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Sarah won’t talk – she sits there, sullen, staring out the window of the plane. Every now and then she tenses her hand in its cuff; the jingle of it startles Rachel every time, but she doesn’t call attention to it. She’s learned (she’s learned) that Sarah likes to believe a choice is her own. Rachel thinks that maybe Sarah could run into any trap, blindly, if she thought she was clever enough to know it was a trap. If she thought she was outsmarting someone, by walking in with her eyes open.
She’d walked into the plane with her eyes open, sure enough, but of course the bait was just an idea. It itches at Rachel, that they don’t have Kira. To set Sarah on her trail like a hunting dog would likely be the most profitable option – Sarah is desperate, hungry, and these things cannot be bought with money or coerced through blackmail – but it also has the biggest margin of loss.
They could lose Sarah and Kira both. Unacceptable.
(Possibly it is just losing Sarah that is unacceptable. Not that Kira isn’t important, essential even, but—)
So they reel Sarah in and before her eyes have finished flick-flick-flicking around the plane, the gesture of a cornered animal, Daniel has Sarah shoved into a seat, the cuff on her wrist and the other end on the arm of the chair. The silver of it matches Rachel’s fingernails, which she thinks is a little funny. There isn’t much time to dwell on the humor of it before Sarah meets her eyes.
She meets her eyes. Rachel’s eyes. Not Paul’s, Paul who stands awkwardly in a corner, so much ornamentation; not the pilot’s; not anyone on the staff.
Sarah meets Rachel’s eyes, and the amount of – of – betrayal, maybe (desperation, a voice in the back of Rachel’s head lists emotionlessly, sorrow, anger, despair, empathy, shock), in the depths of them makes Rachel flinch and look away.
It’s only for a second, though, and then she looks back. Raises her eyebrows in a silent what did you expect? and saunters to her own seat across from where Sarah is already pulling, half-heartedly, at the handcuff around her wrist.
Daniel has removed the gun from Sarah’s pocket and he holds it up for her inspection; she nods, curtly, and he moves to dispose of it.
Sarah’s eyes track it – him – across the cabin. They linger on Paul. Hm. That could be a problem, that attention. Rachel needs to pull it back to more relevant things.
(It’s not that she wants Sarah to look at Rachel, it’s that she wants Sarah to stop looking at Paul. That’s all.)
“I’m sorry,” she says in a tone that is almost sincere, “we don’t have her.”
Sarah snaps to a rigid sort of energy, eyes widening as she looks at Rachel. “You’re lying,” she says, desperate, “you have her, where else would she be—”
Her voice shakes, breaks on the last word. It is another indefinable emotion in her voice, something that trembles on the edge of hope.
“We have our people searching,” Rachel says, breaking eye contact to place her laptop on the table between the two of them. She can’t – can’t stop herself from looking at Sarah again, though, and her mouth is already parted to speak before she can stop herself.
“You’ll understand we couldn’t lose you,” she says slowly, and hates savagely every single scrap of emotion that leaks through her voice. Even if Sarah doesn’t get it she hates it, hates every bit of it.
“No I don’t,” Sarah says viciously; she is pulling on the handcuff desperately, now, and Rachel winces to think of the damage to Sarah’s (Rachel’s) skin.
Rachel shrugs: well. Opens her laptop. There’s a fresh copy of the proposal to look at, and she really should brush up on the notes from the last meeting in Taiwan. The Manning…problem has taken up far too much of her time. They’ll be taking off soon, and hopefully that can put an end to that particular concern.
“Rachel,” Sarah says, her voice so raw it hurts Rachel a little to hear it. She closes her eyes for a brief second and looks at Sarah, because she cannot, cannot, cannot stop. She opens her mouth but Sarah has beat her to it, already.
“Please,” she says, that one trembling syllable, and Rachel can almost taste the blood of it in her mouth, tastes how much it hurts Sarah to say it. Like it’s been pulled from her, spat out like a tooth. Please.
Rachel shakes her head and says, “No.”
It’s a small word, but it falls like a bomb.
She watches the person that is Sarah Manning collapse.
The stages of grief go like this: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Sarah has skipped straight to bargaining, but she has always been exceptional.
