OOM: I must become a lion-hearted girl

[sunbaked_baker]

(From here)

Pat and Theo must've planned this more thoroughly than Rae had anticipated. She recognized the person who waved them quickly through at the security desk as Jocasta. Pat had mentioned her before. Another of SOF's unknowingly unorthodox hires. Her dark gaze met Rae's as they passed her, and the tension-filled shadows on her face the texture of raw silk and the color of old wood showed the knowledge of why Rae was there, and betrayed a faint but undeniable hope that her presence could do some good.

How much had Pat and Theo told her?

How many other SOF agents knew something of why Rae was there?

Most office buildings would be dead and empty in the small hours of the morning, but not Special Other Forces. The place was as busy as Rae had ever seen it despite the hour, and she kept close to Pat and Theo as they walked through the halls among the other SoFs. She couldn't help looking at the other agents, though, for some similar sign of recognition. Rae wasn't sure whether she wanted to find anything, but she couldn't help looking.

She saw a few others. A few Others. A few part-bloods and a one or two that may well have been pure Other, all passing as human as they moved through the halls that worked so hard to keep them out, discussing new patrol schedules or asking a partner to proofread a grant application that might get them some new tech to help out in the field.

Rae was being taken further into SOF's rather labyrinthine offices than she had ever been before; she recognized the first few halls from previous visits, but they soon left them behind. They went through some doors, and Rae found herself thinking back to the stories of the space-folding doors SOF was rumored to use to link their various headquarters, to speed travel between them (and facilitate emergency evacuations, if necessary). She had no idea if the rumors were true. She soon lost all sense of direction or distance.

What Rae wasn't expecting was for them to suddenly stop at what almost looked like a small waiting room at a doctor's office - sans the fake plants, the local childrens' artwork, and the stacks of decades-old magazines, but with the same sterile and impersonal feeling designed to inspire faint dread in those waiting. It was little more than a meeting of hallways where a group of chairs had been set outside a closed door, overhead florescent lights buzzing faintly.

"We're a little early," Pat allowed, tension still singing off him from their curt conversation in the car. "Might as well sit."

Rae wasn't sure she could sit still just yet.

"Um. Is there a restroom near here?"

Pat pointed her to the restroom in an alcove of one of the nearby hallways, and Rae went in and washed her hands and face in the warm water, trying to keep her breathing under control. Trying to calm down. The warm water helped, as did the semblance of privacy. She felt almost normal, apart from the lingering dread, by the time she thought she should be getting back before Pat and Theo started worrying about her.

As she stepped out of the restroom and around the little partition in front of the restroom door, Rae almost ran into someone coming in. Sunshine apologized and side-stepped with all the automatic grace of someone who had practically grown up in cramped restaurant spaces, and only when the person didn't continue past but stopped and looked directly at her did Rae hesitate and glance back at them.

One of the Goddess of Pain's people, one of those who answered directly to Deputy Executive Jain. The Goddess' subordinate, their headset still on and settled well into the haircut seemingly designed to look good even while wearing a headset for eight hours, looked almost as surprised as Rae felt. Which is probably why neither of them had any time to think of something to say before Rae heard Theo calling for her from the hall, saying that Director Misra was ready to see them, and Rae was able to edge past and make her hasty retreat.

~*~*~*~

The encounter with one of the Goddess's... minions seemed too degrading a word to use but Rae couldn't deny it was the word that occurred to her first - with one of the Goddess' subordinates had shaken Rae, and she had difficulty keeping her mind on the meeting at hand while introductions were made.

She managed to smile and greet the executive director of SOF on something like auto-pilot, no more difficult than greeting the first early customers at the coffeehouse after a bad night that's left her mind scattered and elsewhere while her body goes through the motions of living a normal life. Thankfully, Pat and Theo took the lead when introductory niceties were finished. They knew how close to the truth they were comfortable with getting, after all.

Director Misra listened carefully while they explained some background. All true, but not the whole truth, and explained better and with more care than Rae felt she could have managed. Pat and Jesse took turns filling in a broad explanation of how Rae Seddon, coffeehouse baker, had come to SOF's attention. They recounted the official versions of Rae's notable encounters with and subsequent escapes from vampires a few years previous - all instances included in her official file - and the interest those events seemed to have engendered in the Goddess despite Miss Seddon living a largely blameless life before and after those few events. Rae let them speak, and watched the director consider their words from behind his desk. He was older, and somewhat imposing in his suit behind his desk, but out of this context he might have been a more approachable person. His skin was brown and weathered, his nose aquiline, his hands broad and rough, his eyes the color of dark honey and his expression hard to read. He seemed tired, but there was an undeniable vitality to him, like a banked fire. In the shade of his brows and chin, his bright-edged shadows glimmered slowly like glowing embers.

