Reminescence 1a
Reminiscence
***
When he gets out of the elevator, carrying his sister in his arms, they are both put under quarantine and de-briefed by men in thick rubber suits. They’re being treated as if they are radioactive and highly contagious, but they can’t bring themselves to really care. They’re both in shock, and exhausted once the adrenaline runs out. They stare into the void, answering mechanically, trying to detach themselves from the horrors that had happened, from what they’ve seen and heard. Sam is in a worst state than he is; at least he’s dealt with blood and gore before.
They don’t need blood tests, which was what he’d feared. After all, he doesn’t want to see his blood running with the viscous black substance that would expose him for what he is now. He doesn‘t want that to be known, and he really doesn’t want it to fall into the wrong hands. Samantha understands that telling them about the successful injection of the C-24 would be a disaster. He’s sure his twin knows that her brother would never see the light of day again if his secret got out. He feels strange about that, he always was as honest as possible (by training perhaps, or by having “good” genes in the “blueprint of his soul”; who knows?) and he dislikes the figurative weight it puts on his shoulders.
They both agree that a less detailed, but still horrible, description of what went on down there is better than the other options. He doesn’t tell them about the last fight, just tells them that his CO sacrificed himself to seal away the last of the changelings with an active ST grenade after all their comrades died under the onslaught. They later learn that, with the Ark most likely destroyed on one side, the facility has been closed and the elevator condemned.
They both feel relief when they walk out of their temporary lodgings after two weeks. John is liberated by a hefty pension and a promise to keep quiet about his service in the RRTS. Samantha has decided to continue her archaeological anthropologist career. She goes “where the job is” as she had said to him in the lab, when they had met each other again. Two strangers bonded by blood and yet, despite being separated by an ideological rift so vast that they would only sent yearly birthday cards to each other, she‘d dare to say later, “I know you, you‘re my brother.”
Maybe being born two minutes apart meant that you just knew. He would probably never understand exactly what had happened or why she had trusted him so; based on knowledge of a random genetic factor about good and evil. He doesn’t believe in all these things anyway, so he shrugs it off, mostly. It still nags at the back of his head sometimes.
He spends five years tagging along with Sam, the both of them agreeing to live in a spacious flat in a remote place in Canada together. An attempt to bond again, and that's when he notices that his sister‘s hair has sparse grey lines in them. Age has started to work on her (maybe a bit prematurely, but an experience like Olduvai is bound to be life-altering), and the smallest wrinkles are starting to appear on her skin, barely visible to the naked eye (but he does have superior eyesight,) while he doesn’t look a day older than when he wiped off blood from his face in front of a dirty mirror in a godforsaken dimly-lit place.
She doesn’t seem to have noticed yet that he doesn’t age anymore. She’s busy with her life and doesn’t spend a lot of time home, flying away to other countries to check out the archeological digs. She’s meeting new people, building a social life, and he really can‘t blame her for that. He can’t blame her for wanting something else in her life other than her total opposite of a brother. She expressed the desire to create a family, after all, she‘s even met a man she likes… not that John has seen him yet, because despite the fact that she‘s the oldest by two minutes, he still acts like an older protective brother, and she‘s afraid he‘ll scare her beau away.
He knows she still thinks about the easy-going Duke, and what could’ve been. Sometimes he tells her stories about him, and she always has a sad wishful glint in her eyes. One time she told him of what happened in the infirmary, about the power bone saw, and how he had said, “Where have you been all my life?”
They had also shared their impressions as well on their first meeting:
“Come on Reaper, you can’t expect me to believe you let a fine piece of ass like that walk away!”
“She’s my sister!”
“No shit!?”
He smiles fondly at the recollection, despite how annoyed it had made him at the time, but then it turns into a frown, because he‘ll never get to hear Duke again… and maybe there‘s guilt mixing in there, because maybe if he had been quicker, stronger, Duke would have survived instead of...
He cuts that thought right there, it makes him feel a little sick to think about it. He misses his team’s dynamics as well. He misses them all, except maybe Portman. Well that‘s not true, not that he’ll admit it, but he does misses him a little, even if the guy was generally an ass. He tries to keep the memories at bay, and when he can’t, he tries to only remember the good times; remembering their demises usually throws him in a gloomy mood for a few days and that’s when he usually becomes introverted, isolating himself from even his sister. They’re pushing each other away, him through his transformation and her through her desire for normalcy.
