The Weaving Force: Chapter 20 (Patreon)

Chapter 20:

Hannah:

She followed after Dennis and (quite literally) jammed her foot in the door as he tried to close it behind him, all but shoving the door open after him. If he closed it, she didn’t have the code to get it back open, and she was not about to leave him alone to deal with… whatever all of this was.

“Dennis!” she called.

He stepped into his room, pausing at the spot between the entry and the sitting area, head moving on a swivel, searching for a distraction, any distraction.

“Listen to me,” she pleaded softly, staring at his back. “Whatever this is, whatever’s going on, you can talk to me. We can figure this out.”

“You know I’d really rather not figure any more shit out right now, Miss M.” His voice carried the sneer she couldn’t see as he turned sharply to stalk off into the kitchen area. “I know, it’s against the rules and all that, what with underage drinking, but seeing as how I just got it confirmed I’ll be dying before I hit the legal age, I think you can give me a hall pass for this one, eh?”

Was the question a distraction? Genuine? A mix of both? Her training and experiences had covered emotional shock but it was too early to tell just what pattern Dennis might fall into, if that’s even what this was.

“You’re angry,” she hedged on the safe bet. Anger was a default response, a human ‘catch all’ safety net. Fear, sadness… those came later. “I understand, I do, but–”

“No, you don’t!” he screamed, one hand punching the wall as he whirled around to look at her.

Tears were in his eyes, streaming down his cheeks, his teeth bared in a snarl; and there, slowly cracking through the anger was an unsettling… desperation.

“What’s the last thing you remember?” he asked. “Before we came here. What’s the last thing you can think of?”

“I…” She hesitated, wondering if her answer, given all the context she’d gleaned from everything said so far, might make things worse…

Then she realized that Dennis might already know the answer, and getting caught in a lie would be even worse at this juncture.

“I remember getting a call,” she admitted. “Lung. Armsmaster took down Lung.”

“Yeah… Actually, not sure if that was total bullshit or not come to think of it, but… Good fucking times.” He smiled, and there was nothing kind about it, nothing easy or reassuring… there was nothing of Dennis in that smile.

It was all teeth, bitterness, spite and… contempt.

“Must be nice,” he laughed, “missing how everything went to shit, and then kept going to shit!” His hand cut through the air, finger pointing at her, as that desperate, manic anger reached a fever pitch, trapped in the cage of his eyes.

“Bakuda, fucking Endbringers, the Slaughterhouse! Tohu, Bohu, Khonsu,” he marked down the names like they should have meaning and she knew he was getting angrier by the fact that they didn’t. She knew what some were but it carried weight with him. It carried memory. “Fucking Scion!”

She tried not to wince. For so long – the whole of her life, even – Scion was a hero. The Hero. The one who could save everyone, protect anyone, and do anything.

For Dennis to believe… possibly to know otherwise…

“The last thing I remember is him killing me. Killing everyone.” The heels of his palms dug into his eyes, as though physically trying to shove back the tears. “I close my eyes and I see gold, Miss M. I see that beam coming at me! I hear the screams that just stop. I can’t get it out of my goddamn head!”

She stepped forward, her heart breaking for the boy that had apparently been bottling up everything since they arrived, hoping that something would prove these memories, these beliefs, false – and had only found confirmation.

Now that he had… he couldn’t bottle it up any longer.

He stepped away from her, keeping his distance; his eyes and face a strange dichotomy of longing and disgust as he looked at her.

“I wish I was like you!” he hissed. “I wish I didn’t know a fucking thing!”

She stepped forward, closer to him; it was a risk, she knew. He might freeze her, then use the time to do… something she wouldn’t let him do if she were aware, but she felt it was a necessary risk. Dennis needed someone, anyone right now, not a woman who would treat him like a suspect.

“But you’re not,” she answered carefully, her hands slowly inching forward to grab the boy’s biceps, squeezing in a way to reassure him that he was here. With her. Not in a memory where he died. “You’re not like me. And… I don’t want to tell you I know what you’re going through, that I know what it’s like because I don’t. All I know is that you’re strong enough to overcome this.”

“There’s no point,” he hissed, a blackness in his voice that unnerved her, unsettling somewhere deep in the back of her mind. “There’s–”

“You are alive!” she replied, enunciating every word, hands squeezing tightly. “You’re here! Whatever he did, whatever that beam was, you are here, Dennis! He failed.”