Pat brought out the pieces of evidence Rae had given him, explaining each in chronological order. Theo, in his soft-spoken way, provided the supporting paperwork they had gathered from the SOF regional headquarters records themselves - equipment logs, serial numbers, transcripts of communication... all validating the Goddess' involvement in each case. The engagement of an illegal fetch, the one that had been hidden in Sunshine's car and destroyed by Yolande's wards, authorized by the Goddess' own signature. The SOF-issue listening and recording devices hidden in Sunshine's car and bakery a year later. The equipment logs showing that their authorization bore Deputy Executive Jain's signature and no one else's. The second fetch, the one that had ambushed Rae in her bakery, now contained. The sound of it moving within the reinforced container made Rae's stomach turn. She supposed Pat had left it still active, able to sense her presence and seek to reach her, for emphasis. The effect was unsettling, at least to her. She didn't know whether to appreciate the forethought or not.

Pat and Jesse produced other evidence, then, that Rae hadn't known about. Mel had told her that some of the Goddess of Pain's people had tried to question him about Rae, but she hadn't thought about SOF keeping transcripts of those interviews. Neither Charlie nor her mother had mentioned anything about it, nor had Miss Bialawsky. If Rae hadn't been so sickened by finding out how far it had gone without her knowledge, she might have laughed at how Miss Bialawsky had apparently talked circles around the questioner, leading the conversation well away from Rae and turning it to all about raising geraniums and properly modifying soil nitrogen levels. Gods bless Miss B.

Already, Rae could see Pat and Jesse's gentle engineering of how they framed the evidence, suggesting but not outright stating that the Deputy Executive of SOF held an unwarranted and unreasonable interest bordering on a grudge against Miss Seddon, an unfounded suspicion stemming from Miss Seddon's unfortunate experiences a few years previous.

The last bits of evidence Pat showed the director were Sunshine's own, what Pat clearly felt would be the last nails in the Goddess' coffin. He brought out the recording and transcript of Sunshine's visit to SOF to meet with the Deputy Executive Jain from earlier this year, and the sample of Delete-laced tea. Pat, saying it better than Rae ever could even if she weren't sick with nerves, explained that by that point in time, Miss Seddon had begun fearing for her safety in relation to Deputy Executive Jain's harassment, and had taken steps to document the Jain's behavior for her own safety. In fact, Pat added, it was lucky that Miss Seddon had taken such precautions, because - the unauthorized administration of Delete to a free citizen without their consent or the required written permission aside - measurements of the appropriate dosage for orally-administered Delete were notoriously inaccurate, and could have done Miss Seddon lasting damage.

It wasn't an act when Rae shuddered, remembering the numbness, the hours of immobile helplessness those few sips of the tea had caused. What if she had finished the cup? One heard stories of inmates whose dosages had been wrong, who had difficulty with motor control for months or years afterward.

Almost worse than the memory was the stretching silence as Director Misra read the transcript of the Goddess' failed interrogation from that day. Sunshine watched his face for some reaction as he neared the end of it, trying to read something, any information, in the shifting edges of his shadows. His shadows did not hold the stillness of Con's or Yolande's. They moved slowly, however, and their strangely glimmering edges seemed more brilliant to make up for it. She could read little in them, though she saw his shadows react when he reached the end of the interrogation.

("You listen here, you little bitch. You're not fooling anyone. You may think you're clever, playing your little game and pretending to be nobody, but don't think for a second that I don't know what you're up to. Your father may not have mentioned you but there's no doubt whose whelp you are.")

Director Misra was silent for a long while, perusing the line of evidence before him. Rae could feel the tension singing off of Pat and Theo just as she felt the bead of sweat make its way down between her shoulder blades. Pat and Theo could probably feel her tension just as clearly.

"These are..." the director said at last, setting aside the transcript, "very serious accusations, Miss Seddon, Agent Logan, Agent Velasquez."

Please, Rae thought the word hard but did not let the syllable past her lips.

"Deputy Executive Jain has served this department well for many years, and has accomplished much in that time for the common good. I understand that her style of management does not mesh well with certain personalities, and that can lead to resentment from subordinates-"

"Sir, this isn't anything like that," Pat interjected, insistent. The director paused when Pat spoke, but after a moment's silence he continued on.

