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mystical-flute · 4 years ago

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Home is Wherever I'm With You (ch. 6)

FFN || AO3 || Ko-Fi

“Last chance to back out, bud,” Neal said, glancing over at Henry as he stood near the door of their hotel room. “You’re sure you’re okay with us moving here?”

Henry nodded, grinning. “Positive, Dad! It’ll be a new adventure, like you and Mom always talked about.”

Emma couldn’t help but grin slightly, even if there was a knot in her stomach that threatened to make her scream that they were going back to Boston and to forget this little town. It would have been an adjustment to not having Audrey and Snoopy around, but they could have made it work - right?

But Emma didn’t say anything, only giving Neal a quick peck on the lips. “Be careful, don’t rush yourself getting everything packed.”

“I’ll be fine. I’ve already emailed a few friends to help me out,” Neal said, squeezing her hand before ruffling Henry’s hair. “Good luck, listen to your mom, and don’t start complaining about your teacher before you’ve given them a chance, alright?”

“Yeah, yeah, I won’t,” Henry said with a roll of his eyes.

“I mean it, moving is a big deal. We don’t want to start off on the wrong foot.”

“Especially in a small town like this,” Emma grumbled, before sighing. “C’mon kid. You’re lucky the superintendent was willing to meet with us on a Sunday.”

She gave Neal another quick kiss before heading out with Henry.

The school complex seemed enormous, although Emma supposed that’s what happened in these small towns - they didn’t have to travel miles from school to school because there weren’t a ton of shops and houses in the way.

She was surprised to see a woman standing at the top step, waiting for them.

“Good morning! You must be Mrs. Cassidy,” she said with a wide smile. “And this must be Henry.”

“Ms. Jackson, right?” Emma said as Henry gave a nervous wave. “Thank you for meeting with us on a Sunday.”

“Please, call me Olivia. And it’s no trouble. It’s not often we get new students enrolled here, so this is really exciting for us!” Olivia opened the door, guiding them inside. “Come right on in and we’ll get you set up. When we’re done with Henry’s schedule and the other paperwork I’ll give you a tour.”

“Sounds great,” Emma hummed, glancing around. It seemed like any other school she’d been in. A little older, even than the Boston schools Henry and Audrey attended, but it was that same sickly-sweet charming that the rest of Storybrooke seemed to have.

Olivia’s office seemed normal though, and Emma felt herself relax slightly as she began rapidly typing on her computer.

“Alright then, Henry. I received your records a few minutes ago from Boston - ”

“That quickly?” Emma interrupted. “Sorry, I just didn’t expect them to be working on a Sunday.”

Olivia shrugged. “When something like this pops up, sometimes the system actually moves like we want it to. Anyway, his records and notes from his teachers indicate he’s a fan of art, is that right?”

Henry nodded. “It’s my favorite class. And I was in a special art camp this summer.”

“That’s wonderful, Henry! I think I have an opening in the perfect class.” A few more clicks of her keyboard, the sound of a printer, and she was sliding a schedule across the desk. “You’ll be in Miss Blanchard’s class. She does lots of art projects during her lessons to help students learn in a unique way.”

“We met her yesterday!” Henry chirped. “She seemed really nice.”

Emma couldn’t help but let out a small sigh of relief, knowing Henry would be with Mary-Margaret. “She did. She was volunteering at the hospital when we brought Audrey in.”

“Oh! Yes, that’s right, I heard about Audrey’s return. It’s a miracle, really. She’s been gone as long as I can remember…” Olivia trailed off, seemingly lost in thought, before the bright smile returned as she reached into her desk. “So here’s some information on the schools, and a map for Henry in case he needs it. You can find the pieces for the uniform pretty much anywhere, so don’t worry about that. Although, I will need his size for the sweater.”

Henry soured a little at the mention of a uniform.

“He’s a medium,” Emma said.

Olivia nodded, rising to her feet. “I’ll grab one out of storage while we’re on our tour, if you’re ready?”

“Let’s do it.”

“The main menu for lunch rotates every day, and we’re lucky to have a local farmer that donates much of the produce we use,” Olivia explained as they wandered past a display of science fair projects. “Kids are welcome to eat inside or outside, weather permitting, and we have monitors in both areas.”

“That’s cool! We weren’t allowed to eat lunch outside in Boston,” Henry explained.

Emma couldn’t help but raise a brow. “How’d you swing the farmer donating produce to the school?”

“Well, it helps that he’s married to be one of our teachers,” Olivia explained with a laugh. “Daphne teaches high school, so maybe in a few years Henry will be in her class. Or maybe Audrey. I’m going to be taking her schedule and information to the hospital later.”

“I can take it to her, if you want. Henry and I are going to the hospital later this afternoon,” Emma offered.

Olivia hummed, tapping her finger against her cheek. “Well, since you are technically listed as Audrey’s parent on her school records, that will be fine. I’ll get her schedule and information settled when we head back to the office. Do you happen to know what size she wears?”

“Sounds like a plan. And she’s a medium as well.”

“I’ll get her sweater when we grab Henry’s. Miss Blanchard’s room is - oh, it looks like she’s here. That’s strange,” Olivia frowned as they approached the open classroom door. “Mary-Margaret?”

Something thudded to the ground, and there was a startled yelp.

“Superintendent Jackson! I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize you were here too.”

“I’m showing Mrs. Cassidy and her son around… what brings you here?”

“I’ve been looking for my credit card. I tore my apartment apart but it’s nowhere to be found. So I thought I would check here.”

Olivia blinked. “Oh, I see. I’ll run the security tapes and see if anything’s come up. Nothing has been turned in at the Lost and Found, but that doesn’t mean no one has it.”

“Thank you, Olivia. I appreciate it.”

Emma kept a hand on Henry’s shoulder as they lingered in the doorway. “Hi, Mary-Margaret, I don’t know if you remember - ”

Mary-Margaret smiled slightly. “You’re the family from the hospital. What brings you to the schools though?”

“You’re my new teacher,” Henry announced, glancing around the classroom. “Which one is going to be my desk?”

“I’m - sorry?” Mary-Margaret asked, stepping back as Henry pushed further into the room. “His new teacher?”

Emma sighed, rubbing the back of her neck. “Sorry about that. We’re uh, moving to Storybrooke. He was put in your class.”

“Oh! Well come on in then. I’ll get you caught up on what we’re learning about. Henry, this will be your desk right here,” she said, guiding Henry to a desk near the window. “I’ve been teaching them how to build birdhouses. It helps with building empathy and their math skills.”

“Combining art and math. I wish I had a teacher like you when I was growing up. Maybe I would actually like math,” Emma joked.

Mary-Margaret gave her a weak smile. “Math isn’t my favorite subject either, but just know if Henry finds he’s struggling, the high school has a great tutoring program.”

“You guys sure thought of everything,” Emma remarked.

“Well, we figured it’d be a good way for the older kids to earn a little credit, and help the younger students out. It’s also part of the after-school program.”

Emma smiled. “That all sounds great. It’s really making me feel better that Henry’s still going to get a good education, even if we’re not in Boston.”

“Storybrooke is… like a fairytale, Mrs. Cassidy. We may be small, but we prioritize education,” Olivia explained. “Shall we continue the tour?”

Why did her phrasing sound so odd to Emma? Still, she managed a smile. “Sounds good. C’mon kid.”

They saw the playground, the computer lab, and the library before Olivia led them to a small shop area. “And here we are. Two medium Storybrooke sweaters.” They were presented as if they were made of gold, which had Emma biting back a laugh as she took them. “We’ll just get Audrey’s paperwork all settled and that’ll be it. Unless you had any further questions?”

Emma wracked her brain. “No, I think that’s it. But I’ll contact you if I think of anything.”

“Fantastic,” Olivia said, returning to the office and setting up the same paperwork and schedule for Audrey. “It was very nice to meet you, Mrs. Cassidy. We’ll see you tomorrow at 8:30 sharp then, Henry?”

“Yes Miss Jackson.”

Emma guided him out of the office, hearing Olivia answer a phone call as they disappeared down the hall.

“Lacey, what’s up? Yeah I can…”

---

Madalena was going to kill Rumplestiltskin if she ever got out of here.

No. When she got out of here. Because she would get out of here, of course. She was the Dark Queen Madalena after all! She could get out of here on her own… even if she had failed so far and she had no idea exactly how long she had even been trapped in this godforsaken book.

Her Handsome Hero. What a dumb name for a book. What a ridiculous idea for a plot.

If she had to watch Gideon the Great cut a spider in half one more time, she was going to scream.

And she had screamed multiple times already.

The worst part of living in a book was there being no plot for Madalena. The author hadn’t put a Queen Madalena in it, so she was relegated to being in the back of crowd scenes, completely ignored and unable to do anything to end the sieges that plagued this village.

Not that she wanted to be a hero, of course. No, Madalena just wanted to save her own skin and had been caught in the crossfire one too many times.

“Fear not, Duchess Prudence, I, Gideon, shall slay the evil Sorceress!” the hero of the story says, dramatically flourishing his hands.

Madelena rolled her eyes and made a face. Just once, she’d like to be able to turn Gideon or one of the other townspeople into a toad, or a dog, or something. Anything to make this more bearable.

“Madalena?” a voice suddenly said from above. That wasn’t right, and suddenly everything froze. “I don’t recall you being in the story before.”

“Hello?!”

Why could she move? Who was that voice? It was new, didn’t come from any of the stale creatures around her… had someone from the real world finally picked up the book?

“Madalena, I free you from these pages.”

She didn’t have time to think before she felt herself being yanked up, landing hard on a carpeted floor.

“Oh gods, are you okay?” came the same voice, only this time, it was much closer.

Madelena felt the world tilting for a moment, before everything stilled and she lifted her head from the carpet, heaving in deep breaths and staring down at her hands. Free. She was… free? She pushed herself up into a sitting position, feeling the world tilt slightly again as she glanced around the room.

She knew this place. Rumplestiltskin’s library.

She was free.

“Erm… hello?” the voice asked again, and Madelena jumped, glancing over. “Sorry, are you okay?”

That was a loaded question. Was she okay?

“I…” her voice was raspy. “How long… was I in there?”

“I don’t know… you’re Madalena of Keburg, aren’t you?”

Her head shot over to the young woman who had spoken, eyes wide. They still spoke of her? Good. Then it must not have been all that long.

“I am. They deposed me two years ago.”

The woman’s eyes widened, and Madalena’s heart sank. “No… not two years ago. They just celebrated their Decade of Peace.”

Decade? Decade?!

“I’ve been in that book for eight years…” Madalena whispered. “Oh my gods…”

“I’m glad I got you out of there. What happened?”

Madalena rose to her feet, brushing invisible lint off her gown. “That bastard Rumplestiltskin locked me in there. All I wanted to do was learn some dark magic to take control of a kingdom, that’s not too much to ask for, right?”

“Er… I’m probably not the best person to ask about that, but you’re not the only evil queen in the realm.”

“Oh, no, please don’t call me evil, just dark,” Madalena said, raising a brow. “Who are you, anyway?”

“My name is Belle. I’m Rumplestiltskin’s housekeeper.”

“May the gods have mercy on you then,” Madalena said, rubbing her head. “Thank you for freeing me, Belle.”

“You should hurry and get out of here. Rumplestiltskin will be home any moment.”

Madalena nodded, raising her hand to disappear, before she paused. “I don’t know where to go. I can’t go back to Keburg, I can’t stay in this kingdom…”

“I think you’ll find allies here if you stay off Rumplestiltskin’s radar. He’s not exactly the most popular man here. Now hurry, go!”

“Thank you again for freeing me, Belle. I’ll make sure to leave you in peace when I come to power,” Madalena said, vanishing in a cloud of black smoke. Where she would go, she didn’t know, but if what Belle said was true, perhaps there was a chance for her to find allies.

Maybe she could take down Rumplestiltskin and take his place.

That might be nice.

She landed in the middle of the woods, on some sort of carriage path. No matter which direction she looked, she couldn’t see Rumplestiltskin’s castle. Hopefully, that meant she was far enough away. Now all she had to do was find some food or shelter. Or, find some people to give her food and shelter. She was still a queen after all… even if she had fallen.

A small village wasn’t too far from where she’d landed, and Madalena sighed, pushing herself into the nearest pub.

“The next round is on me!” a man shouted, lifting an empty stein into the air. “Grimsund shall prosper once again!”

There was a roar from the crowd, and Madalena gasped as a mug was shoved into her hand from the nearest barmaid.

“Oh, I - ”

“No need to worry, Prince James paid for this round,” she said with a grin. “He’s just come back from a giant hunt.”

A prince, huh?

Madalena could work with that.

“Thank you, then,” she said to the barmaid. “Is that him over there?”

“Aye, that’s him, but if you think you’ve got a chance with him, you may want to temper your expectations. The rumor is he’s got a different woman in his bed every month,” she explained. “Truth is, I don’t know if he’ll ever commit to one woman, even if the king forces an arrangement.”

Ah, so it was that sort of deal, hm? Fine. Madalena could take out the competition.

“I see, thank you kindly,” she said, sipping at her beer before sauntering over to the prince and dropping into the seat across from him.

He raised a brow. “And who might you be.”

“I might be Queen Madalena of Keburg, I might be just a figment of your imagination,” she smirked.

James furrowed his brow. “Weren’t you deposed?”

“Details, details.”

James looked her up and down. “Well, what can I do for fellow royalty?”

“That’s just it. I’m not exactly royal anymore, and I just spent eight years trapped in a book thanks to the Dark One. As much as I hate to do this, I need help.”

Setting his much on the table, James leaned forward. “And what can you do for me?”

Madalena waved her hand, magic gathering in it. “What do you need?”

---

“Here you go, Emma, grilled cheese and onion rings. Hey - you alright?” Ruby asked, setting the plate down in front of her.

Emma rubbed her eyes and looked up from the newspaper in front of her. “Yeah, thanks. I’m just trying to find a place for us to live, and it’s not like there are a lot of options here.”

Ruby rolled her eyes. “You’re telling me. If there were more affordable houses here, I’d have moved out of the bed and breakfast a long time ago. That, and if Granny would ever let me meet with Victoria…”

The last part was said in a mumble, which had Emma raising a brow. “What do you mean?”

Ruby looked around, before digging through her apron and pulling out a card. “Victoria Belfrey-Polastel. She’s a realtor in town. Wanted to buy Granny’s not too long ago and make it more modern, instead of a dumpy diner and bed and breakfast. Granny hit the roof and refused to ever serve her, but she gave me a card if I ever needed it, but you and your family need it more than I do, so here. Just… don’t tell Granny I told you about her.”

Emma took the card, sliding it into her wallet. “Thanks Ruby. I owe you one.”

“So long as you don’t tell Granny, consider us even.”

And that was how Emma found herself sitting in a way too spotless, modern office that afternoon after making sure Henry didn't need anything.

Seriously, was this Victoria thinking she was selling to celebrities and the too-wealthy in New York City? What was with this place?

“Mrs. Cassidy, welcome.”

Emma briefly considered reminding the woman that her name was Emma, but decided against it. “Thank you for meeting with me. I’m sorry it’s on such short notice.”

“Oh no need to apologize for something like that! This is my job after all, and it’s not often I get a client with a family that needs to be moved. Everyone here just seems to be so settled that they never go anywhere. But what sort of house were you and your family looking for?” Victoria said, flourishing a pen and smoothing out the notepad in front of her.

Emma paused. What were they looking for in a house? They hadn’t had many options when it came to apartments, aside from the location and the spectacular front door that Emma was going to miss.

“Er… at least three bedrooms, although four would be ideal, I guess, so Neal and I can have an office,” she started, running her tongue along her teeth in an attempt to think. “Maybe a nice yard. We’re from Boston and our son has never had a yard to play in.”

Victoria was nodding, scribbling away. “I have two daughters. I get it.”

“Maybe something updated? I don’t know if we can handle moving all of our stuff and finding out the house needs new floors or a new bathroom.”

“Ah!” Victoria suddenly said, tossing the pen onto her desk and rapidly typing on her computer. “I have the perfect house for you, Mrs. Cassidy. 715 Tenth Street. Four bedrooms, two bathrooms, nicely updated and a large backyard. It’s an updated Victorian, and one of the best Storybrooke can offer. We can drive over now, if you want to see it?”

Emma nodded, her throat dry.

But Victoria was right, 715 Tenth Street was what she would call perfect for that family, and she signed on the dotted line in the spotless kitchen - her kitchen, and blinked in shock as Victoria passed her the keys.

“Welcome home, Mrs. Cassidy.”

#ouat #once upon a time #swanfire #home is wherever i'm with you

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detroitbydark · 5 years ago

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Luck Be A Lady (H.O.)

Title: Luck Be A Lady

Summary: A complex history comes to a head for a mob doctor and the bosses number one enforcer.

Pairing: Mob!Haz/OC

Warnings: Aftermath of gun violence, mentions of injury/blood, simple medical procedures, cursing, Smut (very soft)

Word Count: 10,500

A/N: So this started as a plot bunny and it kind of got out of control. I thought about separating it into a few parts but I just couldn't find good points to do it. I hope ya'll enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I want to thank @aossi for her constant support and help when I got stuck and @tomsrebeleyebrow for creating a great mood board as well as being an excellent cheerleader.

“I need Doc, Tom…. Fuck” Harrison grits out the words as Harry presses down hard on the wound in his side, blood is already soaking through his shirt, staining the blue oxford crimson. The coppery tang of blood permeates the towncar. Tom looks back in the mirror and sees the pallor his top enforcers face has taken on, the way the tendons in his neck stick out starkly as he bites back the pain. He makes the call.

Doc never meant to get involved with the Holland family but she had student loans to pay off and a daughter to take care of. And no one said ‘no’ to Dom Holland. She tried to keep work and her personal life separate but when she fell in love with Michael, one of Dom’s top men, she knew it would be impossible. The world wind romance and marriage that ensued cemented the fact the little Rosie was going to run in the same circles as the Holland Boys and the lone Osterfield son.

It was with apprehension that Doc found herself bringing her only child to The Holland compound to be introduced to the rest of the family. The boys ranged from 5 to 10 and were a rambunctious bunch, Doc had stitched each of them up on more than one occasion. She’d just recently set little Harry’s broken arm. They were good boys though and looked after one another. It was her hope they’d look after her daughter as if she were one of their own too.

“Rosie” she watches as her little girl, barely eight, stares at the boys rough housing in the garden. Trepidation is clear on her cherubic features. Her little round face was beginning to lean out and she was rapidly looking less like a little girl and more like a little lady. It all felt like it was moving to fast for her mother but children didn’t keep and she had to start preparing her for the path she’d set them on sooner as opposed to later. Doe eyed Rosie watches with caution as the other kids wrestled and rolled around in the grass.

“Why don’t you go play with the other children.”

“Those aren’t children. Those are boys.”

Michael lays a hand on Doc’s arm as he chuckles at his new daughter. She already had him wrapped around her little finger. His adoration for the precocious little girl was evident to anyone who saw them.

“Come on short stack.” He encourages, ruffling her dark braids, “Go play while the grown-ups talk.”

Doc frowns as she watches her new husband slip their daughter a candy bar. Rosie smiles brightly and takes off out the door.

“Did you just bribe her with chocolate”

“Just greasing the wheels a bit. Never hurt anyone, Doc”

“Who are you?” A boy a head shorter than her asks as she skips up. His curly hair is an unruly mop on top of his head and his face is speckled with a thin dappling of freckles.

“That’s Doc’s Kid” another asserts as Rosie turns from one boy to the other. She stands straight and proud, like Michael taught her. The one talking vaguely resembles the first.

“My name is Rosie.” She says, popping a hand on her hip and glaring at the boy in front of her. “My Mum says it isn’t nice to interrupt a conversation.” The boy doesn’t acknowledge she’s said anything.

“I’m Tom.” He says after a minute of assessment, “those are my brothers” he says pointing to the curly boy and another who looks loads like him. “Harry and Sam, the little ones Paddy”

Looking around she spots a taller boy, blonde smiling behind Tom, “what about that one.”

“I’m Harrison.” He introduces stepping forward. Tom grunts crossing his arms over his chest.

“Yeah, well, we were getting ready to play some ball and we’ve already got teams made up so…”

Rosie feels her shoulders droop but she keeps her chin up. She knew what he was getting at. Turning back toward the house she sighs when she sees her Mum and Michael watching her from where they stood with the other adults. A hand on her shoulder startles her.

“You can be on my team if ya want.” Harrison has his head dipped down to look in her eyes, gives her a reassuring smile. Rosie tries not to look too eager as she nods.

“I’ve got some chocolate. I could share with you if you want.” He cocks his head, his smile gets wider.

“My lucky day, I guess”

----

“Lil Doc.”

Rosie’s eyes are barely open but the sound of Tom Holland’s commanding voice has her already moving from bed. She yelps as she stubs her toe on the nightstand. It throbs angrily.

“Fuck...Holland? It’s 2am”

“Yeah, and you’ve got work to do. One of our boys got popped. I’m sending Sam over to get you. He’ll be at your place in five. Be ready.”

Fuck. The line goes dead. She wanted to curse again. It’d been a while since she’d messed with gunshot wounds, at the very least since the first rotation through the emergency room. When Dom and Tom had come to her with the same offer they’d given her mother when she’d first fallen in with the Holland family she hadn’t hesitated to jump at the opportunity. Tuition covered in return for intermittent providing of services? Yeah, there were worse things in the world.

Growing up under the umbrella of a well connected mob family left one accustomed to a certain lifestyle. Rosie wasn’t above admitting she liked some of the finer things life had to offer. She hadn’t wanted to be a starving med student, certainly hadn’t wanted to be a doctor with $200,000 of student loans hanging over her head. Working for the Hollands gave her a certain amount of freedom. She provided care at a local women's clinic four days a week. It was rewarding and she could focus on her patients and not the paltry salary they’d offered.

Of course, freedom only went so far. Like tonight. She was at the beck and call of the Holland’s. Twenty four hours a day. Seven days a week. Holidays. Weekends. She was just a phone call away.

She waits for Sam just outside her front door, ripped blue jeans, the first she’d found on her floor, and grey hoodie pulled over her head. The moon is bright in the sky and, though it was summer, a cool breeze blows down the lane. Fireflies flicker in the garden across the street.

-----

“I guess Rosie can be on my team.” Harrison shrugs and grunts as the girl in question punches him in the shoulder, “Not fair.” He admonished “I wasn’t paying attention.”

