Chapter Text
Myfanwy was not at the office.
What was there instead was a letter. A horrifying fucking letter.
What were they meant to do with that? With “I secretly wanted to touch your hair when we were at school together and never mentioned it for fifteen years but now I remember it even though my memory’s been ransacked so just thought I’d share” and “the spark I feel for you is real” (what?) and “I’ll sign this letter ‘with love’ just to torment you” and “oh by the way, I’m running away and will probably have been kidnapped and/or killed by vultures/rogue Lugate operatives/et cetera by the time you read this”? Just what the fuck were they supposed to do?
They had Ingrid put drawbridge protocol into place. Let the planes sit on the bloody tarmac if they had to.
She was still alive. She was. She had to be. She was still alive and she couldn’t possibly have gone further than the continent, so she was close, more or less. They just had to find her.
But looking for one girl with intermittent transdermal neurotransmission in the entire continent of Europe was like looking for a microscopic needle in an ocean of hay. They were poring through incident reports with all four sets of eyes, dropping all their other work, looking for anything, but none of it was right. A death in France: mugging gone wrong, not her. A fire in Greece: gasoline-fueled, not her. Problems with the power grid in Spain: one of the power lines got tangled up in a fallen tree, not her, not her, not her.
What if this was the thing, finally, that took her away from them? After they failed to protect her from Bristol and they failed to protect her from Farrier and they failed to protect her from her sister’s plans and they failed to protect her from the Lugate on the bridge, and after all that she was still there next to them, what if this was the thing that made her leave?
What if she left them alone in the Chequy with nothing but their own four bodies for company?
They couldn’t let that happen. Would bar the doors against her going themselves if they had to.
Train collision in Germany. Not her.
--
In the end they didn’t find her. Instead she called them, breathless, walking fast, they could hear her shoes clomping on the other end of the line. No fear at all in her voice. Said there was an auction at Viktor Danilov’s house. Wanted them to go save Farrier. They told her to run and she wouldn’t.
(She would have before, probably. If she still had her memories, she would have run. Was this better? Was this who she was supposed to be, someone foolhardy and brave? Was it wrong that they had loved her when she was easier to protect?)
Everyone who worked for the Chequy had mixed feelings about it, even them, but they couldn’t deny that it knew how to manage an emergency. Even Grantchester. He made a fuss about wanting to follow protocol, needing authorization to go after Danilov, but when he couldn’t get it he didn’t try to stop them from heading out. He understood what needed to be done.
It was a relief in a way, infiltrating Danilov’s ostentatious compound. The kind of thing they were good at, the kind of thing they didn’t have to keep worrying obsessively over in their mind. Something concrete to punch, to shoot at. Also Danilov’s taste in decor was vulgar and it was nice to wreck it a little.
Inside they found her easily enough, but she still wouldn’t go with them. Wanted to go after Lorik, had a plan to stop the whole auction from happening, to rescue all the other EVAs, when they couldn’t hope for more than getting her out with Farrier. They only wanted to save the people they cared about, but she wanted to be a hero and save everyone.
They told her to stop, to leave it to them, but she still wouldn’t come with them. Said she’d slow them down, that they should just go find Farrier.
“Come back for me,” she said. Voice steady. Like she’d be there when they got back. Like that had ever worked out for them before.
“Lock the fucking door,” they said. Then they did as she said, like they always did.
Found Farrier, helped her limp out of the building. (She could barely move, they must have drugged her, had Myfanwy been in that state too?) It was all working just as they had planned it except for Myfanwy refusing to go with them, click-click-click, every shot landing and every one of Danilov’s men going down nice and easy, and they were beginning to think they could get everyone out without any problems at all, but when they got back to the powder room where they’d found Myfanwy before she was gone. Of course.
They kept rolling through the house, dropping tear gas, scaring the maids, and there weren’t that many targets left for them to take out here but they could tell that every move they made they were getting closer to Lorik. Where Myfanwy had wanted to go.
Outside the police were starting to roll in, and the ambulances. Shit, they’d have to divert a body or two to dealing with them if they wanted to keep the police away from Myfanwy. But she was still here somewhere, they were sure of it, she was still here —
And then the lights started to flicker and they smelled lightning and they knew for sure.
It was different to how it usually was with her. Every time they’d seen her use her EVA before, properly using it and not just letting bits of static shock dribble out of her fingers so she could de-lint her sweaters more efficiently, it had come pouring uncontrollably out of her body, a whole storm of power moving wherever it wanted to go.
This was deliberate. A wave of power moving through the air with intention, aiming at a target.
Myfanwy was taking out Lorik. And she was using her EVA to do it, because she knew how to control it now. Wasn’t blocked by trauma or guilt or sadness or anything.
This was the person Myfanwy had always been meant to be, before Glengrove, before Bristol, before the fire. This was who she could be now. A hero.
Was it wrong that they loved her now, when she didn’t need them to protect her at all?
They cleared out the house. Headed out to talk to the emergency response. Got the EMTs taking care of Linda, waved some badges at the police, gave them the Robert treatment, sharp nods and authoritative voice, keeping them off Myfanwy’s back. One thing they could do for her, anyway.
When she walked out of the house with the rest of the EVAs from the auction there was smoke from the tear bombs billowing around her and she was wearing black leather like it was armor and her hair was curling around her face and they couldn’t help it. They hugged her tight, and she hugged them back, the lightning smell of her all around them as she burned away everything else in their arms.
They pulled back, let her do her thing, told her Linda wanted to talk to her. But when she walked past them they knew suddenly, deep in their guts, that this could be the last time they’d ever see her.
She wanted to leave. She didn’t need them or the Chequy for anything, not now that she could protect herself. And there wasn’t any other reason for them to try to keep her there with them. Only them, and their foolish hearts, and that wasn’t enough.
So they took down all their defenses and went to her as Alex, and let their face say whatever it was going to say. Something pathetic, probably. But it might be the last time.
“I know you wanted to leave,” they said, “and if you still do, I won’t be angry. But I’ll miss you.”
She looked them in the eye at that, and for just a second, it was exactly the same as it had been outside the coat room that first night, that last night, when she had looked at them just like that and put her hand on their face and said, “Whatever happens next, I want you to know that I don’t regret this.”
At the time they had thought she’d meant that she wanted to start something new, that she meant that she didn’t regret beginning a new chapter together with them. But that hadn’t been it at all: she’d been ending a chapter that night, finishing up the part of her life that she would remember as that version of herself, and she had chosen to end it with them and she hadn’t regretted it.
And they knew how she felt now because they couldn’t regret it either. None of it, not that night and not any of the nights before and not any of them after. They might never see Myfanwy again after this and they couldn’t regret any of it, because it had left her here, striding out of the smoke like a fucking knight in black armor from a fairy story who’s just vanquished the monster, all the self-hatred and the doubt and the fear from before gone, burned out of her eyes from the sheer force of her.
She blinked one time, as though maybe she was going to think about crying, and then she organized her face into something approximating a smile instead. “Thank you,” she said.
Then she walked away from them, and they watched her go.
They had told her how they felt about her, told her without any cover or defenses, no denials or secrets left. They had told her they wouldn’t try to stop her from going.
She could be happy now. She could really be happy.
No, they weren’t going to regret any of that.