Scratch Your Name: Part 2
Jun. 18th, 2009 12:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
harborshoreMaster Post | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Epilogue
--
Over the next two weeks, Lindsey divides her time between intelligence tech and art and trying to make her knee functional again. The latter takes up most of her mornings, after she’s done drinking the shitty coffee and splitting a donut with Mikey or Frank, whichever one manages to wake up in time for breakfast.
Mostly, the other people in the warehouse ignore her, so she gives up pretty quickly on figuring out what anyone’s name is, let alone how they’re working against the government. She does know that the group of quiet people who come in to report once a week do something like what Kitty does, because they flag her down immediately when they get inside, sometimes asking quick questions and sometimes asking her to pull something up on one of her screens that makes them nod and stick their own memory units into a terminal.
Lindsey badgers Kitty into showing her what she does, and it's both the same and different from Mikey’s job. Like, Mikey gets reports from people, but Kitty monitors the government's actual communication channels. Okay, so she doesn’t tell exactly tell Lindsey that this is what she does, but it’s pretty easy to figure it out after seeing how fast she found Lindsey’s picture.
It's fun to watch Kitty work and follow along--she gets this intense little wrinkle between her eyes, and her usual bubbly smile turns into a calm that is a lot like what’s in Mikey's expression when he watches the screen.
Once, while waiting for new reports to surface, Lindsey makes Kitty tell her about the warehouse and why it looks the way it does, all crazy and awesome. You can see that the walls were originally gray, but people have painted all over them. There are words scrawled in all directions; there are dragons; there are faces streaked with red, lots of skeletons and a woman labeled “Joan” in spiky writing who sits astride a horse. The windows are those slits way up high that you see in factory-type buildings and the main source of light is mostly those godawful fluorescents, but they're warmer than normal factory lights. According to Kitty, that's because Frank, Bert, Mikey and Mikey's brother actually painted them. Lindsey doesn't want to think about Mikey, Frank or Bert on ladders balancing paint. Possibly this Gerard is more coordinated or less prone to randomly falling over? Though when she says that, Kitty laughs a lot, so maybe not.
When Chantal finds out Lindsey’s been helping Mikey and Kitty, she yells at them both about compromising the safety of the entire group before turning to Lindsey and forbidding her to touch the computers from now on. That leaves Lindsey with pretty much nothing to do but exercises for her knee and art, and while she yells right back at Chantal, it’s actually fine. Knowing Patrol will have painted over or removed most of her pieces by now, Lindsey wants to get started on some new sketches. And she’d also like to not get out of practice, that’d be nice.
She asks around a bit and once she says what she’s after, a woman named Amanda lends her some pencils and paints.
--
She's working on a miniature version of her Pete-and-Greta piece one morning when Mikey comes over and sits down next to her. She looks up at him and smiles. He's been gone for four days, as have Frank and Bert, and Lindsey hasn't felt much like socializing with the other people who were still here. She’s not big on the idea of making nice with people who seem to think she's either a spy or a dumb little girl who got caught. (Kitty has been the exception here--she's just a hell of a lot of fun.)
“I like that,” Mikey says, poking at the corner of the drawing. “Who's it of?”
“It's from that night,” she says. “His name was Pete,” she thumbs at Pete's hair, smudging it, “and this was Greta.” She looks up at Mikey again, and finds him paler than ever.
“Pete,” he says. “Pete Wentz. From Chicago.”
She's startled. “You knew him?”
Mikey nods.
“Shit, tell me you knew he was dead?” God, if she’s inadvertently hurt Mikey--
“We'd seen the official obituary. He--he was an old friend.” He stops, hands folding and unfolding in his lap. “He--did you see, did he get shot too?”
She gets it. “It was quick, super-fast. With him and with most of them.” Tries to keep her voice steady through all that and fails.
Mikey glances at her and then down at the picture again. “It looks like him.”
“It's just a shadow,” she protests.
“No,” he says, “I mean, yeah, it is, but he was like that, light and dark and, like, he showed you a lot, on stage.”
“You saw him play?”
“Yeah, a couple of months back.”
She looks down at the picture and tries to figure out how to put this, not being used to wanting to tell the story. But she wants Mikey to know. “Probably saw me too,” she finally says, quietly.
“Huh, you mean, you watched the show? Weren't they--”
“No,” she says, some edge creeping into her voice, “No, I'd have been on stage. Playing bass.”
“But--” she glares at him, willing him not to finish the sentence with “you're a girl,” and he looks, really looks at her, eyes going a lot sharper than they usually are. “Wait. Did you wear a plaid skirt? And you--” he bends backwards a little.
“Yup.”
And he's grinning, bright and happy. “You were awesome. You were in Steve's band, I mean, sorry, you were in a band with Steve?”
Lindsey wants to smile back, but she's not prepared for how cold she feels when she hears Steve's name. She thought she'd be better by now. “Yeah, yes,” she says, hearing her voice shake. “Steve and I were best friends.”
“I only met him once,” Mikey offers, tentatively. “Dude called me foxy and bit my ear, and then unfolded the most elaborate scheme for organizing shows, it was fucking amazing.”
She laughs, voice cracking again. “Yeah, that’s just like him. Amazing crazy fucker.”
“Do you have any drawings of him? Because, you should show me.”
So she pulls out the few she's managed to do since she got here, and it's nice, sitting there with Mikey looking over her shoulder, asking about stuff like shading and contrast, which makes her wonder how he knows so much about art. She asks him if he draws, and he shakes his head fast and goes back to asking about the way she stenciled Greta's hair and why Steve is facing away there.
--
On the fourth day of the third week (Lindsey thinks it's a Thursday, but she keeps losing track), Chantal comes by and sits down at Lindsey’s table. “Nice,” she says, indicating the drawing but not looking at it. No, she's looking straight at Lindsey's face, scrutinizing her in an uncomfortable way.
“What do you want?” Lindsey asks; she's never liked being stared at. Except for when she's on stage, but that's entirely different.
“What I want, chickadee, is to be sure of you.”
“It's not my fault you won't believe me.” Great. Petulant is always the best demeanor for convincing anyone of anything; Ann used to say Lindsey’s pouting were the only times she regretted letting her little sister live with her. Of course, that was a long time ago.
“Mikey told me you were there that night, when they killed the musicians.” Chantal hesitates before continuing, “You were the only one who survived.” Her voice is careful, without inflection, but Lindsey can hear what Chantal means, and abruptly she's so furious the room is swimming around her.
“Don't you fucking dare accuse me of--my best friend fucking died that night, okay? I got to watch him--” Her throat seizes up and she can't finish her sentence.
“Yeah, that's what--Sweetpea, I get that this is frustrating and fucking horrible for you, if you're telling the truth, that is--so I wanna give you a chance to prove yourself.”
“I'm not gonna jump through fucking hoops for you.”
Chantal grins, like Lindsey finally said something she liked. “Luckily, I'm not asking that. I'm asking you to go visit a prison where one of our guys is being held, and come back with some intel, and then we can maybe see about getting him out.”
And once Lindsey agrees, that's it, it seems, as far as decision-making goes, at least. Oh, she's briefed more thoroughly later. Like, they tell her that who she needs to get information on is someone named Bob Bryar, who apparently killed somebody when he got caught by Patrol, and he's being held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center.
Amanda, the woman who had paints and pencils, gives Lindsey weapons (nothing complicated, she just checks what Lindsey knows how to use, and once she finds out the answer is “a knife and a gun”, that's what she hands over), and she tells Lindsey Bob is probably being tortured. She also says he won't have spilled much because “Bryar's good at the stoic. And they're kind of inept over there.”
“How do you know?” Lindsey can't help but ask.
Amanda just raises an eyebrow and pulls a sleeve up, demonstrating an impressive array of scars. “Mostly you have to just ignore them,” she says. “Or, if you can't just stay quiet, you lie and lie so they can't tell what's true when you finally fall apart.”
Lindsey thinks about punches under stage lights. “What if they're not trying to get you to tell them anything?”
Amanda looks at her, eyes calm and clear. “Then you're fucked, aren't you.”
--
When Lindsey gets to the prison, she's shaking too much to attempt to go inside right away. So she leans on a wall two blocks down, fidgeting with her uniform jacket and the hidden direct-line mini-phone that Kitty stitched into her collar before she left. Tries to still her trembling hands. The ID is foolproof, she reminds herself, and you don't look like the girl they're looking for right now, so they won't even have a reason to double-check it.
She doesn't look like herself much, it's true, and that's actually reassuring. Frank helped her dye her hair black over the sink in the gritty bathroom, the one with eight shower stalls and plastic curtains that were always sliding off their hooks.
“They think you'll fail or go back home, that's why they're sending you,” he said, fingers moving slowly on her scalp and worry in his voice, and Lindsey had closed her eyes and tried not to breathe.