"-and in members of the public unfamiliar with the rigors of SOF policy." Here, he looked at Rae for the first time. The shade of his eyelids gleamed gold.

"Is sidestepping a citizen's legal rights SOF policy, then?" Rae got the words out even if her voice shook with the effort.

"Taking every precaution for the sake of the public good is, Miss Seddon," Director Misra replied. "As Deputy Executive Jain knows. Especially when a citizen shows signs of being involved in things that would necessarily cause the forfeit of a free citizen's rights."

"I'm a baker," Rae insisted, but her protest was cut-off.

"I am well aware of who you are, Miss Seddon," Misra replied curtly. "Of your parentage, and your father's family's checkered past."

('It is the Cup of Souls from the rite at Oranhallow, given to my Master in exchange for services rendered. Perhaps you reacted to it so because it was the Blaise clan that had possessed it.)

Her mouth was dry, but she managed a faint laugh, as though saying Well, that makes one of us. "Then you probably know more about them than I do. It wouldn't surprise me. But if you knew anything about me, you would know I was raised to be my mother's daughter, not my father's. We left him when I was little, and I never saw him again."

This denial did not phase the director. "Removing you from the influence of your father's family does not erase your heritage, Miss Seddon, or anything you might have inherited."

How was she supposed to reply to that? Did she try to argue that she was wholly her mother's daughter? Did she lie? If she lied, what other lies would she have to be ready to tell to support it? This room was thick with lies already. She could feel Pat and Theo wanting to support her, but not knowing how, for fear of disrupting this tightrope walk they were all trying to accomplish.

Earlier this morning, Rae's mind had produced a multitude of possibilities as to how this conversation could go wrong, her own personal slideshow of potential ruined futures. Now she was in the thick of it, she could hardly even see the shape of the conversation, like how it is difficult to see the shape of the river when you are in the midst of the roaring rapids.

How do you tell just enough of the truth that your lies are believed? To thread the treacherous path among the rocks and eddies and falls, and make it through safely?

She was so tired of lying. And she doubted she would ever be good at it. So... though she could feel the weight of Pat's gaze and the tension singing in the air, she tried something else.

"There are a lot of reasons why someone wouldn't register as a magic-handler, Director Misra," Rae said carefully but honestly, trying to keep her voice steady. "Childhood estrangement from their magic-handling family, lack of any sort of apprenticeship, and the desire to have a life free of complications are just a few. I'm a magic-handler by heritage, yes, but I am a baker by choice, and magic has no place in that life."

They weren't lies and they didn't stick in her throat. They showed as truth on her face, and carried enough of that truth that Director Misra did not dispute what she said. Pat and Theo said nothing, not quite sure of the path Rae intended to take.

"When did you learn you were a magic-handler, Miss Seddon?"

Fair question, Rae couldn't argue.

"When I was a child, just before the Wars. My mother had... cut off all ties with my father's family years before, and so I never told her, and I didn't think of registering. I was her daughter. Apart from that time in childhood, I never used magic again until... the incident a few years ago, by the lake. You'd have read about it - it's in my file."

"I have read about it," he confirmed. "And the other incidents that followed. I admit those events, along with your particular background, would quite naturally lead to some level of professional interest from a member of SOF, if not so far as Jain has apparently carried it. Why not register after what happened?"

"Even aside from still wanting that life free of complications - wanting it more than ever, since it had been threatened - I had no proof of my heritage," Rae says, having thought of this. "I know who my father is, and so does SOF, clearly, but there's nothing I could provide as the required proof when I declared my lineage. And... given my desire for a quiet life and my father's family's disappearance in the Wars, my list of reasons why I wouldn't want to be registered as a magic-handler of their line is pretty long. People keep secrets for lots of reasons, Director Misra, and that doesn't make them bad people, or risks to the public good."

Director Misra leaned back in his chair and said nothing right away, idly turning a plain gold band on his left ring finger as he considered her. The faint reflections of light it threw on his heavily-lined face were too faint for Rae's eyes to see but her Dark Sight could. The glimmering shadows upon his face spoke of understanding, which Rae hoped to build on, and deep-buried regret, which she didn't quite grasp the reason for.

"I can understand Deputy Exec Jain's interest, after the incidents recorded in your file," Misra said pensively. Externally, neither Rae nor her SOFs reacted, but internally, Rae's blood was pounding in her ears. "By your own admission, you are not a completely normal member of the human public, seemingly harassed without any provocation by a member of SOF's administration."

