Starring:
Date: October 11, 2009
Summary:
After the events of When Hunters Become The Hunted, Elena manages to escape. She just wasn't counting on Charlotte to be able to do so as well. Angry over the circumstances, the young Gomez realizes, much to her chagrin, that there's only one direction in which she could run now…
"Fallout"
Somewhere in Upstate New York
She doesn't know how far she's been running, or for how long, but when she finally stops, she finds herself in the outskirts of the nearest suburb she could find. Elena nearly collapses, her knees buckling, weak with fatigue and her lungs burning. But she takes a deep breath, and another, and another. She flexes her fingers. She tries to use her abilities, to get a sense as to how many biological signatures she could find, whether she should stop running.
But she can't.
The Gomez woman sinks against the trunk of the tree, squeezing her eyes shit and bashing a fist once against the trunk in frustration, heat pricking at the back of her eyelids. Gene. They took Gene. Whoever they are, and she could only assume who they are (and if she was right, the sinking feeling in her gut only grows), they took Gene. One of her best friends. One of the few who unerringly dropped everything repeatedly, over and over again, to come to her rescue.
She pushes herself off the trunk determinedly, taking another deep breath to try and calm herself. To think. She had to think.
The buzzing in the back of her head was making it difficult. She coughs once, espying the flecks of blood dotting her palm as she pulls it away. A defiant brush of her knuckles against her mouth wipes off the rusty trace.
Charlotte knows she screwed up. They were looking for a woman - just a woman, a single woman. And then there was…everything. She's gotten almost all that she can from her line of sight, and the guard is coming back - with a hood and a nasal-knockout-gas for her. "No…please don't…" She' can't teleport, her mind isn't together yet. As he approaches her, Charlotte closes her eyes. Blood drips from her nose as she makes a pair of fists. And then?
She's gone.
But not quite. She's there again - beside a tree, standing. At least, standing for a moment. As the blood continues to flow from her nasal cavity, Charlotte falls against the tree, trying to catch herself. FAiling, she stumbles, and hits the ground, leaves crunching underneath. She finds herself dizzy, staring up at the colorfully dark trees above. There's wind. It's swaying. She doesn't even have the heart to think about where she landed. She doesn't know yet.
Slowly, but surely, a plan is forming. This isn't the first time Elena has been in the heat, and this will, undoubtedly, not be the last. After a hand lifts to yank the mask off her head, letting chocolate tresses tumble free, she closes her eyes, forcing herself to breathe slowly, evenly, assessing her situation the best she can. She's in the middle of nowhere, though by the signs and considering her family home is around upstate New York, she was certain once she finds a landmark, she'll be able to determine where she is. She has her phone. She was certain no one saw her face. She has to take off the outfit, and quickly - she'll need to steal some clothes, already espying a few laundry lines somewhere down the road…
Her planning is cut short when there's suddenly someone with her. She takes several steps back, a fist curled. She will attack before she gets attacked, Jack having finally gotten through to her about preemptive strikes and never hesitating when you find yourself in danger.
But no, instead, she sees someone fall on the ground near her, her heart on her throat. How did she get— ?
And then. she sees who it is.
She doesn't help her up, fire and ice water pouring into her bloodstream, mingling in a volatile cocktail of deep-seated anger that's both explosive and cold all at once. She doesn't hesitate when she strides over, doesn't hesitate when she attempts to grab the back of Charlotte's collar and haul her up bodily. She says nothing yet. It is, at present, the most tender of mercies.
"No!" If you've ever been knocked uncontious underwater, you'd know how Charlotte felt. It's like you're wrapped in something, you can't move, you're lazily dozing off. You don't even realize that you're not breathing. Then your mother jumps in the pool and yanks you up and it's like having ice and water dumped on you while you're in the most comfortable, perhaps even two-glasses-of-wine sleep. It's disorienting, to say the least. Not to mention that Charlotte can't see who it is that's grabbing her. "Let go of me! Get off of me, please!"