Amanda had taken a break from refurbishing a crate of old guns to show Lindsey how to use makeup.
“A different kind of armor,” Amanda said, while demonstrating how Lindsey could make herself look completely different without being obvious. It needs to not be obvious: makeup is forbidden (as is hair dye) and Lindsey can't help but thumb at her mouth now and check that she doesn't have any red on her fingers. She doesn't, and she squares her shoulders, turning toward the jail.
Stop being such a fucking pussy. If they sent you because they think you'll fail, you just have to prove them wrong, don't you? Sounds like Steve in her head, or maybe (surprisingly) Chantal.
So she tries to channel both her sister's quiet authority and her own stage persona, and ends up with a steady walk that she hopes looks Squad-like. The trainee at the desk seems to think so, or, well, it's probably mostly the fact that her ID has her as a Squad Regular, and he probably hasn't met anyone of that rank before. Patrol trainees tell each other horror stories about the Squad; she heard most of them when her sister went through training. (She hopes no one in her sister's class works here. Dammit, why didn't she make Kitty or Mikey check that?)
But the trainee brings her the file on Bryar fast enough, without talking with his superior. He hands it over, stammering out an apology for--well, she's not quite sure for what--and shows her a table where she can sit down. She scans the file (she's seen most of it already, obviously; Kitty managed to access almost the whole thing) and waves him over again when she's done.
“Trainee--” she checks his nametag “Johanneson, are you sure you gave me the full file? You've had Bryar for a month and a half, and there's no record of him giving any relevant information. There are three pages on his dogs, which is hardly what we're looking for here.”
Johanneson swallows. “Well, um, he won't, I mean, he's not talking. And the guys were pissed, down at the Tombs where they held him first, because, you know, he killed one of their own, and they were maybe too rough during the first session, and, there's a note about the journalist, right?”
There is. Lindsey knows all about Steven Smith, Intrepid Reporter, who's going to get himself killed any day now, as soon as the government can figure out a way to make it look accidental. They wouldn't bother, normally--they tend to prefer handling internal politics by way of making examples out of suitable deviants. But they’ve been trying to limit negative global attention for the last few months, since they're attempting to look legitimate and all. Steven Smith has one of the few web shows in the country that are still running on a worldwide network, and he has an international following. He somehow got wind of Bob Bryar, and there it was. Word got to Amnesty and the UN, and now Bryar is in the official system and has actual rights.
“I do know the reason for Bryar being transferred to this prison, thank you.” She pauses and crosses her arms. “Trainee Johanneson,” Lindsey puts some edge in her voice and feels a frisson of satisfaction when she sees him turn pale. “I want to see him, if you please. The Squad has license to use more unorthodox methods; perhaps I can make our little bird sing.” And she's deviating from the mission, she knows, but it's pretty fucking useless to have come this far if she doesn't get anything but the file they already have most of and a confirmation of the Smith story.
Johanneson turns even more pale and doesn't say another word the whole time he's showing Lindsey to the cells. She feels a little bad when she notices how pale he is. But then she sees the shape Bryar is in, and doesn't worry about sounding sharp when she dismisses Johanneson; no, she's not worried about Johanneson’s feelings at all anymore.
There's a camera in the corner or she'd be getting Bryar to lie back down and, shit, washing his face for him or something. He has a nasty cut on one cheek, and he's dirty, like they haven't let him take a shower in a while. His pant leg has dark stains, like he bled through the fabric, and his bare wrists look--there's something wrong there.
“You can sit down,” she manages, swallowing down bile.
“Don't think I want to,” he replies, not looking at her.
Lindsey’s trying to think of a way to let him know she's not actually a Squad Regular, which, he must be recognizing the uniform and he must be thinking that shit is about to get worse, oh god. His eyes are angry but he looks so, so tired. Abruptly, she knows she can’t leave him here. Not again, not another one, no fucking way. She has to get him out, has to--
She bites her lip, tries to think of something to say that’ll be both reassuring and ambiguous enough not to raise red flags in case anyone's listening in. “Seriously, you should sit. I have a message from the leadership.” Camera in the upper-right corner, check. Cell door locked behind her, check, but she has the combination for opening it. Johannesen was so useful; if she gets out of here alive, she might even send him a thank you note.
“Not interested.”
“Actually, you are,” she says, and continues, “But before that, give me a second.” And she taps at the communication unit twice, like Kitty showed her. “If you could pull a 180,” she says quietly, “That'd be great.” The comm unit beeps twice for yes, and she takes a deep breath and starts counting to thirty in her head. She doesn't think Kitty will mind if Lindsey uses the absolutely-last-resort emergency escape plan they put together last night, not if it means she gets Bryar out.
He’s staring at her weirdly now, and she doesn't blame him, wants to reassure him that he doesn't have a crazy Squad Regular in his cell but has to wait, wait…there.
She reaches thirty in her count and the cell goes dark, as does the hallway outside. What she thinks is the fire alarm starts howling, and she grins at Bryar. “Come on,” she says, holding out her hand, “let's get you home.”
“You, what, what the hell?” He's not moving yet, dammit--Amanda did say he was a stubborn asshole.
“Seriously, we have two minutes. Kitty explained this to me--she can short out the electricity for two minutes and have the alarm go off, but she can only stay in their system for that long before she or our operative on the inside gets compromised.”
He looks stunned. “Kitty--you mean you're from, really?”
“Yes, Chantal sent me to get you. Seriously, come on!” He doesn't need to know this was supposed to be an intelligence-gathering mission only.
They have one minute and thirty seconds now, and she's thinking through the schematics on this jail. There should be a fire door down this hallway, and she's thanking her stars that they'd put Bryar alone in this wing--this prison doesn't normally hold political prisoners, and they must have been afraid that he would sway all the petty thieves with his rhetoric.
“Fine,” he says, “But I will kill you if you're lying to me.”
She snorts. “Far be it from me to kick a man who's down already, but I seriously doubt you could do anything to me right now. It's okay though, you're not going to need to kill me, because I'm going to get you home.”
And they hobble out the door together. Bryar tries to refuse to lean on her, but she shoulders her way underneath his arm and hangs on, and he shuts up. She can tell he needs the help, he’s swaying and using her to support his weight, and she swears under her breath, feeling her knee give. How the fuck are they supposed to get back? But she couldn't have left him, no way.
The stairs are a bitch, but they manage. After five blocks and as many turns to get them back toward Brooklyn where they won’t be so out in the open, he’s panting hard and she has to get him into a doorway so he can catch his breath. Fine, so her hands are shaking too, but she can't tell if it's the exertion or the adrenaline. Her mini-telephone beeps, and she taps it three times for two-way conversation, which had been turned off while she was still in the prison.
“They're tracking you,” Kitty's voice is urgent in her ear. “They just sorted out the confusion of the fire alarm and I'm seeing messages that Bryar's gone, which, damn, well done, you crazy bitch, but they're tracking you.”
“How the hell are they doing that?”
“Does he know if they implanted anything on him?”
Lindsey looks at Bryar. “When they--did they implant anything?”
“My leg, maybe,” he manages, still breathing heavily. “They burned me and then I passed out, but there's something underneath the stitches, I checked.”
Well, fuck. “Did you get that?” she asks Kitty.
“I did, and you have to get it out of him,” Kitty says, sounding frantic. “They'll find you, and we won't be able to get there in time. I mean, people are on their way, yeah, using your phone as a goal, but like I said, they won't be there on time. But if you can get it out, I can maybe fuck with the signal.”
“Get it out--you mean I have to cut it out.” Lindsey shakes her knife out of her wrist sheath, and, well, she knows why her hands are trembling now.
“I can maybe do it myself?” Bryar offers. “You're looking sort of green.”
“Shut the fuck up,” she responds and kneels, cutting his pants leg open. Amanda apparently gave her a sharp knife, thank fuck. “I can't sterilize it and it’s not like I have anesthetics,” she says, “So basically this is going to suck.”
He half-grimaces, half-grins. “Can't do worse,” and eases down on the ground so he's leaning against the wall, leg stretched out in front of him.
“Deep breath out on three,” she says, as much for his benefit as for her own, and she counts, “One, two, three.”
When he breathes out, she cuts along the haphazard stitches as shallowly as she can, getting the cut to reopen and she feels herself hit what must be the tracker. It’s bulging out, right underneath the stitches--it doesn't seem like they were paying a whole lot of attention to doing this safely and medically soundly--maybe they were hoping he'd die from the infection. Not thinking, not thinking, she gets her fingers into the cut, ignoring the sound he makes. She pulls out what must be the tracker and puts it next to them on the ground.
“It's out,” says Lindsey, trying not to stare at it or the blood on its surface. “Gimme a sec,” she adds, I have to stop the bleeding.”
