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It’s pointless. She knows it’s pointless.
It doesn’t matter.
Muscles straining, feet sliding for purchase, Cass Charke throws her whole weight against the restraints currently keeping her bound to the wall.
Nothing budges.
With an angry huff she slumps back against the cold metal. It’s the fourth set of restraints they’ve put her in, after she busted her way out of the previous three. Sure, she never got far with the insane number of goons crawling through the labs, but right now she’ll take any victory she can get.
God knows they’ve been few recently.
See, Cassium’s weird, terrible labs were supposed to be shut down, yeah? They’d gone in, Luma had been not-Oniko, Cobalt had done his awesome phase-y stuff, she threw a pod, they’d all took out a lot of zombies, Anton had passed out but he was fine, they’d rescued some people and then Lacy had done the thing with their brain and wiped everything. And then Measure Z had passed and stuff was being investigated and shut down.
Well it turns out that “shut down” was just corporate-speak for “shove everything even further underground”.
Oh, and “fucking kidnap people”.
Oya had gotten wind of it first. Well, actually Mama Guillén. Technically Papa Guillén who told Mama Guillén who told Oya that someone from Baldwin Island just… disappeared. And then Oya told everyone and Lacy did some digging. And it turned out that a lot of people had disappeared. Corporate people, non-Corporate people, old, young, and everything in-between. No pattern to it at all. Except one day they were there, next day they weren’t.
Anton was the one who eventually noticed the one clue, the one connection: all of it started after the C6 train bomb.
They were going after people who’d been affected. People with powers.
So Lacy had done their thing and identified a bunch of different targets and none of them had known what to do so the got Old Kylen on some of them and split up for the rest. Luma and Hopps, Anton and Oya… she’d been with Lacy.
It didn’t go to plan.
They did stop the kidnapping, but only kinda because, well…
Turned out that corporate had really wanted one of them, the originals, and sorta figured out what they were doing and there was a big fight and everyone else had shown up but not fast enough, and the last thing Cass remembered was hearing Lacy screaming as she hit the floor.
She woke up here.
Wherever the fuck here was.
Cass closes her eyes and tips her head back. The one thing she knew… well, thought… no, knew, she knew, was that she wasn’t in LA. She couldn’t…
She couldn’t feel the others. For the first time since that night in the alley with Dr. Patel she couldn’t feel anyone, that distant background awareness just… gone. Like an empty missing spot somewhere in her chest.
So either she was outside of the range that the thing worked at, or everyone else was-
Obviously she was outside the range.
“Lacy,” she says out loud to the emptiness of the cell, not opening her eyes. “I know there’s some sorta tech in here and that you’ll find it eventually and hear this, but like, when you do could you maybe hurry? I’m bored out of my fucking mind here.”
“They’re not coming.”
Standing outside the glass wall of the cell is the head scientist in charge of all the very shitty things that people have been doing to her for… however long she’s been here. Cass is pretty sure that she said her name once, but Cass stubbornly refused to know it. She just calls her Head Bitch.
Currently Head Bitch is looking at her with something that could almost be mistaken for pity, except it’s not. There’s a nasty glimmer underneath it that Cass has gotten really used to seeing recently.
“Fuck off. My friends’ are gonna figure out where your dumbass secret villain lair is and-”
“Cassie.” Head Bitch’s fake sympathy doesn’t drop. “It’s been nearly three weeks. Surely your friends, as incredibly powerful people with inhuman powers, could’ve already found this place.”
“Three…” Cass shakes her head. Time had gotten real weird down here, but it couldn’t have been three weeks already. Could it? “There’s no fucking way it’s been three weeks.”
“You were unconscious for quite a while. Necessary, so we could run some preliminary testing and install the implants.”
“You’re lying. You’re just trying to get me to think that they’re not coming.”
Head Bitch shrugs. “I’m only telling you the truth. I don’t care what you think.” She starts to walk off, calling over her shoulder as she does. “But do try not to become delusional just yet. It might interfere with later tests.”
