Chapter Text
Red sat quietly, elbows on her knees, staring down at the dirty carpet of the USA’s waiting room. The Lady had managed to get her to sit after their impromptu meeting, and Red had been thinking hard ever since.
The Agency protected the warp crystals.
That was important.
But why?
Red squeezed her eyes shut and tried to force her brain to function. It felt a bit like wading through molasses.
Finally, with a huff of irritation, she lurched to her feet and turned to the help desk.
“Where’s the bathroom?”
The woman behind the glass looked up from her word search with a bored expression, then pointed off down one of the hallways branching away from the waiting room.
“Second hall on the left,” she droned, before turning back to her paper.
“Thanks.”
Red hurried down the hall, mind suddenly racing rather than slogging, and she locked the bathroom door as soon as she was inside. Sweeping her Captain’s hat off, she set it on the counter and splashed her face with water that smelled faintly of dirty filtration system pipes.
The cold was a pleasant shock on her heated face, and Red dried her face roughly with a handful of paper towels before wheeling around and starting to pace, hands tangling in her hair.
“Alright,” she mumbled to herself once she was certain the bathroom stalls were empty. “Alright. They don’t have Mark. They don’t have a ways to open wormholes, but they do have warp crystals here. They protect them. Why is that important?”
She wheeled around and paced back across the length of the bathroom again, boots echoing on the tiles.
“Something about help,” she mumbled to herself, fully aware that she probably looked crazy. Time travel and time loops had that effect on people.
“What was it—?!” She growled under her breath, before stopping suddenly. “Not what, who. There was someone specific. Someone who helped. Why can’t I remember her? Her. She was a her. She was…she…”
Red trailed off, squeezing her eyes shut again for a long moment before they suddenly popped open again.
“Time bandit!” She all but yelled. “She was a time bandit!”
And suddenly Red had the beginnings of a plan.
She snatched her hat up and smoothed her hair roughly before spinning and rushing out of the bathroom again. She sprinted down the hall, past the help desk, and burst back into the Lady’s office. The poor woman nearly jumped out of her skin, but Red honestly didn’t care.
“You have a time bandit in your custody!” The Captain exclaimed. “I need to speak with her!”
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The Lady was…reluctant, to say the least.
She had no idea what Red was planning—which was probably for the best, honestly—and hearing her say that she would let the universe burn for Mark wasn’t exactly confidence inspiring. Still, she hesitantly agreed to let Red speak with the bandit, Sybil.
Later, the Lady would look back and wonder why she had let Red talk to the criminal at all.
Perhaps she felt sorry for the Captain.
There was some specific, deep part of her that remembered…something. She couldn’t say what exactly, but there were times that she was certain she remembered another life; a life that had been created from the chaos of time; a snapshot into another world.
She would have flashes of smiles, words shared in the dark under the night sky, soft embraces turning to gentle kissing. It was the sort of thing that the Lady could only ever dream of, and in many ways that was what those faint flashes of memory felt like.
Dreams.
Whenever she tried to think harder about them, her chest would feel tight and her head would ache. Something like grief would strangle her for a few moments, and if she pushed hard enough she would see the faint imprints of glowing triangles imprinted on her retinas.
So perhaps it was pity that led her to let the Captain speak with the criminal. The Lady might not have had a significant other, but some part of her understood the pain of losing one.
The more likely reason though, and the one the Lady defaulted to out of habit, was that the Captain was…rather frightening.
There was something otherworldly about her. Something not quite right that scratched the edges of the Lady’s brain and made her feel oddly nauseous.
Yes, it must have been that odd fear that drove her to open the bandit’s cell door, letting the Captain step through as though she owned the place.
Locking the Captain inside the cell only occurred to the Lady once, only to be shoved aside.
Something told her that there was no door or gate in the Agency that could hold Redmayne Martin back.
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“Sybil?” Red tilted her head curiously at the woman before her.
The bandit looked exactly like she had in Red’s faded memories
“What?” She snapped, glaring up at the Captain. “What do you want? Who’re you?”
“You have a piece of tech that I need,” Red replied. “Who I am does not matter.”
Sybil scoffed, but she seemed intrigued even as she tried to appear bored.
“The Agency took every piece of tech off me when I got here,” she drawled, leaning back against the wall behind her small bunk.
Red had a sudden, vivid memory of a man with Mark’s face doing something similar as he softly sang through an old show-tune, and for a moment her heart ached. Then she shoved the memories away. She had bigger things to think about than thoughts of pasts that had been wiped away.
“Really?” Red tilted her head again. “Then explain how you still have a portable wormhole generator tucked away in your boot.”