“That’ll teach you. I’m just as good as any of those other boys.” Rosie stares him down, her arms crossed over her chest. Harrison laughs at her sour expression. Her nose wrinkles in distaste. The other two teams of boys laugh from their positions on the patio. Sam and Paddy stand ready with their jar and Tom and Harry are ready with their own.

“Enough.” Tom snaps, “You know the rules. Two points for each bee you catch-”

“Five points for the red arsed ones!” Harry adds.

Rosie rolls her eyes “This is the stupidest game I’ve ever heard of”

“No one said you had to play Lil Doc. You can go sit with your Mummy for all I care.” Tom throws out challenging.

Harrison glances from one to the other and sees the stubborn set of both of their jaws. Rosie fights him when he throws his arm over her shoulders. He thought she’d been stubborn when he’d met her, but the years had only made her more hard headed. At 11, she was formidable, not backing down from 13 year old Tom for any reason. Bosses son or not, if Rosie thought Tom was trying to get one over on her she was going to call him out. Guaranteed. It was Harrison’s job to keep them from coming to blows.

“Ah, get off it Holland. You're just afraid of my lucky charm here.”

“She isn’t lucky. She’s just a girl.” Harrison holds Rosie back before she can lunge at the oldest Holland heir.

“She’s my girl Holland and you better watch out.”

-----

Sam leans across the seat with a grim smile. He pushes the door open and Rosie quickly climbs in, slinging her pack on the floor. She was sure she’d have everything she needed when she got to the house but she believed in back up and contingencies.

“Do you know what I’m walking into?”

Sam is quiet, his eyes plastered on the road in front of him. “Sam?”

They take a corner faster than normal and Rosie braces herself against the door.

“Tom and the boys went out to have… a talk with some under bosses. Apparently there was less talking than previously anticipated.” His smile is grim, his tone dry.

“What am I looking at?”

“A couple grazes, probably some stitches” he pauses for a second. Sam had a shit poker face. He’d always been better at the behind the scenes workings of the family, never had the stomach for the some of the more...unpleasant business, but he had a brain for numbers and found ways to work magic with some creative accounting. “Someone took one to the gut.”

Sam falls quiet again.

Rosie pulls in a deep breath of air before attempting to relax back into the plush leather. She can feel her palms begin to sweat, can her her heartbeat thrumming in her ears. Closing her eyes and pulling her legs up onto the seat, she tries to center herself.

The ER rotations had been enjoyable. It was always something new, something different. It had forced her to stay sharp. Kept her on her toes. Rosie would be lying to say she hadn’t enjoyed a certain amount of adrenaline that went along with it, the ability to forget about everything that wasn’t the immediate task at hand. All of that was a lot easier to cop to when it wasn’t people you cared about at stake. While she’d only been back a few months after drowning herself in years of schooling, the boys would always be hers and she took her responsibility seriously.

In school she’d never gone in by herself. There had always been a cadre of other doctors, residents, experienced nurses there to back you up if you needed it. She wasn’t going to have that and that thought scared her.

-----

“Come on Ro” Harrison hisses lowly, “move it or lose it.”

Rosie’s converse slap the ground as she jogs to keep up with Harrison’s much longer strides. Water splashes as she missteps and her feet land in a puddle, soaking her shoes and socks in an instant.

“A little discretion, Princess” her companion jibes. The dirty look she sends him shuts him up.

“I don’t even know what I’m doing out here with you.” She growls as she catches up, pressing in close behind his back as the blend into the shadows. She can feel the vibrations of his quiet laugh.

“I needed a spotter and you’re looking for a rush. Getting bored in your ivory tower, Darling?”

“Fuck off, Haz. You could have called Tom.”

Harrison glances over his shoulder, boyish smile in a black hoodie. He winks at her.

“Toms not good luck.”

She’d known it was a bad idea when Harrison had called and said he needed her help with a project. There were loads of questions she should have asked. Why me?

What’s the project?

Am I going to be arrested?

If Doc knew how many times the “sweet Holland boys” had nearly gotten her tied up with the law or jumped by whomever they’d managed to piss off that week she was sure she’d never be allowed to leave the house ever again.

She was partly to blame. She knew that. She needed what the boys offered, danger and excitement. It’s why she could never say no, even if she did make them work for it. She was happy to accept Tom’s bribes. She was easily swayed by Harrison’s bright blue eyes and smile that always promised trouble.

She skids to a stop behind him when he suddenly slows. Her eyes flash to his and she can see the way he’s staring at the BMW they’ve stopped in front of. He licks his lips and she squirms.

“Alright, ready for this?”

She can feel her eyes go wide with shock as he starts rummaging in his pocket, “Ready for what?”

“To steal the car?” He rolls his shoulders, shakes his hands out before flashing her a cocky smirk.

“Harrison, if you get me arrested Michael is going to kill you.”

“So you’re going to help me?” There’s underlying nerves in his voice. He tried so hard to be the big bad in training but she could still see that nervous fifteen year old boy peeking through.

“Yeah, I’ve got you.”

The boost went fine. It was what happened when her step father had found them later that wasn’t so fine.

Rosie watches in stunned silence, tears stinging at her cheeks as Michael lands another blow across Harrison’s face. Their joyride has been cut short but the arrival of her step father. Harrison tries to remember the way her hand felt in his as he drove. The confused smile she’d given him when he reached across the console and twined his fingers with hers. Best thirty minutes of his life.

“You think you’re a big man? You think your ready for this life” Michael snarls in the teens face. “Here are the fucking consequences for dragging my daughter into your fucking games.”

“Michael! Daddy, stop!”

Harrison can hear Rosie’s shrill pleas. He’s pretty sure his nose is broken, knows his lip is split. there’s blood in his mouth too and he’s not sure anymore what came first. This hadn’t been part of the plan.

Michael spins on his daughter, “you’re not innocent in this. You’re gonna break your mother’s heart when she finds out.”

“She didn’t know…” Harrison manages to get out, spitting blood on the ground at his feet. Michael Doherty was a big man and Harrison has to fight the urge to cringe back when he turns back to him. He takes the punch to his gut the best he can, fighting back tears of his own as he tries desperately to suck in a breath of air.

“And why is that son?” He asks darkly before answering his own question. “Because she fucking trusts you. That’s why. She doesn’t ask you the right questions and your gonna get her killed dragging her into this shite. Does she even know whose car that was?”

Harrison’s eyes fall to his feet as he gasps for breath. He hadn’t thought about that. There were loads of things he hadn’t thought of. He’d just wanted to show off a little. Impress the girl he-

“Exactly, and when the Russians rolled up and caught you? Do you know what they would have done to her...fuck! Rosie get in the car.” He growls quietly, not turning back to his daughter. Harrison can make out her face over her father's shoulder. She shakes her head from side to side.

“But…”

“No ‘buts’, get your arse in the car.”

Harrison watches her red-rimmed eyes fall as she climbs in the passenger seat of the Doc’s Mercedes. She doesn’t look away from him. Michael comes close, fists his hands in the youths jacket. Harrison can feel his hot breath by his ear. Rosie’s hand presses on the glass as he sets his jaw, takes the punishment he’s earned.

“You know what the Russians would have done to her right in front of you?”

Harrison chokes back a wrecked sound “yes, sir.”

“They’d have made you watch. I can’t… fuck...You think of that, son. She’s not for you. Not now. Maybe never.”

-----

It seems that every light in the Manor is on as Sam comes to the stop outside the front door. Dom Holland is standing, waiting, with light spilling out around him. It’s strange to see him in night clothes, flannel pajamas and house slippers, instead of a three piece suit. Rosie offers a tired smile as he holds out his hand for her. He’d always be “Uncle Dom” to her but every now and then she’d see the boss underneath the jovial facade.while he was less present these days, passing off day to day handling of the families holdings to Tom, he was nowhere near a toothless tiger.

His brow is set in a hard line as she gives him a firm shake.

“Doc, thanks for coming out”

Neither of them acknowledge that she didn’t have a choice in the matter. “seems the boys got in a dust up tonight.”

“So it seems”

Rosie follows the family Patriarch through the expansive foyer and deeper into the house. He wastes no time. There’s a briskness to his movements, not panicked but certainly hurried.

“Harry and Tom are gonna need some bandaging, maybe a stitch or two but you need to attend to Harrison first. Got him in the infirmary already.”

Rosie’s steps falter.

“He got shot.” She states feeling a fresh wave of anxiety wash over her.

“A few times, yeah.”

Dom had the forethought years ago, before Rosie’s Mother’s time, to have one room in the family home converted to a makeshift treatment room. It was impressive and, though it was small, it had everything a person could need to doctor a mobster or two. Or in this case just one.

Harry is the first to look up and greet her from his perch on the small rolling stool. His mouth is a grim line, his thin lips pressed so tightly together they nearly disappear. Rosie’s eyes don’t linger as she notes Tom on the other side of the exam table, his eye is swelling, already turning black. A laceration over his eye looks freshly cleansed with steri strips holding it together. Neither Holland is her concern now. It’s Harrison, skin so washed out and pale that he nearly disappears into the sterile white of the room, that has her nerves tingling. His eyes are shut and he makes no acknowledgement that anyone has come in.

“Out Tom. Not enough room for all of us.” She says softly already moving toward the small sink to scrub her hands “get some ice on your eye.”

Tom nods only hesitating to rest a hand on her shoulder for a split second. “You sure?”

“I’ve got him” she says but she’s not sure if it’s to him or to prop up herself.

“Harry? How are you doing?” She glances over her shoulder at the younger Holland.

“I’ve… been better.” Harry’s retort is clipped, his voice strained.

“Mind telling me what happened?”

“I’m right here, Princess. I can report all the gorey details” Harrison’s eyes flutter weakly for the first time since she’s entered the room. His voice sounds like shit, like he’d just gotten done gargling glass shards but his eyes find hers. Despite their glassy edge they hold all the warmth she grown to know over the years.

Rosie dries her hands quickly before digging in a nearby cabinet. When she turns back her arms laden with supplies, IV kit, tubing, and bags of fluids.

“I expect you can” she says with a huff, “Right now, I need you to shut up while I’m pulling bullets out of you” Her eyes don’t leave Harrison, watching his shallow breathing, silently counting each draw of air he takes. His eyes fall away from hers. “Now, Harry, what happened.” She asks shooing him to the side and drawing a rolling tray within reach.

Harry steps back, giving her room to work. Rosie’s eyes fall to the slowly spreading stain on his left forearm. It’s hardly noticeable through the black shirt he’s wearing but she knows she’s going to spend some quality time with him and a suture kit later.

“We went down to the club. Tom arranged a meet with Piotr. He brought some of his boys.”

Moving as he speaks Rosie uses shears to cut Harrison’s shirt open before getting a line of fluids going in his arm. He barely flinches as the catheter slips into his skin. It makes her frown, tough guy could take a punch but he hated needles on the best of days.

Leaning over Harrison to adjust the fluids Rosie notes a pile of blood-soaked gauze pads already staining the tiles. The worry she’s feeling matches what she see in Harry’s eyes when they meet.

Harry goes on.

“A new sharking operation popped up the last quarter. We were supposed to be coming to some terms, figuring out how to get the little cunt running it to fuck off. One second it was expensive vodka, toasting to new opportunities the next… all hell broke loose.”

“it was a fucking set up, is what it was.” Harrison’s voice is a mumble but the disgust in it is evident.

Rosie looks down at him. He looks up sullenly, a twinge of pain shooting across his face when she readjusts the pressure on his wound. A black mask is forming at the corners of his eyes, a knot in the bridge of his nose is prominent.

“Your nose is broken” Not a question, but a statement.

“Thanks for noticing.” He moves gingerly, adjusting his body on the propped table.

Rosie presses harder on his side and Harrison hisses “Hold still you div” she mutters darkly. Harrison swats weakly at her hands. She brushes it off easily.

Harry moves to the sink, begins to unbutton his sleeve and peel back the fabric. Rosie shakes her head.

“Careful” she warns “rinse it good, use the antiseptic wash. Wrap in some clean gauze.” she can feel Harrison’s eyes on her but she ignores the pull to look at him. “I’ll have a go at you after I'm done with this mess.”

“I’m right here” Harrison grunts. Rosie blows out a frustrated puff of air.

“Yes, a fact I’m very well aware of. Your bloods on my new trainers.”

“I’ll get you a new pair.” Rosie cocks a brow, “You’ll shut your mouth is what you’ll do.”

Harry chuckles and Rosie's glare snaps to him “Got something to say? No?” her fatigue and irritation bleed together “Good, maybe you can tell me how the div got himself shot?”

“With a gun, Princess.” Harrison’s weak attempt at a smile looks pained. It softens something in her, takes the edge of her ire unexplainably.

“Shut up Harrison” she says tiredly.

“I heard three shots” Harry explains, shoving his arm under a steady stream of water as he speaks. Rosie watches the stream run red as it falls to the drain. “It was close quarters. I didn’t even know what was going on until I saw him stepping in front of Tom. Maybe two took? One in the shoulder and that one.” Rosie’s moves a hand to push back the remnants of Harrison’s shirt. She curses under her breath. She hadn’t even noticed the one to his right shoulder.

“It went in and out.” Harry notes. “Two holes”

Two holes were better than one. It meant the bullet had gone in than out and she wouldn't need to go fishing for it. Unlike his side.

“Fuck it all Haz” she murmurs, rubbing a spot on her forehead.

“Don’t go getting emotional on me now Doc.” His words slur together gently, eyelids getting heavy again. Her heartbeats hard in her chest.

“Nuh uh… keep those eyes open.” She empties a long pair of tweezers onto her table “I need you to tell me when it hurts.” Harrison groans. “News flash, everything fucking hurts.”

Rosie gives him a hard look, peeling off her gloves she cups his cheek gently. New tactic. She can feel Harry’s eyes on them. Harrison’s head rolls into her hand.

“Come on tough guy” she pitches her voice low as her thumb strokes his cheek, “Need you to do this for me. I’ll get you the good drugs. Just cooperate, yeah?” Harrison’s eyes rolls to her. He moves as if he’s drunk, the blood loss was not treating him well and Rosie really wanted to get him closed up before he lost much more. She drags her hand away, pulling on a new pair of gloves. Harrison winces when he hears the latex snap against her skin. “One condition” Rosie watches his eyes focus in on her movements, how he waits until she’s fully focused on him and not the task at hand. “Kiss me”

“Harrison…” she warns

“Kiss me or I’ll die.”

Harry chokes out a laugh and Rosie glares up at him from her seat.

“Don’t start with me. You’re not going to die.” she huffs

“....not if you kiss me, I won’t. Promise”

-----

Tom gives Harrison’s shoulders a squeeze, “You’ve got this, lad. No worries, yeah?”

The blonde shrugs him off, rolls his shoulders experimentally, loosening the tension building between them. He’d been training for this match for ages. He bounces on the balls of his feet, trying to calm the nerves surging through him. He had this, like Tom said.

So why was his stomach in such knots? He vaguely hears a knock on the locker room door but instead chooses to work through some combinations, warming his muscles and ignoring the tension building within him.

He hisses his breath out through a combo. Jab. Jab. Uppercut.

“Looking good tough guy.”

The grin that cuts across his face as he turns to find Rosie standing in his locker room door is radiant. He didn’t know if she’d come when he’d told her about it. Doc and Michael had sent the sixteen year old off to some fancy all girls school earlier in the year after one too many dust-ups that he and Tom may or may not have dragged her into. She hadn’t been around like any of the boys were used to. He’d missed her fiercely.

“You made it!”

The other boys laugh as he takes two quick steps to the door and scoops her up, spins her in a big circle. He can feel her giggling and he doesn’t remember a time he’s ever been so chuffed to see someone. Her arms go around his neck as he sets her back down, they both stumble a little and laugh some more. Her soft hazel eyes look up at him, always an open book for him to read.

“I wouldn’t have missed this for the world.” The admission is soft, just for him.

“She skipped school” Sam interjects loudly and Rosie turns, flashing him an impressive scowl.

“Hush you…”

“Your parents are going to kill you” Harry laughs.

“More worried about what they’re going to do to us when they find out the reason, the Princess here dipped out” Tom flashes a shark like smile to Harrison. Yeah, Michael wasn’t going to be pleased but he’d taken his licks from the old man once before for. He’d do it again if he had to.

Rosie rolls her eyes, arching a brow in Tom’s direction. Her shoulder presses into Harrison’s chest, his arm resting gently at her waist. It feels...really nice.

“You leave my parents to me.”

Tom laughs, as his eyes move from Rosie to Harrison and back. Harrison gives him a questioning look.

“Something funny, Thomas?” Rosie's hand goes to her hip as she pulls away from Harrison. It pops out to the side and he can’t help but remember the first time he’d met her as a little girl in the Holland’s garden.

Harrison watches the quirk of her lips as she shoots Tom a look. His heart does an unfamiliar flop.

Laughing through a small cough, Tom says nothing, shakes his head.

“You just here to distract our fighter or what?” Harry teases. Rosie puffs out a laugh.

“M’not a distraction. Just wanted to wish the tough-guy good luck.”

He may be mistaken but Harrison swears he sees her cheeks going pink. It’s cute. She’s cute. He’s thought it before of course, he appreciated nice things but something about now… maybe it was the distance, not seeing her for months on end with only the occasional call, but it’s like his eyes have finally been opened to the fact that she wasn’t just a pesky little girl anymore, not just one of his best friends.

“So I suppose you wouldn’t be opposed to giving a lad a good luck kiss?”

The words have slipped from his mouth before he even has time to really think them over. Rosie’s eyes snap to him as the other boys laugh.

“Aww..Haz…” Harry chortles, “what about I lay one on you.”

Harrison’s eyes don’t leave Rosie, “wouldn't work mate, you’re not my good luck charm.”

He can hear the “oof” as Tom cuffs his brother, hears him whisper something about ‘love birds’ and ‘privacy’ as he drags Harry out, Sam following obediently behind him. The door closes softly and he’s still staring at her, watching her chewing her lower lip and looking up at him.

“So, Princess, what do you say? Good luck kiss for your favorite boxer?”

Rosie laughs, “I’m not good luck.”

“Kiss me and let's find out.” His voice dips low. He can hear the dull roar of the gathered crowd. “I bet you are.”

“Haz…”

“Ro…” his gloved hand bumps gently against her chin, tilting it up for him. “Scared?”

“Of you?” She breathes quietly, “never.”

She rises on her toes, hands falling flat against his chest, Harrison tilts his head down to meet her lips. It’s a soft kiss, just a quick gentle press but it is everything. Her eyes are closed when she pulls back and he takes a second to admire her, to commit her to memory.

“Did that feel lucky?” She asks, eyes opening to meet his.

“Yeah” he mumbles “pretty sure it did.”

She frowns. Before he can ask her what’s wrong she leans up again, her lips pressing against his more firmly, more needy as he stumbles back. His arms wrap around her, holding her close while her mouth moves against his. She nips at his lower lip as she pulls away again. Harrison groans as his gloves slip over her unable to grip onto anything. All the nerves from earlier have disappeared as he looks down at the girl in his arms.

“Do you feel more than ‘sure’ now?” She asks him sweetly. He huffs out a laugh.

“At least a third round KO.” Her lips quirk.

“Maybe another would make it a first round?”

“Ro-

“Harrison, you’re up mate” Tom’s head peeks around the door, studies the pair of them with a smirk.

“...we’re going to discuss this later, yeah?”

Her soft smile and nod is all the encouragement he needs.

Harrison knocks out his opponent at the end of the second. His father, Dom, and Michael meet him back at the locker room to congratulate him. Rosie doesn’t show.

-----

“Harry! Grab me the morphine! Hold his arm!”

Harry knocks over a bottle of saline in his rush to meet her demands

“One thing at a fucking time!” he snaps.

Harrison was fighting her attempts to fish the bullet from his side. He wasn’t trying to be a shit about it (she was pretty sure) but he wasn’t thinking clearly either. Each time he jerked away the bullet wiggled from her grasp and more blood gushed from the wound. She was a mess. It was like a damn horror movie.

“Fuck it all, Harrison. Stop!” She growls. Harry fumbles to remove the cap from the needle. “Stab him in the fucking arm. Six centimeters below the shoulder” Harry hovers the needle over his mates deltoid as Rosie leans across Harrison’s lap, trying to keep his wrists pinned to the table. “Yes! There!”

The needle finds it mark and Harry pushes every last bit in. Rosie can feel a drop of sweat beading at her temple, a wisp of hair settles in it. She flips her head in an effort to get the stray strands away from her face. It doesn’t work.

She waits. Counts in her head.

Five minutes go by before Harrison begins to go slack and she can let loose.

When she glances up he gives her a drugged grin.

“Pretty…” he mumbles. Rosie huffs.

“Fucking div…” she grumbles, pulling her hair back into a bun before putting on fresh gloves “think you can hold still now?”

“Anything for you…” he trails off sleepily. Rosie sits back down, prods at the oozing hole. Harrison barely twitches.

Harry has deep lines of exhaustion etched across his face. When she looks up she catches him slumped against the counter his head bobbing.

“Har? Can you get me a cup of tea, one for yourself too?”

Harry nods, he doesn’t ask for confirmation that she doesn’t need him like his brother had. His face shows relief to be away from the blood and the tension of the situation.

When he’s gone Rosie slumps back on the stool, sighs quietly. Harrison’s breathing has relaxed, his eyes shut.

“Hazza?”

“Yeah beautiful?” He cracks an eye as she lifts the tweezers again.

“M’gonna get this bullet out of you. I just need you to hold still” she explains softly “can you do that for me?” He nods lazily, glassy eyes watching her movements.

The tweezers slip into the rough edges of the wound. One gloved hand rests along his side, the muscles tense under her hand. Her movements are slow, steady.

“I gotcha tough-guy.” She murmurs as she continues to explore the wound. Her teeth press into her bottom lip as she concentrated on the task. She can feel the tweezers brush up against something. Harrison groans lowly, his face twisted in a grimace, a new stream of crimson runs down his abdomen, adding to the growing stains on his khaki trousers.

“I’ve almost got it…” she mumbles “I’ve almost got it...hold still.” He squirms under her hands.

“Harrison I’ll give you a kiss if you hold still.” She promises, desperation edging her voice. She feels him freeze and the tweezers close around the bullet.

His face goes slack as she pulls the ammo from him. They’re both breathing heavily as the bullet clanks in a pool of blood at his side.