She gets her scarf off (uniform scarf, ugly awful uniform scarf) and pushes it against the wound, praying she didn't hit a vein or anything; she's reasonably sure she didn't hit much at all, given that she wasn't far below the surface of the skin. But it's not like she's a fucking surgeon.
“Done.” She waits for further instructions.
“Motherfucker,” Kitty says, then pauses. “Okay, there should be a serial number on one side. Read them out to me.”
Lindsey wipes the blood off on her sleeve, still not thinking about it, and reads off the series of numbers and letters. She hears beeping at Kitty's end of the phoneline and then her voice comes through again.
“Excellent, stay put for five minutes, there's an unmarked car coming. Get in fucking fast when they arrive, okay? I’m scrambling the signal but I have to make it believable that it moved the way it did, which means starting from where you are, so Patrol are going to be right around where you don't fucking want them. Oh, and kill it on 5-4-3-2-1 now.”
Lindsey doesn't have to ask what Kitty means by “kill it.” Listening to Kitty count down, she gets to her feet, takes aim and carefully grinds the tracker into the pavement.
--
Everything is a blur after that. The car does show up, and Lindsey gets Bryar into it and then practically falls onto the grimy floor next to him. They can't sit in the seats; they have to stay out of sight.
“Fucking Amanda,” he manages when the car drives over the edge of the sidewalk and nearly hits a lamp post. He smiles weakly when Lindsey looks at him. “Terrible fucking driver.”
Amanda turns around in the front seat. “Bitch, please a little more grateful for the impromptu rescue. If we had planned this, I would obviously not be fucking driving, I'd be in the back so I could shoot at people following us. But I threw myself into the damn car when Kitty yelled, and better me than Mikey, right?”
Lindsey waves at her to turn back around, for fuck's sake - you're going to get us killed! - even while snorting at Amanda's comment. No, Mikey shouldn't drive getaway cars, that's for sure. She's not sure why the idea is so funny but she keeps laughing until she, oh, she's crying, dammit. She wipes at her eyes angrily. Now is not the time. And then she looks up and Bryar’s shaking.
“Hurts?” she asks, ignoring how wrecked her voice is.
“Yeah, and I'm just--I don't know what the hell I'm supposed to be feeling?”
She takes his hand and holds on when he squeezes.
--
They do make it. Pure dumb luck and Amanda's knowledge of the city, mostly. And the fact that Kitty beeps in periodically to let them know to stay the fuck away from Midtown, because she's had a couple of their other hackers fuck around with traffic lights and train signals so Patrol would have to go to those areas when the angry calls start coming in. Mikey also lets them know he cleared out the Patrol station nearest the factory by sending Frank and Bert to start a fire.
Lindsey and Amanda half-drag, half-carry Bryar out of the car and then struggle to negotiate the stairs. “I don't know if people are back yet,” Amanda says when they're stopping to breathe halfway up the steps. He shrugs, leaning on the wall, holding himself so, so tightly. Lindsey fiercely wants to help but has no idea how and has to kick at the wall to release some of her frustration.
“Come on,” she says, because at least she can get him the last bit of the way home. He grins a little and takes her outstretched arm, leaning on the railing with his left. Amanda smiles at them both and doesn’t offer to help, staying behind them.
“Were you,” Bryar pauses, putting his right foot down and grimacing. “Actually supposed to,” pausing again, “Get me out of there?” he finally finishes asking.
“Nah,” Lindsey says, carefully, “but I couldn't fucking leave you there, you know?”
He squeezes her shoulder. They've stopped in front of the door, Amanda punching in the password. “Thanks,” he says. “Fucking--thank you.”
She grins. “Anytime you need another tracker out, I'm totally your girl.”
He laughs at that, a startled, surprised sound, and the door opens. Lindsey has never seen the large, colorful room so quiet. Also, everyone is totally back; she doesn't notice anyone missing. And then all hell breaks loose. In a good way, but still.
Matt (it had taken her two weeks to figure out all the tiny tattooed guys in this group) is first, actually crying and hugging Bryar and pulling away to swipe at his eyes before going back in, saying something about “Shit such a goddamn miracle, the hell.”
Frank isn't far behind, so Bryar’s triumphant return is executed with Frank and Matt holding onto him tightly. Also, they’re probably, if Lindsey judges their coordination right, stepping on his feet. Lindsey and Amanda look at each other and shrug, walking in behind them.
Bert and Mikey join the fray, and Bert seems to know he should be careful with Bryar, like he knows how to watch out when people are seriously hurt. That surprises Lindsey, given how careless he tends to be with himself. She'll never forget her first week in the hideout when he came running through the doorway, slipped on the soda someone had spilled and not wiped up yet, faceplanted, got a spectacular nosebleed and shrugged, got back up, and kept walking.
Frank, on the other hand, is obviously too happy to look at Bryar’s injuries yet or pay attention to them, so Lindsey actually does pull him off and drags him away to find first aid stuff so she doesn't have to look at Bryar trying not to wince.
They come back to find him sitting down, finally, and the room has gone quiet, as if people just want to look and look. Even Chantal is looking a lot happier. She turns as Lindsey walks back in and waves her to a stop, yelling: “Look, it's the woman of the hour! Guys, let's give her, Kitty and Amanda a hand for completely refusing to follow orders! Don't you motherfuckers ever do it again!” And the room erupts in cheers. Totally embarrassing. Frank is bouncing next to her, too, whooping loudly. Lindsey she can't decide if she wants to hide or bounce along with him--the way everyone is smiling at her is overwhelming.
Then Brian walks in, and the quiet is instantaneous, like someone flipped a switch. He looks even more frazzled than usual, ripping out his ear piece and saying “Mikey said--Mikey said to come back, because--” and then he sees Bob. For one second, Brian's face is completely, frighteningly open. “You fucking idiot,” he says, voice breaking. Lindsey wants to look away, but she can't; she gets it now, gets why he's been wound so tight she sometimes thought anything at all could make him boil over.
Bob gets one of his hands away from Ray, who'd started to wrap it using the tape Frank threw him when he got back into the room, and holds it out toward Brian. “C'mere,” he says. And Brian goes, the way Lindsey's never seen him follow anyone's orders (he even argues with Chantal, which takes guts). He gets to his knees next to Bob, one hand light on his thigh.
Frank's wiping at his eyes next to Lindsey, and she sees more than one person doing the same. She swallows. It's a good thing to see, those two, but it kind of hurts at the same time. Anywhere else, they'd be taken away for being so completely obvious about how they feel. Anywhere else, this is wrong.
Of course, then Brian notices Bob's leg injury, and the epic yelling starts. Bob's just smiling, though, fingers curled around Brian's wrist.
--
That night, they push all the mattresses into a circle and clear the center of the room. Mikey pulls Lindsey down to sit next to him, and she looks at him questioningly. “What's going on?
He pushes at his bangs, then takes of his glasses, looking down and fiddling with them. “It's what we do when we lose someone.”
“Oh, I'm so sorry,” she says automatically, then continues carefully, “Who did you lose?” And if it's your brother, Mikeyway, I will help you burn this fucking city to the ground.
“Bob told us--we’d been hoping, but as it turns out, none of the Hushies survived.”
“Who were the Hushies?”
Mikey swallows. “They were--you know Greta?”
Her hands clench around her skirt, involuntarily. Greta, Greta, blond hair, clear voice, playing any instrument they threw at her. “I do, I mean, I did.”
“She played with Pete and them sometimes, right, but mostly she played with her first band, with Bob, not our Bob, Bob Morris, Chris Faller, and Darren Wilson. The Hush Sound, they called themselves, like the sound that was always hushed but kept going, you know?” Mikey takes a deep breath before he continues. “And then, when she died, they stopped playing, and we thought they'd given up, because, Greta. As it turned out, they'd just gone back to Chicago and joined Ashlee and Patrick and Travis. Last week--” Mikey closes his eyes and mouths wordlessly for a second before he manages to look at Lindsey again, and she takes his hand, heartsick and knowing she doesn't want to hear the end of this.
Someone clears their throat and Lindsey looks up. Ray is standing in the middle of the circle. “Last week,” he says, eyes as shadowed as Mikey's, “last week, Chris and Darren and Bob set up their instruments in the middle of Hyde Park in Chicago. It was nighttime, and they did it while Travis pulled his biggest operation yet, blowing up banks all around the city. It kept all the Patrols busy, so no one was monitoring the Park all night.” He falters, falling silent.
Chantal joins him, hands clasped tightly together, but Lindsey can see them shaking. “Then in the morning,” she says, voice full of pain and face blank, “the boys played through the songs they wrote with Greta, and when Chicago Patrol came to shut them down, pushing through the crowd, oh, there were so many people there, then they set themselves on fire, and they played and played--” She turns her face into Ray's shoulder, breathing long, deep, shuddering breaths.