Time passed, oozing like blood from a wound.
Four weeks, Head Bitch told her, a whole month.
Five weeks.
Six weeks.
Seven.
Eight.
Cass stopped listening.
It didn’t matter anyway. Time came and went and it just didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was the tests.
Tests. Always tests.
How much could she lift, how far could she throw, how high could she jump. Tissue sample, muscle sample, bone sample. How much pain could she endure. How long could she go without food, water, sleep, and how strong was she still. How did her power work and could it be turned off. Stimulants and steroids and hormones and every possible drug pumped into her body.
And the implant, surgically installed in the back of her head. Always the implant, every time she was stubborn, every time she didn’t jump when they said jump. Because she had nothing but this. Nothing but this tiny, meaningless refusal that changed nothing but she was going to do it anyway.
It wasn’t that she had given up on rescue. No, certainly not. It just seemed less… pressing. Like this was how things were going to be for right now.
Some nights, alone and restrained in her cell, when the lights went dim, she’d talk to Lacy. Some nights it was meaningless nonsense, ridiculous old stories heard from a friend of a friend of a friend, dumb things she did as a kid that Oya had to get her out of. Some nights she’d scream and shout and rant, unloading every dirty word and insult she had at her captors until her voice was hoarse and her eyes damp.
Most night she waited in silence.
Waited and waited and waited.
Cass was never good at waiting.
It’s a growing feeling for the five of them, as Amelia gets closer to the bunker buried in the middle of the Montana wasteland. Like a distant fuzzy radar image, growing clearer with time. Glances between them confirm it.
For the first time in over two weeks, they can feel Cass.
Up in the cockpit, Lacy is dead silent, mouth set in a straight line, eyes staring almost unblinkingly ahead. Last night they finally cracked the security on the Cassium lab where Cass is being held and found the security footage of her talking to them. They’d blown out half the wiring in Blue Dolphin Base and hadn’t said a word since.
Farther back in the cabin, Oya is pacing. Deep purple sparks off her fingertips, but never coalesces into anything. She hasn’t been able to look into the future since last night. She looked, desperate for confirmation that Cass would be okay, that they would get her back. But some of the possible outcomes, futures that could come to pass...
They were things she never wanted to see.
She prayed all night, begging every ancestor she has to watch over her best friend from childhood. The scent of incense still clings to her like a bad dream. She’s practically running on cafecito alone, just like has for the past weeks.
Luma has since stopped trying to get Oya to sit down and has instead taken her place next to Lacy in the cockpit. She grips their hand and occasionally murmurs soft reassurances, although whether they’re for them or her even she can’t tell. Her hair keeps flickering into rainbow spikes, and a reflection of it in the cockpit window almost brings tears to her eyes.
Anton is attempting to meditate, sitting on the floor with his back pressed against the wall, but from the way his breath keep catching, the way his eyes are darting around behind closed eyelids it’s clearly not working. All he can think about is Cass, the way that she wore every emotion on her sleeve, the pure and honest confusion when she asked him about centering yourself, her heart and her enthusiasm, and the weight of anxiety settles in his chest like a stone. They need her with them, he needs her hand in his.
Hopps keeps trying to fill the heavy silence with empty meaningless words, her voice echoing too loudly in the quiet. Cobalt sits next to her, a hand on her knee, quietly answering her questions, reciting the plan crafted over many long nights and longer days. Tiny crackles of electricity flicker through her hair, nervous static that puffs it out into a cloud behind her.
Kostchie, in fact, seems to be the only one not affected by the tense atmosphere, hands tucked behind his head, sleeping. But when Cass had first gone missing, he’d found them, not the other way around. He’d been as vague about his reasons as he usually was, only insisting that finding Cass was “important”.
No one could argue with him on that. Or on how vital the Russian cyborg would be in storming a Cassium lab.
The landscape outside is desolate, grasslands stretching out in shades of brown and grey in the rapidly falling dusk, punctuated here and there with the occasional small hill or rock formation. There’s not a single sign of human structure or settlement, no road, no shack, nothing. But slowly Amelia begins her descent, touching down in what seemed to be the middle of nowhere.