The patch job goes quickly after that. Rosie’s focus goes to flushing the wounds, suturing layers of flesh back together, taping down pressure dressings to both his side and his shoulder.

“You’re gonna have some new, pretty scars” she murmurs, smiling softly as she lays a final piece of tape. Harrison’s grin is lazy and drugged, he reaches weakly for her but his injured shoulder won’t allow it to raise like he wants. His brows knit and a frown crosses his face.

“Do I get my kiss now?”

She’s weary, bone deep, as the adrenaline from earlier dissipates. She slips her hand into his searching one.

“I suppose you deserve it”

Leaning in she lets her lips brush against his cheek. His frown doesn’t fall away.

“Doesn’t count.” His left hand moves up, index finger graze across her lips and then moves to his own. “You can do better.”

“Yeah?” Her hand cups his cheek softly as she brings her face close to his. Her lips brush against his. Harrison makes a soft sound in his throat as he leans forward. “Relax Harrison…” she breathes the words against his mouth, pressing his chest until he’s relaxed back against the table.

“It’s as good as good as I remember.” He mumbles.

-----

The party is In full swing. Rosie’s on her third pint...or maybe it was her fourth. Tom has lost count. He hasn’t let her glass empty, citing being a good host and definitely not the fact that he wanted to see her thoroughly hammered before the night was out. If she was blitzed enough maybe she could forget the melancholy she’s been toting around all night.

She's curled up by herself on the love seat by the billiards table. Harry and Sam are focused on the game at hand. Rosie would usually be taking the piss out of one of them or fussing at them for puffing on the Cuban cigars his father kept in the humidor. Not tonight. She’s quiet, an unusual occurrence for her. In the years Tom’s known her she’s always had something to say but tonight, not so much.

Tom’s eyes follow her gaze to Harrison across the room. He’s set up shop with Rosie’s luscious blonde roommate, Julia, in one of the chunky armchairs near the french doors, her long legs are draped over the arm of the chair as she sits perched on Harrison's lap.

The two had been seeing each other for a few months now. Rosie introduced them. She’d just finished her freshman year at school and the boys had thought a celebration was in order. Rosie had brought Julia along after she’d been stood up by a date. It had been a nice gesture on Rosie’s part. It had completely blown up in her face.

Tom had watched that night, as the rounds progressed, how Harrison and Julia had gotten closer and closer. His hand moving from soft touches on her arm to cupping her ass as they danced. Rosie’s eyes had followed it all with a disconnected gaze. She joked it off as if it didn’t slice her to the core.

“Boys will be boys” she’d groused to Harry with a flippant shrug and a smile that didn’t meet her eyes.

At the end of the night when the pair had gotten a cab together, Harrison had praised Rosie for being his lucky charm, winking at her while one arm was wrapped around Julia’s waist.

Tom sniffed in distaste at the memory of the whole ordeal. He’d put off his own piece of tail that night, stuck her in a cab alone, to take care of his friend. He’d had to listen to Rosie cry softly in bed next to him while he stroked her hair and whispered soft words to her until she fell asleep.

He had to pretend to believe her the next morning when she told him everything “was great”.

Julia laughs and Tom can see Rosie’s spine stiffen, her knuckles going white around her pint glass.

It was ridiculous. All of it. Rosie and Harrison had been circling around one another since they were kids. It was plain as day to everyone around them. Maybe that’s why it had been such a shit show.

Ro’s old man had felt that no guy was good enough for his princess and had made it very clear to Harrison about how he felt when he’d begun sniffing around in earnest. It had given the lad a bit of a complex.

Tom watched as Harrison pushed himself. To get better grades, to be stronger, faster, smarter than the next guy in hopes that one day he would be the man Rosie deserved. It had gone on for too long. It had become almost pathological for Harrison. Nothing he ever did was good enough in his own eyes. So he settled for perfectly acceptable girls who weren’t who he really needed. Like Julia.

And Rosie… well Rosie’s problem had been that she hadn’t recognized Harrison until it was already too late. She’d been what his mum had called a ‘late bloomer’. Closer in age to Harry and Sam than Tom and Harrison, Rosie had always been one of the boys. When Harrison was realizing she was certainly different than his other mates she was still completely oblivious to his awkward attempts at flirting. If Tom was honest, the whole thing was a fucking train wreck to watch.

“Tommy?” Rosie’s sweet voice drags him from his thoughts.

“Yeah, Ro?” He has no time to react as she flops down in his lap and he fumbles forward to keep his drink in hand, cursing lowly as drops of beer roll down his arm, soaking into the rolled cuffs of his shirt. “Fucking Christ...Jesus Rosie I-“ his voice cuts off when she looks at him her eyes brimming with tears.

“Can I leave now?” He glances at her empty glass, the lost look in her eyes that don’t fully focus on him. Maybe he’d been a little overzealous with the drinks. Rosie Doherty didn’t ask permission. It had always been something he admired about her. She didn’t cow down to him, the bosses son, like others did. The fact that she was now wasn’t good. He wraps his free arm around her. She was the closest thing he was ever going to have to a sister and he hated seeing her upset.

“You’ve only been here a few hours. Don’t you wanna play some pool with Sammy and me later?”

She shakes her head, glancing over her shoulder. Tom’s eyes follow hers to where Harrison has his head buried in Julia’s neck.

“Look up here princess.” He demands her attention quietly. She’s relaxes minutely as she lays her head on his shoulder and looks up at him. “I don’t wanna see you look over there one more time tonight. You’re better than that. I’m not putting you in a cab either. Your Father would skin me alive if let you out of this house by yourself, drunk as a skunk.”

Tom can’t help but chuckle at the pout she gives him, ruby red bottom lip jutting out. God, she could be such a mess after too many. Always cute though.

“How about we have a sleepover? Like old times? I tuck you in my bed and I’ll make us pancakes in the morning?”

Rosie seems to think about it, her head begins to turn back toward Harrison when he barks out a laugh but Tom grips her jaw, turns it back. “Pancakes, Ro.”

“Pancakes.” She repeats, with a yawn, “pancakes are good.”

Tom grins down, patting her arm gently. “Atta girl, now let's get you up to bed.”

He happens to glance back at Harrison as he gets to the library door. He’s no longer focused on Julia, only on the way Tom’s hand rests low on Rosie’s back, guiding her along. If the set of Harrison’s jaw meant anything, he was sure to hear about this later.

-----

“How is he, Doc?”

The question startles Rosie and she lets out a quiet gasp. The kitchen had been dark. She’d thought she’d been alone. Harry had never returned with her tea and she was dying for a drink.

Tom sits in the breakfast nook surrounded by shadows. A tumbler in front of him undoubtedly holds the expensive scotch he always favored.

“Shit Tom...I’m gonna put a bell around your neck.” The young mob boss laughs.

“Sorry about that” He holds up a second tumbler and wiggles it, “You look like you could use a drink.”

Rosie chews at her lip for a moment. Tea was probably the smart bet but yeah, alcohol wasn’t always a bad idea either. “The good stuff?”

“Glenfiddich 21. Always.”

Rosie slips into a chair across from him as he pours a few fingers into the spare glass. “I’ve still got to get Harry taken care of.” she mumbles taking a mouthful the rich amber liquid. It’s smooth like she’s come to expect. It lingers long after she’s swallowed it down, the taste of oak and fruit lingering on her palate.

“I sent him up to bed an hour ago” Tom holds a hand up before Rosie’s able to argue, “His arm will keep until the morning. He’s gone longer with worse. How’s Harrison?”

The enforcer was good. Sam had come to relieve her a while ago and help the drugged man to his own bed. “He’ll live this time, I suppose” She says taking another swallow. Tom reaches over and tops her off again.

“What about you?” Even in the low light she can see the sharp line of his jaw, his concerned expression. Rosie huffs. Takes a breath. Her hand trembles as she sets the glass down.

“I’m good.” Tom’s jaw ticks. “Well, yeah, it was a bit much but it’s what I’ve been trained for” she goes on after a minute “I’m sure it’ll happen again. It’s the first but it’s not going to be the last i-”

“Ro, we’ve known each other for what? Coming on 20 years pretty quick if I remember correctly” he smirks “and I do remember correctly. You know that’s not what I meant.”

Her jaw clenches as she stubbornly refuses to respond. Tom takes it as a sign to continue.

“You know, at one time I thought ‘Hey, maybe Rosie girl and I could make a go of it. She’s fucking gorgeous. She’s brilliant. We’d make a smart partnership’ but I never did anything about you know why?” Rosie shakes her head quietly, lets her finger run around the rim of the tumbler but doesn’t move to take another drink. “You’re my family Rosie. I will love you till the end of time but I don’t love… never have loved you like he does.”

“Tom..”

“No, shut up, let me say my piece. I’ve spent too much time watching you two hurt one another and I’m done with it. Do you hear me?” he takes a long drink, emptying the glass before setting it down, running a hand through his short hair. “Everything he is. Everything he’s ever aspired to be is because of you. To be good enough for you. Do you realise that?”

Rosie sniffs, “I never needed him to be anything other than who he is. He’s never had to prove himself to me.”

“No? Did you tell him-”

“Did he tell me?” She throws the questions back, leaning forward. “And the string of women he paraded through. Julia? Claire? Tania? Did he really ‘love them’ too?

Tom laughs low, “Yeah the Julia thing, that was...something but then you stopped coming around. You were already off at your fancy school and then poof your were gone completely. Only time you showed your face was holidays. You didn’t see him trying to fill that gaping hole you left with those other girls. He never could figure out why they didn’t work” Tom reaches for the bottle and pours another drink. “I knew though…” He takes another sip, tipping his glass toward her “they weren’t you.”

-----

“You’re a motherfucker Holland. You know that right?”

Tom rolls his eyes to the ceiling. He was lying if he said he hadn’t been waiting for it. Per the clock on the wall it was quarter twelve. He was surprised it took this long. Hands shove him from behind. He stumbles half a step before catching himself on the counter top. He spins to meet Harrison head on. Out of habit his hand lands on the holster at his shoulder. Harrison’s eyes flicker. “Watch yourself, Haz” Tom warns lowly, straightening and smoothing his jacket, covering the gun back up, “if there's something we need to discuss you come at me like a man and not some chicken shit cunt.” Harrison rolls his head, Tom can hear his neck crack as he does.

“That’s rich coming from you. Going behind my back-”

Tom thumbs at his nose “Choose your next words wisely mate…”

“You and Rosie.” Harrison steps forward, in his space, but Tom doesn't back away. He turns his chin up, stares him dead in the eyes. Hands come up and shove the blonde back a step. He doesn’t give him time to right himself. “And if I wanted to bed her? Fuck her within an inch of her life, what claim do you have?” Uncertainty flashes through Harrison’s blue eyes.

“None!” Tom barks, “You have fucking none, Haz! She’s not your girl and she’s not mine so get off my fucking case.” The confusion continues to shadow Harrison’s features.

“I saw you-” Tom is quick to interrupt him again, fuck him for questioning his intentions with their friend.

“You saw me helping my very drunk, very sad friend to bed. It’s not the first time and as long as the two of you keep doing this dance...and mind you it’s getting fucking old, mate...around each other it probably won’t be the last.”

Harrison rubs roughly at the back of his neck. He pulls in a deep breath. His eyes focus on a point on the ceiling.

“I’m allowed to bring my girlfriend around.” his voice is dull, the fury draining, as he speaks. Tom knows why.

“Not if your trying to use her to get to Rosie, you’re not. That’s not fair to either of them.”

“Rosie doesn’t give a shit about what I do.” Tom laughs out loud, bitter and tired of the whole situation.

“I’ve got a tear stained pillow that says otherwise.”

-----

It takes a moment to realize where he is, waking from a black, dreamless sleep into an equally dark room. His shoulder throbs and his side aches and complains at each attempt he makes to adjust in bed. All in all, Harrison thinks it could be worse. He could have woken up dead.

He doesn’t remember getting to bed. He doesn’t remember much of anything accept Rosie’s soft voice and warm lips brushing against his own. It’s probably the remnants of a fever dream, to much narcotic and not enough blood, but it makes him feel slightly less awful about staining the back seat of Tom’s Audi.

Gingerly, he reaches for the lamp across the night stand, it’s slow going as his body protests the movement. He hisses in pain as he makes one final push and flips the switch. It’s not particularly bright, the warm glow only lighting a small block of the room and casting grotesque shadows over the rest. It is enough though to make out the form curled up asleep in the armchair across the room.

Her chin is tucked to her chest and the thin Afghan, usually relegated to decoration on the back of the chair, is wrapped around her shoulders. Her legs are invisible, pulled up so under the blanket. She looks soft, asleep like this.

It’s been too long since he’s seen her in anything more than an “official” setting, strolling through the house in business suits or a white lab coat left over from a shift at the clinic. He misses it. He misses her. He misses the girl with the French braids rolling down her back, the girl who would help him plot mischief, the one who would fall asleep watching scary movies with the volume turned down low so their parents wouldn’t catch them. Mostly though, he misses seeing the woman she’s become. There were so many things he’d wanted to tell her for so long but never had the chance and now, she’s asleep a meter away and he can’t bear it.

She adjusts in the chair, eyes fluttering open. Her stretching is cat like and elegant before relaxing back into the chair, resting her arms on her knees, her chin on her arms.

“You’re alive.” She mumbles, offering him a gentle smile. “Seems I’m still lucky.”

He laughs. “So it seems”. His smile fades as he watches her, watching him.

“You didn’t need to watch over me.”

“Tom insisted I stay.” She says cautiously. Harrison sees the way her eyes travel to the door.

“Did he say you had to stay in the uncomfortable straight back?”

“Harrison…”

He sighs, running his hand over his face. He feels gross where the thin sheen of sweat from the night has dried across his skin. “Rosie, why are you here?”

“Take your pills.” She encourages, ignoring his question as she motions to his night stand. He picks up the medicine cup.

“We need to talk about something… what are these?”

“The green ones are the Antibiotics. Pain pills are the others.”

Harrison pops the antibiotics into his mouth and drops the pain pills on the bedside table. He takes a long pull from the glass of tepid water sitting on the table. His mouth feels gummy and gross.

“I don’t want drugs.” He grumbles when she gives him a hard look. “I want to talk. Why are you here?” he repeats the earlier question. Rosie pauses, lays her cheek against her hands and looks away.

“I wanted to make sure you were ok, that you didn’t need anything…” she worries her lip between her teeth “I…. you scared me last night.”

“Well call me shocked. I didn’t think you still cared.” Maybe it was the injuries, the lack of sleep. Maybe it was the years of missing something he never got a chance to experience. Regardless, the words spill from his mouth with far more venom than he intended. Rosie flinches. When she looks back, he can see the weariness in her eyes. Not something born of fatigue from a poor night's sleep but something old and bone deep.

“I guess I deserved that.”

Harrison shakes his head. What was he doing? He stares down at his hands, there’s bruising along the knuckles of his right. Small cuts litter both. Scars from the life he’d chosen are immeasurable. “No, forget I said it. You don’t deserve that. You were focusing-“

“I was running Haz. Let’s be real.”

Harrison’s head snaps up. She’s giving him an unreadable look.

“For a long time I didn’t know what I wanted.” She laughs sadly, “and than I did and it was too late. So I pretended like it didn’t exist”

He can’t help the pained groan that escapes his gritted teeth and he tries to push himself to the edge of the bed. Rosie is already out of the chair and striding to him. “Damn it, stop moving” she snarls lowly “Christ, Haz. if you pop those stitches I’ll kill you myself.” He’d laugh if it didn’t hurt so bad.

Rosie settles him back into bed, tutting and mumbling about stupid men and Harrison lets her. Her hands are warm against his bare chest and he basks in her attention. She pulls back for one moment and the next she’s pushing the cup of painkillers in his hand. He looks her dead in the eye as he throws it across the room.

When Rosie tries to move away his hand grabs hers, pulls her down onto the bed. His grip tightens when she tries to get up.

“Look at me. Stop it.” He demands lowly. She turns her head, rolls her eyes. “This has gone on for too long and I’m done.” He watches her eyes widen. “I’m done wasting time and living like everything is ok.” He pulls in a shuddering breath. “This is how it’s gonna work, Princess; I’m going to talk and your going to listen and were going to clear the air of some shite that we should have taken care of ages ago. Understand?” She nods and Harrison is more than happy to accept that for the time being. Rosie turns toward him, one knee on the bed the other dangling casually off of it. Her hands rest in her lap but he can see the nervous way she wrings her fingers.

“Rosie Doherty, I have spent the better part of my life trying to be a man worthy of you-” She opens her mouth to say something and he presses the palm of his hand over it. He can feel her hot breath when she huffs. It brings a grin to his face. “I’m talking“ he chides as he draws back.

“I’ve worked harder than any man in this organization. I’ve lost blood, sweat, and tears for the Holland’s but you know what? It was never really about them, it was about you. About being a man who could take care of you, protect you. And it’s never enough. I’m never going to be everything you deserve.” he runs his hand over his cheek, pulling at the soft skin. “But I can’t do it anymore, I-”

“Harrison, shut up.” her words are soft, almost a whisper. The bed dips at his hip as she moves closer. “I never asked you to be more. I didn’t need that. I don’t care about that. I just needed you.” Gently he brings his hand to her cheek, feels the warm life burning underneath his touch. She covers his with her own. “I didn’t understand what was happening. I was just a dumb kid. One day my best friend and I are talking about the upcoming match and binging horror movies and the next he’s opening doors, telling me how pretty I look. I wasn’t ready and then…”

She trails off. This was as much as he’d gotten out of her in years and he wasn’t about to see her stop now. He needed this. Even if only for closure on this chapter in his life.

“And then…” he prompts. Rosie’s eyes shine, wet with unshed tears.

“And then I realized that I was in love with my best friend and by that time it was too late. You’d moved on to Julia and than after that everytime I saw you it was another girl and the time was never right to say anything because you were finally happy and who the fuck was I to ruin that?”

Harrison catches the tear that rolls down her cheek.

“No tears. No for me. Not now.” His hand slips around to the back of her head and pulls her forward. Chapped lips press against her forehead and Rosie moves closer, her body pressing against the side of his.

“I wasn’t happy with Julia or...any of them. I was lying to myself. Pretending that eventually I’d find that one girl that was ‘it’ but I never did. I wanted to be loved, to be wanted but they were never enough.”

Rosie lays her head on his shoulder, he can feel warm wet tears against his cooled skin. “Why not?”

“Because I already found her. I met her when I was ten years old. I’ve loved her since I was fifteen. She’s been the only woman I could ever see myself with and, yeah, there have been other girls” he looks down at Rosie. “But I’ve only ever loved you.”

The soft hazel eyes, the ones he’d seen in his dreams for longer than he could remember look up at him.

“You mean that?”

The laugh comes out of him before he can hold it back. His thumb strokes along her jaw. “Come here”. He draws her in slowly, enjoying the way her eyes flutter shut the moment before his mouth presses to hers, the soft sigh over his lips as she opens for him and his tongue tastes her. And then something changes and the kiss melds from something soft to something more...more of everything.

Years of pent up frustration, of longing spill over and Rosie is pulling his bottom lip into her mouth, sucking gently, and his hands are pulling her across his lap. Her knees land on either side of his hips as he wraps his arms around her waist. He gasps out a breath as her knee bumps against his bandaged side and lightning shoots through him.

He has to hold her tight to stop her escape.

“It’s ok...don’t move… just” he pants. “Give me a second.” Rosie watches quietly, concern obvious across her face as his pinched expression slowly eases. Her hands cup his jaw, thumbs gently coaxing the muscles to relax.

“Harrison,” her voice is soft but sure “I love you. I love you so much I don’t know what to do with it sometimes. I’ve spent years throwing myself into anything I could to forget you but I don’t want to anymore. I can’t.”

She’s like an angel perched over him, a fucking dream.

“You saying your mine, Princess?” She presses her lips together, fighting a smile as she nods. Harrison buries his head in her neck, inhales the scent of her skin, lets his lips play over her pulse as she squirms. Everything suddenly feels light, like the weight of a thousand suns has been lifted off his shoulders. “Say it.” He demands. “Need to hear it.”

“Harrison Osterfield, I’m yours.” She manages through a sea of giggles as he nips at a ticklish spot. Her hands tangle in his hair, pulling him back. The weariness is gone from her eyes as she kisses him. This Is what it felt like, he thinks, to have everything you’ve ever wanted.

Their kisses turn languid, exploring each other’s mouths, hands roving over each other’s bodies. Clothes get peeled away, tossed into a pile on the floor. His body hurts but he can’t stop himself from reaching between her legs and finding the slick of arousal glistening on her sex. Rosie’s hand slips between them and strokes him with slow even movements. The morning light begins to spill through the eastern window, casting her body in a soft, early morning glow.

She braces her hands against his chest when he positions himself between her legs. There’s no words, only the encouragement of her full lips against his as she sinks down onto him for the first time. He swallows down the soft moans she makes, his hands on her hips as she rocks slowly against him. Her eyes are clouded with lust and he knows, now that he’s had her, there is no going back. There’s no other woman that can make him feel the way Rosie does. There’s no other woman he can love like he loves her. He tries to show her, tries to meet each rock of her hips with a thrust of his own bit Rosie smiles softly.

“You’re on light duty.” She says softly, “let me take care of you, tough-guy”

And so he does.

His hands roam over her body, feel the swell of her hips and the nip of her waist. Her breasts fill the palms of his hands and she makes the most delicate, needy sounds when he rolls her dusky nipples between his fingers. Her body clutches him, grips him in velvet heat that has him whining sounds of his own long before he’s ready too.

“Rosie...I’m close” slips from his mouth and she nods her head and continues to grind her body down on his. She leans into him, her chest presses against his as her mouth sucks tiny marks into his good shoulder. Her words are mumbled against his skin.

“Me too”

His hands fall to her hips and pull her tight against him. It’s only another minute before her body stills and he feels her come apart around him, her body trembling against him. He follows close behind, her name on his lips.

The sun is bright now, filling the room with light. Rosie dozes across his chest as their heart rates slow. Soon it will be time for them to get up, to take their first steps into a new world. Together. Harrison smiles.

It must be his lucky day.

----------------

Tag: @aossi @the-southernbelle @tomsrebeleyebrow @hazmyheart @procrastinatingismybiggestflaw @zselenophile @alltoowellbeneaththemangotree @gl0rynglam

#Mob!haz #Harrison Osterfield #Haz Osterfield #haz osterfield fic #Harrison Osterfield fic #detroitbydark

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sprnklersplashes · 4 years ago

Text

heart of stone (2/?)