Another reason why she hasn’t noticed that he hasn’t changed at all could be because he’s not frozen in time either. He has to shave and his hair has grown longer (though he still prefers to keep it as an untamed mass of short spikes). Plus, they don’t see so much of each other, as he’s isolated himself, burying his head in books that he reads in hours instead of the days they’re supposed to take to be understood. When Samantha realizes that he now has a new fondness for books, and that he keeps borrowing everything he can get his hands on, it makes her ask him:
“Since when do you like books so much? You hated reading after… after they died.”
“I don’t know, I always thought reading was a waste of time since I wasn’t going to become a scientist; to pour hours of one’s time in long strings of words. Just seems that I read faster than I remember and this stuff is much more interesting now that I get it,” he answers, dismissively, as he flips another page of his book.
“John, that’s a book about advanced psychology. When did you take the time to study psychology?” she asks suspiciously.
“Well I started with those books I borrowed from you about the basics two weeks ago, why?” he answers with a frown, and the worst thing is that he doesn’t realize what’s wrong with this picture.
“That’s impossible,” his twin says, utterly disbelieving, before there’s something seems to dawn on her; “and super intelligent…” she whispers quietly, clearing talking to herself, but he hears her anyway.
This conversation makes them realizes that his brain now absorbs information like a sponge, and it’s another straw that makes him realize that’s definitively not what he used to be. It also explains why he reads so fast. That’s when he decides to figure out what else he can do. For five years, he regularly tests the limits of his transformed body and mind.
The first thing he tries, besides becoming a bookworm, is staying awake for a full week straight. Eventually Sam notices that he’s sleeping on his feet, standing in front of the bookshelves of the living room, awake but not really there. She panics and shakes him and all he can manage is garbled words. He frowns because he doesn’t even know what he’s saying because he’s so exhausted and she guides him to the couch so he can finally sleep.
At one point, he calls Sam over from another part of the house to test his running speed; they realize he can go faster than her car if he pushes himself. He can go over 120 km/h if he wants and can actually maintain it for a total of 15 minutes before he has to stop, hurting all over while his muscles desperately try to keep up and recover. He orders her to shoot him too after that, but she refuses. He tells her he believes he can dodge bullets, but she scoffs and claims that they aren’t in a movie.
At that he actually raises an eyebrow and asks if running over 120 km/h is not the stuff that movies are made of. He keeps asking her until she’s incredibly annoyed with him and ready to actually shoot him. To his great amusement, she tries, but with great reluctance and he has to cajole her a lot (telling her he had already been shot many times had not helped).
He dodges most of the bullets, a voice in his head crying out in alarm to tackle the threat before it attacks him but he’s able to ignore it, the knowledge that he asked for this managing to override it. A few hit their marks when she tries firing multiple bullets at once. She doesn’t have extraordinary aim, but it’s better than trying to shoot himself. It’s those times when he realizes that taking bullets out are a bitch when the wound closes instantly over it.
The first time he tries to remove it from his arm with a knife. It’s messy, but then he remembers his medic training and furthers it by reading a book on basic surgery. He develops a fascination with the subject, and starts to read medical journals. He also wonders about his survival, protective instinct, thinking of that voice in the back of his head. It’s the first time he hears it (when Sam shoots him) and he’ll hear it again whenever he’s in danger or around a perceived threat, or even if his twin seems at risk.
One day, he leaves Samantha a note and leaves the house with a backpack, starting to run non-stop for as long as he can. “Gone running. I’ll be back when I can’t run anymore. See you when I get back (I will, promise). Love - Your annoying brother. “ It takes him a week to get back home. He can run at an average speed for a day without stopping if he pushes himself, or can for two days if he goes at a more leisurely pace. He takes the paths and roads less travelled by, preferring to go into the forest where there are roots, snags, and branches; obstacles that he dodges and jumps over with ease and without a second thought. Also, he finds that it smells better. His senses are more sensitive than they used to be and the smell of the city gets on his nerves. He finds the smell of the woods cleaner and more comforting.