The look the executive director gave Pat and Theo suggested there would be discussions on the way they misrepresented the facts to their superior at some later time. "However," he added, shifting the transcript of the Goddess' failed interrogation again as though it in particular troubled him. "Only very strong suspicions of a great wrong would ever lead any member of SOF to feel such actions were warranted against a member of the public. I imagine it is no shock to you to hear that yours isn't the first case of SOF infringing on an individual's personal rights. Though it would only ever be in extreme cases that result in direct danger to the public, and as the last resort after all other options have been exhausted. What is it the Deputy Executive Jain suspects you of having done?"

He waved away Pat and Theo's words of protest and explanation, still looking at Rae. "No, I want to hear her thoughts."

The director was clever, but a number of Rae's terrible imaginings of this conversation had included that question.

"I believe, sir, that she harbors suspicions that I have been fraternizing with vampires with... detrimental effects on the security of the human world, or I am possibly a bad-blood cross," Rae replied, trying to make her hesitation sound like she's just trying to figure out how to put words to the thought, rather than trying to keep her voice steady. "And I believe her actions involve some sort of deep-seated resentment against me due to... my father's heritage. I do not know how or if Deputy Executive Jain knew my father's family, but she seemed particularly... incensed, when she mentioned them."

"That is how it sounded to me, as well," Director Misra murmured, looking over the transcript of the interrogation again. His tone brought confusion and curiosity to Rae's mind. What did he know about the Blaises? Misra looked at her, setting the transcript aside. "But are you any of those things, Miss Seddon? A traitor? A bad-blood cross? You must admit the situations you have found yourself in are not the sorts of circumstances that a completely normal baker would find herself in, and the way your complaint was mis-represented to me this morning does not cast you in the kindest light."

Rae tried not to visibly grimace as Theo sought to answer for her and was swiftly cut-off by Misra insisting that Miss Seddon speak for herself. Pat and Theo were wanting to jump to her defense with well-crafted lies and half-truths, but were being prevented. And Rae had no lies, well-crafted or otherwise, that she could tell.

Half-truths, well... walking the line of telling enough but not too much was difficult, but the only path forward. Even if Pat wouldn't like it. Perhaps it would do some good. It was possible that honesty could persuade the executive director to understand.

('How honest we talkin' here, Sunshine?')

"I am not a traitor," Rae said at last, holding his gaze, and meant the words whole-heartedly. "And I do not believe I am a bad-blood cross."

She felt a faint shiver to realize she meant that, too. Though the possibility had haunted her for years, through horrors indescribable, that particular mental break had never come. She was buoyed up by the realization she was no longer frightened by the unknowns in her genetic makeup, at least in relation to the risk of spontaneously becoming criminally insane.

"What I am," she added, her throat tightening up as she saw Pat tense in her peripheral vision. Rae glanced at Pat and Theo, at their shadows roiling with sudden alarm at what she might tell. She sought with her eyes to ask them to trust her like they once had, when they too had thought she might be a bad-blood cross and a genuine danger to society. They had trusted her then, and she needed their trust and support again now. She held their livelihoods in her hands, knowing their secrets, and she needed them to know she wouldn't betray them.

This was not betrayal, but it was... a risk. A great risk, but she's risking herself, not them, and it is a risk she is willing to take. Risking everything for the sake of everything.

(They were all proof of that, one way or another - Pat, Jesse, Theo, her. Proof that just because you weren't human in the normal way didn't mean you were any less a person. Proof that just because SOF did it didn't mean it was right or what was best for the world. Sunshine wondered just how many SOF agents were like Pat and Jesse and Theo, passing as human in the career field most strictly limited to full-blood humans, while required to mete out the human world's flawed justice on their fellow Others. Trying to soften the blow, perhaps. Trying to make things... better, in whatever ways they could. To maybe make the world a little more just, a little less dark, for people like them and for everyone else. Dismantling the walls the world had built for itself, brick by brick.)

"What I am," Rae tried again, the words difficult. "What I am, is someone who wants to help despite being... unorthodox in regards to SOF's normal hiring practices. Someone who happens to have the ability to help, and wants to be free to use it."