She ignores the protests, the slender brunette hauling Charlotte up bodily, shifting in an effort to spin her around and push her against the trunk, so the waitress can fully face the face before her, face-lines blackened with rage that can't even begin to be articulated. It is Elena that she glimpses in the dark, eyes dark, her expression tight. If looks could kill, the young woman would be setting Charlotte on fire with her stare. She says nothing, for a moment, eyeballing the woman's face, and when she speaks, it is soft, and dangerously low. It sounds like a growl, from the back of her throat. "I," she begins. "Can't even begin to describe to you how badly you fucked up."
She continues on, after a pause.
"They took Gene. I did what I could but there was too many of them to neutralize. Weren't you listening up on the roof? He was bringing me because I can take people down. You even said it yourself, we didn't know what we were stepping into, didn't know what sort of shit we'll be facing. And then you go and 'port yourself in a locked train?!"
There's nothing that Elena could ever say that would be worse than Charlotte's own feelings. There's nothing Charlotte could ever think that would be worse than her own feelings. "If she was in there, I didn't want her getting near you or him…I'm sorry just…step back, please…" Charlotte doesn't touch Elena, but she lifts her hands as though she migth be able to keep the woman away. "Please, I…I just need a minute and we can go to him. I just need some air and we can get him….." Inside Charlotte is screaming, but the tazer and the teleportation - when she shouldn't have been able to - have made the woman a little loopy.
"If there was anyone you should've been concerned with, it SHOULD HAVE BEEN GENE." Her temper lashes out suddenly along with the sudden rise in her voice, Elena letting go of the woman and restraining the urge, even now, to all out and deck the waitress. Plant her delicate knuckles on the fine bones of the Southern female's face. "You don't know me. You don't know what I'm capable of. You don't know how Gene and I work. When we got there, the hope, the hope, was for all of us to stick together and come up with a plan LIKE YOU SAID once we got there. Not you going in pell-mell-willy-nilly brandishing your powers in the false assumption that just because its nature affords you an easy escape automatically means you can. The people our kind are dealing with are trained. Dangerous. They are not laymen like us. The moment you landed us in that station, with the abandoned tracks and the train, what exactly screamed that it was a GOOD IDEA to go inside? Just because we've all got a fraction of God's power living inside us does NOT give you carte blanche to be bloody stupid."
She cuts her protests off with a wave of her hand. "We're not going after him. Do you even know how many they were? A dozen bodies, in that train. At least one guard in that train. Close to twenty people in the perimeter were Gene and I were. They had vans. Guns. Tazers. A fucking helicopter. Are you seriously contemplating on doing the same mistake twice?"
With some effort, she jerks herself away from her, her jaw setting. "If we go back we're going to get caught. I'll probably be killed on sight. We're going about this another way."
Charlotte would normally be in tears now. Any desire whatsoever to ever be anything but a waitress is entirely gone. She wants to crawl in a hole and die. But she can't, not yet at least. She has her back pressed back against the tree, her nails digging into the bark. "I will go back and find him, please." Her words aren't strong, they're weak - not weak-willed, the desire is there as powerful as Elena's hate. But Charlotte isn't good at fighting. Particularly when she knows that eveyrthing is deserved. "Please just let me fix this. I don't have to go right to him - I know the area now, I can go in somewhere safe until there's an opportunity, and then I'll bring him out."
"You are going to help fix this," Elena replies, in a tone that brooks no argument. That, at least, they're in agreement on. "But not going back there without a plan. And not alone. We're going to get help." And she hopes, hopes, that they won't deny her now. The possibility of using this as leverage for her cooperation isn't lost on her, but there was Gene to consider. She had no choice. She rakes her fingers through her hair, and takes a deep breath, closing her eyes, bitter bile lancing through her blood and the taste of it sour behind her tongue.
"You're going to teleport the both of us to Benjamin Winters." She turns her head to look at Charlotte. "He was a friend of my father's, once. He knows more about what's going on than we do."
Charlotte won't speak. She isn't sure she can bring Elena to this Benjamin Winters person - she's barely standing as it is. But she doesn't dare argue with Elena. Instead, she reaching out an arm, almost as though groping for something to hang on to - something that will help her stand up. That hand finds Elena's shoulder. She pressed won on it, her finger very gentle, almost as if she's afraid to touch the woman. But she does.
As Charlotte closes her eyes, it seems to take quite a few breaths before the tingling starts again. It starts, then it stops, then finally it starts again, and the view fizzles away.