نوال بشارة (nawal) wrote in invol_rpg, @ 2013-01-01 23:37:00 |
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Entry tags: | ! log, ! plot: kidnapping, harlow hart, nawal bechara |
WHO: Harlow Hart and Nawal Bechara
WHAT: Friends discuss training, rescue, things.
WHEN: Backdated to 28 December, 2012, just before Astrid and Vanessa's rescue. Pretend there is a bar in the safehouse, so it fits with all of Harlow's other backdated logs.
WHERE: American safehouse, the room they share. They have bunk beds. dwi.
WARNINGS: Fewer sads than most logs in this plot, actually.
STATUS: Complete!
Sweating was something Harlow had never enjoyed, regardless of if it came in the form of a ladylike sheen across the brow or enough to darken a shirt. She had always been a child, a teenager, a young adult who would rather read a book. She could sit still as a snowfall and sketch or paint for hours, attention absorbed so fully that she hardly was aware of the world around her. It was only of late that she’d begun to take interest in anything remotely athletic, and while she still detested the calisthenics and running and displays of upper body strength that always came along with team training, the interest she’d taking in learning a bit of sparring wasn’t solely to do with her primary teacher. It was another outlet for something she couldn’t seem to otherwise express, and at times a way to exhaust herself when nothing else could bring her to sleep. Last night she had gotten up late and returned even later, hair wet from a shower and muscles feeling much like the towel she’d used to dry it. It had emptied her, no more energy to lie awake and think restless thoughts, and so Harlow had slipped into bed to dream empty dreams. The alarm of a phone pulled her into consciousness, and Harlow rolled over, covering her eyes with her palm. “But I don’t want to go train with Sam and Rathborne,” she sighed, with finally a full comprehension of why Mal had never been a fan of his former team leader. How the Roosters suffered someone bossing them around, day in and day out - well, it made her rather glad to be on an independent minded team. In the bunk above her, Nawal mirrored Harlow's sigh, but pushed herself to sitting. She rubbed at one bleary eye. "Me neither," she groaned. She wasn't one for much athletic activity either. She hadn't been in Ramallah, and then there had been no space while she was in Ofer or Neve Tirza -- not that she would have been motivated to do anything about it there. By the time she had reached Camp Rabin and had to witness bands of robust Israeli soldiers jogging around the base at all hours, Nawal was thoroughly out of shape. The entire month, it seemed, had been an exercise in disbelief. She hadn't been able to believe she had really been in Canada with Yasmin, and she could hardly believe she was here now with Harlow. She still couldn't believe Providence was dead, like she would go back to IVI and Prov would be there at the next Eagle training session. Nawal would have rather been there than here with Rathborne, but this is what they needed to do. "I never realized how much I appreciated Eagle and Rene until now." “Rudd isn’t even close to kind,” Harlow admitted without strain, “but he’s not crazy, or quite so sadistic.” It was surprising to her that he wasn’t there to begin with, considering his past experience with terrorist situations. Maybe it meant that one of the other safehouses needed his expertise more than they did, maybe he was in Europe, along with a reasonable portion of her idle thoughts. “And Oden is nothing like Sam.” If Peacock had a leader it was their giant, same as Rooster, but Peacock was blessed with a far gentler soul, someone who had earned the nickname of Papa, someone whom Harlow enjoyed her conversations with. Talking with Sam felt more like being interviewed for a position she was grossly under qualified to hold, and in present situations, did little to make her feel as though she belonged here, helping rescue anyone. Nawal swung her legs over the side of the bunk. Eagle didn't have much of a leader, as far as Nawal could tell. Juli pushed them, Rose took care of them, Prov -- Nawal had forgotten again that there was a missing member of their team (and a new one she hadn't yet met, Odd Bjarne). "We might as well get used to crazy," she said. Rathborne's brand of crazy wasn't anything she could imagine herself growing used to quickly, but there had to be some use to it. "It'll prepare us for whatever we face when we go into the field." And Nawal could use whatever preparation she could get. Even though she had assured the team leaders that she had enough control to be an asset rather than a hindrance, she wasn't as certain as she wanted to be. Sometimes, she wondered if she shouldn't have stayed back and helped instead with administrative