AO3

It’s three days before Janis’ rest results are available. That night, her mom pops her head around her bedroom door and tells her they need to be at the hospital early the next morning. She had spent the intervening time lounging around her house, rotating through different sweaters and reading the same book over and over, all the while filling in Damian and Cady as much as she could, trying to reassure them and herself that it was nothing and in a few days she’d probably be fine. She’d be back bugging them in no time, probably by the first day of school, in fact.

And that better be true, she thinks, because she has never been so bored in her life. In those few days between appointments her biggest achievement was successfully showing her dad how to master Netflix and introducing him to Killing Eve. She had tried to draw, but no idea stayed still in her mind long enough for her to recapture it on paper. The pencil bounced between her hands as she looked through outlines of unfinished sketches, trying to make one jump out at her. She puts them all in her drawer with a resigned sigh, one of those impossibly rare moments where she willingly admits defeat and submits to her fate. Her body feels too weary to move and her brain completely burnt out, but her soul keeps pushing her to create, to be active and busy. Her hands weren’t meant for scrolling through her phone as she’s half asleep, they’re artists hands, built for innovation. The restlessness crept through her nerves and up to her brain, shaking it so much that when her mom hung up the phone and told her she had an appointment the next day, she threw her head back and thanked God.

But her initial relief is gone now as she and her parents follow the perky secretary’s directions down to the doctor’s room, passing sunshine yellow walls and hurrying over pristine white floors. She keeps her hands in her pockets, her heart clenching each time she catches a glimpse of a patient. Some of them smile, some of them don’t, some look normal and others… not so much, gaunt faces and loose headscarves. Wrong as it is, her anxiety only spikes when she sees them, not to mention her bedside manner isn’t the greatest. Perhaps it’s lucky her parents don’t set high goals for her because she’d never make a doctor.

Her dad keeps looking back at her, asking if she’s okay, and she tells him she is, even though her chest is pained and tight, either from worry or her own body’s weakness. Or worse, both. Her little personal storm cloud makes itself known again, desperate for her attention after she had put so much effort into ignoring it. It clings to her brain and strains against her skull, stretching over and whispering in her ear, telling her she should get used to this place. She might be seeing more of it than she wants to.

She closes her eyes tightly and stops walking for a second, wishing she could go back to a few days ago, lounging in bed with Cady when everything was normal and okay. But she can’t, so she jogs to catch up with her parents and keeps her eyes on her boots.

“Mr and Mrs Sarkisian.” The doctor they meet is around her dad’s age, brown hair beginning to grey with thick rimmed black glasses and wearing a funky green and blue tie over a white shirt. If he ditched the white coat and clipboard, he’d look like a dad. On his desk, amongst the paperwork and nameplate, is a Rubix cube, a framed photo of two kids and a stuffed frog chilling against the computer, wearing an oversized pair of sunglasses. Doctor Dad looks at Janis, his mouth opening and closing silently for a split second, a fearful glint in his eyes. Exactly what she needs. “And Janis, I assume.” She lets him shake her hand, not letting herself show how clammy it feels. His nerves sparks on the skin in a way only someone who has been through it could pick up on.

She’s been reading him since she first saw him and none of it puts her at ease. His smile looks like someone is pulling it across his face with wires and his eyes flash behind his glasses when he looks at her. His breathing hitches, his fingers fidget and when he sits down, she sees him pull himself back together, starting with the shoulders and up to the chin, straightening everything out, looking presentable. Approachable. Softening the blow he’s about to make. Maybe her parents take notice, or not. They’re specific things, only noticeable to those who are looking for them.

They do say ignorance is bliss.

“These… these types of conversations are never easy.” Oh, what a brilliant opening line. It makes her mom’s hand clasp her dad’s with a grip that’s white-knuckled and desperate. As for Janis herself, she squirms in her chair, biting down hard on her thumbnail. She feels like there’s a million little centipedes all over her body, scurrying around with their tiny feet, wriggling into her elbows, writhing beneath her knees, twisting around on her stomach. She could burst at any moment and they’d invade his office, bury themselves in his carpeting and make homes in the vents.

“Just give it to me straight, doc,” she blurts out. Her parents turn to her, more amused than surprised, and she offers a shrug, the beginnings of a smirk on her face. “Which might be hard in my case.” Her parents chuckle as she looks over at the doctor, herself getting a kick out of his own dumbfounded expression. “Because I’m a lesbian.”

“Oh, right,” he says, managing something that sounds like a laugh. He clears his throat and opens the file in his hand, blocking it from her view in a move that she isn’t sure is accidental. Pressure builds in her chest, her lungs feeling smaller and smaller inside her. The clock must be wrong, because it says only seconds have passed, but they’ve been there for far longer. Minutes. Hours, it must be. She grips the side of the plastic chair, drumming her nails along the underside and pressing her palm into the metal legs. Her mom rubs her hand down her back, asking quietly if she needs anything. She shakes her head, knowing ‘for this to be over’ probably isn’t a good answer.

“Janis… I’m afraid you have leukaemia.”

She’s falling.

Someone took her chair out from underneath her and she’s falling. She phases through the floor and keeps falling, her surroundings a silent blur. She tries to breathe but nothing can come in or out, her hand outstretched but no one holding it. She’s trapped in a bubble, one with no air or no sound, keeping everyone else away from her. She’s alone as she falls, nothing but the white expanse for company, her heart still, her mind empty. All she knows is she’s hurtling towards… something, at full speed and getting faster with each second.

“Janis!”

She blinks, the bottom of the chair cutting a deep, red line into her palms. But it’s steady beneath her, even if nothing else is. All at once, her body and mind come back to her, her heart beats faintly in her chest, weak from shock, and her breaths are quick and rapid. Her brain is a jumbled and confused mess, so much so that she preferred it when she couldn’t think of anything. Now her mind is opening ideas in a flash and tossing them out just as quickly; dashing around her head so thoughtlessly and rapidly that she can’t get a grip on anything. So instead she’s just sitting there, a ringing in her head and cold weakness in her chest, waiting for someone to fix this.

“Janis.” Her dad’s hand is on hers, his fingers curling around with a touch that’s so soft and gentle it almost doesn’t belong in here. Not with that word lingering between them. “Are you okay kid?”

How the hell is she meant to be okay?

“Leukaemia.” She drags her eyes up, not to meet the doctor, but to look past him, to look at the ugly shade of yellow his wall is painted and the framed certificate, declaring him as having graduated from somewhere with a degree in something. She bites her lip so hard she feels the beginnings of a little lump forming there. Like the ones on her neck. Like the ones they always say are a sign of…

The word sticks in her throat and she has to tear it out of her.

“Like… cancer? Like the cancer kind of leukaemia?”

“I’m afraid so,” the doctor says, his voice soft. She doesn’t know if she’s ever heard a voice that soft before, maybe when she was a kid, a really tiny kid and her goldfish died and her mom had to explain to her what death was.

Why did her mind have to go there?

It’s only now she notices one of the posters on the wall. Bright green lettering and a glossy photo of a little girl, fourteen, maybe thirteen, sitting up in a bed, a tube in her nose and a hat on her bald head, grinning brightly up a nurse with a sweet face. That’s what cancer is. It’s losing your hair and being in hospital and having tubes sticking in and out of your body. It’s other stuff too, stuff she hasn’t thought about and doesn’t know because it’s not for her. Cancer isn’t for her, it’s for old grandmas in knitted cardigans and tragic little kids who get to meet spiderman. Occasionally, it’s for teenagers and young people like her, but not her specifically. Never her. Cancer is something that exists far away, lurking around corners, on the tongues of adults who them about the dangers of cellphones or their health teacher telling them to eat healthily. It exists all right, but it doesn’t happen to her.

“Janis,” her mom says gently, running her fingers through her hair. Her voice is thin and shaking as though she’s about to cry. Why would she be crying? She’ll fix this. There’s no way this is real and now her mom is crying over nothing.

“I’m fine,” she replies, squeezing her mom’s hand back. Life comes back to her body and she looks up at the doctor, finally feeling heat inside her, attacking the cold emptiness and sending it back where it belongs. It flares up in her chest, a spark that she’d sorely missed these past few days. She grips her mom’s hand tighter, her own hand shaking and her fingers tight and tense. “I’m fine because I don’t have cancer.”

“Janis I know this is difficult to hear-”

“It’s not. It’s not because I am fine. Because I don’t have cancer, you did the test wrong.”

“Our team ran several tests. We ruled out other possibilities.”

“Clearly you didn’t if you’re telling me that I have cancer, which I don’t, so do another one.” Her grip on her mom isn’t just for her sake, but it’s also keeping Janis from getting up and flipping that desk over and telling Doctor Dad to get fucked. Who does he even think he is anyway? That degree can’t be much good if he’s telling her this and screwed up a test like that.

“Janis,” he sighs, gesturing with his hands like that’s going to fix anything. “I understand that this is a lot to take in right now-”

“It’s not,” she snaps, the smile on her face strained and sharp. “It’s not because you’re fuck-you’re wrong. I don’t-I can’t have-”

“Janis!”

Her mom’s voice is what pulls her back down. When she looks over at her, she sees brown eyes identical to hers, but they’re filled with tears and rimmed red and show a tiny spark of anger amongst the sadness. Her mom’s mouth is half-open, a plea waiting on her lips, begging her daughter to see sense. Her hand tightens around Janis’, her grip becoming less comforting and careful and more irritated and exhausted.

“Sweetheart… please.”

God she’s a horrible person. Her parents just heard probably one of the worst things a parent could hear, and she just threw a tantrum over it.

She looks at the doctor with uncharacteristic and unfamiliar shyness, trying to pick herself back up, present herself as anything close to reasonable after the meltdown she just had. Something about him makes her feel like he understands. Maybe she’s not the first to react like that. Or maybe it’s wishful thinking.

“So what happens now?” she asks in a flat voice.

“What happens now is you start treatment as soon as possible,” Doctor Dad explains. He leans forwards on his desk, his hands clasped together and when Janis notices the distressed expression on his face, the pain of guilt in her stomach only gets worse. “My colleagues have already discussed this and we think it would be best for you to begin within the next two weeks. The earliest start would be next Monday.”

“Next Monday?” she echoes, her voice cracking. “But… but I start school in three days I start before that, I can’t…” She knows it’s a lost cause and there’s no point to it, but it’s the last thing she has. Her school is the last part of her life that’s real in all this, so forgive her for clinging to it. She looks from her parents to the doctor, three different, grave expressions and only one is able to give her an answer.

“I’m afraid going to school will be out of the question,” the doctor tells her. Her mom’s fingers lace between hers, squeezing her hand in what’s meant to be comforting, but Janis can’t feel it. She’s too busy trying to push back another protest. “I’m sorry, Janis. There is the option of online school, but your treatment is likely to make you too tired to focus. It might be easier on your mental health if you saved school until next year.”

Saved school until next year. When everyone she knows is already gone and this year’s juniors will be seniors. She’ll have to wait a year for all the fun stuff that seniors get to do, cutting in the lunch line, going to prom, graduation parties, using the senior’s lounge. She’ll be sitting in a class of people she’s a year older than her, all in pre-formed friendship groups and likely knowing her as Cancer Girl. Cady, Damian, Karen, everyone else will be graduating this year and will move on to new adventures. And she’ll be left behind.

The idea makes her more sick than the cancer has.

“Jan?” her dad asks softly. She finds three pairs of expectant eyes on her and all she can offer is a small nod.

“Okay,” she whispers. She’s not sure what she’s saying okay to.

“What about the treatment itself?” her mom asks. “How is that going to work?”

“We might have to do a few more tests to find that out,” he explains. “But it would likely be chemotherapy. What we’ve discussed so far is two weeks in hospital and then a week at home to recover for around three months. Thankfully, the cancer hasn’t progressed far enough to warrant more, and we’ll want to keep it at that. The goal is to get Janis to remission.” She nods, her head starting to throb a little. She presses her fingers to her temples before she can stop herself, and that’s a red flag to both her parents. She drops it, muttering a lie about being fine.

“Of course there will be a lot of support for Janis through this,” he goes on. “There is an excellent support group and appointments can be made with a counsellor on a one-to-one basis.”

Somehow that doesn’t help, she thinks. It’s not meant to, she guesses.

It’s cold when they step outside, or that might just be her. The wind cuts through her jacket and the sweater she pulled on and attacks her skin, leaving her fighting off shivers. She pushes her dad’s arm off her when he tries to help her to the car. That only makes her feel worse, mentally and physically.

Being in a car with your parents after a cancer diagnosis is a weird experience. The tension between the three of them strangles her. An unspoken conversation passes between her parents in the front and frankly, it pisses her off. If they’re going to be concerned about her, they could at least do her the courtesy of involving her. But maybe it’s better that way because despite being an arm’s length from them, she feels as though she’s miles away. Like when they started driving, she stayed put. She sinks back into the seat and stares straight ahead, the pain in her head coming back louder and stronger, pushing against her skull and screaming behind her eyelids.

“Janis… are you okay?” her mom asks.

“Fine,” she sighs.

“Do you need anything? We can go to the gas station-”

“I said I’m fine,” she replies, firmer than before. “I just want to lay down.”

She’s not kidding. She wants to press her face into her pillow until everything blacks out and all that exists is the colours that explode behind her eyelids. Then they can fade to, and she won’t have to deal with anything anymore.

They drive on in a heavy silence, and the longer they go, the angrier she finds herself growing. She doesn’t know where it’s directed, at herself or her parents or the doctor or the universe, but it’s there, rising in tandem with her the pain in her head and making her restless. She grabs her upper arm and squeezes hard, pressing her nails in until it starts to hurt, just to get it out somewhere.

“Hey… why don’t we go to Dairy Queen?” her dad suggests, as though they’re on their way back from mini golfing. It’s a sweet offer and Janis almost smiles at it. But it’s why it’s sweet that she doesn’t want it.

“I don’t want to,” she replies. “I just want to go home.” Besides, there is a real risk of her upchucking a milkshake on the seat.

Her parents exchange another worried look, their hands clasping over the gearshift, and Janis has to bite back a scream.

When they do finally get home, Janis doesn’t wait for them to get out of the car. Instead she storms ahead, regardless of how it hurts her head more, because she’s so damn relieved to be out of that care and in open space. She opens the door with her own key, remembering to leave it open for them. She runs into the hallway and then stops almost immediately, her chest tight and her breaths coming in short, quick gulps. Something rushes against her and grabs at her legs, and she takes a minute to work out that it’s Maxie, no doubt pouting at her and wondering what she was doing and where she was and why she didn’t take him. He’s probably whimpering or barking, and her dad is probably trying to talk to her, but she can’t hear anything but the blood rushing in her ears.

“Oh my God,” she says out loud. Everything she’s held back in the car bubbles over and she can’t hold it back any more.

She just about makes it to her room in time to throw herself on the bed and start screaming. She doesn’t even sound like a human. It’s deep and it’s guttural, tearing at her throat and painted with rage and pain and fear. Poor Maxie is probably hiding in his bed, scared of the monster upstairs. Her eyes, her face burns and her bedroom melts away, leaving just a mesh of dark colours bleeding together. Tears and snot run down her face and over her hands and on the pillows, making the mark of a miserable, self-pitying girl going insane.

Her head doesn’t just hurt any more, it’s screeching and kicking at her and she can’t do anything about it. She can’t do anything about anything. That’s the problem. Her chest aches and her neck hurts and her mouth is dry and her eyes burn. But all that’s nothing to what’s going on in her heart and head, where dangerous, toxic cocktails bubble. All she wants to do is not feel, but she feels everything and it’s all just pain.

She runs out of tears at one point and they dry on her face as she looks up at the ceiling, the word “cancer” written in invisible ink above her. She thinks “I might die” and then rolls her eyes at herself for being bleak. She wants to tell her all the good stuff about new treatments and technology and whatever but it’s all surface level nonsense. Fear wins over optimism and it cuts right into her, deep into her soul.

She doesn’t know what she’s most worried about and she’s an idiot for it. Not knowing if she’s more scared of the fatal disease wreaking destruction and chaos inside her body or of not getting to go to Cady’s Mathletes competitions or see Damian in the musical. It should be plainly obvious what’s the worse one, but it isn’t. Is this her now? Vapid and shallow, more obsessed with her petty teenage fun than her health? Was she always like this?

Her parents find her laying across her bed, unblinking, the slow rise and fall of her chest the only thing that indicate her being alive.

“How long ago did you guys wait?” she asks flatly.

“Two hours,” her dad explains, shifting on his feet. “We thought you’d need some space.” She nods numbly at that. “Janis… I know this is a lot to process for you.”

“Understatement of the century,” she mumbles. At least she’s still got humour. The bed sags and she sees her mom sitting next to her, her hand reaching out to stroke her hair. Janis can’t remember the last time her mom did that to her, not like this, with dainty fingers that could send her to sleep.

“We’re going to be here the whole time,” her mom promises. “You’re not doing this alone.”

She is though. That’s the problem. They’re not going to be the ones in the hospital beds and taking medicine and missing her senior year. She is. They’ll be beside her all they like, and she hopes to hell they are, but they aren’t going through it with her.

“I know,” is what she says instead. “I know.” She pulls herself to a sitting position, grabbing her mom’s shoulder as her room starts tilting. It takes a few seconds of deep, shaky breaths and her eyes shut tight before she feels normal again. “I’m okay.” She looks up at the two of them, overwhelmed by a feeling of helplessness that makes her feel tiny despite her impressive height. “So what happens now?”

“We’ll take care of the official stuff,” her dad days softly, his arms wrapped around himself Holding himself together. “Letting the school know and all that. But… it might be better if you tell your friends.” She shakes her head on instinct. She can barely get that word out of her mouth on her own. In front of Damian or Cady, she knows she’d crumble.

“Sweetie,” her mom says. Her hand hasn’t stopped stroking her. “I know it’s hard. But they love you and they’re going to want to hear it from you. Not from us and not from the school either.” Janis presses her face into her knees, blinking away another wave of tears. They’re right. Of course they’re right. But that doesn’t mean that the idea of telling them makes her want to vomit.

Right now, only she, her mom, her dad and some doctors know. And she can pretend the doctors don’t exist and remove them from the equation. And when the only people who know are living in this house, it’s easier for her to pretend that it doesn’t really exist. She can push it away and ignore her parents and keep it inside these walls. Once she tells her friends…

It’s real. There’s no going back after that. Granted there’s no going back either way, but there’s no hiding either.

“Janis,” her mom agrees, sharking a look with her dad. “If it’s really too much for you… we can tell your friends for you.

“No,” she says with a shake of her head. “No, you’re right. They need to hear it from me.”

“Oh, baby,” her mom breathes, hugging her tightly around her shoulders. She’s not crying, but her breathing is ragged and her grip scared. “I’m so sorry. I wish this wasn’t happening to you.” Her dad sits on the other side of her and wraps his arm around her, letting her head on her head on his shoulder. The hug is clumsy and a little forced, no-one knowing when to let go and Janis quickly becomes uncomfortable in their embrace. The longer it goes on, the less like herself she feels.

She spends the rest of the day and most of the following morning looking at her phone, even when she’s eating or watching TV with her dad or playing with Maxie. Every gesture is half-hearted, the building sense of dread distracting her form everything else. She scrolls through the messages from yesterday, Cady asking how her appointment went and Damian asking if she was free and Gretchen asking her opinion on a shirt. All living in blissful ignorance.

It’s no contest as to who to tell first. She sits on her bed, Damian’s face looking up at her from the phone screen, one button all that separates the two of them. Just press a button. How hard can that be? Very hard, it turns out, when your arm feels like lead and you don’t even know what to say to him, your words written and crossed out and written again on the notebook beside you. The worst part is that she isn’t even sure what she’s scared of. There’s a lot to choose from and when it’s telling someone you love as much as she loves him, that only makes it worse. Like she’s on top of a skyscraper, about to be pushed off and into darkness.

She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and calls him.

“Hey,” he chirps on the other side, picking up after just one ring. She leans back on her bed, biting her nail, her heart ceasing beating altogether. In the back of her mind, she wonders if he’d been waiting for her. “What’s up?”

“Are you-can you come over?” she asks. “Are you free right now?”

“Uh yeah,” he replies. “Everything okay?” No it’s not, the okay train left the station yesterday and I missed it and I’m about to pull you off it too. “Janis… are you okay?”

“Just… how soon can you come over?” she says, moving from biting her nail to her knuckles. “It’s just… it’s kind of important and I don’t know if I can-”

“Woah, woah, woah, okay,” he replies. “Hey, my mom’s giving me a ride. I’ll be ten minutes, tops. Okay?”

“Okay,” she nods. “Thanks.” She’s not even sure if he heard that last word.

He’s seven minutes actually. Seven minutes between her hanging up the phone and the front door opening, her mom letting him in and telling him she’s up in her room. Every step closer only makes her stomach hurt worse and she prays she’s not headed for a panic attack.

“Hey.” His voice is gentle as he opens the door, stepping into her room cautiously, like she’s in the middle of a minefield. He must have picked up on the tension in her house; rather than draping himself across her bed or sitting on her desk, he lowers himself gently beside her, offering her a comforting smile. The same kind he gave her years ago when she was crying in a bathroom stall. God, she loves him. “Everything okay? You sounded nervous on the phone.”

“Because I was,” she confesses. Her hand wraps around Damian’s, him squeezing tightly, but she doesn’t feel the usual strength she gets from him. There’s just a cold, heavy weight in her stomach. “Oh God.”

“Hey, hey, hey,” he says softly, rubbing his hand up and down her arm, confusion and compassion in his eyes. “It’s okay. Whatever it is, it’s okay.”

“It’s not,” she tells him. Her chest feels like someone is tying a rope around her lungs. The words battle from her mind to her mouth, weary and unwilling. “It’s about my… that doctor’s appointment I had. We found out-”

This is it. The point of no return. No pretending or faking or daydreaming after this.

“Damian… I have cancer.”

Damian shakes his head a little, disbelief written all over his face. He keeps his eyes on her, waiting for her to laugh and tell him she’s kidding, almost willing it so. She wishes. Soon the doubt and hope melt away, his eyes turning sad and his mouth falling open, a small, strangled noise coming out as he realises she’s not kidding. As for her guilt tears her chest open and her face crumples. She begins to untangle herself from him, but he refuses, his arm in a firm grip around her shoulders. Maybe he wants to hold her or maybe he just can’t move, paralysed by what she dropped on him. The longer he goes without talking, the more it hurts her.

