Clarice is working with portals (lostinexile) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2015-03-04 15:10:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, clarice ferguson (blink), neena thurman (domino) |
What happened, Neena?
Who: Clarice and Neena
What: Clarice talks sense into Neena, and Neena finally reveals what mission Natasha had sent her on.
When: A few nights ago
Where: Casa de Neena
Status: complete
Rating: PG-13 for disturbing topics
It must have been a bad night. Clarice actually ran out of thread for stitching and had to port out to get some more. She came back a moment later and finished her work. Once she’d cleaned Neena up the rest of the way (taking extra pleasure in using really stinging alcohol on the wounds), she’d ported away, and hadn’t come back until nearly an hour later.
She returned, with snow in her hair and her ears and nose a little reddened from cold. Her breath smelled like whiskey, but she didn’t seem to be more than a little tipsy.
Leveling a look at her wife, she declared. “We need to talk.”
It actually wasn't the first time that Neena found herself alone while she rolled gauze over stitched cuts or swallowed down contraband painkillers with alcohol. That should have been a sign that things were getting... strained. Strained was a good word. But she was just trying to ignore it.
The truth was, she'd spiraled past constant drinking and chainsmoking, and into something else entirely. It had to be bad when Booker was sent to talk to her.
She'd chased down a couple of vicodin with whiskey this time, and when Clarice showed back up she frowned, "Yeah. I guess we do."
Logan had actually shown up to talk to her, but she hadn’t been in, so he’d left a note on the fridge.
But right now, Clarice was alone. She didn’t have to be alone, she was pretty sure she could port Neena into a locked room and then gather up her friends in short order. But she had to try it with just the two of them first. She rubbed warmth back into her nose. When Clarice was stressed or hurting, she often teleported to places that were very cold. It was her coping mechanism.
“So what was it this time?” She asked, sighing.
"The same thing it always is." Neena shrugged a shoulder. The one that wasn't just stitched up. A lot of her cuts were along her back and sides, places that she couldn't easily protect.
"Cleaning off the list of leads we have, places that have danger in days ending in Y. I brought a gun to a knife fight. These guys were sporting some high-tech vibroblades. I mean I shot a lot of them but eventually you run out of bullets."
It probably didn't help that she'd kind of just run right in. She knew how to be careful. She knew how to get blueprints and plan ahead, to infiltrate an area without ever being seen. But lately she just wasn't in the mood to be careful.
“Did you have a plan?” Clarice asked, softly. “Did you stop to think that maybe you could have used back up? That you aren’t alone?” She raised her hand and gestured at Neena. “I mean… this. All of this. You’re being reckless even by your standards.”
"You just gestured to all of me," Neena joked. They'd recently caught up on the wonder that was 'How To Train Your Dragon'. But this wasn't really a time for joking, it was Wife Lecture Time, and she frowned, "I'm just having a little fun. There's no fun in it when it's that easy."
Clarice’s lips quirked, just a little. But that was all she got. “There has to be something to this, Neena. Something more. Talk to me. Don’t make me beg.”
"I know that I'm not alone. We go on plenty of adventures together, don't we? You and I have done a lot of fighting crime lately. It's not like I'm leaving you out!" Neena replied, flailing one hand in the air. It was still the good hand. The other one was clutching onto her alcohol with a death grip. In case Clarice took that away from her next.
"It's not that I feel left out!" Clarice threw up her hand, then walked over and picked up her phone. She opened up the photo album and shoved it in Neena's face. She started paging through pictures. Dozens of them. "This is what you're doing to yourself! That's not normal, even for you! Is the fucking Hand after you or something?"
Yes, Logan had told her about that.
Dozens of pictures of cuts, bruises, and at least two gunshot grazes. Neena thought it was a good sign that none of them were outright gunshot wounds at least, but she figured Clarice wouldn't appreciate the distinction.
She shook her head, "How do you even KNOW about the Hand? But fuck no, the Hand isn't after me. If they were after me this would be a LOT worse. All of these pictures would be a day's worth of work for them at once, this is... what... a couple of weeks? Maybe the whole month?"
"Seven. Days." Clarice's jaw grew tight and the phone actually trembled in her hand. "This is seven days of 'work'. This is worse than the previous... previous whole year I've known you! So what is it? What the hell have you been up to?"
She dropped her hand, putting the phone on the table in front of Neena, the last picture still on the screen. "You know you can talk to me, right?" Her voice wavered.
That was a little hard for Neena to believe. Just one week? She didn't even remember half of that happening, not over a week. The days had started to run together. She stared at the photo that was left open on Clarice's phone, and chewed on her bottom lip. It looked a lot worse than it felt, she hadn't even noticed.
"I know... I don't know what it is. I just..." Neena set her glass of liquor on the table, and then flailed that hand in the air, "I don't feel right. I can't sleep, I feel run down all the time, I just don't feel right. Like the last ten years are catching up with me. My powers are a little slow, everything hurts."
“You’re not that old,” Clarice whispered. She knelt on the couch, running her hand along Neena’s shoulder. “Why don’t you feel right? When did it start?” She wondered if it was all in Neena’s head or if it was a physical ailment. Neither idea made her all that happy. “I’m not going to abandon you over this, but we can’t ignore this. We can’t pretend it’s okay.”
She wondered if she’d make her first wedding anniversary without being a widow. That wasn’t too much to ask, was it? Clarice never wanted to make Neena feel trapped. Her eyes grew sad. “Are you trapped?”
"What? No!" Neena shook her head, "No, of course not. I'd never have married you if that's how it was going to be. I didn't even think I was shutting you out. I think I was just trying to outrun it."