“We didn't know,” Brian starts, from where he's sitting next to Bob, when it becomes clear that neither Chantal nor Ray can continue, “we didn't know if they survived. Patrol cleared out the area and called in the Fire Department, but there hasn't been any clear intel because it was so goddamn recent--” his voice breaks.
Bob clears his throat. “Some of the NYC Patrol came back from Chicago four days ago, and they made a big deal about dragging all the politicals out so we could listen when they made announcements about recent rebel deaths in Chicago. All the other names on the list are deaths we know have happened, and Bob and Chris and Darren were on it too.”
“So there's Passage today,” Amanda says, calm and measured from her place in the circle, her voice so dark it hurts to listens to. “There's Passage, for Bob and Chris and Darren, and for Greta, even though we already held it for her, because the four of them were the Hush Sound, silenced but never silent.” She looks at the girl in a knit cap sitting next to Kitty. “Vienna, will you sing?”
Vienna nods. Lindsey's never met her before, but she's pretty sure this is who Kitty kept going off to meet, the one who works in the Mayor's office where she's supposed to be doing menial computer work as penance for some minor transgression (but who is a better hacker than Kitty, according to the latter, which is why she's the one working from the inside--the 'minor transgression' was very much on purpose). And they definitely do more than just work together, judging by the way they kiss, softly and sweetly, before Kitty says, smile less bright than usual but no less there, “Sing, sweetheart.”
Vienna nods, tugging off her hat and getting to her feet. She runs a hand through her dark hair and walks into the center of the circle. Ray and Chantal both hug her before they go to sit down.
“It's Passage,” she says, and closes her eyes and sings. “I died two days ago. Unrecognizable…”
Clean and clear, her voice cuts through the silence in the room, and Lindsey cries, helpless against all the memories that rise unbidden. Steve, Steve, Steve. Face a blur in stage lights.
Mikey's crying too, still holding on to her hand.
--
That night, even when she's curled up on her mattress, Lindsey keeps hearing that song, Vienna's voice. My future an impossibility. She can't stop shivering.
“Hey,” she hears, low and shaky. Mikey's looking at her from his usual place on the mattress to the right of hers. “Could we, maybe--” he tugs at her mattress a little. “My brother and I, we used to, when something bad happened.”
She gets what he's saying, and rolls off her mattress to tug it so it's next to his. There's an awkward moment when they're trying to figure out how to hold on to each other, but finally she just lies down on her side and pulls him in. “Today was too much,” she says, voice low. He nods against her hair.
“I miss him,” he says, “I miss my brother.”
“I miss Steve,” she answers.
And it's uncomfortable (Mikey is really bony), but she feels calmer like that, like she has something to hang on to. The last thing she thinks before falling asleep is that it'd be good if they could get a bit of a break. Just a little one, just a little rest.
--
Getting to rest was a dream, of course. What Lindsey hadn't known but quickly finds out (the next day, man, couldn't she have gotten a day, even?), was that Bob had been captured while attempting to protect an undercover operative named Quinn Allman. Quinn had been meeting with Mikey's brother (who was apparently some sort of front figure for this whole crazy mess) and the explosives expert Jimmy Urine. The meeting was set up because Quinn (who'd been undercover working for the city rebuilding efforts) had gotten his hands on a report that gave the group crucial intel. Namely, where they could set off explosives and cause the most damage possible to the new guard tower when there would be the least people and no civilians around.
That opportunity had been nothing short of a miracle, so of course the report had been planted. All four of them, Jimmy, Gerard, Quinn and Bob (he told Lindsey to call him that, after they had Passage) were captured, but they were separated when Steven Smith got wind of the Bob Bryar story.
Initially, Patrol had judged the four based on appearance and how they acted when they were cornered, and figured Bob was the most important one (he'd killed two officers when he was arrested).
The keyword there is initially. It wasn’t long before the government figured out that shit, they had Gerard Way and Jimmy Urine, and they were going to make the most of the PR inherent in capturing those notorious underground artists and leaders. Luckily (depends on how you see it, but luckily for Gerard and Jimmy, probably) there had been an escalation of the Chicago uprising about a week after the four were captured, so many government operatives (especially the Squad Operatives and most higher-ranking Patrol officers) had to go up there to reinforce the Chicago Patrol, and Gerard and Jimmy and Quinn were left in their cells.
“As far as we know, anyway,” Chantal finishes the story bleakly. “But Mikey, Vienna and Kitty all have intel from different sources that the three of them are alive, and we know where they're held, but we need to fucking move before Chicago dies down or before, you know.”
“Well, shit.” Lindsey says. They’re alone in one of the meeting rooms, because Chantal apparently decided Lindsey needed to be filled in. “Who’s Jimmy, by the way?”
Chantal swallows, and for a second she looks a lot younger. “Yeah, James is my husband,” she says, drawing a thick line down the center of the page she'd been doodling on while explaining what has been happening to Lindsey. “But let’s not talk about that; I need to focus on how I'm going to get that idiot back. You saw Brian before last night, it's fucking impossible to function if you start dwelling on it.”
Lindsey nods, thinking about taking a break, thinking about painting and drawing and the stencils she left in a pile over by the file cabinets. She shakes her head, tries to clear it. “How do you want me to help?”
“Shit, sweetheart, you did a lot yesterday. Are you sure you're up for another one?”
Lindsey shrugs and tries to really think about her answer. “It wasn't--I'm not going to say it was the most fun I've ever had or anything: I've never been so fucking terrified in my entire life, but I could do it, and I wasn't bad, and I did something. The art--I want to keep doing the art, because the people who aren't here anymore are important too, but I couldn’t leave Bob in that jail and I can’t stop now, I don’t think.”
“Okay, okay.” Chantal grins at her. It's barely visible, but it's there.
--
It feels like barely any time at all passes before Lindsey’s in front of a mirror again, Mikey next to her this time. They're both going; Mikey flat out refused to be left behind, which prompted Chantal to demand he make himself look pretty goddamn different, because it wasn't like the authorities didn't have pictures of Gerard Way's little brother, with his dorky glasses and birds' nest hairdo. “You have to look like a different person,” she'd said, Brian next to her, nodding in agreement.
Mikey had just shrugged at them both and gotten Frank to help him with the hairdye: his hair was now the same shade as Lindsey's. “I figured,” he'd said when she grinned at him and asked if he was auditioning to be her twin, “if we look the same, they’ll look at that, not at us as like, separate people.”
“Smart boy, Mikeyway,” Amanda had said, and started teaching him about makeup, switching to a new set of colors, using the same for both of them. She'd looked at Lindsey consideringly. “Lucky that idiot trainee of yours was too terrified to tell anyone about you,” she'd said.
Lindsey'd nodded. “He was sent to Chicago this morning, Kitty told me. Also, thank god we’re not going back to the same jail.”
Now, wearing identical vests and ties, she and Mikey look stunningly similar. At this point, Lindsey's starting to believe Amanda knows how to do almost anything except drive a car, but seriously, looks nothing like he usually does. Darker hair, no glasses, it’s weird how much that changes his appearance. And he looks like Lindsey. Freaky.
The whole group meets up in the main room. Their cover story is that Crush, Chantal's clothing manufacturing company (how the woman runs a rebellion and a company at the same time, and makes both of them work is seriously a mystery) is looking at maybe using prisoners as workers.
Frank and Bert are not coming to the meeting, they're wreaking havoc in Uptown and Matt is, in his own words, “blowing up some bridges that are closed for repair”.
Amanda's going, fake eyebrows pasted onto her tattooed ones, and it's throwing Lindsey off every time she looks at her. And every time she does look, Amanda waggles her eyebrows at her, so Lindsey giggles through the whole briefing. This does not make Brian or Chantal happy.
Brian is going (under protest, because Bob is not recovered enough to come too), because he's the best at playing business manager and bodyguard in one, in case they want Chantal in a meeting without her entire entourage. So he's covered his neck tattoo and taken his piercings out, placing little flesh colored patches of fake skin (also conceived of by Chantal, officially produced to cover scars--thou shall not show where thy skin has been broken) over the resulting holes.
Last but not least, Mikey's going to cover the tech end of it in the group while Vienna's back at her undercover job to uphold her end of the electronic break-in, and Kitty will coordinate from headquarters. Lindsey has her knife and her knowledge of how these places work (Ann, oh, Ann), and she's memorized the plans for the prison.
Bob makes some comment about feeling like it’s a small force for a break-in, which mostly sounds like he wants to go too, but Chantal grinned at him. “Nah,” she said. “Sneakiness works better with fewer people, and besides, the fewer we are, the fewer we have to keep track of. We're gonna have enough people by the time we get ready to leave, after all.”
Part 1 | Part 3 |
--
Over the next two weeks, Lindsey divides her time between intelligence tech and art and trying to make her knee functional again. The latter takes up most of her mornings, after she’s done drinking the shitty coffee and splitting a donut with Mikey or Frank, whichever one manages to wake up in time for breakfast.
