InsaneJournal

Who: Connor
What: Alter switch narrative!
Where: The dance studio, then wandering around.
When: Backdated to just after Olive skipped town.
Warnings/Rating: None.



Connor had called Olive back directly when she left her distraught message, but by the time he arrived at the dance studio, gun at his hip and ready to fight, it was already a crime scene. Whatever hotel he was at, there was no sign of her, and news shortly came down that no one seemed to be able to find her anywhere.

So someone had gotten her out of town. If the Giacoma had found her, she would have been made an example of. This Giacoma, they didn't care who saw what they did, who knew. They were brazen, brash, and it would undoubtedly get them all killed very soon.

The emotions her sudden flight evoked were...complex. That in and of itself was an immediate problem, a startling thing that Connor didn't quite know how to manage. He felt the sharp sting of fear, that she wouldn't be safe where she'd gone, and the white burn of anger. That never really went away, though. It had lived inside him since he was six. Anger was part of his neutral baseline. Still, there was a flare when he considered why she had been driven out.

Disappointment, too. Was it disappointment? No, it didn't fit the profile. Sadness, maybe. Now that was foreign enough to give him real pause. Sadness. It had been a very long time since he'd put his finger on that particular feeling. And why? What did he have to be sad for? He had hardly known Olive. But it was true that the times they had spoken had led him to come to like her, for all her foolishness. It seemed childish, even to think it. 'Like her'. Like she was a pet.

Most strange, most frightening, most damning, there was a gnawing that left him restless, and he left the studio and walked through the night to the hotel. He didn't want to name that feeling, didn't want to empower it by christening it, or even pretend to think he might know what it was. That emotion was better left alone. One of these things is not like the others. It didn't belong. He'd never been able to process that particular emotion he wouldn't name, and to think that it might be creeping in would suggest perhaps a growing madness, or, even worse, an edge of hope, that something had actually changed. It was part of what being a whole person was supposed to mean, and something that had always precluded him from that sort of personhood. He wasn't sure he wanted it. He was perfectly fine not being a person. Wasn't he?

He hadn't managed to keep Olive safe, and someone else had needed to come and help her, to clean up the mess he's created. He'd failed an informant, just as someone in the organization had done for his family.

Guilt.