Dennis’s expression crumpled, the boy almost folding in on himself as she closed the remaining distance and hugged him. He was still shorter than her, his head just low enough to rest beneath her chin as she squeezed her arms tightly around him.

“We’re alive for a reason, this happened for a reason.” she whispered, feeling his hands digging into her back, holding onto her like a drowning man grasping onto a life raft.

“Nothing could stop him,” Dennis sobbed. “Behemoth. Leviathan. He was killing Endbringers, Miss M.”

She felt a chill go down her spine.

She’d fought both those monsters at one occasion or another. She’d seen what they could do.

If Scion could kill them…

She really wasn’t sure what chance any of them had.

But Dennis didn’t need to hear that. Didn’t need to be reminded of that.

“You’re not going to die again,” she answered him, praying somewhere deep in her heart she wasn’t lying. “Whatever you saw, whatever you remember… just by us being here… it’s not the same anymore. We can change it. We can fix things.”

“How?”

She had no idea.

She didn’t tell him that either.

Pulling away, she gently cupped the sides of his head in her hands, making him look at her.

“I promise–” she answered quietly, “I promise that we’ll get home. And when we do, we’ll bring back whatever we need to win.”

He didn’t believe her. She could see that.

She could also see that he wanted to. Desperately, fervently, he wanted to.

So he nodded… and pretended.

She felt her heart break a little more at the sight.

(X)(X)(X)

She stayed with Dennis for a long, long while. He was exhausted and drained, talking about what he remembered. Everything he could, everything that might be true, and might not be true.

If this was a fantasy, some shared delusion of some kind, it was remarkably detailed and thorough.

Some things she wanted to push back against: the idea that Colin would break the Endbringer Truce, or set some girl up to take the fall for him out of spite.

She wanted to say that Piggot wouldn’t send children to fight the Slaughterhouse Nine, let alone drop heavy ordnance right onto their heads for the mere chance to take out a member or two.

She wanted to believe that corruption didn’t run so deep, couldn’t be so systemic that not even Chevalier - bright, shining Chevalier - could fix the organizations. That he couldn’t even begin to truly grasp the extent of the problem.

The people she worked with were better than that. The PRT was supposed to be better than that.

And yet… evidence to the contrary was in the other room.

She didn’t want to leave Dennis alone, but the questions burned at her mind. When the boy fell asleep in the living room chair from which he told his story, though, she slipped out of the room.

Marching towards Alexandria now felt like marching to interrogate a prisoner, and that thought was equal parts disturbing and dismaying.

When she reached the door, she entered the code that Alexandria had used earlier, and the metal sheet slid upwards into the ceiling.

Alexandria was sitting almost in the exact same spot Hannah had left her. She looked… exhausted. Leaning back in her seat, she had one hand resting across her brow, and the other resting on the armrest.

She sat still as a statue, the gloom and dark of the Mandalorian night casting the whole room in cold gray and unsettling hues of blue.

Hannah opened her mouth, ready to say… something. She wasn’t sure what, when Alexandria beat her to it.

“Meaningless.”

She stopped, confused, almost unsure if she’d even heard the whispered word that slithered through the room like a malediction. “What?” She asked.

Alexandria shifted, the movement almost imperceptible and yet so very unsettling for just how minute it was, like something chittering in the dark and you weren’t sure if it’d moved at all.

“It was all… meaningless,” she repeated.

“What was?” Hannah asked, frowning as she stepped deeper into the room; closer to her.

Silence reigned over the room for a long moment. The unsettling stillness of Alexandria’s body was oppressive, like a high pitched note growing louder in the back of her mind.

“We had projections,” Alexandria finally said. “Precogs. Thinkers. We didn’t know the exact numbers. But we knew how many we’d lose… more or less. Lowest estimates, the optimistic ones, were five-hundred billion. Higher ones were in the hundreds of trillions.”

Militia wondered for a moment how that made sense, knowing there were less than six billion on earth.

Then she remembered that there were other worlds. Earth Aleph for instance. And even more besides that.

Add enough of those planets together… you could reach those numbers.

Would Scion have wiped them all out?

Why?

“Do you know how many humans live in this galaxy, Militia?” Alexandria asked and Hannah’s eyes darted towards the tablet resting on the coffee table right in front of Alexandria, though its screen was now dark, like the rest of the room.

Her eyes returned to Alexandria, finding the woman’s own gaze fixed on a spot somewhere on the table. Staring far away, staring past the room, staring past Hannah herself.