Mostly, the other people in the warehouse ignore her, so she gives up pretty quickly on figuring out what anyone’s name is, let alone how they’re working against the government. She does know that the group of quiet people who come in to report once a week do something like what Kitty does, because they flag her down immediately when they get inside, sometimes asking quick questions and sometimes asking her to pull something up on one of her screens that makes them nod and stick their own memory units into a terminal.
Lindsey badgers Kitty into showing her what she does, and it's both the same and different from Mikey’s job. Like, Mikey gets reports from people, but Kitty monitors the government's actual communication channels. Okay, so she doesn’t tell exactly tell Lindsey that this is what she does, but it’s pretty easy to figure it out after seeing how fast she found Lindsey’s picture.
It's fun to watch Kitty work and follow along--she gets this intense little wrinkle between her eyes, and her usual bubbly smile turns into a calm that is a lot like what’s in Mikey's expression when he watches the screen.
Once, while waiting for new reports to surface, Lindsey makes Kitty tell her about the warehouse and why it looks the way it does, all crazy and awesome. You can see that the walls were originally gray, but people have painted all over them. There are words scrawled in all directions; there are dragons; there are faces streaked with red, lots of skeletons and a woman labeled “Joan” in spiky writing who sits astride a horse. The windows are those slits way up high that you see in factory-type buildings and the main source of light is mostly those godawful fluorescents, but they're warmer than normal factory lights. According to Kitty, that's because Frank, Bert, Mikey and Mikey's brother actually painted them. Lindsey doesn't want to think about Mikey, Frank or Bert on ladders balancing paint. Possibly this Gerard is more coordinated or less prone to randomly falling over? Though when she says that, Kitty laughs a lot, so maybe not.
When Chantal finds out Lindsey’s been helping Mikey and Kitty, she yells at them both about compromising the safety of the entire group before turning to Lindsey and forbidding her to touch the computers from now on. That leaves Lindsey with pretty much nothing to do but exercises for her knee and art, and while she yells right back at Chantal, it’s actually fine. Knowing Patrol will have painted over or removed most of her pieces by now, Lindsey wants to get started on some new sketches. And she’d also like to not get out of practice, that’d be nice.
She asks around a bit and once she says what she’s after, a woman named Amanda lends her some pencils and paints.
--
She's working on a miniature version of her Pete-and-Greta piece one morning when Mikey comes over and sits down next to her. She looks up at him and smiles. He's been gone for four days, as have Frank and Bert, and Lindsey hasn't felt much like socializing with the other people who were still here. She’s not big on the idea of making nice with people who seem to think she's either a spy or a dumb little girl who got caught. (Kitty has been the exception here--she's just a hell of a lot of fun.)
“I like that,” Mikey says, poking at the corner of the drawing. “Who's it of?”
“It's from that night,” she says. “His name was Pete,” she thumbs at Pete's hair, smudging it, “and this was Greta.” She looks up at Mikey again, and finds him paler than ever.
“Pete,” he says. “Pete Wentz. From Chicago.”
She's startled. “You knew him?”
Mikey nods.
“Shit, tell me you knew he was dead?” God, if she’s inadvertently hurt Mikey--
“We'd seen the official obituary. He--he was an old friend.” He stops, hands folding and unfolding in his lap. “He--did you see, did he get shot too?”
She gets it. “It was quick, super-fast. With him and with most of them.” Tries to keep her voice steady through all that and fails.
Mikey glances at her and then down at the picture again. “It looks like him.”
“It's just a shadow,” she protests.
“No,” he says, “I mean, yeah, it is, but he was like that, light and dark and, like, he showed you a lot, on stage.”
“You saw him play?”
“Yeah, a couple of months back.”
She looks down at the picture and tries to figure out how to put this, not being used to wanting to tell the story. But she wants Mikey to know. “Probably saw me too,” she finally says, quietly.
“Huh, you mean, you watched the show? Weren't they--”
“No,” she says, some edge creeping into her voice, “No, I'd have been on stage. Playing bass.”
“But--” she glares at him, willing him not to finish the sentence with “you're a girl,” and he looks, really looks at her, eyes going a lot sharper than they usually are. “Wait. Did you wear a plaid skirt? And you--” he bends backwards a little.
“Yup.”
And he's grinning, bright and happy. “You were awesome. You were in Steve's band, I mean, sorry, you were in a band with Steve?”
Lindsey wants to smile back, but she's not prepared for how cold she feels when she hears Steve's name. She thought she'd be better by now. “Yeah, yes,” she says, hearing her voice shake. “Steve and I were best friends.”
“I only met him once,” Mikey offers, tentatively. “Dude called me foxy and bit my ear, and then unfolded the most elaborate scheme for organizing shows, it was fucking amazing.”
She laughs, voice cracking again. “Yeah, that’s just like him. Amazing crazy fucker.”
“Do you have any drawings of him? Because, you should show me.”
So she pulls out the few she's managed to do since she got here, and it's nice, sitting there with Mikey looking over her shoulder, asking about stuff like shading and contrast, which makes her wonder how he knows so much about art. She asks him if he draws, and he shakes his head fast and goes back to asking about the way she stenciled Greta's hair and why Steve is facing away there.
--
On the fourth day of the third week (Lindsey thinks it's a Thursday, but she keeps losing track), Chantal comes by and sits down at Lindsey’s table. “Nice,” she says, indicating the drawing but not looking at it. No, she's looking straight at Lindsey's face, scrutinizing her in an uncomfortable way.
“What do you want?” Lindsey asks; she's never liked being stared at. Except for when she's on stage, but that's entirely different.
“What I want, chickadee, is to be sure of you.”
“It's not my fault you won't believe me.” Great. Petulant is always the best demeanor for convincing anyone of anything; Ann used to say Lindsey’s pouting were the only times she regretted letting her little sister live with her. Of course, that was a long time ago.
“Mikey told me you were there that night, when they killed the musicians.” Chantal hesitates before continuing, “You were the only one who survived.” Her voice is careful, without inflection, but Lindsey can hear what Chantal means, and abruptly she's so furious the room is swimming around her.
“Don't you fucking dare accuse me of--my best friend fucking died that night, okay? I got to watch him--” Her throat seizes up and she can't finish her sentence.
“Yeah, that's what--Sweetpea, I get that this is frustrating and fucking horrible for you, if you're telling the truth, that is--so I wanna give you a chance to prove yourself.”
“I'm not gonna jump through fucking hoops for you.”
Chantal grins, like Lindsey finally said something she liked. “Luckily, I'm not asking that. I'm asking you to go visit a prison where one of our guys is being held, and come back with some intel, and then we can maybe see about getting him out.”
And once Lindsey agrees, that's it, it seems, as far as decision-making goes, at least. Oh, she's briefed more thoroughly later. Like, they tell her that who she needs to get information on is someone named Bob Bryar, who apparently killed somebody when he got caught by Patrol, and he's being held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center.
Amanda, the woman who had paints and pencils, gives Lindsey weapons (nothing complicated, she just checks what Lindsey knows how to use, and once she finds out the answer is “a knife and a gun”, that's what she hands over), and she tells Lindsey Bob is probably being tortured. She also says he won't have spilled much because “Bryar's good at the stoic. And they're kind of inept over there.”
“How do you know?” Lindsey can't help but ask.
Amanda just raises an eyebrow and pulls a sleeve up, demonstrating an impressive array of scars. “Mostly you have to just ignore them,” she says. “Or, if you can't just stay quiet, you lie and lie so they can't tell what's true when you finally fall apart.”
Lindsey thinks about punches under stage lights. “What if they're not trying to get you to tell them anything?”
Amanda looks at her, eyes calm and clear. “Then you're fucked, aren't you.”
--
When Lindsey gets to the prison, she's shaking too much to attempt to go inside right away. So she leans on a wall two blocks down, fidgeting with her uniform jacket and the hidden direct-line mini-phone that Kitty stitched into her collar before she left. Tries to still her trembling hands. The ID is foolproof, she reminds herself, and you don't look like the girl they're looking for right now, so they won't even have a reason to double-check it.
She doesn't look like herself much, it's true, and that's actually reassuring. Frank helped her dye her hair black over the sink in the gritty bathroom, the one with eight shower stalls and plastic curtains that were always sliding off their hooks.
“They think you'll fail or go back home, that's why they're sending you,” he said, fingers moving slowly on her scalp and worry in his voice, and Lindsey had closed her eyes and tried not to breathe.
Amanda had taken a break from refurbishing a crate of old guns to show Lindsey how to use makeup.