“We’re here,” Lacy says, the first thing they’ve spoken in almost twenty four hours.
As if on cue, the feeling lances through the five of them, utterly unmistakable, intense enough that Oya and Luma gasp, while Lacy presses a hand to their chest and Hopps pops with a surge of lightning.
“What is it?” Cobalt asks, voice full of concern.
“It’s Cass,” Anton explains through clenched teeth. “She’s in pain.”
It’s stronger the second time, strong enough that it sends Cass to her knees, every muscle tensing as the electricity courses through her.
The voice of Head Bitch comes over the speakers. “I said, again .”
When the shock stops Cass has to catch herself from topping face first onto the floor. To be perfectly honest, she’s not entirely sure she can even get up again, let alone deadlift the several thousand pound weight she’s supposed to. Whatever drug they had pumped her full of this time had left her shaky and weak. Throwing up earlier probably hadn’t helped any.
But she isn’t about to admit defeat. Not out loud, at least.
So Cass shuts her eyes and waits.
The third shock comes and this time there’s nothing to stop her from hitting the floor as every nerve in her body lights on fire, a wall of white pain drowning out every sense until she finally slips away into black unconsciousness.
The lab has only one entrance. One of the benefits of being underground. Sneaking in would be practically impossible.
So they weren’t going to try.
The plan was simple: Lacy was going to hack the locks, then Hopps, Anton, Oya, Kostchie, and Cobalt were going straight in. Under the cover of the chaos of the other six, Luma was going to slip in disguised as a scientist, find Cass, and get her out.
For once, everything was running perfectly.
At least for a little while.
Cass’ cell is on the twenty-first floor, but when Luma steps into the elevator, she doesn’t even have to hit a button before it starts moving, a mental nod from Lacy in her direction before they dive back into the programming of the lab.
The door opens on an empty, sterile white hallway, the air thick with the cold chill of disinfectants. Luma’s footsteps echo slightly on pristine tile floors as she makes her way down the hall. She passes a few doors, locked with retina scanners and labeled things like Testing Chamber 2 and Observation Room 2. Fear and revulsion are already twineing in her stomach at the thought of Cass being kept here, poked and prodded and experimented on like a lab rat.
And that’s when she reaches Cass’ cell.
The entire front wall is glass, giving not even the barest hint of privacy. And manacled upright to the back wall is Cass.
Her eyes are closed, head dangling limply in unconsciousness. The iconic rainbow hair is gone, shaved off into patchy and uneven brown fuzz. Her skin has a sickly greyish pallor to it. A jumpsuit, like a prison suit except sterile white, hangs loosely off her. Somehow she looks both stronger and more fragile at the same time, as if her muscles had toned but every scrap of fat had been stripped from her body.
In short, she looks like hell.
Lacy, Luma calls over the subvocals, working desperately to keep her building tears out of her voice, unlock Cass’ cell now. But… hold off on the restraints, I don’t know if she can stand on her own right now.
There’s no verbal response, but mere milliseconds pass before the scanner beeps in acknowledgement and the door slides open.
The whole cell can’t be more than a few feet wide, so it’s nothing more than a couple steps before she’s right in front of Cass. Gently, she puts a hand against Cass’ cheek, supporting her head. Her skin is clammy with cold sweat, and combined concern and fury rage through Luma.
“Cass?” The voice that comes out is unfamiliar, and suddenly Luma remembers that she’s still shapeshifted into Paul Girard, Cassium employee. Carefully she shifts just her face and voice back so as not to startle Cass. “Cass, hey, c’mon, wake up, we’re getting you out of here but I need you to wake up first.”
Cass doesn’t even stir.
She taps Cass’ cheek. “Cass? C’mon, Cass, c’mon just wake up.”
Cass’ eyes flutter for a moment, but nothing more.