“What?” he asks eventually. “You… what?”

“Leukaemia,” she tells him as if that makes it better. He blinks, looking around the room like he’s searching for another answer.

“You have cancer?” he asks. She nods, exhausted from the two sentences she spoke, and he pulls her closer, her head falling onto his shoulder. Tears that aren’t hers fall onto her body and her own wet his shirt. His arms are weak around her as he tries to make sense of it. “How?”

“I don’t know how. It just happened,” she mumbles. “Karma, maybe. I don’t know.”

“Okay then let me talk to Miss Karma because this is… fu-this isn’t…”

“Go on. Say it,” she urges, a grin beginning to tug on her lips. “Just for me.” Maybe this will be the day Damian Hubbard finally says fuck.

“It’s fiddlesticks is what it is.” She laughs and it feels unfamiliar. He pets her hair in a steady rhythm, strength coming back into his body. “So what do you do now? Do you know? What even happens?”

“Okay.” She pulls away from him, seeing for the first time how red his eyes are. “I start… I start getting treatment next Monday.”

“Next Monday?” he interrupts. “But you can’t, we have school. We start school in two days!”

“Yeah I don’t think the cancer gives a shit,” she sighs heavily. “I’m just going to do senior year next year.”

“No,” he whispers, his face nothing short of heartbroken. Part of her is actually kind of weirdly flattered that someone cares so much. Most of her just feels worse every second for doing this to him. “But… we were going to… What about the LGBT society? I’m going to have to run it by myself?” He rakes a hand through his hair and looks over at her. His mouth falls open and his hand drops to his lap. “Oh God I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry?”

“For making this about me,” he says. “This is about you.”

“Oh please, the other half of your soul has cancer, you can be a little self-centred,” she says.

“Who said you’re the other half of my soul?” he jokes.

“You did.” She lifts the half-heart around her neck, the twin to the one around his. He smiles sadly, his eyes glistening. She tosses her hair over her shoulder, holding on to the only trace of familiarity. “Besides, the club will survive without me. You can always get Cady to do it. I’m sure she’d love something for her college application.”

“Oh my God, Cady,” he says.

Why did she bring up Cady? she thinks as another wave of sadness crashes over and drowns her.

“Have you told her?” She shakes her head, swallowing the lump in her throat.

“How could I?” she says. “You’re… you’re one thing. Cady’s another.” She leans her head on his shoulder, closing her eyes. “I don’t know how to do that to her.” Damian hums in understanding. He doesn’t need to ask what she means. He saw her at her absolute worst five years ago, at her most scared and angry and broken. He’s seen everything there is to her and it hasn’t pushed him away. Cady thinks she’s seen the bad, but that’s just scratching the surface. While she heard how it was back then, Damian lived and breathed it.

What she has with Cady is perfect, far too perfect to be scarred by something like this.

“You know… I could tell her for you,” he offers. “If it’s too much for you.”

“No,” she cuts him off, opening her eyes. “I can’t make you do that.”

“You’re not making me do anything,” he tells her. She nods, but the conversation ends there. Of course he’d do that for her. He’s the most loyal person she’s ever met, worthy of the Hufflepuff badge on his backpack. He’d move Heaven and Earth for the people he loves, especially in their hour of need. Or months of need, she guesses is her case now. He deserves endless happiness and love and joy, and an amazing senior year.

Seconds pass in silence before she croaks out “I’m sorry”.

“Did you just apologise for having cancer?” he asks. He shifts and tilts her head to make her look at him, his hands cupping her face and his eyes severe. She’s never seen him like this before, completely serious, devoid of jokes or laughter, and it makes her nervous. “Janis Catherine Sarkisian, don’t you dare. Don’t you dare apologise for this. This isn’t because of you. This is because… I don’t know. But it’s not you.”

“Okay.” She covers his hands with hers, her breath catching. His thumbs wipe at her wet cheeks and she wonders what she did to deserve him. “Okay, I won’t.”

“Good.” His voice cracks and two tears race each other down his cheek landing in his lap. He takes a heavy, shaking breath before continuing. “You’re going to be okay. You’re going to be fine.”

“Of course you’d say that,” she mumbles, their clasped hands now sitting between them.

“You will be,” he says again, a fierce determination shining on his face. “Even if I have to go in there and physically fight that cancer myself.”

“You’d win,” she tells him, sniffling. They sit in the quiet, letting the weight of her news settle over both of them, a new and terrifying reality looming in front of them. Then she reaches out and pulls him into a hug; her arms wrapped around him, her head in the crook of his neck. As he hugs her back, she can feel the anxiety in his touch and how his touch is far more careful now. Like she’ll break if he holds her too much. But there’s also courage in there and above all, so much tenderness and it makes her heart grow and almost burst out of her stone cold chest.

“I love you,” she whispers against his shirt.

“I love you too,” he replies, ferocity in his voice, and Janis is struck by just how grateful she is that her best friend is Damian.

#mean girls broadway #mean girls fanfic #mean girls ff #janis sarkisian #damian hubbard #cadnis ff #do i have the right to tag as cadnis ff when cady isn't even in this chapter?#pls read my stuff thank u #fic: heart of stone

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sshbpodcast · 5 years ago

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Tales from the Holodeck: TNG Fanfic: Jake’s Story

A Star to Steer Her By is closing the book on Star Trek: The Next Generation with our much anticipated fanfic series “Tales from the Holodeck”! With our random draws for our special guest characters in hand, we’ve written new adventures for the crew of the Enterprise-D for you to enjoy! Listen to the whole episode here, or read on below for Jake’s story!

[images © Paramount/CBS]

“Thank Hugh”

By Jake

Random picks: Juliana Tainer, Hugh

Prologue

Captains Log, Stardate 48325.6. The Enterprise has entered drydock to undergo a routine refit. We have been joined by a contingent of former Borg Drones led by Hugh who will advise on upgrades to our defensive systems. The refit has afforded many of the crew some much-needed down time, while one member of the senior staff has disembarked to attend to a pressing matter of a personal nature.

“Thank you for coming on so quickly, I really didn’t know who else to contact.” Dr. Pran Tainer’s face was grave, perhaps apprehensive, and clearly expressing discomfort. The nuances of humanoid facial expressions remained elusive to Data, even after all his years in Starfleet. Dr. Tainer gestured down the hallway. “I’m hoping you may be able to answer some questions we have.”

“Certainly,” Data dutifully responded as the pair proceeded through the corridor.

“Tell me, Data: when did you become aware that your mother was an android?” Data paused in-stride. He had not expected this question. The message he had received only indicated that Juliana Tainer was ill, but did not suggest that her true nature as a Soong-type android had been revealed. He pondered the question.

“Juliana was injured in a fall during our mission here last year. It was at that time that I learned.”

Dr. Tainer’s expression had changed, and this time there was no ambiguity; he was angry. “And you didn’t feel it was necessary to inform her husband of this fact?” Data thought for a moment. The decision to keep his mother’s nature a secret from her and Dr. Tainer was done thoughtfully, and at the time had seemed to be in the best interest of everyone involved. Perhaps, Data considered, that was a miscalculation. Before he could conjure a response, Dr. Tainer continued, “It’s no matter. The secret’s out now.” The doctor proceeded along the hallway, and Data followed, “It’s a shame. If we’d known sooner, it’s possible we may have been able to do more for her. And now...”

Data interjectected, “Sir, could you tell me what has happened?”

“See for yourself.” Dr. Tainer stopped and pressed a keypad on the wall, opening a door. Beyond was a small, well-lit room. Modestly furnished with a bed, a small dresser and vanity, and a chair in which sat Juliana Tainer. As Data stepped in he noticed that she seemed to be staring vacantly, her shoulders slumped, her jaw slack.

“Has she been deactivated?” Data asked.

“The doctors didn’t know what to do. She was confused and erratic. At first I feared it was some form of dementia, but when they attempted to perform a neurological scan they discovered… what she was. It was then that she just... turned off.”

“She is programmed to shut down if she discovers that she is an android.” Commander Data leaned closer to examine his mother. “She appears undamaged. Curious what could have triggered the failsafe subroutine.”

“Curious indeed,” grumbled Dr. Tainer. The Atrean let out a deep sigh. “Look commander, whether she’s an android or not, she’s still my wife. If there’s anyone who could do something for her, it would be you.”

“I will try, Doctor.” Data reached his arm around to the back of his mother’s neck. In an instant, she awoke. At first she appeared frightened and confused, her eyes scanning the room wildly, but when her gaze met Data’s she calmed immediately and a smile crept across her lips. “Data,” she said, warmly.

Data turned the corners of his mouth up by eleven degrees, an angle he had determined would suggest a calm and loving recognition. “It is good to see you, Mother.”

“Did you send a message that you were coming? If I’d known you were visiting I would have-”

Dr. Tainer excitedly stepped forward, shoving past Data, “Juliana! You’re awake!”

“Pran, what’s going on? Going on?” Suddenly, her neck twisted rapidly to the left. “Going on. Going On. On.” She jerked her neck several more times, then froze.

“What happened?” the mortified Dr. Tainer asked.

Data had observed similar behavior once before in a Soong-type android. “Her failsafe engaged again. Doctor Tainer, I am afraid the facilities on Atrea will be insufficient to diagnose the cause of the malfunction.”

“Malfunction…” muttered Dr. Tainer.

“I must return with Juliana to my laboratory on the Enterprise.”

A sullen disposition overcame Pran Tainer. “Of course… Data… I know you’ll do everything possible for her.”

Data nodded.

Scene 1

“Impossible!” scoffed Lieutenant Worf.

The Borg opposite him replied dryly, “I assure you, Mister Worf, with these modifications, explosive yield will be considerably increased. Our estimates suggest that an improvement of up to twenty-three per cent is possible.”

“Your estimates…” Worf muttered, dismissively.

“Worf, just let him try it,” Geordi La Forge pleaded, “What’s the worst that can happen?”

“Commander, when we agreed to allow these… Borg… access to our tactical systems, it was with the understanding that they would serve an advisory role-”

“And they will,” Commander La Forge had learned that a gentle reassurance tended to work best when dealing with an angry Klingon. “The Captain has ordered that any modifications recommended by the former Borg will be thoroughly reviewed by the senior staff before being implemented.”

Worf grunted in what could only be an acknowledgement and walked away. Hugh watched him as he left engineering. “Geordi, I believe the Lieutenant is angry with me.”

“It’s nothing personal, Hugh. Worf is just a little… uneasy with anyone going near the tactical systems. But he’ll come around. He just needs to learn to trust you as I have. Now, let’s see what we can do with the rotating shield-”

“Bridge to La Forge,” the voice of Commander Riker cut in.

Geordi pressed his comm badge, “Go ahead, Commander.”

“We just received word that Data’s shuttle will be arriving momentarily and he’s requested that you meet him in his lab.”

“Acknowledged.” Geordi tapped his badge again to end the call. “Hugh, the shield modifications can wait.”

Scene 2

There was no doubting what had caused the malfunction. Data had seen it before. The positronic brain is a remarkable feat of engineering, but ever so complex, and ever so fragile. It only takes one pathway among billions to destabilize, and by then it is too late. Surrounding pathways attempt to compensate, and become unstable themselves. The failures spread across the neural network like a fire consuming a forest.

It was only her failsafe program which managed to stave off the inevitable, but once reactivated the cascade would continue at an ever-accelerating rate. Data couldn’t be sure how long she would survive, let alone be lucid.

“I’m sorry, Data,” Geordi lamented, reading the scans, “These are practically identical to the readings we got from Lal.”

“I am aware, Geordi. Were it not for her failsafe program, I believe her neural net would have already experienced total failure.” Geordi was certain he could hear a twinge of sadness in the android’s voice. “I would like you to help me establish a neural link so that I can transfer her memory engrams to mine.”

“Of course, Data. Would you like to activate her one last time? To say goodbye?”

Data considered it for a moment. He had observed in humanoid cultures the practice of “saying goodbye” to a loved-one. He, himself, had once reactivated his daughter Lal for the purpose, but Lal had known that she was an android... “If I reactivate her now, in this environment, she may realize that she is an android. It had been my Father’s wish that she be able ‘live out her days’ without knowing of her true nature.”

Geordi hadn’t considered that, “What if we took her somewhere else? We could configure the holodeck to resemble her home on Atrea.”

The thought had not occurred to Data, but the idea seemed to trigger an unusual response in Data’s subconscious programming. “That may be acceptable.”

Scene 3

The program was a near-perfect recreation of an Atrean villa. The sun shone brightly through twin skylights illuminating a rustic sitting room. Juliana Tainer lay on a lavish day-bed, with her only surviving son seated beside her in a modest wooden chair. Data reached over and depressed her activation switch. Her eyes opened, peacefully.

Scanning the room briefly, her eyes connected with Data’s. Her lips formed a smile, as they had in the hospital on Atrea.

“Noonien, “ she said, calmly.

“No, mother, I am Data.”

“Of course, son. I just had a wonderful dream that we were all back on Omicron, and you and your brother were- Oh, look at me, going on about dreams. Why are you here, on Atrea?”

“Doctor Tainer contacted me.”

“Pran contacted you? Whatever for?”

“He told me that you were feeling unwell.” Data hadn’t considered how this conversation would go.

“Oh, that’s nonsense,” Juliana let out a slight chuckle, “Pran worries about me too much. I’m fine. Tell me about you. What adventures have you been on since I last saw you?”

“Mother, I am afraid I do have much time.” Data again experienced an unusual response, he made a note to conduct a level two diagnostic of his physio-response subroutines.

“Why, where do you have to be? To be?” As it had in the hospital, her head darted swiftly to the left, then the right. “You must help him, Data. Help him, Data.” Her speech took on an unnatural cadence, no longer the comforting tone Data was accustomed to. He wondered if reactivating her had been a mistake. Juliana appeared confused and frightened.

“Help him, Data,” she repeated.

“Help whom?” Data asked, unsure if she was lucid enough to know.

“Help, Noonien.” Data thought for a moment. Perhaps in her delirium she saw him as his father. “You must help. before it’s too late. Too late.”

“Mother, Doctor Soong is not here. I am Data.” She reached up and grasped Data’s arm, squeezing it tightly. Tighter than her programming should have allowed. She locked eyes with him. Her grasp continued to tighten. Data could detect stress vibrations in the servos in her fingers, and was concerned that they would be damaged if she continued. With his free hand, he reached behind her neck and depressed the switch to deactivate her, but her grasp persisted. The cascade had progressed faster than he expected. He pressed his Comm Badge.

“Data to transporter room three. Emergency site-to-site transport.”

Scene 4

Hugh stood in the back of the lab as Geordi and Data worked feverishly to set up the neural link. It had been in this room that the Borg first awoke, where he received his real name, and where he made his first friends. In many ways, Hugh mused, this was the room in which he became who he was. As he gazed at the panicked expression on the woman’s face, he recalled his own anxiety and confusion during those fledgling moments of individuality.

“Data, the pathways are collapsing too quickly,” Geordi’s voice was somehow both calming and apprehensive, “I can’t activate new connections fast enough.”

“Attempting to compensate.” Data’s eyes darted back and forth as he raced to establish the neural link. The lights in the optical cable strung between the androids blinked ever faster as each new connection caused another to fail. While Data appeared focused, the look on Geordi’s face betrayed the severity of the situation.

Hugh stepped closer, “Geordi.”

“Not now, Hugh,” Geordi snapped. Hugh hadn’t expected the reaction, but he persisted.

“Geordi. I can help.”

Geordi paused for a moment and looked at Hugh. Realizing Geordi was no longer manipulating the connections, Data glanced in his direction, “Commander?”

“Wait, Data.” Geordi set down his opto-coupler and stepped back from Juliana, “I think he may be able to help. I trust him.”

Data removed the neural link cable as the Borg approached Juliana. Hugh raised his augmented arm up towards her chin. For a moment he locked eyes with the ailing woman, and he could sense fear from her. It was a fear he was all too familiar with, a fear he had seen hundreds of millions of times in the collective, a fear he had hoped to never see again.

Two tubes emerged from Hugh’s wrist and contacted Juliana’s neck. Reacting as if by instinct, Data reached over and pulled the Borg away, but it was too late. Juliana’s eyes shut, and her shoulders slumped. Confused, Hugh stared at Data, unsure what he had done wrong. For a moment, all was still.

Suddenly, one of the panels began to chirp, and new data began to roll across the screen. Geordi looked at it, “Hang on Data, something’s happening.”

Data released Hugh and went to the panel. “The neural pathways are reestablishing on their own. It appears as though the Borg nanoprobes are repairing the damaged positronic connections.”

“Data?” The voice was that of Juliana Tainer.

“Mother.” Data was yet again unable to identify the errant sensation.

“Data. I know... what I am. What your father did for me. What you did for me.” She turned to face Hugh, “And also what you did for me...”

“I am Hugh. Data is my friend.”

Epilogue

Captains log, supplemental. The Borg tactical upgrades have been completed. Hugh and the other Borg have disembarked for their home colony. Data informs me that his mother is expected to make a complete recovery, and will experience no negative effects from the Borg Nanoprobes.

Data glanced up from his canvas and observed his mother. Her hand manipulated the brush rapidly, no longer encumbered by the restrictive programming his father had placed on her to appear more human. “May I see, mother?”

“Not just yet, Data. I’m nearly done.” Juliana went again to her palette, and briskly mixed a muddy gray color. Data considered his own painting, a landscape in the style of the second Bolian renaissance painter, Di’Rak. He was planning to present the painting to the Enterprise's barber at his birthday celebration next week, but felt there was still some work to be done on the shading.

“Ok, come have a look,” Juliana announced, smiling. Data rose and stood behind his mother. The painting was quite good, Data thought, if perhaps a bit lacking in technique. “It’s a family portrait.”

Depicted was a woman resembling Juliana Tainer; an older gentleman Data recognized as Noonien Soong; two twin androids, arms over each other’s shoulders, one devilishly grinning, and the other tussling the hair of the figure beside him: a pale young boy, dressed in all black, smiling up at his big brother.

Again Data observed an anomalous sensation. He made a note to upgrade that diagnostic to level one.

—

We’re moving on to new Star Trek and Star Trek–related series we’re sure you’ll enjoy, so be sure to keep listening on SoundCloud, follow us on Facebook and Twitter, and upgrade your diagnostics to level one.

#star trek #Star Trek TNG #fanfic #Star Trek Fanfiction #juliana tainer #hugh #borg #android #data #la forge

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theliterateape · 5 years ago

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Hope Idiotic | Part VII

By David Himmel

Hope Idiotic is a serialized novel. Catch each new part every week on Monday and Thursday.

BY MID-NOVEMBER, LOU HAD BEEN LIVING WITH MICHELLE FOR TWO MONTHS. She provided half of the dresser for him and cleared out space in the bathroom cabinets and her closets for him in an effort to make her place his place, too. But she refused to let him hang any photos of his friends or family. And there was no way he was putting his film trophy on display anywhere.

“It’s tacky,” she told him.

“I’m proud of it.”

“You won that years ago. In college. Why does it matter now?”

“Because, it is a big part of my creative career. The first real acknowledgement I received. It reminds me that I’m capable of succeeding.”

“It’s not like it’s an Oscar, Lou.”

“Would you let me display an Oscar?”

“Win an Oscar. You can carry it around your neck for all I care.”

Her case: She spent a lot of time and money making her home nice and mature and professional-looking. A trophy from a university film department contest would only cramp her style. It should have been enough that she made room for his stuff in her closet. “I had to give away a lot of shoes,” she reminded him.

“You didn’t even wear half of those shoes,” he said.

“If you absolutely have to have photos of your friends and family in the apartment, you can put them on your nightstand on your side of the bed.”

“But this is our place, right? You have photos of friends and family everywhere.”

“My family doesn’t live in the city. I never see them.”

This was bullshit. She saw her parents about every two months whether she was visiting them in Las Vegas or if they were visiting her in Chicago or if there was a vacation somewhere else they’d take together. And those friends in the photographs? They all lived blocks away from the apartment. Fact was, she saw her parents and friends far more than he saw his. Michelle said she wanted Lou to call the apartment home, but it seemed she didn’t really want him to move into it.

His father once told him about a girl he dated in high school who lived in a high-rise. “I broke up with her after the first date,” he said. “I didn’t like her enough to wait around for the elevators only to have to make nice with the other tenants.” Lou loved that story, and after living in a high-rise for two months, he had even more of an appreciation for it.

What he couldn’t move into, he began to feel trapped in. They lived on the twenty-ninth floor, so he had to wait for an elevator every time he wanted to go anywhere. If he was in a hurry to get back to the apartment to, say, go to the bathroom, he had to wait for an elevator to take him up. To run a load of laundry, he had to wait for an elevator to take him down to the basement’s laundry room. When he needed to drop a portfolio in the mailbox in the lobby of the building, or pick up a frozen pizza and a pack of gum from the store, he had to budget fifteen minutes to do so, just in case the elevators were moving slowly that day. What were once quick, thoughtless, chores back in Vegas had become time-consuming errands in Chicago.

It was not only a hassle getting out of and into the apartment, but not having a job to go to each day presented a certain kind of claustrophobia for him. The apartment was a perfectly good size for a one-bedroom in the city, and it never felt that he and Michelle were living on top of each other. But where there was a specific bedroom and kitchen, the living room, dining room and office were all one large space. It’s called an open-floor plan, and it was suffocating.

He was home all day scouring the web for jobs, calling businesses, opening a LinkedIn account and joining groups, learning about networking opportunities, perfecting and re-perfecting his résumé and cover letters, all from Michelle’s tiny IKEA desk shoved in the corner of the main room. When he wasn’t staring at the computer screen, he was looking through the large windows at the panoramic view of the city and he swore it was mocking him. Like it was saying, “Here I am, Lou! I’m right here! Come and get me; make me yours! Hurry, you don’t want to miss the elevator!”

The city, and all it offered was out of his reach. By two o’clock every afternoon, he was so emotionally drained and physically exhausted from sitting on his ass, that his six o’clock scotch routine was bumped up four hours.

✶

CHUCK’S MOTHER HAD BEEN IN AND OUT OF THE HOSPITAL FIVE TIMES FOR THREE HEART ATTACKS since the first one back in June. He was sending nearly every cent he had back home to cover the cost of the rapidly growing medical bills and hardly making a dent. As a result, he was falling far behind on his own bills. Lexi was barely keeping both of them afloat.