She tries anger, next, as the plane begins to roll away. Rachel can see the way it lights up her eyes like a firework and if she was close enough to put hand to skin she is certain she could feel the anger sparking through Sarah’s veins, heading towards her wrist to say break, heading towards her legs to say run.
Daniel is there first, of course, his hands another sort of steel on Sarah’s wrists, the pressure of his legs pressing hers against the seat.
Rachel stands up and gets herself a drink from the other end of the plane as Sarah struggles. She holds eye contact with Paul as Sarah screams, the sounds torn from her throat, sorrow-anger-despair. His hand clenches a little on his own drink but he says nothing; he does not break her eye contact. Good. Rachel knew she liked him.
She allows him the tiniest curve of a smirk around the rim of her glass. Positive reinforcement is always good, after all, when you are training someone.
He doesn’t smile back, but that may be because Sarah has switched to yelling Paul, and other words like help and please and Kira, always Kira.
There’s a crackle over the loudspeaker: we’re off, ladies and gentlemen, and Sarah does not stop screaming.
Rachel returns to her seat eventually, the alcohol just enough to smooth the edges of everything. The plane is silent but for the sound of her fingers on the keyboard and the sound of Sarah crying, the sniffle as she wipes snot from her face with her sleeve.
Stage 4: depression – or, at least, that’s what Rachel assumes. She certainly isn’t looking up; she would offer a tissue but she doesn’t think it would exactly be appreciated. She’ll bide her time until they get to acceptance.
From behind her there is a rustle as Paul or Daniel shifts in his seat. It irks Rachel to not see the remainder of the plane, but that is less important than making sure that Sarah cannot see the door. Too much hope is a dangerous thing, especially for such a long flight. Rachel isn’t that cruel. Probably.
She thinks about small mercies as she types, the sound a staccato counterpoint to the low, irregular noise of Sarah weeping. String section, maybe. Or woodwind. There is a small and pointed curiosity in Rachel, Rachel who has not cried for a long time. It tap-tap-taps at the back of her head, asking: do I sound like that? could I sound like that? could I ever sound like that?
It’s tragically the closest she can come to empathizing, that wondering if she could, hypothetically, empathize. Distracting enough. Between turning that curiosity over and over in her head – this sort of interest is a foreign object – and her work, most of her attention isn’t focused on Sarah at all.
They can’t afford to let Sarah grieve in private, not after seeing what she did to the wall of the diner. This is the most privacy Rachel can give her.
(Maybe one day Sarah will even be grateful.)
Of course, she runs out of work to do eventually. She’s behind, but not several hours behind. That’s the sort of incompetence she abandoned as a child. She keeps editing for a little while anyways, changing the wording on a contract three or four or seven times so that she doesn’t have to abandon the shield her laptop has become. Pathetic. And yet: she persists.
Enough is enough, she thinks, and decisively closes the laptop, revealing Sarah behind it—
Sarah whose eyes have closed, who sits curled in on herself like a child.
She looks at Sarah’s sleeping body with a small oh.
She could have been like that for minutes, maybe an hour, maybe more. Suddenly Rachel is enormously furious with herself for dithering away at her laptop, when Sarah was asleep in front of her this whole time. She imagines the nodding of her head, the way she would blink, the lethargic syrupy motions of those blinks slowing.
She struggles picturing it. In her head Sarah is awake until she is not, like flicking a switch; Rachel missed it, she missed data, and that rankles.
But the irritation serves no purpose, so she lets it go and turns her attention back to the woman across from her.
She wonders idly how long it has been, since Sarah has slept – there is exhaustion in every line of her body where she lies slumped against the glassy curve of the window, exhaustion in her muscles and exhaustion in the deep frown etched in her face.
She must be so, so tired, to fall asleep here. Sarah’s not stupid enough to rest in a space she doesn’t consider safe; she is like an animal, in that respect. There must be fatigue worn into her bones to overcome those instincts.
There is a small part of Rachel that wants to reduce the noise of the plane even more, somehow, stop the breathing of the two men on the plane, stop her own breathing, turn down the motor. Sarah Manning is sleeping, and the world should hush accordingly.