She saw the question rising in Misra's golden-edged shadows, confusion and a strange spike of wariness with the potential for dangerous backlash, and so she pressed on. "And you need all the help you can get, don't you? After... the incident on Ingram Street three years ago, P... Agents Velasquez and Logan told me." It was a risk to mention them, possibly inviting scrutiny, but if she hadn't mentioned how this came about Director Misra would have had to ask, and she was beginning to think she saw dawning comprehension in his look. "They told me about the overwhelming odds SOF is facing, about the Wars being merely a diversion, and the end of the Wars a lie, a paper victory to allay the public's fears. And about how the Wars are still going on even now, only not openly. About how we're losing despite SOF's best efforts, how the daylit world is sliding slowly but inexorably into darkness. They told me how we perhaps have only about a hundred years left, unless things change, and soon."

('No. Today is about today. If we make it to tomorrow, then we'll think about tomorrow.'
'And how many tomorrows will it take, do you think? Fewer than we have left?')

"And well, for better or worse, I can help things change," Rae asserted, her throat feeling very dry, "by my magic-handling, I can make a difference, and I have. I believe that people who have the ability to help also have the responsibility to use those abilities, whoever they may be, whatever those abilities are, and whether or not SOF gives its stamp of approval first."

Rae's voice shook as she spoke just then, because she'd realized what it was her Dark Sight was reading in Misra's shadows, why she had seen fear there when she began speaking of their personal responsibility to take risks for the sake of the world. She wondered how old he really was. She wasn't sure, but she would guess there was huma or garuda demon in his background, with shadows like that. And how long had he been hiding it? With his rank, his infiltration of SOF surely pre-dated Oldroy's discovery of the blood-test, and the ways Others might get around it. How hadn't he been found out? Just from how they were acting, Rae was sure Pat and Theo didn't know. And if they were so strongly against pushing for change within SOF too hard and too quickly, for fear of being found out.... how difficult would it be to have a chance at convincing Misra, someone who had also presumably joined SOF however long ago with the hope of making the organization better for part-blood Others like himself. Would he push back more strongly in order to keep himself safe? Would he be willing to take the risk?

"Under normal circumstances, my efforts would be considered illegal for a civilian," she allowed, feeling the hollow sensation in her stomach at the risk she is taking. Rae kept her gaze on Director Misra, her words steady, trying to reach him, to remind him of the necessity of taking great risks for the good of the world. "But when Agents Logan and Velasquez told me the reality of the situation, they asked for my help. Because help is greatly needed and they knew I could help. Knew I would. Knew I couldn't do otherwise and still live with myself. And while they knew my background would... normally preclude me from being an official part of SOF, I think they knew - as I do - that the needs of the world are more important than the rules of SOF, which is sometimes tragically stiff and inflexible when it comes to who it deems worthy of helping save the world from the horrors of the dark."

Director Misra held her gaze after she spoke, and Rae could see him trying to reach a decision. She realized she was holding her breath when Pat spoke.

"Sir," Pat said, hesitating, not wanting to break the spell but also feeling like he needed to interject as the senior field agent involved. "The reality of the instance in Ingram Street was that Miss Seddon staked a vampire, with no warning, no training, and no backup. And she staked it with a stainless steel table-knife. It shouldn't have been possible, but in her hands, it was. When we told her the truth of the larger situation, sir, we asked Miss Seddon to work unofficially for us. For SOF. Just more unofficially than most of our other unofficial agents. We felt - we still feel - very strongly, that Miss Seddon has the potential to make a great impact on the trajectory of the conflict. She already has - just look at the numbers from the past few years, after so much lost ground in the previous decade. Already our local officers have the room to breathe a bit. But... we felt even back then that Deputy Executive Jain would probably seek to prevent Miss Seddon's efforts, out of some desire for personal gain or out of some grudge against Miss Seddon herself. We did not get her authorization to enlist Miss Seddon's aid. We felt that, yes, the world was more important than SOF protocol. And I feel our judgement has been borne out by the lessening in local sucker activity these last few y..."

Rae didn't dare look away from Director Misra. She held his gaze, trying to say more than she could manage to arrange into words. And she thought she was seeing understanding form between them. Her Dark Sight caught the glimmer of suspicion from her words, and the following realization that she knew his secret, and then, following the rising alarm in the director's shadows, the further realization that she would keep that secret. Because the world mattered more, and because she too knew the urge to do what one could to change the world for the better, the responsibility of having the ability to bring about change, despite the disadvantages of genetic circumstance, despite the law, and despite the very real desire for a normal, uncomplicated life.

She hoped he remembered having felt the weight of that responsibility, remembered the need to do what he could - even if it meant lying to authority and breaking the law - despite the flawed bias of the human world, and that he could still recognize that same need in others.

But she couldn't be sure, because in that moment the door behind them slammed open, and the Goddess of Pain strode in.


(Continued here.)