When Chuck’s mom went in to the hospital the fifth time, he thought it best to fly out there. On his way back to Vegas, he stopped in Chicago to see Lou. He was going to stay at Lou and Michelle’s place, but realizing Chuck’s one night in town would likely result in drunken and horrific behavior, Michelle politely suggested they both get a hotel.

“That’s fine,” Chuck said. “Since neither of us has any money.”

“And she wants me to start paying half of the rent,” said Lou. “That’s about nine hundred bucks a month. I’ve been in Chicago for almost six months and haven’t even made a total of nine hundred bucks. And she wants me to pay that every thirty days?”

“It’s not right. Because it’s not that she needs help making rent. She’s pulling in four hundred grand a year, right?”

“One seventy-five. Which is plenty. And I’ve saved her money on housecleaning. She used to pay a service. Seventy-five dollars every two weeks. I clean the house better than they did, and I do it every week, plus I do the laundry. And I cook. Dinner is always ready for her when she gets home from work. I’m pulling my weight the best I can.”

“You’re the perfect 1950s housewife she always wanted,” Chuck said. “You’d think that would be enough.”

Michelle told Lou she wanted to at least have dinner with the boys since it would be her one chance to see Chuck while he was in town for the night. She was sweet and asked about his mother and the rest of his family. She pressed him about his plans to marry Lexi, which made the boys uncomfortable because they knew that he not only wasn’t making plans to marry her, but he was mostly fucking someone else — and possibly falling in love with that someone. Michelle, however, had no idea about Gina and there was no way Lou was ever going to say anything about her as long as Chuck was still living with Lexi.

He was a cheating, conniving bastard, yes. Lou knew that. And he told Chuck so several times. But Lou also understood the reasons for the attraction and the reason he had to sneak around. Without Lexi, Chuck had no money, and with all he had on his plate, not having his sugar mama would be a disaster.

There was also the fact that despite the cheating and lying, he loved Lexi. She wasn’t perfect, but who was? So she bored him sometimes; who doesn’t get bored with the woman they love? They hadn’t had sex in ages, so what? People go through slumps. It was complicated because matters of the head and heart so often are. But it was wrong to lie to the person he was in a recognized relationship with. And that’s all Michelle would see, the black-and-white physical truth, not the grey emotional truth. So, it was best to just not bring it up.

He ran toward and lunged at Chuck, and they began fighting each other.

Michelle even paid for their dinner. “You’re both having a hard time right now; let me get this,” she said yanking the black checkbook away from Chuck.

“You want to pay for our hotel, too?” Chuck said.

“Sorry, boys. You’re on your own with that one.”

Following dinner, the drinks came fast and hard. It had been more than five months since they saw each other, but they spoke on the phone and emailed each other nearly every day so there was no reason to sit someplace quiet and catch up. What they missed was the rowdiness. Since they ate dinner downtown, Lou suggested they go to “that wretched Viagra Triangle. It’s full of tourists, rich women, creepy old perverts and over-privileged go-hards.”

When Chuck and Lou committed to a binge, they did so with every good therapeutic intention in mind. Some people relieve stress and manage problems by jogging or going to the gym or seeing a shrink. Chuck and Lou were each other’s shrinks, and their exercise routine consisted of filling their guts full of booze so that their blood thinned out and they could flush out their brains with a simple blackout. There was often a consequence or two to deal with when they came to, but it was always worth it.

At a karaoke bar where the drinks were overpriced and the floor was dramatically sticky, Chuck nearly had his head beaten in by three big frat-types, probably day traders, after invading their performance of “Don’t Stop Believing.” After being thrown out of the karaoke bar, Lou stumbled into an alley around the corner to puke up his dinner and about fifty bucks worth of beer. Chuck took pictures of it.

“You like that?” Lou yelled at him. “There’s plenty more where that came from.”

Then he ran toward and lunged at Chuck, and they began fighting each other. Lou was half the size of Chuck. Where Lou was a star cross-country runner in high school, Chuck was all-state in football. Whenever these playful fights broke out, Chuck was always the victor. But Lou was scrappy, and their antics made messes.

Out of the alley, Chuck stumbled backward, falling over a young couple sitting on the curb, sick from too much of something. The boys apologized as Chuck threw a few dollar bills at them. “Get a cab home,” he said.

Lou lunged again. Chuck caught him and rotated his body, using Lou’s momentum to throw him into the middle of the street. A black Lincoln town car almost ran him over. It blared its horn. Lou imitated the sound back to the car at the top of his lungs.

Chuck came at him. Lou tried to escape to the other side of the sidewalk, but Chuck grabbed hold of his jacket. Lou spun around and slapped Chuck across the face. Holding onto Lou’s jacket collar, Chuck shoved Lou backward to the corner of the next block. Just as he was about to throw his skinny friend into a collection of street corner newspaper dispensers, Lou tripped him and twisted his body, causing the bigger, heavier Chuck to fall into the dispensers, with Lou landing on top of him.

Metal newspaper stands clanged loudly against the street pavement. One of them broke open, and copies of the Inquisitor spilled into the intersection. Chuck pushed Lou off of him, and when they were both balanced on their feet again, Chuck charged, which pushed Lou back into a trash can, knocking it over, as well.

By this time, a crowd had gathered to witness the street fight between the two maniacs who were laughing their drunken heads off. Chuck’s leather jacket was ripped. Lou’s hand and forehead were bleeding. Someone called the cops.

If the police really wanted to capture half-aware drunks like those two, it would have served them best to not hit their sirens as they approached. Chuck and Lou trained themselves over the years to spring into action at the first sound and sight of an officer of the law. Chuck quickly grabbed Lou’s hand and yanked him up off of the ground, and they took off down Dearborn Street, where they successful evaded the cops in the Gold Coast neighborhood.

✶

THEY WOKE UP ON THE FLOOR OF THEIR ROOM IN THE CONGRESS HOTEL. The room was trashed, Chuck’s jacket was ruined and Lou had to think of a way to explain the cuts on his hand and forehead to Michelle. Getting into a street brawl with his best friend wouldn’t resonate well with her. They had to pull themselves together quickly. Chuck had a flight to make.

“We are fucking idiots,” Lou said.

As they hustled out of the hotel and to the Orange Line El train that would take him directly to Midway Airport, Chuck reminisced, “Remember when we used to have no responsibility for anything?”

“We always had responsibility. We’ve always just been good at keeping our circus act from burning the whole town down.”

“But all of this accountability to people now. My family. Lexi. Michelle.”

“We’d be more fucked without it.”

“I suppose.”

“Anchors to our drifting ships.”

Lou saw Chuck onto the train. They hugged and laughed at each other in a way that they both understood what the other was thinking; that they were going to be okay. That somehow they would figure it out, but that yes, they were complete and total fucking idiots.

✶

LEXI WASN’T AT THE AIRPORT TO PICK UP CHUCK AS PLANNED. He called her, but she didn’t answer. He waited there an hour and called her a dozen times leaving just as many messages. Nothing. He caught a cab. The fare emptied out his wallet. When he walked through the door, Lexi was lounging on the couch watching TV. Her phone was next to her, the voicemail indicator light blinking. He set his bag down.

She turned off the television, sat up and said, “We need to talk.”

Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V Part VI

#Fiction #David Himmel Author #David Himmel Fiction #Chicago Fiction #Humor #David Himmel Novel

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kansascityhappenings · 6 years ago

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Backward leg allows young cancer survivor to dance

Delaney Unger’s ankle, turned 180 degrees, functions as her new knee. (Photo courtesy Melanie Unger/Stony Brook Children’s Hospital)

It was a cold morning in early December 2016 when Melissa Unger received a phone call at work that changed her family’s life forever.

She heard a physician on the other end say “the words that no parent ever wants to hear, that your child has a mass on her femur and you have an appointment that afternoon with a pediatric oncologist,” Unger said.

For the Ungers and their 12-year-old daughter, Delaney, a dedicated dancer since the age of 3, the news was devastating. Delaney had a rare and aggressive bone cancer called osteosarcoma of the knee, which would require chemotherapy and amputation of her left knee.

Her future as a dancer seemed over.

But this brave girl took an unusual course. Today, Delaney appears to show no signs of cancer. She keeps a contagious smile on her face and even has resumed her training as a lyrical, hip-hop and jazz dancer — despite having a left leg that now faces backward.

A ray of hope

Osteosarcoma affects fewer than 1,000 people a year in the United States, and about half are children and teens, according to the American Cancer Society.

The cancer can grow anywhere but normally attacks a child’s rapidly growing knee, said Dr. Fazel Khan, an orthopedic surgeon at Stony Brook Medicine in New York who treated Delaney.

More than 90% of patients, Khan said, get a massive artificial knee replacement, which in a growing child is unstable and limits the ability to do any intensive activity such as dance or sports.

Yet because of the location of Delaney’s cancer, the Ungers had another option: a rare procedure called a rotationplasty.

“Her cancer really was in the knee and nowhere below the knee,” Khan explained. “Her ankle, her foot, the bottom part of her calf, all of those muscles, nerves and even the ankle joint were fully intact.”

Instead of an above-the-knee amputation, Khan said, they would cut below the knee, and “rather than throw out the good ankle, leg, foot and some of the muscles in the bottom part of the calf, we actually take the ankle, the calf, the foot, and we use that to make a new knee.”

In other words, the ankle, turned 180 degrees, functions as the new knee. Her ankle sits in the location of where her knee would be, since her lower leg was reattached to her thighbone.

Doctors say they keep the foot because the toes provide important sensory feedback to the brain.

Delaney’s father, Noah Unger, said he was told that by having a natural joint at the knee, instead of a prosthetic joint, Delaney would be able to do “the leaps, the jumps, the hops” that dancing requires.

“So that’s the reason for the rotation,” he explained. “You’re using a natural joint in the direction it’s supposed to go.”

Delaney would then have an entire foot where her old knee had been, pointing backward. A lower-leg prosthesis would fit over the backward foot, giving her an artificial leg and foot.

‘A chance to try and fail’

The family knew that it would be a startling sight, a foot facing the opposite way. Mom Melissa was apprehensive. After all, Delaney, who lives in Selden, New York, would soon be a teenager, going to parties, meeting people who would not know her story.

They debated the options in a family huddle, Noah said, until Delaney spoke up.

“She looked at Melissa and said, ‘I would rather have a chance to try and fail then not have a chance at all,’ ” Noah remembered. “And this surgery was the only chance she had at ever doing what she wanted to do.”

The 13-hour surgery occurred at Stony Brook Children’s Hospital in New York in April 2017, followed by chemotherapy and a prosthetic below her new knee — which the family has affectionately dubbed the “knankle.”

Recovery was tough. “She had to learn to flex and things like that in the opposite way … so there definitely is a learning curve,” Melissa said.

“You really have to rewire your brain,” Noah said.

But Delaney had a goal: to resume dancing and try out for the school kickline team, something she always wanted to do.

“I wanted to be normal again,” she said. “I wanted to make sure I could do most of the stuff that all my friends were doing and I could keep up with them.”

An unforgettable moment

For Khan and Dr. Jason Ganz, another surgeon on the 13-hour operation, Delaney’s spirit has been inspiring.

“I’ve never met someone that had such a clear vision of what she needed,” Ganz said, adding that Delaney had a smile on her face constantly.

“Every time she was in the hospital, every time I’d see her, she had that same grin, which is incredible.”

Delaney’s positive attitude was an important part of her journey, they said, and has contributed to her rapid recovery.

“She is blowing us all away with how fast she is progressing with dance and walking,” Khan said. “We have videos of her walking, and when she has pants on, it’s almost impossible to tell that she had any surgery to begin with.”

When the doctors first saw videos of Delaney in recovery and later dancing, they say, they both choked up.

“Literally, there were tears in both of our eyes,” Khan said. “I’m so happy to see her free from her cancer, so happy to see her actually get back to the thing that she wanted to do.”

Ganz added, “I have a daughter her age. It was definitely a moment that will make my life highlight reel: seeing her walking, seeing her smiling, seeing her dancing. That was just incredible. I’ll never forget that.”

This weekend, Delaney and her family are planning to travel to Washington for a childhood cancer rally called CureFest. There, she will be advocating for childhood cancer research funding and performing a dance routine on stage.

As for the future, “she has her whole life ahead of her,” Melissa said. “We wanted to give her the best chance of being able to do as many things as she would want to do and not be limited. We definitely feel like we made a good decision.”

Although the doctors say they were able to remove all the cancer, about a third of osteosarcoma patients are expected to relapse, so Delaney will need monitoring for the rest of her life.

What would Delaney say to other children who might be in her situation?

“What I would say to another teenager who has cancer is to keep your personality,” she said. “When I heard I had cancer, I said ‘I want to be an inspiration and I just kept smiling and doing what I always did.’

“Don’t say ‘I can’t.’ Just try it, and if you can’t do it then, that’s fine, but if you never actually tried it, you should. It’s like just a little stop in the road, but then you got to just keep going.”

from FOX 4 Kansas City WDAF-TV | News, Weather, Sports https://fox4kc.com/2018/09/10/backward-leg-allows-young-cancer-survivor-to-dance/

from Kansas City Happenings https://kansascityhappenings.wordpress.com/2018/09/10/backward-leg-allows-young-cancer-survivor-to-dance/

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ethelbertpaul444-blog · 6 years ago

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The Untold Story of Robert Mueller’s Time in Combat