“A different kind of armor,” Amanda said, while demonstrating how Lindsey could make herself look completely different without being obvious. It needs to not be obvious: makeup is forbidden (as is hair dye) and Lindsey can't help but thumb at her mouth now and check that she doesn't have any red on her fingers. She doesn't, and she squares her shoulders, turning toward the jail.
Stop being such a fucking pussy. If they sent you because they think you'll fail, you just have to prove them wrong, don't you? Sounds like Steve in her head, or maybe (surprisingly) Chantal.
So she tries to channel both her sister's quiet authority and her own stage persona, and ends up with a steady walk that she hopes looks Squad-like. The trainee at the desk seems to think so, or, well, it's probably mostly the fact that her ID has her as a Squad Regular, and he probably hasn't met anyone of that rank before. Patrol trainees tell each other horror stories about the Squad; she heard most of them when her sister went through training. (She hopes no one in her sister's class works here. Dammit, why didn't she make Kitty or Mikey check that?)
But the trainee brings her the file on Bryar fast enough, without talking with his superior. He hands it over, stammering out an apology for--well, she's not quite sure for what--and shows her a table where she can sit down. She scans the file (she's seen most of it already, obviously; Kitty managed to access almost the whole thing) and waves him over again when she's done.
“Trainee--” she checks his nametag “Johanneson, are you sure you gave me the full file? You've had Bryar for a month and a half, and there's no record of him giving any relevant information. There are three pages on his dogs, which is hardly what we're looking for here.”
Johanneson swallows. “Well, um, he won't, I mean, he's not talking. And the guys were pissed, down at the Tombs where they held him first, because, you know, he killed one of their own, and they were maybe too rough during the first session, and, there's a note about the journalist, right?”
There is. Lindsey knows all about Steven Smith, Intrepid Reporter, who's going to get himself killed any day now, as soon as the government can figure out a way to make it look accidental. They wouldn't bother, normally--they tend to prefer handling internal politics by way of making examples out of suitable deviants. But they’ve been trying to limit negative global attention for the last few months, since they're attempting to look legitimate and all. Steven Smith has one of the few web shows in the country that are still running on a worldwide network, and he has an international following. He somehow got wind of Bob Bryar, and there it was. Word got to Amnesty and the UN, and now Bryar is in the official system and has actual rights.
“I do know the reason for Bryar being transferred to this prison, thank you.” She pauses and crosses her arms. “Trainee Johanneson,” Lindsey puts some edge in her voice and feels a frisson of satisfaction when she sees him turn pale. “I want to see him, if you please. The Squad has license to use more unorthodox methods; perhaps I can make our little bird sing.” And she's deviating from the mission, she knows, but it's pretty fucking useless to have come this far if she doesn't get anything but the file they already have most of and a confirmation of the Smith story.
Johanneson turns even more pale and doesn't say another word the whole time he's showing Lindsey to the cells. She feels a little bad when she notices how pale he is. But then she sees the shape Bryar is in, and doesn't worry about sounding sharp when she dismisses Johanneson; no, she's not worried about Johanneson’s feelings at all anymore.
There's a camera in the corner or she'd be getting Bryar to lie back down and, shit, washing his face for him or something. He has a nasty cut on one cheek, and he's dirty, like they haven't let him take a shower in a while. His pant leg has dark stains, like he bled through the fabric, and his bare wrists look--there's something wrong there.
“You can sit down,” she manages, swallowing down bile.
“Don't think I want to,” he replies, not looking at her.
Lindsey’s trying to think of a way to let him know she's not actually a Squad Regular, which, he must be recognizing the uniform and he must be thinking that shit is about to get worse, oh god. His eyes are angry but he looks so, so tired. Abruptly, she knows she can’t leave him here. Not again, not another one, no fucking way. She has to get him out, has to--
She bites her lip, tries to think of something to say that’ll be both reassuring and ambiguous enough not to raise red flags in case anyone's listening in. “Seriously, you should sit. I have a message from the leadership.” Camera in the upper-right corner, check. Cell door locked behind her, check, but she has the combination for opening it. Johannesen was so useful; if she gets out of here alive, she might even send him a thank you note.
“Not interested.”
“Actually, you are,” she says, and continues, “But before that, give me a second.” And she taps at the communication unit twice, like Kitty showed her. “If you could pull a 180,” she says quietly, “That'd be great.” The comm unit beeps twice for yes, and she takes a deep breath and starts counting to thirty in her head. She doesn't think Kitty will mind if Lindsey uses the absolutely-last-resort emergency escape plan they put together last night, not if it means she gets Bryar out.
He’s staring at her weirdly now, and she doesn't blame him, wants to reassure him that he doesn't have a crazy Squad Regular in his cell but has to wait, wait…there.
She reaches thirty in her count and the cell goes dark, as does the hallway outside. What she thinks is the fire alarm starts howling, and she grins at Bryar. “Come on,” she says, holding out her hand, “let's get you home.”
“You, what, what the hell?” He's not moving yet, dammit--Amanda did say he was a stubborn asshole.
“Seriously, we have two minutes. Kitty explained this to me--she can short out the electricity for two minutes and have the alarm go off, but she can only stay in their system for that long before she or our operative on the inside gets compromised.”
He looks stunned. “Kitty--you mean you're from, really?”
“Yes, Chantal sent me to get you. Seriously, come on!” He doesn't need to know this was supposed to be an intelligence-gathering mission only.
They have one minute and thirty seconds now, and she's thinking through the schematics on this jail. There should be a fire door down this hallway, and she's thanking her stars that they'd put Bryar alone in this wing--this prison doesn't normally hold political prisoners, and they must have been afraid that he would sway all the petty thieves with his rhetoric.
“Fine,” he says, “But I will kill you if you're lying to me.”
She snorts. “Far be it from me to kick a man who's down already, but I seriously doubt you could do anything to me right now. It's okay though, you're not going to need to kill me, because I'm going to get you home.”
And they hobble out the door together. Bryar tries to refuse to lean on her, but she shoulders her way underneath his arm and hangs on, and he shuts up. She can tell he needs the help, he’s swaying and using her to support his weight, and she swears under her breath, feeling her knee give. How the fuck are they supposed to get back? But she couldn't have left him, no way.
The stairs are a bitch, but they manage. After five blocks and as many turns to get them back toward Brooklyn where they won’t be so out in the open, he’s panting hard and she has to get him into a doorway so he can catch his breath. Fine, so her hands are shaking too, but she can't tell if it's the exertion or the adrenaline. Her mini-telephone beeps, and she taps it three times for two-way conversation, which had been turned off while she was still in the prison.
“They're tracking you,” Kitty's voice is urgent in her ear. “They just sorted out the confusion of the fire alarm and I'm seeing messages that Bryar's gone, which, damn, well done, you crazy bitch, but they're tracking you.”
“How the hell are they doing that?”
“Does he know if they implanted anything on him?”
Lindsey looks at Bryar. “When they--did they implant anything?”
“My leg, maybe,” he manages, still breathing heavily. “They burned me and then I passed out, but there's something underneath the stitches, I checked.”
Well, fuck. “Did you get that?” she asks Kitty.
“I did, and you have to get it out of him,” Kitty says, sounding frantic. “They'll find you, and we won't be able to get there in time. I mean, people are on their way, yeah, using your phone as a goal, but like I said, they won't be there on time. But if you can get it out, I can maybe fuck with the signal.”
“Get it out--you mean I have to cut it out.” Lindsey shakes her knife out of her wrist sheath, and, well, she knows why her hands are trembling now.
“I can maybe do it myself?” Bryar offers. “You're looking sort of green.”
“Shut the fuck up,” she responds and kneels, cutting his pants leg open. Amanda apparently gave her a sharp knife, thank fuck. “I can't sterilize it and it’s not like I have anesthetics,” she says, “So basically this is going to suck.”
He half-grimaces, half-grins. “Can't do worse,” and eases down on the ground so he's leaning against the wall, leg stretched out in front of him.
“Deep breath out on three,” she says, as much for his benefit as for her own, and she counts, “One, two, three.”
When he breathes out, she cuts along the haphazard stitches as shallowly as she can, getting the cut to reopen and she feels herself hit what must be the tracker. It’s bulging out, right underneath the stitches--it doesn't seem like they were paying a whole lot of attention to doing this safely and medically soundly--maybe they were hoping he'd die from the infection. Not thinking, not thinking, she gets her fingers into the cut, ignoring the sound he makes. She pulls out what must be the tracker and puts it next to them on the ground.
“It's out,” says Lindsey, trying not to stare at it or the blood on its surface. “Gimme a sec,” she adds, I have to stop the bleeding.”
She gets her scarf off (uniform scarf, ugly awful uniform scarf) and pushes it against the wound, praying she didn't hit a vein or anything; she's reasonably sure she didn't hit much at all, given that she wasn't far below the surface of the skin. But it's not like she's a fucking surgeon.
“Done.” She waits for further instructions.
