By Absinthe
Disclaimers: See Chapter 1
Chapter 4: Brave and Crazy
It had been a long time since she'd been in such dire straits, but the feeling of readiness and resignation was powerfully familiar. In any case, the odds here were so strongly against her that attempting escape seemed almost a futile endeavor. She specialized in futile endeavors. Her first instinct was to go straight out the door and fight her way out, but upon further reflection, Maia realized that she didn't stand a chance of surviving that way. She inspected the cell again. The air vent that she spotted on the ceiling she mistook at first for a hallucination. It seemed too good to be true. Theoretically it was a good 20 feet up and far too high for a person to reach without mechanical assistance, but height had never been a problem for her. Crouching below it, Maia took a deep breath and then launched herself up, slipping the tips of her fingers through the slats. Her weight pulled the cover from the vent, leaving an aperture just barely large enough for her to squeeze through.
Sweeping the floor free of the dirt that had come down with the vent cover, Maia used a piece of bloody rope to tie the cover to her waist and crouched again, this time catching the lip of the vent with her fingers and painfully pulling herself up. The agony in her back and shoulders almost made her cry out, but she knew that worse was to come as the got her head inside and had to scrape the brutalized flesh against unforgiving metal.
When at long last she lay panting on her stomach, she coughed feebly and kicked up a flurry of dust bunnies. She wriggled backwards and replaced the vent cover. That done, she looked ahead at the featureless black and behind her at more of the same. Maia was inclined to simply go forward, but somethng told her that there was a better way to decide. Staring wide-eyed in the dark, she realized that the cell she'd been tortured in hadn't been entirely soundproofed. She hadn't heard any evidence of other people in the bulding; this duct carried sound, there simply wasn't anyone else here.
Her captors, in the hopes of avoiding a rescue mission, had planted her far from their primary base of operations. This was a secondary site. Relieved, she checked the direction of the air's flow through the duct, and started off in the opposite direction. The gentle nature of the breeze told her that it was probably blowing in of its own accord, and that there was no air pump involved. If she went against the wind, she should eventually come to an outlet on the outside of the building.
Inching her way along for what felt like miles, Maia wondered if she was going to make it out of this alive. The farther she got, the more deja vu she felt. A faint hint of light ahead distracted her weary and vertiginous mind from the task and hand, when suddenly the metal under her hands dropped away. It took all of her strength to catch herself and continue on. The light ahead grew brighter until she finally reached the tilted shaft that led outside of the building. Her way was blocked by a screen panel designed to keep the birds from nesting in the ventilation system. All it took was a hard shove and it came loose. Maia watched it fall to the ground about thirty feet below.
Her view of the surrounding area was entirely cut off by the vent's hood. All she could see was a small patch of cement. Taking a deep breath, Maia pushed off. She somersaulted neatly in the air, but her landing was less than graceful. Impact with the hard ground jarred her battered body to the bones and dropped her into a heap of blood and ragged skin.
Nikita noticed that she was crying in her sleep. She watched the droplets of salty water run down Cassandra's cheeks. The agent sighed before turning away, there was nothing to be done here, and she had other priorities at the moment.
The darkness called to her. There is a part of the soul that never changes; of this ancient and tired soul there would always be a part that was susceptible to the seduction of letting go. Not letting go of life -- no -- that was too easy. She would never easily relinquish her hold on life, but her grasp of the light. The darkness called to its daughter, and the name of the darkness was hate or anger or war. The daughter of darkness, however, carried with her a light that held her like a moth. Sometimes it flickered and grew dim, but always it was there. The ancient battle had suddenly been upset by the introduction of a new woman to this soul; a practiced thief, and a cold blooded manipulative killer. She had no light of her own, and she carried enough dark within her to shift the balance dangerously in the old soul. For a while, when Cassandra was the dominant consciousness, the battle had been neglected. The beacon had grown lower than it had in centuries, and the struggle to beat back the shadows would be hard and long.
From the encroaching emptiness rose a flash of memory.