Gritting her teeth, telling herself that she’s going to hate herself for the rest of her life but she’ll hate herself more if they don’t save Cass, Luma does the only thing she can think of.
She slaps Cass.
Blue eyes slowly flicker open, although the blow was strong enough to snap Cass’ head to the side. Her eyes are dull and bloodshot, and worse still, there’s not even a glimmer of recognition in them.
“Hey, you’re awake! Sorry, I had to, you wouldn’t wake up and we gotta get out of here, it...it’s Moth, we’re here to rescue you, we all are, we’re going to take you home.” Luma is aware that she’s rambling but she can’t stop herself. The emptiness in Cass’ gaze is more terrifying than anything else in this whole damn lab. “Right, well, can you stand? I didn’t want to take off the restraints until I was sure you weren’t going to land in a heap on the floor.”
A beat passes where Cass just stares at her, unblinking. And then slowly nods her head, still not breaking eye contact.
Lacy, the restraints, please.
Is she okay? Lacy responds on the subvocal, just as the restraints click open with a pneumatic hiss-
-And Cass promptly topples onto Luma as her knees give out. Luma barely manages to keep the two of them from hitting the floor, but it’s a near thing.
I’ll have to get back to you on that . Then outloud to Cass, “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Can you just fuckin’ get this over with?” Her voice is scratchy and broken, and despite the strong words a bone-deep exhaustion has replaced her usual fire.
“Yeah, alright, yeah, we can just go.” Looping Cass’ arm over her shoulders, Luma turns to go, shifting back fully into Paul as she does.
Only to find the doorway to the cell blocked by a tall, heavyset woman, dressed in a spotless white lab coat over a corporate suit, her blonde hair pulled into a neat bun on top of her head. Behind her, fanning out into the hallway are half a dozen security guards with plasma rifles trained on the two of them.
“I’m very sorry, but you’re not going anywhere.”
Backup on floor twenty-one right now, Luma calls over the team-wide subvocal as she raises the hand that isn’t currently supporting Cass. “Don’t shoot!”
“Only if you make it necessary. You two are much too valuable to damage without cause.” The nearly genuine concern in her voice sends a shiver up Luma’s spine. What was it with Cassium and their polite evil scientists? “Cassie, dear, you don’t look very good.”
“Fuck you,” Cass responds.
The woman laughs. “I suppose that’s fair. Now, our tech doesn’t seem to be working at the moment, so if you could just stay right there while we finish dealing with your friends upstairs, none of this has to come to violence.”
“Sure,” Cass says, before shoving Luma off and launching herself at the scientist.
Even weakened she’s still strong as hell, and Luma hits the wall hard enough to see stars for a moment but not enough to obstruct her front row seat to watching Cass body slam a woman to the ground and wrap her hands around her throat.
“Cass, no!” Luma cries, but everything is happening too fast and her own plea gets buried under the sound of Cass screaming as her spine arcs and her whole body stiffens. A gut wrenching familiarity overtakes her because she’s seen this before, when Hopps attacks-
Electrocuted, Cass was being electrocuted right in from of Luma’s eyes-
And taking the scientist out with her as the current was forced to go to ground right through her.
The guards level their rifles, preparing to shoot and nothing short of pure panic races through Luma as Cass collapses, once again unconscious. She activates her shield, running over in a desperate attempt to save Cass-
And at that moment the elevator at the end of the hall arrives with a soft ding, and out steps a Russian cyborg wielding twin pistols, a living battery already crackling like a live wire, and an absolutely furious looking technopath.
Luma, however, has very little in the way of combat skills, and so drags Cass into a corner, curling around her to protect her as much a possible. The hallway is overrun with the sounds of plasma fire and gunshots and explosions and thunder and screaming, but Luma just shuts her eyes and waits, focusing everything she has on the faint, barely audible sound of Cass’ breathing.
Eventually the noise in the hallway ends, and Lacy’s hand comes to rest on her shoulder.
“The guards are done. We need to get her to Amelia.”
It’s only then that Luma realizes that there are tear tracks down her face, and she hurries to scrub them off.