“Motherfucker,” Kitty says, then pauses. “Okay, there should be a serial number on one side. Read them out to me.”
Lindsey wipes the blood off on her sleeve, still not thinking about it, and reads off the series of numbers and letters. She hears beeping at Kitty's end of the phoneline and then her voice comes through again.
“Excellent, stay put for five minutes, there's an unmarked car coming. Get in fucking fast when they arrive, okay? I’m scrambling the signal but I have to make it believable that it moved the way it did, which means starting from where you are, so Patrol are going to be right around where you don't fucking want them. Oh, and kill it on 5-4-3-2-1 now.”
Lindsey doesn't have to ask what Kitty means by “kill it.” Listening to Kitty count down, she gets to her feet, takes aim and carefully grinds the tracker into the pavement.
--
Everything is a blur after that. The car does show up, and Lindsey gets Bryar into it and then practically falls onto the grimy floor next to him. They can't sit in the seats; they have to stay out of sight.
“Fucking Amanda,” he manages when the car drives over the edge of the sidewalk and nearly hits a lamp post. He smiles weakly when Lindsey looks at him. “Terrible fucking driver.”
Amanda turns around in the front seat. “Bitch, please a little more grateful for the impromptu rescue. If we had planned this, I would obviously not be fucking driving, I'd be in the back so I could shoot at people following us. But I threw myself into the damn car when Kitty yelled, and better me than Mikey, right?”
Lindsey waves at her to turn back around, for fuck's sake - you're going to get us killed! - even while snorting at Amanda's comment. No, Mikey shouldn't drive getaway cars, that's for sure. She's not sure why the idea is so funny but she keeps laughing until she, oh, she's crying, dammit. She wipes at her eyes angrily. Now is not the time. And then she looks up and Bryar’s shaking.
“Hurts?” she asks, ignoring how wrecked her voice is.
“Yeah, and I'm just--I don't know what the hell I'm supposed to be feeling?”
She takes his hand and holds on when he squeezes.
--
They do make it. Pure dumb luck and Amanda's knowledge of the city, mostly. And the fact that Kitty beeps in periodically to let them know to stay the fuck away from Midtown, because she's had a couple of their other hackers fuck around with traffic lights and train signals so Patrol would have to go to those areas when the angry calls start coming in. Mikey also lets them know he cleared out the Patrol station nearest the factory by sending Frank and Bert to start a fire.
Lindsey and Amanda half-drag, half-carry Bryar out of the car and then struggle to negotiate the stairs. “I don't know if people are back yet,” Amanda says when they're stopping to breathe halfway up the steps. He shrugs, leaning on the wall, holding himself so, so tightly. Lindsey fiercely wants to help but has no idea how and has to kick at the wall to release some of her frustration.
“Come on,” she says, because at least she can get him the last bit of the way home. He grins a little and takes her outstretched arm, leaning on the railing with his left. Amanda smiles at them both and doesn’t offer to help, staying behind them.
“Were you,” Bryar pauses, putting his right foot down and grimacing. “Actually supposed to,” pausing again, “Get me out of there?” he finally finishes asking.
“Nah,” Lindsey says, carefully, “but I couldn't fucking leave you there, you know?”
He squeezes her shoulder. They've stopped in front of the door, Amanda punching in the password. “Thanks,” he says. “Fucking--thank you.”
She grins. “Anytime you need another tracker out, I'm totally your girl.”
He laughs at that, a startled, surprised sound, and the door opens. Lindsey has never seen the large, colorful room so quiet. Also, everyone is totally back; she doesn't notice anyone missing. And then all hell breaks loose. In a good way, but still.
Matt (it had taken her two weeks to figure out all the tiny tattooed guys in this group) is first, actually crying and hugging Bryar and pulling away to swipe at his eyes before going back in, saying something about “Shit such a goddamn miracle, the hell.”
Frank isn't far behind, so Bryar’s triumphant return is executed with Frank and Matt holding onto him tightly. Also, they’re probably, if Lindsey judges their coordination right, stepping on his feet. Lindsey and Amanda look at each other and shrug, walking in behind them.
Bert and Mikey join the fray, and Bert seems to know he should be careful with Bryar, like he knows how to watch out when people are seriously hurt. That surprises Lindsey, given how careless he tends to be with himself. She'll never forget her first week in the hideout when he came running through the doorway, slipped on the soda someone had spilled and not wiped up yet, faceplanted, got a spectacular nosebleed and shrugged, got back up, and kept walking.
Frank, on the other hand, is obviously too happy to look at Bryar’s injuries yet or pay attention to them, so Lindsey actually does pull him off and drags him away to find first aid stuff so she doesn't have to look at Bryar trying not to wince.
They come back to find him sitting down, finally, and the room has gone quiet, as if people just want to look and look. Even Chantal is looking a lot happier. She turns as Lindsey walks back in and waves her to a stop, yelling: “Look, it's the woman of the hour! Guys, let's give her, Kitty and Amanda a hand for completely refusing to follow orders! Don't you motherfuckers ever do it again!” And the room erupts in cheers. Totally embarrassing. Frank is bouncing next to her, too, whooping loudly. Lindsey she can't decide if she wants to hide or bounce along with him--the way everyone is smiling at her is overwhelming.
Then Brian walks in, and the quiet is instantaneous, like someone flipped a switch. He looks even more frazzled than usual, ripping out his ear piece and saying “Mikey said--Mikey said to come back, because--” and then he sees Bob. For one second, Brian's face is completely, frighteningly open. “You fucking idiot,” he says, voice breaking. Lindsey wants to look away, but she can't; she gets it now, gets why he's been wound so tight she sometimes thought anything at all could make him boil over.
Bob gets one of his hands away from Ray, who'd started to wrap it using the tape Frank threw him when he got back into the room, and holds it out toward Brian. “C'mere,” he says. And Brian goes, the way Lindsey's never seen him follow anyone's orders (he even argues with Chantal, which takes guts). He gets to his knees next to Bob, one hand light on his thigh.
Frank's wiping at his eyes next to Lindsey, and she sees more than one person doing the same. She swallows. It's a good thing to see, those two, but it kind of hurts at the same time. Anywhere else, they'd be taken away for being so completely obvious about how they feel. Anywhere else, this is wrong.
Of course, then Brian notices Bob's leg injury, and the epic yelling starts. Bob's just smiling, though, fingers curled around Brian's wrist.
--
That night, they push all the mattresses into a circle and clear the center of the room. Mikey pulls Lindsey down to sit next to him, and she looks at him questioningly. “What's going on?
He pushes at his bangs, then takes of his glasses, looking down and fiddling with them. “It's what we do when we lose someone.”
“Oh, I'm so sorry,” she says automatically, then continues carefully, “Who did you lose?” And if it's your brother, Mikeyway, I will help you burn this fucking city to the ground.
“Bob told us--we’d been hoping, but as it turns out, none of the Hushies survived.”
“Who were the Hushies?”
Mikey swallows. “They were--you know Greta?”
Her hands clench around her skirt, involuntarily. Greta, Greta, blond hair, clear voice, playing any instrument they threw at her. “I do, I mean, I did.”
“She played with Pete and them sometimes, right, but mostly she played with her first band, with Bob, not our Bob, Bob Morris, Chris Faller, and Darren Wilson. The Hush Sound, they called themselves, like the sound that was always hushed but kept going, you know?” Mikey takes a deep breath before he continues. “And then, when she died, they stopped playing, and we thought they'd given up, because, Greta. As it turned out, they'd just gone back to Chicago and joined Ashlee and Patrick and Travis. Last week--” Mikey closes his eyes and mouths wordlessly for a second before he manages to look at Lindsey again, and she takes his hand, heartsick and knowing she doesn't want to hear the end of this.
Someone clears their throat and Lindsey looks up. Ray is standing in the middle of the circle. “Last week,” he says, eyes as shadowed as Mikey's, “last week, Chris and Darren and Bob set up their instruments in the middle of Hyde Park in Chicago. It was nighttime, and they did it while Travis pulled his biggest operation yet, blowing up banks all around the city. It kept all the Patrols busy, so no one was monitoring the Park all night.” He falters, falling silent.
Chantal joins him, hands clasped tightly together, but Lindsey can see them shaking. “Then in the morning,” she says, voice full of pain and face blank, “the boys played through the songs they wrote with Greta, and when Chicago Patrol came to shut them down, pushing through the crowd, oh, there were so many people there, then they set themselves on fire, and they played and played--” She turns her face into Ray's shoulder, breathing long, deep, shuddering breaths.
“We didn't know,” Brian starts, from where he's sitting next to Bob, when it becomes clear that neither Chantal nor Ray can continue, “we didn't know if they survived. Patrol cleared out the area and called in the Fire Department, but there hasn't been any clear intel because it was so goddamn recent--” his voice breaks.