She faced a shamaness; a woman with incredible mental powers. Xena screamed helplessly as she was besieged by old pain: Her village was on fire, and Cortese was laughing as he had his men tie her hands. Caesar waved his hand and the soldier broke her legs as she hung on a cross. Her second in command watched contemptuously as she walked the gauntlet and fell at last, just barely safe and just barely alive. She pushed the child to safety and felt the log slam into her body. Callisto screamed maniacally before she attacked with a fury that startled the Warrior Princess. Indrajit pinned her right hand to the wall with a knife and then neatly severed both of her arms. Something hit her back and a numbness spread down her body. She fell and watched as Gabrielle killed eight roman soldiers. Six inch spikes were driven through her wrists and ankles.
Alti opened the flood, but the memories kept coming even past the history that the Sorceress knew. The blizzard continued until she thought that she would never see the light again. The tears that Nikita had witnessed were caused by the shift of this mnemonic flood to an even darker part of her many many lives; the harm that she had done to others.
She didn't think that she could take anymore.
She didn't even make it through her first memories: The burning villages, the massacres, the bloody hand to hand fighting and killing, and even Maia's long years as an assassin. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped. It was replaced wtih the memory of a voice; the voice of Ares, reminding her who she was and what she could do. The voice drowned out the memories, and its soft tone was seductive and rich. She was his Chosen, and she always would be. She had a destiny to reclaim; one that had been snatched from her hands by the treachery of her lover and friend. Alone she was strong. Alone she could have anything she desired.
She was a creature of will, and it was that will that brought her back.
What she didn't remember were the lives she had lived in peace.
She woke up.
The familiar setting of Section One's infirmary turned her stomach even more than the after effects of anesthetics. Maia pushed herself up on her elbows and immediately regretted it when the curving of her back wrinkled her ravaged skin. She dropped back onto her stomach and breathed a sigh of relief.
It was a few days until Nikita was able to stop by to speak to her invalid protegee.
"How are you?" the blonde bombshell asked gently, though Maia could read her clearly enough anyway. Nikita was condescending to an agent that had been severely injured through her own fault.
"I'll live," Maia replied, keeping her amusement in check.
"I'm not going to tell you how stupid that was, you're lucky to be alive right now, Cassandra," Nikita sat down at Maia's bedside.
"You're telling me?" Maia arched an eyebrow and her blue eyes sparkled a little, though Nikita was taken aback by the depth and darkness she saw lurking just behind this jovial facade. "Madeline will be coming to debrief you in an hour," the agent went on, "I just wanted to warn you. So you'd have time to prepare yourself."
"Thank you, Nikita," Maia said, but as Nikita turned to leave, she added, "I know what I've been doing wrong now. Things are going to be different."
When Madeline came, Maia was prepared. She told the truth, leaving nothing out except for the really groundshaking events that had occured during her imprisonment. Madeline left satisfied that nothing untoward had happened in spite of the stupidity of their fledgling agent. Maia bit down a smirk at her back. That was too easy.
She was irritated though that she was now in a position where she would have to work for years to reach the status that she had already known as Maia in Section.
After her recovery, which was accomplished with a minimum of scarring, though she would always bear faint traces of a tree pattern in stripes on her back, Maia threw herself into her work with a fervor and aptitude that surpassed her previous efforts. As Cassandra she had been good, but now that she remembered herself, she was fearsome. Already recognized as formidable on the field when performing rote tasks, her rediscovered initiative and inventiveness saved countless missions and agents. It was a turn-around that Maia had known enough to moderate at first. For six or seven months, she made it seem like her improvement was a result of hard work and gradual accumulation of skill thanks to a renewed sense of purpose after her ordeal.
She worked, and she did it well, but without compassion. She did what she did for a reason. She was there to advance her position. She would no longer dance to Section's tunes if she could avoid it. All she needed was a position from which even Section and Oversight couldn't touch her. Sometimes she thought about those precious months she had spent free and realized with the bitterness born of her recent ephiphany that she had never been free. Always she had been afraid; afraid of losing the semblance of normality that she had stolen for herself.
Never again. Instead of swimming against the currents, she swam with them.
An ad in the arts section of the newspaper changed everything yet again.
Continued in Chapter 5
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