“Anton, Oya, and Cobalt?” she asks.
“Dealing with last of the guards upstairs,” Kostchie answers as with surprising gentleness he picks up Cass.
“They had everything under control,” Hopps adds.
“Then let’s get the hell out of this place.”
With a thought, Amelia’s get engines switch on, the ramp lowering as all of them come rushing out of the lab, Kostchie and Hopps firing a few last shots over their shoulders.
Sweet Baby, Lacy thinks, can you fly Amelia, please? I have to save Cass.
Confirmed, Operator Lacy. Good luck.
Thank you, Sweet Baby.
“Hello, I am Florence, a medical bot!”
“Someone shut that thing up!”
Everyone is talking and moving and yelling and Lacy is already exhausted from jumping through code and there’s a headache building at their temples but Kostchie is laying Cass down on the medical bed they had installed in the cargo space and she’s still and pale and barely breathing. Anton and Hopps are holding Oya who’s crying and Cobalt is saying something and it’s too loud and too busy and too soaked in fear.
And then Lacy is standing next to them and her hand is in their hand and her eyes are red.
“It’s gonna be okay.”
“Yeah.”
Lacy takes a deep breath, preparing to sink into Florence’s code, to assist the medbot however they can but something else grabs their attention first, an unfamiliar piece of tech, something that wasn’t there before.
Something that’s inside Cass.
An implant, surgically installed at the base of her skull, designed to receive wireless signals and output currents between 10 and 100 milliamps.
The exact range of current that is painful to lethal to a human body.
The code rips and tears and vanishes under their grasp, completely purging everything in mere seconds. They can’t do anything about the hardware, but they can at least destroy the firmware.
When there’s nothing left Lacy pulls themself out to find that they’re shaking and gripping Luma’s hand as tight as they can.
“Lacy?” she asks, her voice tight with fear.
“They put something in her head. They put something in her head so they could hurt her without even touching her! They were hurting her! They could’ve killed her just by pressing a button! I hate them, I hate them, I hate them, I hate them!” They’re screaming by the end of it, nearly choking on their own rage.
Next to them Luma has gone statue still as the color drains from her face. “Oh god,” she whispers, “she knew. When she attacked that woman she knew what would happen. They could’ve killed her.”
The chaos and noise erupts all over again, but this time Lacy drowns it all out.
Cass could’ve died but she didn’t. She wouldn’t, they wouldn’t let her. She’d just have to deal with being alive.
If they had ever had a say in anything, she was going to have to deal with being alive.
The first thing to come back, always the first thing to come back, is sound. The soft beeping of medical machinery, the hum of ventilation systems…
...and a quiet conversation off to one side.
“You need to sleep.”
“Eventually. I just need to see her awake first, you know?”
“I know. That goes for you too.”
“I’m not tired.”
The voices are somehow familiar, but not any of the guards or scientists that she was used to hearing. New transfers? Then why are they familiar?
Next comes touch, and this too is unexpected. She’s lying down in what she knows is a hospital bed, but there’s a blanket over her and an actual pillow under her head. It’s the most comfortable she’s been in weeks, and for a moment she lets herself sink into it, enjoying the brief break.
“I think she’s waking up.”
Damn it. Well no point in trying to delay the inevitable.
Slowly, squinting against bright lights that aren’t there, Cass opens her eyes. The ceiling above her is still the same sterile white, vents and recessed lights turned off, still some lab.
It wasn’t real. Of course it wasn’t real, it’s never real. For a moment a wave of bitter disappointment washes over her, black and choking, a feeling that has never gone away despite how many damn times this has happened.
And then Oya is leaning over her.
“Cass? Oh god.”
And then she’s hugging her, cautious and desperate all at once, and Cass is so shocked she doesn’t know what to do, simply laying there until Oya pulls back, grabbing her by the shoulders and looking her over in that way she’s so familiar with, the look of concern and relief after Cass had done something stupid and dangerous.
“Are you alright? How do you feel?”