“The minimum number is nearly seven quadrillion…” She snorted. “Last they checked.”

Hannah wasn’t sure what to say to that.

“The attack can happen,” Alexandria continued. Somehow, Hannah understood that she was no longer talking to her, not really. “He can kill… everyone… And it wouldn’t have wiped us out. Humanity would have lived on. We’d still exist.

“All of it…” Alexandria shuddered. “It was always… pointless.”

Hannah stood there in the darkened room, feeling uneasy. Out of place. Seemingly in an eyeblink both her Ward and her Mentor were suddenly off their respective centers, despairing in equal if different ways.

She’d never seen Alexandria like this, not even in the worst of times, after the most devastating of defeats. But now…

She moved softly, quietly, as though afraid to disturb the stillness of the room.

She took a seat on the couch beside Alexandria’s seat, her knees felt stiff, and her throat dry. Armsmaster said she was good with people; right now she wished that were true.

“You’re a good person,” she decided to say.

Alexandria snorted, dismissively, almost disdaining. “You don’t know nearly enough to say that. You’re saying it to make yourself feel better; because otherwise you were taught by a false Hero, and just what does that say about you.” she replied, speaking with a coldness and sharp, cutting certainty that had always made Hannah both admire and fear her judgment as a child.

But right now, she felt her hackles rise, anger bubbling under the surface.

It was one thing to make mistakes. It was entirely a different matter to refuse to correct it if you could.

Alexandria had been the one to teach her that.

“You were a real hero once!” She retorted, heat entering her voice. “Do you want to be one still? Or would you rather be… this!”

There was no denying that Alexandria had grown colder, harsher, more severe and more demanding since Hannah had first trained under her, all those years ago. Hero’s death, the Siberian, Behemoth, Leviathan, and the Simurgh: each of these had taken their toll, making her harder. And now, seemingly, Scion, as well,l bore down on her shoulders. Hannah could understand why Alexandria’s idealism might have died. She could forgive the fact that her mentor might have become something she once would have fought against.

But only if Alexandria, herself, wanted to change, this time for the better.

The woman watched her now, as if studying a canvas. With her usually helmet-obscured face naked, Hannah could almost read Alexandria’s own bared ‘micro expressions,’ subtle as they were.

Hannah shook her head. “Maybe you lost your way. Maybe things went wrong, or… whatever. But you’re still alive. You and Dennis… this gives you a chance, now.”

“We lost, Militia,” Alexandria sighed. The word ‘lost’ was pronounced like  a damning condemnation. “Everything we did - everything I did - I could live with. I’d do it all again, if it meant that we won! But… ten minutes.”

She never screamed. She never raised her voice, even. But the severity - the emotion - was certainly there.

Alexandria shook her head with a laugh filled with bitterness and sorrow. “Ten minutes…”

Before she knew what she was doing, Hannah had closed the distance, shuffling forward to place her hands on Alexandria’s shoulders as she had Dennis before her, standing over the sitting heroine in a way that she never would have thought would happen, their roles utterly reversed.

“What happened, happened.” She shook her head. “We don’t know how we got here. Maybe that can’t be changed. Maybe it can. But regardless of whether or not that can change, what can change is how you do things now. How you do things going forward.”

“... Even if I tried… I’m not sure I’m able anymore.”

“Why not?” Hannah felt like she was talking someone off the ledge of a building, their feet standing at the edge of the drop.

Alexandria looked up at her and in the dim light of the room. The false eye caught the light, its glass reflecting the cold blue almost like a cat’s.

“That woman died,” she finally whispered softly. “I’m not sure when… All you’re looking at is the corpse… puppeted by whatever’s left to be in control.”

“I don’t want to believe that,” the younger woman answered firmly. “The woman who made me who I am today is no more dead than I am.”

Alexandria shook her head. “You’re a good woman… a good hero. You don’t need a creature like me for validation.”

“Maybe not.” Hannah shrugged. “Validation isn’t what I’m looking for. Just to help you. Both of you. I may not remember anything, or know everything. But somehow, right now, I think the both of you could actually use that.”

(X)(X)(X)

So this is coming in early this week :D

That's the good news.The Bad news is that there's a possibility that next week; the next chapter will be slightly delayed because it needs to be quite a bit longer than normal. So hope the early release of this makes up for the possible delay for chapter 21.At any rate, I hope you all enjoyed this moment where Militia, Overnight became the only functional member of her team.