She cuts that part out neatly, like a tumor, to preserve and analyze later. For now she indulges herself and just…looks.
Sarah’s lip is split, the bruises under her eyes dark and deep. Her hair, relaxed, falls in jagged waves around her face. (Rachel doesn’t know if her own hair does the same. It’s been a long, long time since her hair looked like that.)
She still looks angry in dreaming, and so besides the difference in the hair she is about the same as the last time Rachel saw her. Angry. Tired. Refusing, even as she leans on the wall, to soften.
(Her hair has fallen across her face and Rachel thinks – Rachel wants – Rachel—
—stares idly at her hand on the lid of her laptop. She’s certain it’s moved, slightly, but she can’t see any change.)
Does Rachel look like that when she sleeps, that angry? Anger seems such an intrinsic part of Sarah. It’s silly that Rachel can’t imagine it on her face; what’s Sarah’s is hers, after all, and what’s hers is Sarah’s. But still.
She’s never checked the footage, so she doesn’t really know. Maybe her brow also tightens minutely as she dreams. Maybe every now and then her shoulders twitch, like the movements of a dog dreaming of hunting rabbits.
No, probably not. Rachel has no rabbits to chase, no lab-rat daughters, nothing worth running to. Her brow is no doubt unwrinkled and serene.
She keeps watching Sarah anyways. There is something hungry in this watching, something hungry in the way Rachel’s breathing has slowed and evened out to match Sarah’s own. But she refuses to acknowledge that it’s there. If you don’t feed an animal it will leave, eventually. This has always been Rachel’s tactic when it comes to feeling.
Sarah sleeps and the plane flies on. Rachel pulls her eyes away from Sarah (and it is a pulling) and looks out the window instead. She can see the dark pits of her eyes in the glass, the only change in an otherwise uninterrupted field of clouds.
At some point Rachel also falls asleep; she never plans to but it always happens, on flights as long as this. She’s made peace with it. There are some things that are outside of her control, and she feels the sort of amused fondness for her body one would feel for a particularly cooperative pet. She permits it its rest.
She’s dozing in and out, dreaming any number of scattered images: she is awake, and looking at Sarah, and the cuff grows like a mouth, and Sarah takes her wrist out of it, grinning all sharp teeth; there is a body on a slab in a laboratory, cold as a grave, and the body is hers; Sarah straddles her and presses a gun to her head, hisses you don’t own us; the plane has vanished and Rachel is sitting in a great, empty expanse of sky.
The last one fills her with a deep and nameless fear and she wakes with a jolt. Sarah is awake, and watching her. Rachel would feel fear about that, or possibly shame, but Sarah is probably owed her own curiosity. She doesn’t seem particularly curious, though, just…tired.
Denial, Rachel thinks with the sort of hollow fuzziness that rises from a sharp transition from sleep to wakefulness. Maybe not that either. This system, like a lot of other things, is failing her completely.
“You drool when you sleep,” Sarah says, voice sharp and utterly emotionless, cutting through Rachel’s thoughts like a switchblade.
Rachel shrugs, sits up, straightens the crick from her neck – she’s always been terrible at sleeping on planes, her body refusing to relax even in resting. Slowly, she wipes the saliva from her chin with the back of her hand. She could say any number of things in return, but this isn’t about getting even ground. She’s learned, after all. If it makes Sarah feel better, makes her feel like she’s winning, makes her stop considering Paul or the gun or the door or the pilot in his cockpit, well…Rachel’s been insulted about worse than drooling.
“So, what,” her copy continues, voice now tightening, slightly strained, “you got me, you fuckin’” (her voice cracks) “won, now what? Gonna keep this on me ‘til bloody Stockholm Syndrome kicks in?”
She rattles the chain of her handcuff accusingly, and Rachel can almost feel Daniel jerk to attention across the plane. She’s so lucky.
“It depends on how much you’re willing to cooperate,” Rachel says, batting her eyelashes. She thinks her tone may come off as patronizing, but honestly she can’t be bothered. It is a little bit like speaking to a child. A child who, for some inexplicable reason, has been given a gun.