“I’m… alright, yeah.” Cass answers before she can even fully process the question, surprise further addling her sleep heavy mind. Normally it didn’t last after she woke up.
“You’re still experiencing the effects of dehydration, malnutrition, sleep deprivation, acute and repeated electrical shocks, and just, so many drugs in your system.” Lacy rolls up as they rattle off her diagnosis. “You need to rest more.”
“Is this real?” The question slips out before Cass can stop it.
Oya pulls back, glancing over at Lacy and Luma who’s standing off to the side, looking on. “Yeah, this is real. We got you out, you’re safe. We’re in Blue Dolphin Base.”
“You’re not just a hallucination? Not that hallucinations normally say they’re hallucinations, but it doesn’t hurt to ask, right?”
“Cass?” Luma asks, “have you been having hallucinations?”
Dark realization dawns on Lacy’s face as their gaze goes distant, searching through the web. “Some of the residual compounds in her system could be linked to hallucinogens,” they whisper.
“This is real. I promise you this is real,” Oya tells her, her grip on her shoulders tightening.
Luma steps closer. “What can we do to prove this is real?”
“I-” Cass in interrupted as Anton’s head (just his head) pops up in the doorway.
“Cass!” His head retracts, only for the rest of him to show up a moment later, followed by Hopps and Cobalt.
“Oh my god, Cass, are you okay?”
It’s too much. It’s too much all at once and Cass wants to believe it, she wants to believe that it’s real so bad but she’s scared, she so scared to believe it because she can’t be wrong, not again, not about this, she can’t face going back into Cassium hell after this. Her breath catches in her throat, the hot pressure of tears building in the back of her eyes. She grabs Oya arms, but it still doesn’t feel real, doesn’t feel like she’s touching anything, doesn’t feel like she’s real. There’s voices around her but she can’t make out any of the words.
Something warm lands against the back of her neck and she clings to the sensation. A few words filter through, “Focus on this, just focus on this.”
Moments stretch on, but slowly Cass’ breath comes back, sounds comes back, the dark rings around her vision faed. When she comes back, it’s just Luma and Oya in the room, Oya still holding her hands.
“I’m sorry-” Cass starts, but Luma cuts her off.
“You have nothing to apologize for. We shouldn’t have overwhelmed you.”
“But this is real, Cass, and we’re not going anywhere,” Oya adds. “Whatever happens, we’re going to be right here. Just tell us what we can do for you.”
“Can I get out of bed? This place looks a lot like the labs there and…” she trails off, unable to find the words to even begin to explain how she feels.
She still can’t walk on her own, so Oya supports her and Luma lingers close, but it’s mostly under her own power that she walks out of the medical lab and into the main room. The rest of the team is there, attempting to seem relaxed and natural and almost succeeding. Lacy makes a joke about bipedalism being a fool’s game, Anton and Cobalt are careful and supportive, and Hopps is trying her best not to be quite so loud and angry about the situation.
It’s nice. It almost feels normal, despite the elephant in the room that no one wants to address, Cass least of all.
Her energy is still low, so it isn’t long before Oya is helping her back to her room, and it’s only then she realize that Florence has been silently following her, a medical mechanical ghost.
The whole base still looks like Cassium, but there’s something else overlayed on top of it, the hints of personality and people and life instead of just the cold sterility of a lab. Cass clings to whatever she can, anything that she can use as proof that this is real.
She lays in bed and listens to music that she’s never heard before until she falls asleep.
She dreams about the lab, and when she wakes up she has to convince herself it’s real all over again.
The gentle lapping of waves against Amelia’s hull makes a soft background white noise, and coupled with the sea breeze and the sunshine against her skin, it’s about all Cass could possibly want.
After a few days regaining her energy in the base, she had gotten to the point that she was pretty sure that she would lose her mind if she didn’t see the sun right then. But going back to LA sounded awful, being around that many people and that much noise and all the corporation nonsense, so Lacy offered to fly Amelia up to the surface and just let her sit on the roof.