Bob clears his throat. “Some of the NYC Patrol came back from Chicago four days ago, and they made a big deal about dragging all the politicals out so we could listen when they made announcements about recent rebel deaths in Chicago. All the other names on the list are deaths we know have happened, and Bob and Chris and Darren were on it too.”
“So there's Passage today,” Amanda says, calm and measured from her place in the circle, her voice so dark it hurts to listens to. “There's Passage, for Bob and Chris and Darren, and for Greta, even though we already held it for her, because the four of them were the Hush Sound, silenced but never silent.” She looks at the girl in a knit cap sitting next to Kitty. “Vienna, will you sing?”
Vienna nods. Lindsey's never met her before, but she's pretty sure this is who Kitty kept going off to meet, the one who works in the Mayor's office where she's supposed to be doing menial computer work as penance for some minor transgression (but who is a better hacker than Kitty, according to the latter, which is why she's the one working from the inside--the 'minor transgression' was very much on purpose). And they definitely do more than just work together, judging by the way they kiss, softly and sweetly, before Kitty says, smile less bright than usual but no less there, “Sing, sweetheart.”
Vienna nods, tugging off her hat and getting to her feet. She runs a hand through her dark hair and walks into the center of the circle. Ray and Chantal both hug her before they go to sit down.
“It's Passage,” she says, and closes her eyes and sings. “I died two days ago. Unrecognizable…”
Clean and clear, her voice cuts through the silence in the room, and Lindsey cries, helpless against all the memories that rise unbidden. Steve, Steve, Steve. Face a blur in stage lights.
Mikey's crying too, still holding on to her hand.
--
That night, even when she's curled up on her mattress, Lindsey keeps hearing that song, Vienna's voice. My future an impossibility. She can't stop shivering.
“Hey,” she hears, low and shaky. Mikey's looking at her from his usual place on the mattress to the right of hers. “Could we, maybe--” he tugs at her mattress a little. “My brother and I, we used to, when something bad happened.”
She gets what he's saying, and rolls off her mattress to tug it so it's next to his. There's an awkward moment when they're trying to figure out how to hold on to each other, but finally she just lies down on her side and pulls him in. “Today was too much,” she says, voice low. He nods against her hair.
“I miss him,” he says, “I miss my brother.”
“I miss Steve,” she answers.
And it's uncomfortable (Mikey is really bony), but she feels calmer like that, like she has something to hang on to. The last thing she thinks before falling asleep is that it'd be good if they could get a bit of a break. Just a little one, just a little rest.
--
Getting to rest was a dream, of course. What Lindsey hadn't known but quickly finds out (the next day, man, couldn't she have gotten a day, even?), was that Bob had been captured while attempting to protect an undercover operative named Quinn Allman. Quinn had been meeting with Mikey's brother (who was apparently some sort of front figure for this whole crazy mess) and the explosives expert Jimmy Urine. The meeting was set up because Quinn (who'd been undercover working for the city rebuilding efforts) had gotten his hands on a report that gave the group crucial intel. Namely, where they could set off explosives and cause the most damage possible to the new guard tower when there would be the least people and no civilians around.
That opportunity had been nothing short of a miracle, so of course the report had been planted. All four of them, Jimmy, Gerard, Quinn and Bob (he told Lindsey to call him that, after they had Passage) were captured, but they were separated when Steven Smith got wind of the Bob Bryar story.
Initially, Patrol had judged the four based on appearance and how they acted when they were cornered, and figured Bob was the most important one (he'd killed two officers when he was arrested).
The keyword there is initially. It wasn’t long before the government figured out that shit, they had Gerard Way and Jimmy Urine, and they were going to make the most of the PR inherent in capturing those notorious underground artists and leaders. Luckily (depends on how you see it, but luckily for Gerard and Jimmy, probably) there had been an escalation of the Chicago uprising about a week after the four were captured, so many government operatives (especially the Squad Operatives and most higher-ranking Patrol officers) had to go up there to reinforce the Chicago Patrol, and Gerard and Jimmy and Quinn were left in their cells.
“As far as we know, anyway,” Chantal finishes the story bleakly. “But Mikey, Vienna and Kitty all have intel from different sources that the three of them are alive, and we know where they're held, but we need to fucking move before Chicago dies down or before, you know.”
“Well, shit.” Lindsey says. They’re alone in one of the meeting rooms, because Chantal apparently decided Lindsey needed to be filled in. “Who’s Jimmy, by the way?”
Chantal swallows, and for a second she looks a lot younger. “Yeah, James is my husband,” she says, drawing a thick line down the center of the page she'd been doodling on while explaining what has been happening to Lindsey. “But let’s not talk about that; I need to focus on how I'm going to get that idiot back. You saw Brian before last night, it's fucking impossible to function if you start dwelling on it.”
Lindsey nods, thinking about taking a break, thinking about painting and drawing and the stencils she left in a pile over by the file cabinets. She shakes her head, tries to clear it. “How do you want me to help?”
“Shit, sweetheart, you did a lot yesterday. Are you sure you're up for another one?”
Lindsey shrugs and tries to really think about her answer. “It wasn't--I'm not going to say it was the most fun I've ever had or anything: I've never been so fucking terrified in my entire life, but I could do it, and I wasn't bad, and I did something. The art--I want to keep doing the art, because the people who aren't here anymore are important too, but I couldn’t leave Bob in that jail and I can’t stop now, I don’t think.”
“Okay, okay.” Chantal grins at her. It's barely visible, but it's there.
--
It feels like barely any time at all passes before Lindsey’s in front of a mirror again, Mikey next to her this time. They're both going; Mikey flat out refused to be left behind, which prompted Chantal to demand he make himself look pretty goddamn different, because it wasn't like the authorities didn't have pictures of Gerard Way's little brother, with his dorky glasses and birds' nest hairdo. “You have to look like a different person,” she'd said, Brian next to her, nodding in agreement.
Mikey had just shrugged at them both and gotten Frank to help him with the hairdye: his hair was now the same shade as Lindsey's. “I figured,” he'd said when she grinned at him and asked if he was auditioning to be her twin, “if we look the same, they’ll look at that, not at us as like, separate people.”
“Smart boy, Mikeyway,” Amanda had said, and started teaching him about makeup, switching to a new set of colors, using the same for both of them. She'd looked at Lindsey consideringly. “Lucky that idiot trainee of yours was too terrified to tell anyone about you,” she'd said.
Lindsey'd nodded. “He was sent to Chicago this morning, Kitty told me. Also, thank god we’re not going back to the same jail.”
Now, wearing identical vests and ties, she and Mikey look stunningly similar. At this point, Lindsey's starting to believe Amanda knows how to do almost anything except drive a car, but seriously, looks nothing like he usually does. Darker hair, no glasses, it’s weird how much that changes his appearance. And he looks like Lindsey. Freaky.
The whole group meets up in the main room. Their cover story is that Crush, Chantal's clothing manufacturing company (how the woman runs a rebellion and a company at the same time, and makes both of them work is seriously a mystery) is looking at maybe using prisoners as workers.
Frank and Bert are not coming to the meeting, they're wreaking havoc in Uptown and Matt is, in his own words, “blowing up some bridges that are closed for repair”.
Amanda's going, fake eyebrows pasted onto her tattooed ones, and it's throwing Lindsey off every time she looks at her. And every time she does look, Amanda waggles her eyebrows at her, so Lindsey giggles through the whole briefing. This does not make Brian or Chantal happy.
Brian is going (under protest, because Bob is not recovered enough to come too), because he's the best at playing business manager and bodyguard in one, in case they want Chantal in a meeting without her entire entourage. So he's covered his neck tattoo and taken his piercings out, placing little flesh colored patches of fake skin (also conceived of by Chantal, officially produced to cover scars--thou shall not show where thy skin has been broken) over the resulting holes.
Last but not least, Mikey's going to cover the tech end of it in the group while Vienna's back at her undercover job to uphold her end of the electronic break-in, and Kitty will coordinate from headquarters. Lindsey has her knife and her knowledge of how these places work (Ann, oh, Ann), and she's memorized the plans for the prison.
Bob makes some comment about feeling like it’s a small force for a break-in, which mostly sounds like he wants to go too, but Chantal grinned at him. “Nah,” she said. “Sneakiness works better with fewer people, and besides, the fewer we are, the fewer we have to keep track of. We're gonna have enough people by the time we get ready to leave, after all.”
Part 1 | Part 3 |
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-18 05:49 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-18 01:32 am (UTC)(♥)
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Date: 2009-06-21 02:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-24 09:05 am (UTC)oh my god. oh my god. i love you. i feel stupid saying it over and over; but i don't know how else to express it. i just want to quote every line of this fic back at you and declare my unending love.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-25 11:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-28 10:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-29 12:13 pm (UTC)