Can he really be blamed for preferring the smell of nature to the smoke from a car’s exhaust pipe? He gets used to it, but it’s always slightly unpleasant, the smell of... people, of a large assembly of people. He can’t stand public transit. He knows his sister’s individual smell and it‘s okay, but en masse, the smell is downright overwhelming and unpleasant. He tries to avoid crowds, at least until he finds a way to stop using his nose so much, it‘s rather frustrating he thinks. On the fourth day, he’s had enough and takes a comfortable perch in a tree and sleeps there, undisturbed, before he starts the trek back. She’s understandably angry at him when he comes home, but he placates her when he provides the information that he has gathered, and tells her that he *needs* to do this.
During the winter, he tries to stay outside and she calls him a crazy man, but has to admit he looks a bit deranged, in casual clothes, sitting on a pile of snow in the backyard with a thermometer in his mouth. He wants to see if he has some sort of immunity to cold or if his body will compensate for the weather, or at least the cold, and he hasn’t tried the hot summers. Canada needs to settle on more even temperatures, rather than going at the extremes.
It’s goddamn humid and it snows a lot during the winter, hence the fact that he’s outside in a mild snowstorm, sitting on a pile of snow, and his socks are getting drenched because he’s sweating in his boots. Samantha is vaguely exasperated because of his so-called suicidal behaviour; he’s not suicidal, he just wants to know what he can do. She’s acting as if one day she could suddenly fly and she wouldn’t want to try it out.
He also concludes he can stay in the cold, but his body will not really last beyond normal human capacities. He comes back in with blue lips and unable to feel his extremities. Sam would probably have thrown him in the fireplace if he hadn’t been so heavy. He doesn’t believe he’s seen her this pissed off in a while.
He’s amazed that despite being stronger than anyone, he hasn’t broken anything accidentally. It’s like his subconscious knows how to not break that which is weaker than he is. He can hug Sam without breaking her in half, he can write, he can hold a coffee cup in a normal grip without shattering it. On a side note, he has to drink three cups of strong black coffee to get a 15-minute high… apparently the fact that his cells divide fifty times faster eliminates everything that’s not supposed to be in his body. He has conquered sickness, caffeine, painkillers, all sorts of lethal substances and most likely alcohol. He hadn’t been so sure about drinking battery acid either, and he’s never, ever, going to do that again. He swears he’s through with being a guinea pig because that stunt was one too many. Sam hadn’t seen him to do it, or the consequences, but she had heard him bitch and generally be in pain miles away. She had wisely decided to stay away and not mention it to him, and he’s been tight-lipped about the incident ever since.
Eventually, she notices that he hasn’t changed - when she brings up the latest photo she has of him (a year before Olduvai, with his platoon, he’d sent it to her with their yearly birthday card). At first she’s silent, and then she burrows her face in her hands and he can hear the muffled “What have I done?” that he feels he shouldn’t be supposed to hear (he does have super hearing and sometime wishes he didn’t) but replies nonetheless, uneasily, “ You saved us from Olduvai, and you saved others as well. That’s what you did, Sam.” And he hugs her hard, trying to be a reassuring brother, until she winces in pain. He lets go, ashamed to have hurt her. He’s still stronger than he’s supposed to be, after all.
They grow a little distant after that; Sam understanding before him that he’s most likely some sort of immortal. He hasn’t yet given thought to the fact that he will outlive Sam by centuries, because he doesn’t believe that he will live that long. He’s repressing the thoughts subconsciously.
One night, Sam finds him in his study and announces that she has found Mr. Right, and that she wants to move into a more spacious house with the man she intends to marry.
She leaves the flat to him, it’s already paid for after all, but he wonders why she’s leaving him alone as he stares blankly at the moving truck. He feels like a lost kid for a moment. She packs her things and he sees her off, meeting the man that will father his nephews and nieces. He’s nice and charming, and will probably make a good husband, that much he admits. ‘Best of all, he’s normal,’ he thinks bitterly. They go back to occasional phone calls, a few visits at first, but the more she ages and the more he does not, the less they see each other.
***
Eventually, it’s down to yearly birthday cards again, and it hurts a lot. He starts to feel disconnected, isolated from the world around him and it sinks in down to his bone marrow that he’s not quite human anymore. He travels a lot, exploring the United States and Canada. He feels useless and doesn’t know what to do with himself; he feels abandoned like a toy that’s been replaced by something shinier.
