsciously begin wringing her hands around it; she could at least pretend it was Orion's neck she had a hold of.
Collecting herself, she continued her rejection of his idea. "It's unethical, it's underhanded and it puts their reputation at risk! I will not break into the place where my mother worked for years, from the time she was my age to after I was born, I just won't!"
"You are allowing your personal feelings to become an obstacle, Miss Lawson."
Bending lower, Nadia banged her head against the table gently, but loudly. This man was going to drive her insane: this impossible, shape-shifting, injury-defying man. The dull ache of the red half-bruise forming on her forehead seemed to drive that last part home; what had he said about healing faster when he was someone else?
Thomas' injuries from the alley were less severe than the doctor had expected, weren't they? She thought to herself. He couldn't have been someone else for very long if he was still hurt when he was found. And he couldn't have gone too far, either, since Thomas was still found in that alley. But who had he become during that time? Orion? Or... someone else?
Feeling her eyes widening as she began to connect the dots, she was struck by the sudden realization that no one was interrupting her train of thought. Wheeling about, she saw her living room was empty. Losing control of her frustration for a moment with a loud verbal expletive, she sprinted to the door; throwing it open, she slid into the hall on her bare feet just in time to see the tall, wraith-like form of her guest disappearing into the elevator.
"Orion!"
Nadia was three steps down the hall before she realized she was still in her pyjamas; while the loose, soft material was ideal for sleeping or lounging around her apartment in, she wasn't going to get very far at a run without getting dressed first. Adding to the problem was the faint, dark spots she was leaving on the hallway; her slide across the carpeted hall floor had not been kind to the cut left on her foot by the ceramic edges of her broken cup.
Taking a deep breath, she limped back into her apartment and had to make a conscious effort to shut the door behind herself gently to avoid slamming it. In a hurry, it would take her only a few minutes' time to get dressed, but she knew Orion would be gone by the time she made it to the ground floor. Considering that he had probably stepped off of the elevator looking entirely different, there wasn't much point in chasing after him, either. So much for keeping an eye on him, but at least she knew where he was going; if only she knew who she was looking for when she got there.
In Icarus' Shadow Page 33