Chapter Text
Washington DC, November 1979
“Hey, Cindy.” Curt Mega strolled into Cynthia Houston’s office with a cup of coffee and a very, very guilty smile on his face, and Cynthia put her head in her hands. Did she really want to know what he had done? No, but she had a feeling she was going to hear it anyway.
“First of all, Mega, you have absolutely no right to call me Cindy and if you do it again I will shove my foot so far up your ass that you will taste it in the back of your throat.” Cynthia removed her head from her hands to glare at the idiot standing before her. Her look must have shown she meant business because Curt put his hands up.
“Okay, okay, sorry boss,” Curt replied. “But, um, I need to tell you something. Important.”
“Spit it out, Mega,” Cynthia snapped. “I don’t have all day. What’d you fuck up this time ?”
“Well, you know that room. The one you told me never to go in, ever?”
“The room where we keep all the supernatural threats that we as an organization have spent decades neutralizing?”
“Uh-huh,” Curt replied, looking a little bit sheepish, which was an expression Cynthia had never seen on his face before. “Well, you see, I took a wrong turn and I may or may not have… Opened it a little?”
Cynthia shot to her feet and marched around her desk. She grabbed Curt by the lapels of his immaculate jacket and pulled him close to her face. Normally she’d never get close enough to Curt to smell his bad breath, but this was too important.
“Mega. Did. Anything. Get Out?” Cynthia shook him. “Fucking answer me. DID YOU LET ANYTHING OUT OF THAT ROOM?”
“I don’t know, Cynthia,” Curt said, worming his way out of her grip and edging towards the wall. He gave her another one of those smiles that said ‘please don’t kill me.’
“I knew I should have never left fucking Boston,” Cynthia muttered, throwing her hands up. Curt looked wildly confused. “Fucking New Yorkers are too damn stupid to function. I told them that. But did they listen to me? No .”
“I take a lot of offense to that, as a New Yorker-” Curt was cut off by an exasperated huff from Cynthia, who was already clearing off her desk.
“Mega, this is a code red. Until we find out whether or not you’ve killed us all, we need to be on high alert, and tell NO ONE.”
“That won’t be necessary.” A new voice came from the doorway and Cynthia and Curt whirled around. Cynthia let out a groan.
“Fuck, no, not you.” She waved her hand at the voice and continued to clean her desk off. It was Curt’s problem now.
Curt, who was now screaming like a little girl. He was, as usual, going to be of absolutely no use. Why she hadn’t fired him yet, Cynthia had no idea.
“Heya, Cynthia Houston,” the voice continued. “Remembah how you captured me at that Red Sox game and imprisoned me in your little panic room for twenty gahddamn years?”
“Yeah, Wally, I fucking do,” Cynthia replied, glancing up at the creature for the first time. He looked just as she remembered. “Best day of my miserable life.”
“Well, well,” Wally continued cheerfully. “I’m gonna make ya regret it, just you wait and see!”
“Alrighty, bye, Curt,” Cynthia picked up her box of stuff, and strolled out the door, brushing past her agent and the green doll that hovered in midair.
“Wait, wait, Cynthia, you just can’t do that-” Curt protested, not feeling like being left alone with a sentient doll.
“I sure as hell can, Mega.” Cynthia gave him one last cursory glance backward. “I’m moving back to Boston, where I belong, and you can clean up your mess!”
There was more screaming like a small child from Curt, but Cynthia didn’t so much as look back. He could figure it out, and she was heading North.
An 8-hour drive of peace and quiet, minus the shitty drivers, was all Cynthia wanted to get back to Boston. She was lucky she got out, or she would’ve had an aneurysm and died.
The little apartment she found in the North End was small and quaint, two blocks from an excellent pastry shop, with a room just the right size for holding meetings with approximately two to four people, which was all Cynthia could handle at one time anyway, and she could see the Charles River from the window. Perfect, nice and quiet and far away from the dumbass Curt Mega. It seemed like even Wally wouldn’t bother her here.
She thought that, but the little doll appearing in her dream was terrifying. He was just chilling in an armchair--the same armchair she had in the living room.
“Heya, Cynthia,” the doll said with a wide smile. The fact that its mouth was moving gave Cynthia chills. It brought her right back to her first mission as an agent, when she had faced him the first time. “Betchya thought you’d seen the last a me, eh?”
“What the fuck are you doing here? It’s 1am. Give me…..40 years.” She mumbled, “I’ll be dead, then you can fuck with me however much you want.”
“Forty years?” The doll’s smile grew wider and wider. “Sure thing, I can give ya that, darlin. In fact, I can give you… infinite years! Just so you can see the revenge I’ll take on ya.”
“Oh, fuck you.” Cynthia flipped him off, not having it at all. The laughter as the image dissipated was not very settling.
The last thing Wally said before he faded from Cynthia’s mind completely was simple. “The people ya love’ll suffer first. Just for fun.”
Well, that was good. Cynthia really didn’t have any personal connections to worry about.
40 years passed. Cynthia adopted a little boy named Tom off the streets and raised him from there. He had brown curls and eyes that basically broadcasted “trouble”, but he was her son now and he couldn’t change that. He went to school with a girl named Becky, who Cynthia remembered adoring very well.
The problem was, she wasn’t getting any older. Tom surpassed her in height, but she hadn’t even gotten a grey hair yet. Well, not any more than the ones Curt caused her. Tom went through high school, off to college too, and while the other parents at his graduations had plenty of grey hair and aged faces, Cynthia still looked the exact same as the day Wally visited her in her nightmares.
Tom got married to a girl named Jane, his class’ valedictorian, and they had a little boy named Tim. Cynthia remembered the wedding and how every single adult there complimented her young appearance.
Cynthia began to realize that Wally wasn’t fucking around. He had meant what he said. He had made her immortal and the forty-year mark was rapidly approaching.
It wasn’t very good when, exactly forty years to the day Wally had visited, Tom called her from the hospital, nearly in tears over a car crash and a small “Jane’s dead, Mom.”
That wasn’t very good at all.