tasks. Slowly, she began to lower herself to the floor from the top bunk. Nawal wasn't one to jump quickly. She retrieved her phone from the floor, where it was plugged into the wall, and checked the time. "This training is awful, but I feel bad complaining," she confessed. "Because Condor has to deal with him all the time, and because we don't really know what's happening to everyone else." She thought back to George Cooper. When she had been in the asylum, nobody knew where she was or what she was experiencing. This was similar. "It could be worse." Or they could be dead, but Nawal refused to believe that. It made no sense. Harlow was sure that it would be worse than field training with Rathborne and Sam. The notion of keeping the kidnapped vols in any sort of luxury felt ridiculous; this wasn’t the sort of situation in which they were all sitting around together, arguing over what to watch on television. If they found them - when they found them, the best Harlow dared to hope for was uninjured, or at the least, alive. When George Cooper had sedated them all, trapped in nightmares, it had been a similar feeling on a more abstract scale. It wasn’t easy to dismiss what the dreamers had gone through, she knew that some of them still struggled with some measure of PTSD. The victims of this kidnapping most likely would as well, should they be recovered. “Do you think we’re going to find them?” she asked, sitting up and reaching for her glasses, and then her own phone. There weren’t any new messages, but Harlow scrolled to what Edwin had said the day before, trying to convince herself again that she was doing the right thing, that if she could help to save one life, it would be worth it to test out whether or not they had built this chip for her. Tracing her fingers lightly over the tender spot on the back of her neck, Harlow tried not to think of what her family would say. She had lied, telling them that she was alright and being shipped back to the safety of the school compound, that internet and telephone might not be available to her at the same hours given the resources being used to track down vols who had been taken. "We have too many resources not to," Nawal said firmly, more firmly than she felt. After all, their resources hadn't been able to save Providence in time. "I'm glad they let us help. With all of our skills in use together, we have to. There are people who can find anyone, even without the chips, and you could get past any barrier." Something in Nawal's face twitched ever so slightly. In the dream -- at the last, when her powers were returned to her -- she had used her powers to kill. They were dream constructs, at least as far as she could tell, but she had still killed them. That wasn't what she had signed up to do here. "I could get past any barrier as well, but it would be messier." Nawal glanced over at Harlow and saw her fingers ghosting over the back of her neck. It could have been any sort of gesture, maybe scratching an itch, but something told Nawal that her friend was thinking of the chip she'd only recently had implanted there. Nawal's own chip was months old already, a token of her long-standing fear of this very situation, a fear that overtook all the risks that Harlow had made very clear. "Do you think it's worth it?" she asked. "Getting the chip, so that you can help?" “I don’t know,” Harlow murmured, pulling her hand away. “I hope so.” So far it wasn’t exactly as she had imagined it would be, going out in groups with IVF soldiers in search of their fellows. Harlow could see now that it wasn’t a realistic vision she had had, that it took time for information to come to them, to plan rescue efforts. It meant a lot of time training, much like IVI only without Rudd at the helm, a reasonable amount of resting, efforts to lend a hand wherever one could be of use, and then time that Harlow didn’t know how to fill. She was glad to have Nawal with her here, and would have been terribly lonely without her, most likely wouldn’t have been able to talk herself into staying, but Harlow didn’t want her friend to feel responsible for the choices she had made, so she said nothing more. Her phone chirped at the same time as Nawal’s, not an alarm this time, but a notice via text that there would be training and a strategy meeting for all field operatives, with times and locations for each. “Nawal,” Harlow said, a ball of nerves lodged in her throat. “I think we’re going somewhere.” Nawal looked down at her phone, feeling both a sense of dread and of determination as she read the notice. "So we are." Here at the safehouse, Nawal slept in clothes and a sports bra, so all she had to do was reach for her jacket and slip her feet into her shoes before she was ready. She held out her hand to Harlow. "Come on," she said. "Maybe now we'll see if it's worth it." |