Her mind is still muzzy from sleep and her metaphors aren’t precisely adequate. It’s a shame. She’d quite like to verbally spar with Sarah in a setting where both of them have enough sleep and Sarah is not seriously considering dealing considerable bodily harm to Rachel’s person.
Could be enjoyable, maybe.
But that’s not where they are.
“Cooperate, right,” Sarah says, looking to the side like she can’t even bear how much of a lie this all is. “Why don’t we just assume I’m not willing, yeah? I know you’re thinkin’ it.”
(Rachel’s not. She doesn’t want to think of a universe where this was all in vain, where they keep Sarah in a holding cell forever, staying an arm’s length away so that she won’t try to break someone’s neck. Caged animal. Rachel’s learned to thrive in her cage, like a vine trained to a trellis, but Sarah would bow heavy with some strange fruit and collapse under her own weight. She does not belong in the sterile glass space of the DYAD. She is not so much a creature of artifice.)
“This would be much easier if you did,” Rachel sighs, turning her own head to mirror Sarah, looking at the rolling white fields of clouds below. “We’d like to work with you.”
“We could get Kira back,” she says, pauses, waits for the timing to be right to land the knockout punch: “together.”
She lets her eyes slide back to Sarah, a deliberate gesture, a measuring. Sarah’s throat rolls as she swallows; the word no is likely on her tongue, bitter, immediate, but Rachel waits for the thought: maybe this is my best option.
Of course it’s a trap. Sarah knows it’s a trap. Rachel knows that Sarah knows it’s a trap.
Does Sarah know that—
Never mind.
(…Is it a trap?
The thought is worrying in Rachel’s head. Maybe this is our best option. The hunting dog on a leash…tempting. Entirely too much so. Especially the thought of the end of the leash in Rachel’s hand.
No, no, not tempting enough.)
“More of this black van business, then?” Sarah asks. “Me and him—” she jerks her head towards the direction of the other men on the plane, and at this point it doesn’t matter which one she is referring to, “—breakin’ into houses, holding threatening conversations and shit?”
“Maybe,” Rachel says, shrugs. “You’ll be free to negotiate your own role in the search; she is your daughter, after all, and we respect that.”
“Yeah, now you respect it,” Sarah says, voice rasping at the edge of a growl. “You respect me and my daughter because I’m in chains and you don’t have the faintest bloody clue where Kira is.”
(Rachel politely ignores the way Sarah’s voice shatters around Kira. She will remember it, though; these sorts of things are often useful.)
“I’m your best chance,” she continues with growing realization. “You’re desperate.”
Sarah leans forward, eyes suddenly glittering, and Rachel feels the urge to sink back in her own chair in response, to cower away. Sarah is handcuffed to a chair, she reminds herself. There is absolutely nothing to be afraid of.
“This your idea of negotiations, Rachel Duncan?” Sarah breathes, and there she is, the woman who tore so many plans apart like wet paper, the lioness stirring awake in the easy motion of Sarah’s muscles.
There’s a rule of negotiations that is something like don’t put your heart in it. If this is in fact a negotiation Rachel is doing an abysmal job. She wants Sarah. She wants Sarah badly.
The things Rachel could do, with that savageness. Sarah is beautiful now, unshaped as she is; with Rachel to help her – oh. She could be everything.
It’s a stupid thing to want, but: why not? Rachel is not stupid enough to assume she has all the power here – there is never, never a situation where one has all the power, and she isn’t naïve enough to believe there is – but Sarah’s options are rapidly dwindling.
There are few things Rachel relishes more than the feeling of power humming low in her stomach, and right now it is pulsing along with her heartbeat.
But she’s kept Sarah waiting long enough, with thinking.
“Do you want them to be?” she asks back, certain her smirk is mirroring Sarah’s own, a domesticated variety.
“I want a lot of things,” Sarah says, voice still dangerous. “I want to be able to use my left hand. I want to not be on my way to bloody Taiwan.”
“I want my daughter back,” she snarls, the animal in her showing its teeth.
Then she pauses, tucks that wildness neatly under her skin, and leans back in the chair.
“So,” she says, narrowing her eyes, “let’s negotiate.”