So that’s where she is, sunbathing on Amelia’s roof off the sunken island of Catalina, the California coast off in the distance. Luma and Lacy are swimming around the ship, but outside of that she’s mostly alone. Everyone has been giving her space, which has been mostly nice. Most of the time she doesn’t feel up to being the Cass she used to be, the Cass they’re all expecting her to be.
After awhile Luma and Lacy come up to join her on the roof, and she offers them a hand getting up. They’re both smiling, dripping and smelling of seawater, and she smiles back at them.
There’s gentle chatter between them, mostly Luma and Lacy talking about the plants and sea life and ruins around the base, with Cass occasionally asking questions or letting them know she’s still listening.
Eventually the conversation dies, and then-
“Hey Cass?” Lacy asks, “Can I ask you a question? You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”
Something dark twists in her stomach, but she manages to keep her voice light. “Yeah, okay, ask away.”
“How long were you at the lab for?”
Despite the warmth of the day, Cass feels a chill ripple across her skin. “I don’t know exactly, I sorta lost track of time but, uh. Nine weeks? Ten? Something like that.”
She feels the look that passes between Lacy and Luma more than she actually sees it. “Wait, what? Why? Was it-”
“Cass,” Luma gently interjects. “To us you were gone for sixteen days.”
“It shouldn’t have even been that long if it hadn’t been for the absolute nonsense of their security,” Lacy mutters mostly to themself.
“Sixt- two weeks?”
“Yeah.”
“This is why your medical stuff didn’t make sense, because you had malnutrition and sleep deprivation and stuff that weren’t possible with the time you were gone for. Or, gone for us for,” Lacy explains.
“Wait, so Cassium has figured out how to mess with time?”
Luma fiddles with a zipper on her wetsuit. “Either that or they have their own Oya.”
“Well shit, then we gotta go save them. Or fight them. Something! We can’t let the corps do that.”
“Yeah, we do, but,” Luma pauses. “Cass, you don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”
It’s like a bubble popping. For just a moment she had felt like the old Cass, ready to go out swinging and fight the corps, like the Cass that had protested for Measure Z outside the convention, like the Cass that had tried to punch Kylen Krouse, like the Cass that had jumped onto a prison transport miles above LA. But now that was gone and she was back to current Cass: tired, uncertain, and afraid.
“Yeah, I suppose.”
“Cass-” Luma tries to start.
“Can we go back to the base? I think I need to take a nap.”
“Cass-”
“If that’s what you want.” Lacy says.
“Yeah.”
Amelia hums back to life, rising slowly out of the water to give them all access to the back ramp.
Whispers follow Cass down as she begins climbing back inside, questioning and concerned. It stings, of course, but she tries not to let it hurt. After all, she doesn’t think she could explain any of it even if she tried. Words were never her strong suit. And certainly not with this.
Back in Blue Dolphin she lays in her bed as words and emotions and memories swirl around her head, going and going and going and getting nowhere.
Dinner is the same quiet, scattered affair that it has been for awhile now. Lacy and Luma were in the lab, Oya was in her room, Hopps had already eaten and gone back to training. The only ones in the main room are Anton, Sal and Oniko. Anton has found that he’s starting to divide time into Before The Kidnapping and After The Kidnapping. Sure, not everything had changed, but a lot had.
And if things had changed for them, how much more had it changed for Cass?
It’s as he’s contemplating that over a plate of Luma’s excellent seafood spaghetti that he realizes the woman herself isn’t in her usual dinner time place in one of the big chairs in the main room.
“Hey, has anyone seen Cass since this afternoon?”
“Cass in her room,” Sal pipes up from where Oniko is still trying to teach him checkers. He’s practically designated himself as her unofficial caretaker, keeping track of where she was in the base and when and what she had last eaten.
“Did someone take her dinner?”
“No. Hasn’t eaten since lunch.”
“Right, well, I suppose I’ll go do that.”
Extra plate in hand, Anton walks down the short hall where all their rooms are. Oya’s door is half cracked, the constant and faint scent of incense drifting out from inside. Farther down, the door to Cass’ room is closed entirely.