One day in the summer of 1969, a young Marine lieutenant listed Bob Mueller arrived in Hawaii for a rendezvous with his wife, Ann. She was hovering in from the Eastern coast with the couple’s babe daughter, Cynthia, a child Mueller had never fulfilled. Mueller had made a plane from Vietnam. After nine months at war, he was finally due for a few short daylights of R& R outside the battle zone. Mueller had seen intense action since he last replied goodbye to his wife. He’d received the Bronze Star with a distinction for spirit for his actions in one combat, and he’d been airlifted out of the jungle during another firefight after being killed in the thigh. He and Ann had told only twice since he’d left for South Vietnam. Despite all that, Mueller admitted to her in Hawaii that he was thinking of increasing his deployment for another six months, and maybe even making a career in the Marines. Ann was understandably ill at ease about the prospect. But as it turned out, she wouldn’t has become a Marine wife for much longer. It was standard practice for Marines to be rotated out of duel, and later that time Mueller determined himself to be given to a table undertaking at Marine headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. There he discovered something about himself: “I didn’t relish the US Marine Corps absent combat.” So he headed to law institution with the goal of dishing his country as a prosecutor. He went on to hold high positions in five presidential administrations. He produced the Criminal Division of the Justice Department, overseeing the US investigation of the Lockerbie bombing and the federal prosecution of the Gambino crime family boss John Gotti. He became director of the FBI one week before September 11, 2001, and stayed on to become the bureau’s longest-serving administrator since J. Edgar Hoover. And yet, throughout his five-decade vocation, that time of duel experience with the Marines has tower huge in Mueller’s mind. “I’m most proud the Marines Corps deemed me are worth heading other Navals, ” he told me in a 2009 interview. June 2018. Subscribe to WIRED. Illustration by Jules Julien; Source Photo: Gerald Herbert/ AP Today, the face-off between Special Counsel Robert Mueller and President Donald Trump stands out, amid the pitch-black humor of Trump’s Washington, as an epic fiction of differing American nobilities: a fib of two men–born really two years apart, raised in similar affluent backgrounds in Northeastern cities, both deeply influenced by their leaders, both wizard prep school players, both Ivy League educated–who now find themselves frisking most varied roles in a riveting national theatre about political corrupt practices and Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The two men have lived their lives in pursuit of virtually diametrically opposed goals–Mueller a life of patrician public service, Trump a life of private profit. Those diverging routes beginning with Vietnam, the conflict that cried the country apart just as both men graduated from college in the 1960 s. Despite having been developed at an nobility private armed academy, Donald Trump famously attracted five sketch deferments, including information for bone stimulant in his paws. He would later joke, frequently, that his success at forestalling genital herpes while dating several women in the 1980 s was “my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier.” Mueller, for his part , is not simply volunteered for the Marines, he spent a year waiting for an injured knee to regenerate so he could act. And he has said little about his time in Vietnam over the years. When he was preceding the FBI through the disasters of 9/11 and its aftermath, he would brush off the crush stress, pronouncing, “I’m getting a lot more sleep now than I ever did in Vietnam.” One of the only other periods his staff at the FBI ever heard him mention his Marine service was on a flight residence from an official international junket. They were watching We Were Soldiers , a 2002 film starring Mel Gibson about some of the early clashes in Vietnam. Mueller gazed at the screen and saw, “Pretty accurate.” His reticence is not rare for the generation that served on the front line of a campaign that the two countries never actually embraced. Many of the veterans I spoke with for this story said they’d evaded speak about Vietnam until very recently. Joel Burgos, who served as a corporal with Mueller, told me at the end of our hour-long speech, “I’ve never told anyone most of this.” Yet for almost all of them–Mueller included–Vietnam observed the primary formative experience of their lives. Practically 50 year later, countless Marine ex-servicemen who served in Mueller’s unit have email addresses that reference their time in Southeast Asia: gunnysgt, 2-4marine, semperfi, PltCorpsman, Grunt. One Marine’s email handle even references Mutter’s Ridge, the area where Mueller firstly fronted large-scale combat in December 1968. The Marines and Vietnam instilled in Mueller a sense of restraint and a relentlessness that have driven him ever since. He once told me that one of the things the Marine taught him was to determine his plot every day. I’d written a work about his time at the FBI and was by then very well known his severe, straitlaced demeanor, so I giggled at the time and pronounced, “That’s the least surprising situation I’ve ever learned about you.” But Mueller persisted: It was an important small-time daily gesture epitomizing follow-through and hanging. “Once you think about it–do it, ” he told me. “I’ve ever became my bunk and I’ve ever scraped, even in Vietnam in the jungle. You’ve positioned money in the bank in terms of discipline.” Mueller’s onetime Princeton classmate and FBI chief of staff W. Lee Rawls withdrew how Mueller’s Marine leadership style carried through to the FBI, where he had little perseverance for subjects who interviewed his decisions. He expected his line-ups to be executed in the Hoover building just as they had been on the battleground. In finds with subjects, Mueller had a dres of quoting Gene Hackman’s gruff Navy submarine captain in the 1995 Cold War thriller Crimson Tide : “We’re now to perpetuate republic , not to practice it.” Related Stories Andy Greenberg The White House Warns on Russian Router Hacking, But Muddles the Message Garrett M. Graff A Guide to Russia’s High Tech Tool Box for Subverting US Democracy Garrett M. Graff Robert Mueller Likely Knows How This All Ends Discipline must really been a defining aspect of Mueller’s Russia investigation. In a government era of extreme TMI–marked by rampant White House seeps, Twitter outbursts, and an administration that disgorges jilted cabinet-level officials as rapidly as it can appoint new ones–the special counsel’s part has been a fastened entrance. Mueller has remained an serene cypher: the stoic, speechless representation at the centre of America’s government gyre. Not once has he expressed publicly about the Russia investigation since he took the job in May 2017, and his carefully picked squad of prosecutors and FBI negotiators has proved leakproof, even under the most intense of media spotlights. Mueller’s spokesperson, Peter Carr, on lend from the Justice Department, has generally had one thing to tell a media horde devouring for informed of the Russia investigation: “No comment.” If Mueller’s discipline is reflected in the silence of his team, his relentlessness has been abundantly evident in the gait of indictments, stoppages, and law tactics coming out of his office. His investigation is proceeding on several breasts. He is excavating into Russian report functionings carried out on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms. In February his office impeached 13 people and three entities connected to the Internet Research Agency, the Russian organization that allegedly masterminded awareness-raising campaigns. He’s too following those responsible for cyber interferences, includes the hacking of the email system at the Democratic National Committee. At the same time, Mueller’s researchers are probing the business dealings of Trump and his associates, great efforts that has furnished arraignments for tax fraud and plot against Trump’s former safarus chair, Paul Manafort, and a guilty plea on business fraud and lying to researchers by Manafort’s deputy, Rick Gates. The squad is also looking into the countless bilateral relations between Trump’s people and Kremlin-connected chassis. And Mueller is questioning evidences in an effort to establish whether Trump has inhibited justice by actually attempting to squelch the investigation itself. Almost each week wreaks a amaze developed as police investigations. But until the next accusation or seize, it’s difficult to say what Mueller knows, or what he thinks. Before he grew special admonish, Mueller freely and repeatedly told me that his attires of brain and person is very much influenced by his time in Vietnam, a interval “hes also” the least explored section of his biography. This first in-depth history of his time at war is based on several interviews with Mueller about his time in combat–conducted before he became special counsel–as well as hundreds of pages of once-classified Marine combat accounts, official notes of Marine involvements, and the first-ever interrogations with eight Navals who served alongside Mueller in 1968 and 1969. They cater the best new window we have into the mind of the man conducting the Russia investigation. Mueller volunteered for the Marine in 1966, right after move away from Princeton. By late 1968 he was a lieutenant passing a action squad in Vietnam. Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of National Archives Robert Swan Mueller III, the first of five children and the only son, grew up in a stately stone house in a wealthy Philadelphia suburb. His father was a DuPont executive who had commanded a Navy submarine-chaser in World War II; he expected his children to abide by a strict moral code. “A lie was the worst blasphemy, ” Mueller remarks. “The one thing you didn’t do was to give anything less than the truth to my mother and father.” He accompanied St. Paul’s prep school in Concord, New Hampshire, where the all-boys classifies accentuated Episcopal principles of modesty and manliness. He was a ace on the lacrosse force and played hockey with future US senator John Kerry on the school unit. For college he choice his father’s alma mater, Princeton, and entered the class of 1966. The expanding war in Vietnam was a frequent topic of discussion among the elite students, who spoke of the war–echoing earlier generations–in terms of duty and service. “Princeton from ’6 2 to ’6 6 was a completely different life than ’6 7 onwards, ” supposed Rawls, a lifelong friend of Mueller’s. “The anti-Vietnam push was not on us yet. A year or two subsequently, the campus was transformed.” On the lacrosse province, Mueller matched David Hackett, a classmate and jock who would profoundly affect Mueller’s life. Hackett had already enlisted in the Marines’ version of ROTC, expending his Princeton times training for the escalating campaign. “I had one of the finest role model I could have asked for in an upperclassman by the epithet of David Hackett, ” Mueller recalled in a 2013 pronunciation as FBI director. “David was on our 1965 lacrosse team. He was not undoubtedly the best on the team, but he was a identified and a natural leader.” After he graduated in 1965, Hackett embarked training to be a Marine, giving top reputations in his officer nominee class. After that he carried out to Vietnam. In Mueller’s seeings, Hackett was a shining example. Mueller “ve decided that” when he graduated the subsequent year, he too would recruit in the Marines. On April 30, 1967, shortly after Hackett had signed up for his second tour in Vietnam, his unit was ambushed by more than 75 camouflaged North Vietnamese armies “whos” burning down from bunkers with weapons that included a. 50 -caliber machine gun. According to a Marine history, “dozens of Marines were killed or wounded within minutes.” Hackett set the source of the incoming burn and charged 30 grounds across open soil to an American machine gun team to tell them where to shoot. Times later, as he was moving to facilitate direct a neighboring team whose captain had been wounded, he was killed by a sniper. Posthumously apportioned the Silver Star, Hackett’s commendation explained that he died “while pressing the abuse and encouraging his Marines.” By the time word of Hackett’s death filtered back to the US, Mueller was already making good on his pledge to follow him into military service. The information merely enhanced his resolve to become an infantry policeman. “One would have thought that the life of a Marine, and David’s death in Vietnam, would argue strongly against following in his footsteps, ” Mueller said in that 2013 speech. “But many of us attended in him the person or persons we wanted to be, even before his death. He was a lead and a role model on their areas of Princeton. He was a ruler and a role model on the fields of engagement as well. And a number of his pals and teammates joined the Marine Corps because of him, as did I.” In mid-1 966, Mueller underwent his armed physical at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard; this was before the preparation of the proposed programme gamble began and before Vietnam became a divisive cultural watershed. He echoes sitting in the waiting room as another nominee, a buckling 6-foot, 280 -pound lineman for the Philadelphia Eagles, was regulated 4-F–medically unfit for military service. After that this organization is Mueller’s turn to be rejected: His years of intense sportings, including hockey and lacrosse, had left him with an injured knee. The military announced that it had a duty to heal before he would be allowed to deploy. In the meantime, he married Ann Cabell Standish–a graduate of Miss Porter’s School and Sarah Lawrence–over Labor Day weekend 1966, and they moved to New York, where he gave a master’s degree in international relations at New York University. Once his knee had regenerated, Mueller went back to the military physicians. In 1967 — just before Donald Trump received his own medical deferment for heel spurs–Mueller started Officer Candidate School at Quantico, Virginia. For high school, Mueller attended St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. As a senior in 1962, Mueller (# 12) dallied on the hockey team with future US senator John Kerry (# 18 ). Dan Winters; Archival Photo by Rick Friedman/ Getty Images Like Hackett before him, Mueller was a star in his Officer Candidate School discipline class. “He was a cut above, ” recollects Phil Kellogg, who had followed one of his frat friends into the Navals after graduating from the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico. Kellogg, who went through schooling with Mueller, recollects Mueller scooting another campaigner on an obstacle course–and suffer. It’s the only period he can remember Mueller being bested. “He was a natural jock and natural student, ” Kellogg does. “I don’t think he had a hard date at OCS, to be honest.” There was, it turned out, exclusively one thing he was bad at–and it was a flunking that would become familiar to legions of his subordinates in the decades to succeed: He received a D in delegation. During the time Mueller spent in training, from November 1967 through July 1968, the context of the Vietnam War changed significantly. The vicious Tet Offensive–a series of arranged, widespread, surprise attack across South Vietnam by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese in January 1968 — stupefied America, and with public opinion souring on existing conflicts, Lyndon Johnson said he wouldn’t run for reelection. As Mueller’s improving class graduated, Walter Cronkite proclaimed on the CBS Evening News that the fighting could not be earned. “For it seems now more particular than ever, ” Cronkite told his billions of onlookers on February 27, 1968, “that the vicious ordeal of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.” The country seemed to be descending into chaos; as the spring unfolded, both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. Municipalities erupted in rampages. Antiwar dissents feelings. But the shifting tide of public opinion and civil unrest just registered with the patrolman campaigners in Mueller’s class. “I don’t retain anyone having anxieties about where we were or what we were doing, ” Kellogg says. That spring, as Donald J. Trump graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and began working for his father’s real estate company, Mueller finished up Officer Candidate School and received his next duty: He was to attend the US Army’s Ranger School. Arriving in Vietnam, Mueller was well trained, but he was also afraid. “You were scared to death of the unknown, ” he mentions. “More afraid in some ways of omission than death.” Mueller knew that simply the best young men went on to Ranger training, a strenuous eight-week advanced the competences and lead planned for the military’s society at Fort Benning, Georgia. He would be spend weeks practising patrol tactics, homicide goals, assault approaches, and attacks staged in submerges. But the aftermath of the duty were also sobering to the newly minted detective: Many Marines who progressed such courses were designated as “recon Marines” in Vietnam, a chore that are typically moved with a life expectancy measured in weeks. Mueller approvals the training he received at Ranger School for his existence in Vietnam. The coaches there had been through forest combat themselves, and their fibs from the front line schooled the candidates how to avoid several mistakes. Ranger trainees often had to function on time two hours of respite a nighttime and a single daily banquet. “Ranger School more than anything learns you about how you react with no sleep and nothing to gobble, ” Mueller told me. “You hear who you require on spot, and who you don’t want anywhere near point.” After Ranger School, he also accompanied Airborne School, aka jumping clas, where he learned to be a parachutist. By the autumn of 1968, he was on his action to Asia. He boarded a flight from Travis Air Force Base in California to an embarkation item in Okinawa, Japan, where there was an approximately tangible current of dread among the distributing troops. From Okinawa, Mueller headed to Dong Ha Combat Base near the so-called demilitarized zone–the dividing line between North and South Vietnam, launched after the collapse of the French colonial regiman in 1954. Mueller was determined and well trained, but he was also afraid. “You were scared to death of the unknown, ” he articulates. “More afraid in some ways of default than extinction, more afraid of being found wanting.” That kind of nervousnes, he announces “animates your unconscious.” For American corps, 1 968 was the deadliest time of the crusade, as they beat back the Tet Offensive and opposed the combat of Hue. All told, 16,592 Americans were killed that year–roughly 30 percent of total US fatalities in the fighting. Over the course of the conflict, more than 58,000 Americans succumbed, 300,000 were wounded, and some two million South and North Vietnamese died. Just 18 months after David Hackett was felled by a sniper, Mueller was being sent to the same part as his officer-training classmate Kellogg, who had arrived in Vietnam three months earlier. Mueller was assigned to H Company–Hotel Company in Marine parlance–part of the 2nd Battalion of the 4th Marine Regiment, a storied infantry contingent that traced its parentages back to the 1930 s. The regiment had been fighting almost nonstop in Vietnam since May 1965, making the nickname the Magnificent Bastards. The grueling action made its fee. In the precipitate of 1967, six weeks of duel reduced the battalion’s 952 Marine to just 300 is suitable for duty. During the Tet Offensive, the 2nd Battalion had received acrimonious and bloody battle that never let up. In April 1968, it campaigned in the fight of Dai Do, a days-long booking that killed virtually 600 North Vietnamese soldiers. Eighty members of the 2nd Battalion died in the fight, and 256 were wounded. David Harris, who arrived in Vietnam in May, affiliated the depleted legion just after Dai Do. “Hotel Company and all of 2/4 was devastated, ” he reads. “They were a skeleton gang. They were haggard, they were pummel to fatality. It was just pitiful.” By the time Mueller was set to arrive 6 months later, the human rights unit had rehabilitated its grades as its wounded Marines recovered and filtered back into the field; they had been experimented and surfaced stronger. By co-occurrence, Mueller was to inherit leadership of a Hotel Company platoon from his acquaintance Kellogg. “Those kids that I had and Bob had, half of them were ex-servicemen of Dai Do, ” Kellogg speaks. “They were field-sharp.” A corpsman of Company H facilitates a wounded Leatherneck of 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines, during Operation Saline II in the Quang Tri Province of Vietnam in 1968. Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of National Archives Second Lieutenant Mueller, 2 4 years and 3 months old, joined the regiment in November 1968, one of 10 brand-new officers assigned to the unit that month. He knew he was arriving at the so-called pointy mission of the American impale. Some 2.7 million US troops served in Vietnam, but the great majority of fatalities were suffered by those who defended in “maneuver battalions” like Mueller’s. The conflict along the demilitarized zone was far different than “its been” elsewhere in Vietnam; the primary antagonist was the North Vietnamese army , not the infamous Viet Cong guerrillas. North Vietnamese armies generally operated in bigger units, become better studied, and were more likely to engage in maintained fighting rather than melting apart after placing an waylay. “We pushed regular, hard-core army, ” Joel Burgos says. “There were so many of them–and they were really good.” William Sparks, a private first class in Hotel Company, recalls that Mueller get off apache helicopters in the midst of a rainstorm, wearing a raincoat–a telltale sign that he was new to the crusade. “You figured out somewhat fast it didn’t help to wear a raincoat in Vietnam, ” Sparks answers. “The humidity time compressed for the purposes of the raincoat–you were just as humid as you were without it.” As Mueller marched up from the operations zone, Kellogg–who had no idea Mueller would be inheriting his platoon–recognized his OCS classmate’s gait. “When he came marching up the hill, I chortled, ” Kellogg alleges. “We started joking.” On Mueller’s first night in the field, his brand-new tent was destroyed by the wind. “That thing evaporated into thin breeze, ” Sparks suggests. He didn’t even get at spend one night.” Over the coming days, Kellogg progressed along some of his wise from the field and interpreted the procedures for calling in artillery and air strikes. “Don’t be John Wayne, ” he said. “It’s not a movie. Navals tell you something’s up, listen to them.” “The lieutenants who didn’t rely their Marines went to early deaths, ” Kellogg says. And with that, Kellogg told their commander that Mueller was ready, and he hopped aboard the next helicopter out. Today, military units usually teach together in the US, deploys together for a placed sum of term, and return home together. But in Vietnam, rotations began–and ended–piecemeal, driven by the vagaries of harms, illness, and individual action tours. That made Mueller acquired a legion that mingled combat-experienced ex-servicemen and relative newbies. A platoon consisted of approximately 40 Navals, generally led by a lieutenant and divided into three crews, each was presided over by a sergeant, which were then divided into three four-man “fire teams” led by corporals. While the lieutenants were technically in charge, the sergeants operated the show–and could stimulate or undermine a new patrolman. “You land, and you’re at the pity of your staff sergeant and your radioman, ” Mueller says. Marines in the field knew to be dubious of brand-new young second lieutenants like Mueller. They were scoffed as Gold Brickers, after the single amber saloon that signified their rank. “They might have had a college education, but they sure as hell didn’t have common sense, ” suggests Colin Campbell, who was on Hotel Company’s mortar squad. Mueller knew his guys panicked he might be incompetent or worse. “The platoon was stupefied, ” he remembers. “They wondered whether the brand-new light-green lieutenant was going to jeopardize “peoples lives” to boost his own career.” Mueller himself was evenly terrified of acquiring land command. As he settled in, talk spread about the strange brand-new platoon commander who had gone to both Princeton and Army Ranger School. “Word was out real fast–Ivy League guy from an affluent clas. That set off fears. The affluent chaps didn’t go to Vietnam then–and they certainly didn’t finish up in a rifle team, ” announces VJ Maranto, a corporal in H Company. “There was so much talk about’ Why’s a guy like that out here with us? ’ We weren’t Ivy Leaguers.” Indeed , none of his fellow Hotel Company Marines had written their college thesis on African territory spats before the International Court of Justice, as Mueller had. Most were from rural America, and few had any formal education past senior high school. Maranto spent his youth on a small farm in Louisiana. Carl Rasmussen, a lance corporal, grew up on a farm in Oregon. Burgos was from the Mississippi Delta, where he was raised on a cotton plantation. After graduating from high school, David Harris had gone to work in a General Engine mill in his home mood of Ohio, then attached the Marines when he was set to be drafted in the summer of 1967. Many of the Marines under Mueller’s command had been wounded at least once; 19 -year-old corporal John C. Liverman had arrived in Vietnam merely four months from a neighbor of his from Silver Spring, Maryland, had been killed at Khe Sanh–and had heard heavy combat much of the year. He’d beset by shrapnel in March 1968 and then again in April, but after recovering in Okinawa, he had agitated to return to combat. Hotel Company quickly came to understand that its new squad chairwoman was no Gold Bricker. “He wanted to know as much as he had been able to as fast as he could about the terrain, what we did, the waylays, everything, ” Maranto says. “He was all about members of the mission, the mission, the mission.” Second Battalion’s mission, as it turned out, was straightforward: Probe and destroy. “We stayed out in the bush, out in the mountains, precisely below DMZ, 24 hours a day, ” David Harris pronounces. “We was exactly enticement. It was the same meeting: They’d touched us, we’d stumbled them, they’d disappear.” Frequent deaths and injuries meant that turnover in the field was constant; when Maranto arrived at Hotel Company, he was issued a flak jacket that had dehydrated blood on it. “We were always low on servicemen, ” Colin Campbell says. Mueller’s unit was constantly on patrol; the battalion’s preserves described it as “nomadic.” Its undertaking was to keep the foe off-kilter and disrupt their supplying words. “You’d march all day, then you’d burrow a foxhole and devote all night altering going on watch, ” announces Bill White, a Hotel Company ex-serviceman. “We were always tired, always starving, always thirsty. There were no showers.” In those first weeks, Mueller &# x27; s confidence as a captain developed as he triumphed his men’s confidence and respect. “You’d felt his nervousness, but you’d never see that in his behaviour, ” Maranto says. “He was such a professional.” The members of the platoon soon got acquainted with a better quality that would be familiar to everyone who is dealing with Mueller later as a prosecutor and FBI director. He asked a great deal and had little fortitude for malingering, but he never asked for more than he was willing to give himself. “He was a no-bullshit kind of chap, ” White recalls. Sgt. Michael Padilla( left) with Cpl. Agustin Rosario( right ), who was killed in action on December 11, 1968, during the operation at Mutter’s Ridge . div> Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of Michael Padilla Mueller’s unit began December 1968 in related silent, to protect the security for the primary military cornerstone in the field, a glorified campsite known as Vandegrift Combat Base, about 10 miles south of the DMZ. It was one of the only planned outposts nearby for Marines, a region for resupply, a rain, and red-hot food. Lance Corporal Robert W. Cromwell, who had celebrated his 20 th birthday shortly before beginning his tour of duty, entertained his compatriots with stories from his own reporting period R& R: He’d matched his wife and parents in Hawaii to be introduced to his newborn daughter. “He was so happy to have a child and wanted to get home for good, ” Harris says. On December 7 the battalion boarded helicopters for a new operation: to retake control of a mountain in an loathsome neighbourhood known as Mutter’s Ridge. The strategically important piece of ground, which rolled along four mountains on the countries of the south boundary of the DMZ, had been the scene of fighting for more than two years and had been overrun by the North Vietnamese months before. Artillery, air strikes, and cistern strikes had long since denuded the bank of vegetation, but the circumventing hillsides and depressions were a forest of trees and vines. When Hotel Company touched down and fanned out from its landing zones to support a bound, Mueller was arriving to what would be his first full-scale battle. As the American contingents boosted, the North Vietnamese withdrew. “They were all drawing back to this big bunker complex, as it turned out, ” Sparks mentions. The Americans could see the signs of past combats all around them. “You’d view shrapnel openings in the trees, bullet punctures, ” Sparks says. After three days of patrols, isolated firefights with an elusive enemy, and several nighttimes of American shelling, another division in 2nd Battalion, Fox Company, received the lineup to make some high ground on Mutter’s Ridge. Even nearly 50 years later, the date of the operation abides burned into the recollections of those who pushed in it: December 11, 1968. None of Mueller &# x27; s fellow Marines had written their college thesis on African territory conflicts before the International Court of Justice, as Mueller had. That morning, after a darknes of air strikes and cannon blast “ve been meaning to” faded the antagonist, the men of Fox Company moved out at first light. The attack vanished smoothly at first; they confiscated the countries of the western portions of the crest without resistance, evading simply a handful of mortar rounds. Yet as they continued east, heavy small-arms fire started. “As they fought their practice forwards, they came into intensive and deadly fuel from bunkers and at the least three machine guns, ” the regiment later reported. Because the vegetation was so dense, Fox Company didn’t realize that it had stumbled into the centre of a bunker complex. “Having crusaded their nature in, the company ascertained it extremely difficult to maneuver its way out, due both to the fuel of the antagonist and the problem of carrying their wounded.” Hotel Company was on a neighboring mountain, still feeing breakfast, when Fox Company was attacked. Glint remembers that he was drinking a “Mo-Co, ” C-rations coffee with cocoa gunpowder and sugar, heated by igniting a golf-ball-sized segment of C-4 plastic explosive.( “We were ahead of Starbucks on this latte bullshit, ” he jokes .) They could hear the gunfire across the valley. “Lieutenant Mueller called,’ Saddle up, saddle up, ’” Sparks pronounces. “He called for first squad–I was the grenade launcher and had two bags of ammo buckled across my chest. I could just stand up.” Before they could even reach the antagonist, they had to fight their route through the dense cover of the depression. “We had to go down the hill and come up Foxtrot Ridge. It took hours.” “It was the only locate in the DMZ I remember meeting botany like that, ” Harris reads. “It was thick-skulled and entwining.” When the platoon lastly crested the highest level of the crest, they confronted the repugnance of the battlefield. “There were wounded parties everywhere, ” Sparks recalls. Mueller said everyone to quit their jam-packs and preparations for a fight. “We assaulted right out across the top of the crest, ” he says. It wasn’t long before the unit came under ponderous fervor from small arms, machine guns, and a grenade launcher. “There were three North Vietnamese soldiers right in front of us that rushed right up and scattered us with AK-4 7s, ” Sparks says. They reverted fervor and advanced. At one point, a Navy corpsman with them threw a grenade, only to have it bounce off a tree and explode, wounding one of Hotel Company’s corporals. “It just got worse from there, ” Sparks says. In the next few minutes, several followers went down in Mueller’s unit. Maranto remembers being impressed that his relatively lettuce lieutenant was able to stay calm while under criticize. “He’d been in-country less than a month–most of us had been in-country six, eight months, ” Maranto says. “He had remarkable equanimity, targeting fervor. It was sheer terror. They had RPGs, machine gun, mortars.” Mueller realise rapidly how much hassle the patrol was in. “That daytime was the second heaviest barrage I received in Vietnam, ” Harris mentions. “Lieutenant Mueller was guiding commerce, outlook parties and calling in air strikes. He was standing upright, moving. He probably saved our hide.” Cromwell, the lance corporal who had just become a papa, was shooting in the thigh by a. 50 -caliber bullet. When Harris encountered his wounded sidekick being hustled out of harm’s action, he was funnily relieved at first. “I discovered him and he was alive, ” Harris does. “He was on the stretcher.” Cromwell would ultimately be able to deplete some time with his wife and new child, Harris figured. “You lucky chump, ” he concluded. “You’re going home.” But Harris had miscalculated the seriousness of his friend’s harm. The missile had nicked one of Cromwell’s arteries, and he bled to demise before he reached the field hospital. The death destroyed Harris, who had sold weapons with Cromwell the darknes before–Harris had taken Cromwell’s M-1 4 rifle and Cromwell took Harris’ M-7 9 grenade launcher. “The next day when we punched the crap, they called for him, and he had to go forward, ” Harris remarks. Harris couldn’t shake the be thought that he should have been the one on the stretcher. “I’ve only told two people this story.” The battle atop and around Mutter’s Ridge feelings for hours, with the North Vietnamese barrage received from the smothering jungle. “We got hit with an ambush, plain and simple, ” Harris suggests. “The brush was so thick, you had perturb hacking it with a machete. If you got 15 meters away, you couldn’t consider where you came from.” As the fighting resumed, the Marines atop the crest began to run low on quantities. “Johnny Liverman hurled me a handbag of ammo. He’d been ferrying ammo from one surface of the ridge to the other, ” Sparks withdraws. Liverman was already wounded, but he was still contend; then, during one of his runs, he came here under more shell. “He got hit right through the pate, right when I was looking at him. I get that ammo, I crawled up there and got his M-1 6 and told him I’d be back.” Sparks and the other Marine protected behind a dead tree stump, trying to find any defence amid the firestorm. “Neither of us had any ammo left, ” Sparks remembers. He slithered back to Liverman to try to expel his love. “I get him up on my shoulder, and I got shot, and I went down, ” he does. As he was lying on the dirt, he listened a shout from atop the ridge, “Who’s that down there–are they dead? ” It was Lieutenant Mueller. Sparks called back, “Sparks and Liverman.” “Hold on, ” Mueller answered, “We’re coming down to get you.” A few minutes later, Mueller seemed with another Marine, known as Slick. Mueller and Slick slipped Sparks into a missile crater with Liverman and kept a battle dress on Sparks’ wound. They waited until a helicopter gunship passed overhead, its grease-guns clattering, to amuse the North Vietnamese, and hustled back toward the top of the hill and comparative safety. An OV-1 0 criticize airplane overhead plunged smoke grenades to facilitate shield the Marines atop the ridge. Mueller, Sparks reads, then went back to retrieve the mortally wounded Liverman. The extinctions organized. Corporal Agustin Rosario–a 22 -year-old father and husband from New York City–was shot in the ankle, and then, while he tried to run back to safety, was kill again, this time fatally. Rosario, extremely, lived waiting for a medevac helicopter. Finally, as the hours transferred, the Marines coerced the North Vietnamese to rescind. By 4:30 pm, the battlefield had hushed. As his eulogy for the Bronze Star eventually predicted, “Second Lieutenant Mueller’s courage, vigorous initiative and unwavering devotion to job at great personal gamble is also contributing in the overcome of the enemy force and were in keeping with the highest institutions of the Marine Corps and of the United States Naval Service.” As night precipitated, Hotel and Fox held the anchor, and a third busines, Golf, was brought forward as added buttres. It was a brutal era for both sides; 13 Americans vanished and 31 were wounded. “We framed a pretty good hurt on them, but not without enormous expenditure, ” Sparks suggests. “My closest pals were all killed there on Foxtrot Ridge.” As the Americans searched the field around the ridge, they weighed seven enemy dead left behind, in addition to being able to seven others killed in the course of the clash. Intelligence reports afterward revealed that the duel had killed the commander of the 1st Battalion, 27 th North Vietnamese Army Regiment, “and had practically decimated his staff.” For Mueller, the engagement had proved both to him and his gentlemen that he could lead. “The minute the shit stumbled the fan, he was there, ” Maranto says. “He performed outstandingly. After that night, there were a lot of guys who would’ve sauntered through walls for him.” That first major revelation to combat–and the loss of Marines under his command–affected Mueller deeply. “You’re standing there consider,’ Did I do everything I could? ’” he answers. Afterward, back at camp, while Mueller was still in startle, a major came up and swiped the young lieutenant on the shoulder, saying, “Good job, Mueller.” “That vote of confidence helped me get through, ” Mueller told me. “That gesture pushed me over. I wouldn’t follow out life guilty for fastening up.” The heavy toll of the casualties at Mutter’s Ridge shook up the whole legion. Cromwell’s death reached extremely hard; his laughter and good nature had tied the human rights unit together. “He was happy-go-lucky. He appeared after the new people when they came in, ” Bill White withdraws. For Harris, who had often shared a foxhole with Cromwell, the death of his best friend was devastating. White also took Cromwell’s death hard-bitten; overcome with sorrow, he stopped scraping. Mueller tackled him, telling him to refocus on members of the mission ahead–but eventually accommodated more consolation than punish. “He could’ve applied me punishment hours, ” White announces, “but he never did.” Robert Mueller receives an honor from his regimental officer Col. Martin “Stormy” Sexton in Dong Ha, South Vietnam in 1969. Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of the place of Robert Mueller Decades later, Mueller would tell me that nothing he ever confronted in his profession was as challenging as conducting workers in duel and watching them be cut down. “You realize a great deal, and every day after is a commendation, ” he told me in 2008. The remembering of Mutter’s Ridge positioned everything, even terror investigations and showdowns with the Bush White House, into view. “A lot is going to come your behavior, but it’s not going to be the same intensity.” When Mueller ultimately did leave the FBI in 2013, he “retired” into a hectic life as a top spouse at the existing legislation house WilmerHale. He learnt some first-class in cybersecurity at Stanford, he investigated the NFL’s handling of the Ray Rice domestic violence case, and he provided as the so-called colonization captain for the Volkswagen Dieselgate scandal. While in the midst of that assignment–which required the kind of delicate give-and-take ill-suited to a hard-driving , no-nonsense Marine–the 72 -year-old Mueller received a final call to public service. It was May 2017, just days into the twirling blizzard start out by the firing of FBI director James Comey, and deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein wanted to know if Mueller would serve as the special counselor in the Russia investigation. The job–overseeing one of the most difficult and sensitive investigations ever undertaken by the Justice Department–may simply graded as the third-hardest of Mueller’s career, after the post-9/ 11 FBI and after resulting those Marine in Vietnam. Having accepted the job as special counselor, he retreated into his prosecutor’s bunker, cut off from the rest of America. In January 1969, after 10 epoches of rain showers and cold weather, the unit got a three-day R& R break-dance at Cua Viet, a nearby brace locate. They listened to Super Bowl III on the radio as Joe Namath and the Jet-blacks defeated the Baltimore Colts. “One touch of actuality was listening to that, ” Mueller says. In the field, they get little information about what was happening at home. In fact, later that time, while Mueller was still deployed, Neil Armstrong made his first step on the moon–an incident that people around the world watched live on Tv. Mueller wouldn’t find out until daylights afterward. “There was this whole segment of autobiography you missed, ” he says. R& R breaks is likewise rare opportunities to imbibe alcohol, though there was never often of it. Campbell says he drink just 15 brews during his 18 months in-country. “I can retain drinking warm beer–Ballantines, ” he pronounces. In tent, the three men traded publications like Playboy and mail-order automotive catalogs, dreaming the cars they are able to soup up when they returned back to Position. They guided the time toy wino or pinochle. For the most part, Mueller bounced such activities, though he was into the era’s music( Creedence Clearwater Revival was–and is–a particular favorite ). “I retain several times strolling into a bunker and feeling him in a corner with a notebook, ” Maranto says. “He read a lot, every opportunity.” Throughout the rest of the month, they patrolled, meeting little linked with the enemy, although abundance of clues of their spirit: Hotel Company often radioed into allegations of concluding descended the organizations and disguised ply caches, and they are usually made incoming mortar rounds from unseen enemies. Command under such conditions wasn’t easy; drug use is an issue, and racial hostilities guided high. “Many of the GIs were draftees; they didn’t want to be there, ” Maranto says. “When new people revolved in, they imparted what happens in the United States with them.” Mueller recalls at times struggling to get Marines to follow orders–they already felt that the beating of serving in the infantry in Vietnam was as bad as it could get. “Screw that, ” they’d reply sharply when was necessary to do something they didn’t wishes to do. “What are you going to do? Route me to Vietnam? ” Yet the Marines were bonded through the constant danger of being subjected to duel. Everyone had close calls. Everyone knew that luck in the combat area was finite, fate hurtful. “If the good Lord diverted over a placard up there, that was it, ” Mueller says. Nights particularly were fitted with horror; the enemy elevated sneak assaults, often in the hours before dawn. Colin Campbell recalls a night in his foxhole when he turned around to find a North Vietnamese soldier, armed with an AK-4 7, right behind him. “He’d get inside our bound. He had our back, ” Campbell suggests. “Why didn’t he kill me and another chap in the foxhole? ” Campbell roared, and the infiltrator bolted. “Another Marine down the line shot him dead.” Mueller was a constant existence in the fields, regularly reviewing the code signals and passwords that marked friendly contingents to each other. “He was quiet and reserved. The plan was meticulous and detailed. He knew at night where every place was, ” Maranto recalls. “It wouldn’t be peculiar for him to come out and make sure the volley crews were correctly placed–and that you two are awake.” The souls I talked to who performed alongside Mueller, adults now in their seventies, largely had strong recollections of the kind of captain Mueller had been. But numerous didn’t know, until I told them, that the man who led their team was now the special guidance probing Russian interference in the election. “I had no idea, ” Burgos told me. “When you’ve been in action that long, you don’t remember appoints. Appearances you recollect, ” he says. Maranto says he only put two and two together recently, although he’d thought for years if that person who was the FBI director had served with him in Vietnam. “The name would ring a bell–you know that’s a familiar name–but you’re so busy with daily life, ” Maranto says. At the makeshift landing zone getting briefed before being airlifted to join the rest of the operation. Mueller is standing on the right with his back to the camera . div> Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of VJ Maranto April 1969 recognized a stark American milestone: The Vietnam War’s engagement death toll transcended the 33,629 Americans killed while campaigning in Korea. It too drew a brand-new menace to Hotel Company’s region: a laid of powerful. 50 -caliber machine gun nests that the North Vietnamese had set up to harass helicopters and low-flying airliners. Hotel Company–and the battalion’s other units–devoted much of the middle-of-the-road of the month to shooting down the lethal artilleries. Until they were found, resupply helicopters were limited, and flights were vacated when they came under direct flame. One Marine was even killed in the landing zone. Ultimately, on April 15 and 16, Hotel Company overran the enemy firearm and action a departure, uncovering 10 bunkers and three firearm positions. The next day, at around 10 am, Mueller’s platoon was attacked while on patrol. Facing small-arms ardour and grenades, they called for breath assist. An hour later four assault rolls thumped the North Vietnamese position. Five days later, on April 22, one of the 3rd Platoon’s garrisons reached under same attack–and the situation abruptly grew frantic. Glints, who had returned to Hotel Company that winter after healing from his wound at Mutter’s Ridge, was in the waylaid garrison. “We lost the machine gun, jammed up with shrapnel, and the radio, ” he recalls. “We had to pull back.” Nights especially were filled with frightful; the adversary wished sneak onslaughts, often in the hours before dawn. With radio contact lost, Mueller’s platoon was called forward as buttres. American artillery and mortars pounded the North Vietnamese as the team boosted. At one point, Mueller was engaged in a close firefight. The incoming fervour was so intense–the stress of the moment so all-consuming, the adrenaline pumping so hard–that when he was shot, Mueller didn’t instantly notice. Amid the combat, he glanced down and recognized an AK-4 7 round had overtaken clean through his thigh. Mueller prevented fighting. “Although seriously wounded during the course of its firefight, he resolutely maintained his position and, aptly guiding the volley of his squad, was instrumental in demolishing the North Vietnamese Army force, ” reads the Navy Commendation that Mueller received for his action that day. “While approaching the designated area, the team emanated under a heavy loudnes of enemy burn from its right flank. Skillfully soliciting and directing corroborating Marine artillery fire on the opponent outlooks, First Lieutenant Mueller ensured that burn superiority was gained during the hostile unit.” Two other members of Hotel Company were also wounded in the fight. One of them had his leg blown off by a grenade; it was his first day in Vietnam. Mueller’s eras in duel ended with him being lifted out by helicopter in a sling. As the aircraft peeled away, Mueller withdraws reviewing he might at least get a good dinner out of the harm on a infirmary carry, but he was delivered instead to a field hospital near Dong Ha, where “hes spent” three weeks recovering. Maranto, who was on R& R when Mueller was wounded, retains returning to camp and hearing oath that their commandant had been shot. “It could happen to any one of us, ” Maranto says. “When it has come to him, there was a lot of sadness. They experienced his company.” Mueller recovered and returned to active office in May. Since most Marine detectives spent only six months on a combat rotation–and Mueller had been in the combat zone since November–he was sent to serve at bidding headquarters, where he became an aide-de-camp to Major General William K. Jones, the head of the 3rd Marine Division. By the end of 1969, Mueller was back in the US, his engagement tour accomplish, working at the Marine barracks near the Pentagon. Soon thereafter, he cast off an application to the University of Virginia’s law school. “I consider myself extraordinarily lucky to have constructed it out of Vietnam, ” Mueller announced years later in a discussion. “There were many–many–who did not. And perhaps because I did survive Vietnam, I have always experienced compelled to contribute.” Over the years, a few of his former chap Marines from Hotel Company recollected Mueller and have watched his busines unfold on the national theatre over the past two decades. Sparks cancels dining lunch on a July day in 2001 with the story on: “The TV was on behind me.’ We’re going to introduce the new FBI director, Robert … Swan … Mueller . ’ I slowly switched, and I appeared, and I belief,’ Golly, that’s Lieutenant Mueller.’” Sparks, who speaks with a thick Texas accent, says his first thought was the running gag he’d had with his former captain: “I’d always announce him’ Lieutenant Mew-ler , ’ and he’d mention,’ That’s Mul-ler . ’” More lately, his former Marine comrade Maranto says that after devoting six months in fighting with Mueller, he has watched the coverage of the special advise investigation progress and chortled at the news reports. He says he knows Mueller isn’t sweating the pressure. “I watch people on the word talking about the distractions getting to him, ” he alleges. “I don’t think so.” Garrett M. Graff ( @vermontgmg) is a lending writer at WIRED and scribe of The Threat Matrix: Inside Robert Mueller’s FBI and the War on Global Terror . He can be reached at garrett.graff @gmail. com . em> Such articles is displayed in the June issue. Subscribe now . em> Listen to this story, and other WIRED features, on the Audm app . em> More Great WIRED Stories If Trump is laundering Russian fund now &# x27; s how it would work Spot the illegal in these airport baggage x-rays How a DNA transfer virtually imprisoned an innocent being of murder PHOTO ESSAY: Ominous view Read more: https :// www.wired.com/ narration/ robert-mueller-vietnam / http://dailybuzznetwork.com/index.php/2018/07/01/the-untold-story-of-robert-muellers-time-in-combat/