Sybil gawked at her for just long enough that Red knew she had struck gold. Her memories had served her well yet again.
“How did you—?”
“Unimportant,” Red cut the woman off. “The important thing is that you have it, and I need it.”
Sybil laughed at her, reaching down to pull out the horribly familiar generator from one boot.
“Even if I gave it to you,” Sybil mocked, “you have nothing to power it! It’s useless without a warp crystal, and there is no way you’re ever going to get your hands on one of those.”
Red leaned forward quickly and plucked the generator out of Sybil’s hand before the woman could protest. There was a soft click as the Captain slipped it into place around her left wrist. She had to force down a wave of awful memories as the weight of it settled, familiar and terrible.
The first half of her plan had gone off, remarkably, without a hitch.
Now for part two, the part that could go wrong in the blink of an eye if she wasn’t careful.
“Thank you for your cooperation, Sybil,” Red nodded respectfully toward the now fuming woman. Sybil made no attempt to follow her when she left.
The Lady didn’t even glance at Red’s wrist when she stepped out, the generator blending in with the dark material of Red’s glove, just as it always had.
Red drew in a deep, steady breath, and turned to the Lady.
“Can you give me a ride?”
“To…where?” The Lady asked slowly, brow furrowed in utter confusion.
“There’s a museum I want to visit.”
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Red really had forgotten how fast things could move on adventures like this.
The Lady had given her transportation—another Wug shuttle that got her within beaming distance of Earth before dropping her—and now Red crouched quietly in the bushes outside the Museum of Universal History.
A tiny smile touched her lips for a moment as she made sure her gear was all in place.
The museum had been visited more than once by her and another version of Mark during the loops. Red remembered that adventure well enough, and she well remembered how uncomfortable that Mark had made her. She wondered if he was still in prison, or if he had gotten out.
Or had he stayed dead after those loops where he ended up shot?
Red had no idea, but she owed him at least a little for giving her the knowledge necessary to pull off her own heist.
Staying low, Red jogged quickly to the wall beside the museum entrance and fired her grappling gun at the railing high above.
Heist-Mark had kept a sizable cache of gear and tools just a few miles east of the museum, and Red had been thrilled to discover that it hadn’t been found by the authorities. It almost felt too easy, but she wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Or a gift grappling gun in the barrel, as it were.
Pushing off the ground with a soft grunt, Red let the winch system in the gun haul her up to the railing. The balcony was empty, and she hurried to the ventilating grate that she remembered so well.
It always seemed like her memories grew stronger depending on what skill set she needed, and Red had often wondered if her tumbles through space-time had given her some sort of foreknowledge.
The vent slipped loose with a soft clang, and she hauled herself into the duct behind it carefully before wriggling herself around to pull the grate back into place. It was an uncomfortable position, but one she had been in before. She knew she could do it.
Once the grate was safely held in place by several zip-ties, she wriggled around until she faced forward again, then began army crawling.
Right at the first junction, left after two more, straight for six junctions, left at the seventh…Red pulled herself along silently, trusting her memory and the occasional check through the vents to guide her. She paused a handful of times to let guards walk by beneath her, and she noted with glee that the guard detail was just as sparse now as it had been then.
Good.
Perfect, in fact.
When she finally reached her destination, Red paused for a few minutes to catch her breath and consider her next moves.
The door to the particular safe she needed to get into had two locks on it, not just one. The keys had to be turned at the same time, or the alarms would go off. Two different guards each carried one of the keys.
The easiest part would be the guards.
Red dropped silently from the ventilation system, grapple gun held tight as she rappelled down. The line retracted as soon as she was on the ground, pulling the now unneeded gun back up into the ducts. She ducked down behind a pillar and watched the first guard come around the corner toward her.
She waited, circling the pillar carefully to get behind him, then crept forward behind him once she was certain she wouldn’t be seen. When she reached him, Red carefully tugged his own baton loose from his belt and swung it firmly into the back of his head.
Definitely not enough to kill, but enough to knock him out for a bit.
“Sorry,” Red murmured quietly. “I need your key.”
The key in question hung innocently from his belt, and Red quickly hurried to the first lock. She slipped the key in carefully and left it there for a moment as she dug through her gear for a few things.
Time to MacGyver herself a second person.
It took some doing, but she eventually had an automatic key turner attached to the key in the first lock. The guard detail was thin enough that no one else had come by, and she nodded to herself as she made sure the wires attached to the tool were long enough.