Balancing both plates in one stretched out hand, he carefully knocks, calling, “Hey, Cass, I’ve got food. Luma made seafood spaghetti.”
A long moment goes by until Cass opens the door. “That smells really good.”
“It is really good. You mind if I join you for dinner?”
The request seems to throw her, and silence slips over the two of them until Cass responds with a hesitant “Yeah, I suppose, if you want to.”
“Yeah, I do want to.”
Calling the room a mess is probably a generous statement. There’s clothes and blankets and empty spray paint cans thrown everywhere. The walls are a riot of neon colors, not anything artistic or careful like Luma’s painting, just messy shapes and colors. Luckily the ventilation is good here, but the smell of paint still lingers.
Nowhere in the room is there a single spot of white.
“Oh, uh, sorry, um.” Cass starts shifting a pile of clothes out of the way.
Anton just sits on top of another one. “Hey, it’s no problem.”
He hands over her plate, and they sit in a companionable sort of silence, simply enjoying good food.
It’s Cass who breaks the silence eventually.
“Look, I’m sorry, if you want to go you can.”
“Cass, why do you keep apologizing? What are you apologizing for?”
She pokes listlessly at a piece of shrimp on her plate, not looking at him at all. “I don’t know, just, for being…”
“For being what, Cass? A little messy? No one is going to blame you for not doing everything perfectly right now.”
“For not being… me.”
Anton sets his plate down, focusing on her more intently. She’s already physically starting to look better compared to a week or so ago, the grey tint gone from her skin and the bloodshot faded from her eyes. Her hair is still in the process of growing back in, still brown as it’s still too short and patchy to dye yet, and it’ll be awhile before the last of the gauntness is gone, but clearly she’s physically on the mend.
Mentally, though…
“Cass, you’re still you. No matter what happened you’re still Cass.”
“Except I don’t feel like me anymore. And then all of you, sometimes you treat me like I’m different now and sometimes you don’t and I don’t know who I’m supposed to be.”
“You’re supposed to be you.”
“But who is that?” Cass jumps to her feet and starts pacing through the mess, hands clenching and unclenching like she wants something to punch.
“It’s whoever you are, right now. Listen, what happened to you was terrible. You’re allowed to feel whatever you want about it, and deal with it however you want as long as you’re not hurting yourself or others.”
“What about punching the bad guys?”
“Well, yeah if that’s something you still want to do you can still do that.”
She plops onto the end of the bed. “Good, okay.”
Anton carefully stretches across the room to sit next to her, but far enough away to still give her space. “Is that something you want?”
“I don’t know,” Cass says, letting her head fall into her hands. “Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t want to do anything but punch, but sometimes I’m just. Sometimes I’m so scared and I’m not even sure this is real.”
“Okay, well, then, what can you do about that?”
“What?”
“What can you do to help convince yourself that this is real?”
“Sometimes… I listen to music that I haven’t heard before. My brain’s not good at making that stuff up, so if I haven’t heard it before it has to be real, right?”
“Yeah, that makes sense.” Hesitantly, Anton reaches out and puts a hand on her knee. “Hey, you remember when I taught you about centering yourself and how you have to let yourself just be in the moment and let whatever thoughts you have come to mind?”
“Yeah, I mean, I remember but it still doesn’t really make sense.”
“It’s the same thing for emotions. You have to let yourself feel whatever emotions you have, and then you learn to deal with them. And we’re here to help you with that too, but things are never going to get better if you just shove everything down and feel guilty about it all the time. We all want to help, Cass. You have to let us help.”
When Cass finally looks up at him, her eyes shine with tears threatening to spill over. “Then can I have a hug?” she asks, voice quavering.
“Of course.”
There, amid color and pattern and the chaotic spread of life, with unfinished plates of spaghetti lying on stacks of dirty clothes, Anton holds Cass as she cries. And maybe it’s not how things were, but it’s how things are, and it feels like a step towards a better how things could be.