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sending-the-message · 7 years ago

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In The City Of Meatbot-Powered Killers (part 4) by molotok_c_518

Table of Contents.

Part 3.

I hit the dark web for a few minutes, burned a couple of Bitcoin for a block of stolen credit card numbers, and searched for what the hell just happened downtown.

While I took a couple of the platinum card accounts to activate some of my burner phones (their fraud support will save them some charges, and I'll still have some prepaid phones to work with), I digested what the Army and Air National Guard just did.

(*26 hours ago, in RQZ HQ...)

Col. {Jones}, HQ "Six" (HQ6): This is Six, go ahead, sir.

Adjutant General, New York National Guard (AGNY): This operation is strictly need-to-know now, Six. It has been designated "Top Secret: Compartmentalized" at the highest levels, and the code name attached is "Glass Chipmunk."

HQ6: What the... who comes up with this shit... uh, sir?

AGNY: Some spook at the NSA. More time on their hands than sense.

HQ6: Yes, sir.

(Side note: The reason top secret stuff gets odd code-names is because they are words you would not accidentally say in a normal conversation. Try to work "Glass Chipmunk" into a sentence without sounding like you're crazy. It *might** work with someone with a curio collection... sort of like Alpine Shepherd Boy... but otherwise, you will stand out.*)

AGNY: How is the perimeter?

HQ6: Solid, sir. Nothing is getting out of there. We've had a few... anomalies, but no breaches.

AGNY: "Anomalies?"

HQ6: Well... it appears that the mad scientists' little toys don't hole up well in non-humans. We've had some animals come to the wire and just melt. The larger ones, we need to put down... have you ever tried shooting a cat and her kittens? They melted, too.

AGNY: I'll arrange to get some more men rotated in. Things like that obliterate morale.

HQ6: Thank you, sir... but we need a longer-term solution to this. We've gotten lucky, so far, in that only a few infected have tried to hit us. Tracers work well, so we've taken to loading all of our SAWs with nothing else. If they hit us in anything larger than 3 or 4 at a time, we're gonna get overrun in a heartbeat and a half, and you'll have a lot more than a city's worth of these things to worry about.

AGNY: Roger that, Six. I gotta tell ya, Tom... I've never thought, not even once, that we'd be talking about bombing American citizens.

HQ6: Roger that, Six. Voting demographic will definitely shift.

AGNY: Are you suggesting...

HQ6: No, sir. Just a bit of gallows' humor. Whistling in the graveyard, as it were.

AGNY: How about our reluctant big-brain?

HQ6: Still no sign of him. We lost him during his move towards the campus. We think he's in the Advanced Research Labs facility on campus, but we're not sure enough to risk an extraction team in a hostile-heavy area of the city.

AGNY: We have a good set-up on the plaza. Give the green light for the Reaper to launch. You are covered.

HQ6: That's an order?

AGNY: Direct order, Tom. Take solace in the fact that it's an act of mercy for the poor bastards.

HQ6: Yes, sir.

(23 hours ago.)

Reaper drone pilot, designated RD-3: On station, awaiting instructions.

HQ6: What's your load, RD-3:

RD-3: I have 4 Hellfires, sir. I see the target, awaiting order.

HQ6: You've been briefed as to the situation?

RD-3: Yes, sir. Glass Chipmunk. (almost inaudible chuckle)

HQ6: Right. When you have the target locked, you are cleared to engage.

RD-3: Order received. Lightin' em up.

Video footage from RD-3

It's daytime, timestamp on the video is 1106. Wide shot of a square plaza surrounded by concrete and glass buildings, in a Brutalist architectural style.

In the plaza is a large, pulsating mass of bodies, covered in dirt, rags, dried "blood" (in reality, it's mostly meatbots at this point), sweat, and strips of dried flesh.

A fountain in the center has kept these people hydrated since the outbreak. It has allowed this... gathering... to continue unabated.

"Gathering" is too weak a word. It's like a Roman orgy crossed with Cannibal Holocaust or Green Inferno.

The weakest have either stayed at the fringes and devoured what scraps they can, knowing that they have no chance at survival in the main body, or threw themselves in early, were torn to shreds and eaten whole, in order to kill the all-consuming hunger driving them.

The strongest have formed a horrific symbiosis, tearing chunks off of each other, letting chunks get torn from them, then healing enough to repeat the process. The looks of pain when injured are almost indistinguishable from the looks of rapture when they devour a neighbor.

There is no "sex," per se. Hunger has replaced sexual desire. If anything, the erogenous zones seem to be the most targeted areas for consumption... and since they grow back, they get targeted a lot.

I don't want to look. I want to make a bad joke about oral sex and fix myself a bottle of rum. Better still, a keg.

I look anyway.

At 1113, a missile tears into a fuel truck abandoned at the east end of the plaza. The angle is perfect: flaming kerosene or diesel splashes over the crowd, and thick clouds of boiling black smoke quickly fill the space.

Some of the (un)lucky few who escaped the initial blast run away.

Most, either sensing a well-cooked meal or realizing this will end the agonizing hunger, dive into the center of the holocaust.

In one strike, the National Guard have eliminated about 3/4 of the population of [REDACTED].

I've been working frantically for the past day, trying to find a way to protect myself from possible infection. I can't think "if" anymore: those idiots out there will see me at some point and launch an extraction. I've seen enough horror movies to know how catastrophically it will fail, and how likely I will be to have highly-trained, inhibition-impaired, hungry, rapid-healing killers at my door.

Yes, I'm a pessimist.

I know now how we got to this point, and I have the entire sequence ciphered out. My meatbots were part of a power struggle within the group, and were weaponized purely by circumstance.

First, Dr. A. He got in to the GATACA compiler and dropped his little brain bomb in the code. Hidden in the "comments" in the DNA (we had plenty of space to put messages in the DNA, and did so frequently to explain why Sequence 8c, for example, was written to repair a long muscle in a certain manner, rather than another) was his excuse:

Dr. A: By the time you read this, you will no longer head this project. If I can strike quickly and "prove" that you bungled the neuro programming, I can capitalize and run this program as I see fit. Some people aren't worth saving. Others should be reprogrammed for the greater good.

Dr. B followed this up by checking out the endocrine codes and cranking hunger to 1000. His excuse:

Dr. B: Need more. We can fund this by selling the old versions on the black market, and keep the excess for ourselves.

Profiteering, meet societal re-engineering.

It might have gone almost unnoticed, except for player 3.

Late in the project, I had an assistant basically forced on me. Dr. C was also a computer scientist, come to us from government service. He said the right things, asked the right questions, and made himself indispensable.

What I didn't know until last night was, he was a military contractor on the side, and was looking for combat applications for the 'bots.

He knew what the other fuckwits had done, and instead of fixing it...

It was he who showed Bobby the "Jesus room" (he used a different name for each guard, knowing they would be impressed with what was within). He managed to get a copy of Steve's key card to the most pliable guards, then waited for the inevitable.

He got very lucky (or unlucky) that we had just begun to prep for primate trials when Bobby's wife died. He had the "perfect" weaponized version of my project, and its spread was the perfect test.

I know this because the dumb fucker emailed his superiors on a civilian email account.

The NSA grabbed him up rapidly after that. He's sitting in Guantanamo Bay, if there's any justice.

What I've learned in the past 48 hours is sickening.

When I was a kid, I read Frankenstein several times. Mary Shelley shares my birthday, so it's like we're soul mates separated by 200 years.

I always told myself, "Don't let hubris be your downfall. You're doing this for mankind. You're not playing God... you're doing God's work, if we really are created in His/Her image."

This has never been about doing it because we could. It's doing it because we need this... to save lives cut too short by disease or accident.

Do this now, decide later how it should be used. That was always the mission.

Now... now, I'm using my knowledge of chemistry to destroy my life's work. I know what to mix for the best explosives I can make given what I have on hand. The labs we've been working will be utterly annihilated.

There's no way this project gets out. They aren't ready.

They aren't worthy.

Before I do that, though, I am going to call several people and let them know what happened. I am going to tell the press why my malignant miracle is being denied to the world.

NOW I'm playing God.

I've already made several vials of my counter-bots and hid them on my person. They're untested, but better than the alternative.

I may have a way to sneak off-campus, and from there I have a possible way to get out of town. It's going to involve laying low after the powers-that-be order a full sweep and cleanup of the bot-ridden, which I fully expect in a week or so.

I did some very rough calculations. Fatty tissues have probably all been digested by now. Protein can be burned for energy, and some of it will be consumed by each repair and replication cycle. I figure that, in 3 or 4 more days, there won't be enough metabolic energy to drive a flea left in anyone with meatbots in their blood.

Before I do anything else, though... time for a smoke.

I head up to the roof, and take a deep breath... then step to the wall and puke as the foul reek of thousands of roasting bodies pours into my sinuses.

I won't be eating barbecue any time soon.

By some dark miracle, I puke right on a bot-ridden at the base of the building. He looks up, then begins licking the vomit off of himself.

Didn't need to see that.

I move away from the wall. I fumble a smoke from the pack, and light up with very shaky hands.

I also crack the seal on the cheap водка I found in a lab assistant's office and take a deep swig. I dislike the cheap stuff... it has this nasty chemical aftertaste.

All of this is distracting me from the little fucker I puked on, who is free-climbing the wall.

I catch the barest hint of movement out of the corner of my eye as he crests the retaining wall and leaps 20 feet across the roof to tackle me.

I drop the водка and spin quickly to meet him. I'm unarmed, because "Of course they can't get to me. I'm behind two locked doors!" and this is going to kill me...

...and it gets close enough for me to see that "he" is a "she," and she's emaciated and nothing but bone, skin and wiry muscle and hunger and fuck I'm going to have to punch a girl to save my life as I loop a right cross straight into her oncoming jaw, and she drops to the roof...

...and I grab my водка and run for the door as she scrambles to her feet and makes the sprint after me with frightening speed, and I stop and duck as she comes at my back and misses her grab and I stand up straight into her jaw and she staggers backwards...

...and I spin around and plant a solid left into her gut and she doubles over but she has a grip on my back and can't bite through my shirt but I stand up straight and she flips over my back to the ground at my heels...

...and I spin again and kick her in the head and she grabs her head and it gives me just enough time to get to the door and open it...

...but she's on her feet and after me and through the door just as I pull it shut and now I'm in the stairwell to the second floor with a crazed bot-ridden woman who lunges for me...

...so I throw her over the railing and she hangs on barely and I'm running down the stairs and to the second floor entryway and through the door...

...and she drops from the railing and down all the way to the first floor and I hear the CRACK-CRACK of both of her legs snapping on impact and she screams in agony but she's up on both broken legs and trying to limp up the stairs...

...and the door to the second floor closes on the stairwell.

I'm now trapped in the building with a for-now injured bot-ridden.

Oh... and my knuckles are bleeding.

I may be infested as well.

#reddit #nosleep #scary #story

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ethelbertpaul444-blog · 6 years ago

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The Untold Story of Robert Mueller’s Time in Combat

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