The wheel from the pulley harness on Red’s belt had been attached to the key with copious amounts of wire. The wheel had been anchored carefully in place with part of her belt, carabiners holding everything straight. A length of wire wrapped twice around the wheel, anchored in place with the built-in locking mechanism in the wheel itself.
It was…not ideal.
Red hoped it would work.
She crept away from the locks for a few moments to do a cursory search for the second guard, and—bingo.
The man sauntered into view, coming from the direction his partner had been going, and he quickly realized his colleague was down for the count. Red took advantage of his distraction and the crouched position he put himself in, and rushed forward.
The second man went down just as easily as the first had.
“Sorry,” Red whispered again. “My boyfriend needs my help. Sorry about your heads.”
She rushed back to the locks, heart pounding out of her chest, and slipped the second key into its lock.
“Okay,” she murmured, “c’mon, work with me…”
She pulled on the wire firmly but carefully, and turned the other key at the same time.
Two green lights blinked on simultaneously, and Red punched the air victoriously as the massive safe door unlocked with an audible thunk.
She rushed in, leaving the keys and her key turner behind, and actually froze for a few moments when she saw just how close she actually was.
All the loops reseting had put the box right back where it had started, sitting on a pedestal in the middle of the room. The blue warp crystal in the top edge of it glowed faintly, and Red felt almost like it was calling to her.
It really did feel like it was pulling her forward as she walked to the glass case and pulled out a small, handheld glass-cutter.
She made sure it was anchored, then carefully scored a circular line into the glass on one side of the case. The piece of glass popped loose with a few targeted taps to the line, and she set it aside quickly before pulling a small multitool out of her belt and flicking open the smaller knife.
Red didn’t need the entire box.
Just the crystal.
Red held the case steady as she slipped her other hand into the hole she had made. She carefully turned the box toward her and started working the edge of the blade under the upper edge of the crystal, where it was flush with the top of the box.
Now, Red knew perfectly well that prying crystals out of their mountings with a knife was generally a bad idea. The knife could slip, the crystal could break or chip, any number of things could go wrong.
But Red also knew that this wasn’t an ordinary crystal.
Red wiggled the blade a bit, sliding it along the edges of the crystal very carefully. She could actually feel it loosening up a bit, and she worked a bit faster.
She was, after all, in a bit of a time crunch.
No pun intended.
The crystal popped loose suddenly with the soft sound of ancient glue giving way, and she carefully reached down into the case to scoop it off the pedestal. It hummed softly in her gloved palm when she pulled it out, and Red laughed silently as she examined it.
“Hello again,” she murmured.
Alarms started blaring.
Red cursed softly, then scrambled to the manhole cover across the room. It was very, very heavy, but adrenaline lent her strength and she hauled it up and off of the maintenance shaft with a grunt of effort before dropping down into the shaft below.
Sliding down the ladder, she wheeled around for a moment as she tried to remember the right way.
There had been so many paths down here—!
The crystal was humming a bit louder.
Red finally just picked a direction that felt right and started running. Almost immediately, she knew she had made the wrong choice.
She hated it when this happened.
Behind her, there were sudden shouts, and panic flooded her veins.
Scrambling, she clawed her left glove off and dropped it carelessly. The crystal was droning audibly now, and she opened her left hand wide before pressing it down to her palm.
“C’mon, c’mon, do your thing—!” She begged softly, pressing hard enough that the edges dug into her skin and drew a few drops of blood, crimson slicking the surface of the crystal.
The world turned white.
Red was distantly aware that she was screaming with a hundred thousand voices, body contorting uncontrollably into a multitude of different forms, time itself trying to swallow her whole as her blood came into contact with the crystal. She doubled over, screaming her throat raw, arm shaking as the crystal’s power rippled through her for the first time in almost a year.
Fumbling, desperately trying to focus through the burning, searing, writhing, white-hot agony of it, Red pulled the portable wormhole generator from where she had shoved it into her belt. The crystal seemed to hum even louder when she tugged it out, and she collapsed to one knee as the entire left side of her body lit up with agony more intense than anything she had ever felt.
And Red had experienced death a hundred thousand different ways, so she knew pain.
Screaming through her teeth, tears blinding her, she shoved the generator onto her wrist.
It powered up with a screaming whine, nearly overloading from the sheer amount of power pouring into it, but Red didn’t give it the chance. She slammed her hand down onto it, and the familiar drone of a wormhole swallowed everything else.
Redmayne Martin staggered to her feet, teeth bared, time itself flowing through her veins, and tumbled headlong into the white-blue.
All that she left behind was a black glove, and the echoing silence of a cataclysm’s aftermath.