The only person who understood has gone on to live another life, a life in which he is not included. At first he is, but the last time he sees Sam is when her daughter is six years old and he’s been invited to her birthday party because the little angel claims he’s her favourite uncle. He shouldn’t blame her, shouldn’t resent her, but he does and it makes him all the more bitter.
He spends a lot of time away from what used to be their house, using the money from his pension to build up a military set again: sniper’s rifle, small handguns, throwing knives, padded black bullet-proof vest, and fingerless leather gloves. It was something comfortable and familiar, so he tries to have it as similar as to what he had in the RRTS. He starts taking jobs on the side; the kind of job no one else wants and no one else is sure to survive from. The news starts to talk about a vigilante that takes down criminals such as drug lords and frees prostitutes. There’s testimonies about a man that should have died but still stands and asks, “Are you okay ?” after he’s done saving you from becoming the latest victim.
He becomes an urban legend of a sort, even if he’s real, because nobody gets to have a good look at his face and lives to remember it. Sometimes when he walks with his face open to the sun and where nobody knows who he is (they wouldn’t know what to look for anyway), he hears snatches of conversation about a benevolent shadow that helped them and the tiniest smile graces his lips. Sam is calling more frequently, suspecting that maybe he’s the one doing it and she urges him against it. She thinks it’s dangerous, but he continues anyway because it’s something to do for him and he tells her he’d rather help people with the gift she gave him, even if it’s said a little spitefully.
Eventually, he doesn’t care anymore about who he saves, who he kills and why he does so... He grows more detached as more time passes; 25 years since Olduvai. He still counts the time. He’s supposed to be around 50 years old and he still looks like he’s in his late 20’s, but his eyes are older and colder than he looks. He doesn’t see the world as good or evil anymore. It’s just a grey place that he’s passing through until he dies. And he doesn’t seem to inch closer to death.
The more he becomes cynical and folded in on himself, the more people tend to avoid and look away from him; few bother him even as he goes into the seedier parts of the world, as if they know that they are dealing with something stronger and more dangerous than they could ever hope to be. He’s an intimidating figure, in his leather trench coat and with the hood hiding his face, tall and broad-shouldered. He doesn’t make noise when he walks. He hasn’t tried jumping across the rooftops, but he probably could, but it’s the sort of flashy thing he wouldn’t do. Eventually he gets (a tad uneasily and fearfully) approached by larger organizations for special contracts, the kind that requires a bit more of intelligence and planning than taking care of idiots in the streets.
They don’t know his name, they barely even know what he looks like, but they believe he’s ‘the angel of death incarnate’ and they know that he kills for a living with a well-placed knife or bullet. He’s the Reaper. That’s what he’s become, all that he is anymore. Not a human being, only the promise of death. He doesn’t even receive yearly birthday cards at this point... If he does, he never reads them. It’s because he hasn’t been at the flat he used to call home in a while.
***
Eventually, the papers start to refer to him as a line of assassins code-named as ‘The Reaper’ partly because of how long he has been active (quite unbelievable that a single assassin would have a career that would last this long and a trail of bodies behind him as impressive) and because of his usual method at dispatching the higher echelons of the crime lords: He sneaks in, or comes in straight through the door. They are always arrogant and cocky, sure of themselves, as he tries to look as harmless as possible; they are always nervous in his presence, but they always open the door for him because they figure it must be a joke, or maybe a delivery, and either way, he can always be disposed of if they wish so.
That’s usually when he pulls the gun out and executes them.
Sometimes he deals with them more anonymously, with a sniper’s rifle. He’s very careful and thorough and he never leaves anything behind that could be traced back to him, which works because he has yet to be identified.
Days, nights, months and years passes and he doesn’t notice any longer. He’s not quite inside of his head anymore. He’s an automaton that’s still very intelligent and cunning. He still speaks, but his voice is rough, scratchy and brings dread. He still walks, but his gait is that of the predator above all the others and of one who is confident in his abilities. He enlists in conflicts as a mercenary, tries to take the side that he believes is right despite being relatively uncaring as to what happens ; short of being utterly obliterated, there’s nothing that can threaten him. Even then, he does not fear death. There’s nothing in this world that he cares about and nothing that he believes in anymore.
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