Chapter Text
Blinking. The harsh sting of salt in wounds and eyes. The vague sound of waves against the shore. Blurry, head-pounding glimpses of a dark blue sea, grainy sand, a looming mountain smoking and glowing red at the dented peak that seemed vaguely familiar to her subconscious.
Everything was blurry. Touch, sound, sight, mind.
But one violent, gut-wrenching cough forcing excess sea water out of Agent Phoenix’s lungs brought everything crashing back like the waves on the shore. Her drenched, scorched, 4’11” body shook with the force, expending what little energy it had left to double over and retch up the unwelcome salty liquid.
God, she should be dead.
But she thought that a lot more than ‘normal’ people did, didn’t she? Brushing death at seemingly every opportunity given to her. But this time felt… different.
She’d almost split her mind in half TKing all three of the shield generators at once and couldn’t recall much detail past that. Mostly the cracking and groaning and screeching of metal and machinery, a horrible searing heat to rival the depths of hell, and… her.
Dr. Roxana Prism.
Her yell, her scream, her plea for Phoenix was branded onto her mind despite not even remembering her having spoken the words.
“We did it! Phoenix, we stopped the wave, we—…”
A lifetime’s-length pause.
“…wait, Reginald, something’s wrong with Phoenix!”
The distant shouting of her handler echoing through her scrambled skull.
“I can see Phoenix! Right below me. I can get there if—…”
Rumbling and crashing. Everything getting hotter and hotter. Her vision getting blurrier and more faded. Reginald’s panicked commands getting more jumbled and faded.
“I can get there! If—… I—… …can just—…”
Blackness.
Heat.
Pain.
Hell.
“—PHOENIX—! NO—!”
She coughed again, searing bile climbing the back of her throat.
Another crash of the waves against the beach.
She hadn’t risen from the pit of death herself this time. Roxana had wrenched her out of it by sheer force of will instead. That made that first time Agent Phoenix had really needed saving.
And somehow, sitting here aching and wet and shaking to hell, she didn’t mind.
Shifting her hand on the only stable thing in her world right now, the slightly jagged rock she’d awoken on, her hand nudged and promptly knocked over a nearby object into the sand.
Her hat.
Battered and burned and bruised, that hat told more of her stories than she ever could. A weak, brown eyebrow raised into her sopping wet, slightly bloody fringe.
Why was it here? Why was she here?
Shifting carefully on the rock with some decided difficulty—gasps of pain and intakes of breath mixing with the sounds of the sea—her hat was in her grasp, the crown now slightly filled with sand.
She tipped the brown fedora by its brim, emptying it of both sand and a foreign object before returning it to her head.
A piece of paper now lay half covered in the sand, of which she shook off and unfolded with faintly shaky hands.
/
‘Hello, Phoenix. I couldn’t risk the Agency finding me on that beach, so I had to leave you there. Listen. What we did back there—what YOU did back there… well, I’ve spent my life trying to make something meaningful; something that would outlast me. I loved my robots more than anything, and I miss them every single moment, but I can’t pretend they could have ever replaced an agent like you. And I’m okay with that now. Protect that TK implant in your head, okay? I’m realising now… you’re the one I made it for.
—Dr. Prism
P.S. Head east along the coast (facing away from the sea) and follow the nearest road to a nearby town. I’m sure you need to recover.’
/
She blinked. Just watched diluted red drip from her forehead onto the page for a moment, thinking.
She… really understood, didn’t she? She had just been trying to make an impact but had just gone about it in the wrong way, and understood that. She had just made a mistake. She was human, after all.
A few more drops littered the paper, though they weren’t sea water or blood. They stung her eyes lightly, and made her sniffle her nose as she wiped the source away with the palm of her hand.
She just sat there for a moment. Quiet.
Then she raised her head, looking in the direction that was supposedly east.
Walking in any form sounded like absolute torture right now; but considering Agent Phoenix hadn’t been replaced by a needless robot, getting to a warmer, safer place sounded like a survival necessity.
It was going to hurt, and it was going to be some form of hell, but she wasn’t going to let the legendary Agent Phoenix burn out.
Not yet.