Who: Morgan & Cory What: Flashbacks to Morgan's time in captivity and the origins of Veritas to the present Where: The Manticore facility in Seattle, Washington / Cory's apartment in Queens, New York When: Friday, July 13 2018 / Sunday, February 9 2020 Warnings: Vague mentions of torture and death
It hadn't taken as long as she'd expected to start losing track of the days. After a certain point, she'd stopped trying just to keep herself sane. If she didn't think about how long she'd probably been in here, then there was still a chance that she could get out. That they could all get out.
Rhett had died first. It had been the second week, and she'd started having seizures again. For days they'd done nothing but take the three of them into separate rooms to poke and prod them, push them to their limits over and over again until the exhaustion was overwhelming. X-5's could take a lot. They were engineered that way, but in the end, it didn't matter how built you were to withstand the things an average human would never be able to endure. Everyone has their limits.
When she wasn't being studied under a microscope, Morgan was mostly kept in a six by eight cell where she was given food, water, and not much of anything else. She barely slept, and when she did, her sleep was plagued with the worst kind of nightmares her subconscious could concoct. Someone else might have given into the sweet release of insanity a long time ago, and she might have, if it weren't for the only thing that kept her from ever going over the edge most nights. Cory.
Thinking about him existing somewhere outside of the walls that held her captive was the only thing that got her through the night most days, even focusing on the little things. His smile that was sometimes a little crooked, or the way the back of his hair always stuck up a little bit in every direction. Sometimes if she buried her face in the stale mattress that occupied her small room and concentrated hard enough on a memory, she thought she could actually remember the way he smelled.
Ryan died the night that they were both supposed to get out. Morgan had woken up that night with a start, a familiar face standing over her. Riley was urging her to get up, that Cory had gotten them inside but they had to hurry, the guards wouldn't be unconscious forever. They were being rescued.
The three of them had entered that place. Her, Rhett, and Ryan. Two of her closest friends. As close as family in some ways. In the end, it had only been Morgan who walked out. Some of the guards had come to, and Ryan turned back to keep them busy, allowing Morgan and the rest who'd come to their rescue time to make it to the fence line. Morgan hadn't wanted to leave him behind. She'd fought to stay, but she was weaker. When he never came back and they heard the explosion, she knew what had happened.
"Morgan?" She blinked, his voice sounding too far away from her to be real. It couldn't be. She was still trapped in that hell place, this was just a trick. She was finally going crazy.
Numb with shock and disoriented, it took Morgan a long moment to fully understand where she was. She was no longer in that cell, she was on Cory's couch. In Cory's apartment, where she was finally safe. Morgan looked up into his concerned face, chest swelling with relief in the midst of all the grief that had yet to really flow. Feet tucked under her and a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, Morgan's eyes shone with tears that she refused to let spill.
"We have to get them, Cory. We have to make them all pay."
Having spent the morning in serious recon mode, Morgan was looking forward to getting back to Cory's for a little while to see what's been going on outside of her little covert bubble where they all operated in the shadows. Not that she didn't love being out in the world with her boyfriend's voice in her ear all day, but after awhile, she started to get antsy. She much preferred being back at base, in other words Cory's apartment, watching him work and seeing what everyone else had brought in.
It was almost two years now since they'd officially formed Veritas. Cory's genius idea, having already been using the name in his Eyes Only style broadcasts, it just seemed like the natural first step to taking the name and really mobilizing it. The second step was getting more people to join the cause, and luckily, they'd already had a few ready to participate before Cory had even asked. If they were going to do something as crazy and potentially suicidal as take on the Resistance, Camelot and the Agency like this, they were definitely going to need some more willing bodies.
Veritas was declaring war on all of the factions.
For nearly two years, almost all of her energy had been put into this. It was the only way she could cope with the twins deaths at first, but now, it really was the mission. She'd never been so determined to see anything through in her entire life, a girl who'd always been something of a 'C' student and an all around unmotivated person who was more or less content with just coasting through life, and stealing anywhere she could. All of that had already started to change when she first met Cory, before her world had actually been turned upside down. Now? Now she really had a purpose.
Taking her usual entrance through the window after an invigorating scaling of the fire escape, Morgan dropped softly into the hallway of Cory's apartment like she'd done a million times before, thanks to her genetically engineered reflexes. The door to his office was ajar, so she made a beeline for it. "Hey," Morgan slipped inside, crossing the room to drape her arms over his shoulders where he was working. "How's it going here?"