Like if she worked harder, she could prove to herself that nothing was happening. Or if it was all in her head, it would go away. "I don't know, I think it started before... somewhere in December, maybe."
"What happened, Neena?" She thought for a moment that if she called her Domino it might help her associate better, but decided being humanized would help best. "You never told me. About when you'd been gone?"
Part of her was still angry over that. She'd forgiven Neena, but she'd never not get a little angry thinking about it. Being left while practically on her death bed.
But Neena had never really talked about what she'd done while she'd been gone. Some kind of mission.
"I didn't think you wanted to talk about it, considering." That had been a low point in her life, as low as when she'd dealt with Milo's death the first time. And leaving Clarice like that had felt like the best thing for both of them at the time, but she hadn't been thinking straight. That had been a few months ago now and she still wasn't thinking straight.
Neena sighed, and stared down into her cup, "I went to Germany. There's a facility there that was dealing with eugenics, making little girl soldiers. Kind of like the program that made me, in the dreams. Hanna's a product of it. And I spent nine months there, I don't even remember it. But Nat was worried that Hydra had infiltrated the Red Room and moved it there. Or that they were starting up a real life version of it, or... something. It doesn't matter, she was at least half right."
And since they were still using Neena's eggs in their program, several of the little girls she'd come across while she'd been there had looked a lot like her. Some of them had looked like Nat, too.
The data she'd uncovered during her visit there had been haunting. But Neena didn't think it had anything to do with how she physically felt.
Clarice felt both trepidation and relief when Neena had started talking. Whatever she was going to say sounded like something that was going to be bad, and she steeled herself for it. What Neena told her was even worse than anything she’d thought possible. She reached for Neena, resting her hand on her arm.
“What did you do to the place?” That explained Neena’s emotional state, but it didn’t explain how run down she was. “And….Neena...have you considered they might have included some kind of kill switch or intentional degradation?”
"Infiltrated it, gathered data, and left. We're keeping an eye on the situation but I'm not enough to hit a place like that on my own. And if I'd tried to take even one of those girls out of that situation they would have gone to ground. We'd never find them again." Neena didn't like that it had to be that way, and she knew that Nat didn't either. But they were both too pragmatic to do it any other way.
But the other thing that Clarice mentioned, that possibility, was one she'd never thought of. Her stomach turned to ice and her throat went dry, "No... I never thought of that. I only found out about my time there last year."
Thank god, Clarice thought. She didn’t think that Neena should be the one to hit a place like that. It was too close, and too personal. It should be someone else to do the dirtiest part. Let Neena save the girls.
She shifted closer to her wife. Maybe she wouldn’t need to bring others into an intervention. But depending on what they figured out, they might still need help. “But do you think it’s a possibility?”
"I don't know." Neena ran her hand up into her hair and closed her eyes for a moment, trying to think. Deep down, she'd thought that the cause of everything might just be an ongoing reaction to what had happened to Clarice. And Neal.
But she'd dealt with that the way she normally dealt with things, and the hits just kept on coming. Things hadn't been smooth before that, either, and she'd always felt just fine. Physically. Hangovers aside.
"...why activate it now? Unless they know. If they know, that's... that's bad." Neena finally said, chewing her lip a bit.
“Maybe they finally figured things out. Or maybe they’re doing it to try to make you come back. You know, dangle a ‘cure’ or ‘fix’ in front of you like a carrot on a stick.” A thought occurred to Clarice and her heart thudded in her chest. “Neena, what if they baked this in? Like a time bomb?” What if Neena was never meant to last this long?
"No. NO." Neena's insides started to squirm at the very thought of that. If that had transferred over along with everything else... And her dream self didn't even realise it. But she'd never felt like she was meant to live that long. Clarice and Booker weren't the first people who'd told her she had a death wish.
She brought her hands up to her face, wincing a bit as stitches stretched, and rubbed a bit, "There's no way of knowing, God."
“What about a genetic test?” Unless it was behavioural? Clarice’s face fell. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything. Well no. I should have. We have to consider everything. But…” She pulled Neena’s hands from her face, and squeezed them. “I’ll be at your side through whatever happens. And we have friends to help us.”
"I don't want to make a thing out of this," Neena decided, quietly. She squeezed Clarice's hands and glanced over at her, "It might be genetic. They might have added something to my genetic coding that makes things degrade over time, or something that just shuts down. Or maybe it was something Hydra did while I was there. We don't know enough, and I don't need everyone panicking."
"Well we need to figure this out, Neena!" The physical thing and the mental shit. Clarice got to her feet and started to pace. She wanted Neena to tell someone else. She needed help with this and Clarice didn't know if she could carry it alone. "I'm not going to lose you to some Hydra Cerberus bullshit!"
She stopped, and put her hands on Neena's shoulders. "Will you at least slow down? Stop and think about what's motivating you?"
"I KNOW we need to figure this out, but I don't need the entire world on my case like they have been the last few days!" Neena shouted. She was shaking a bit, though it calmed down considerably when Clarice put her hands on her shoulders.
Who the hell could she even talk to about this? Booker or Logan were probably the only two who would get it. But Logan was overprotective sometimes, and Booker... she wasn't sure she wanted to get that close to him again.
"... but I can slow down. I can do that. I just don't think there's any reason to tell anyone anything until there's something to say."
“Neena... “ Clarice sighed, then nodded her head. “Slow down. And we’ll search for someone who’s familiar with genetics who can take a look and rule that out. I won’t tell anyone until you’re ready, or I feel like there is no choice. Deal?”
"Deal." Neena replied, with a nod. It didn't really seem like she had any other choice.