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| Scene Title | A Rainbow Connection |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Jac makes an attempt to connect Adam with an old ally. |
| Date | February 8, 2020 |
“Thank you.”
It’s the third time Squeaks has said those two words in less than a minute. It was risky for everyone. For her making a call on the cell phone that technically isn’t her’s, dragging Alia into a scheme she wasn’t even entirely sure would work. But the line needed to be secured, she couldn’t chance Scylla listening in if this plan actually worked.
Silence reigns for the moment it takes for the call to be patched through. Squeaks waits by the door that leads out of her apartment, listening, barely daring to breathe in anticipation.
A crackle and some static alert the teenager to the line connecting, but she waits until a familiar voice reaches out to her. "…Jac? Jac are you there?" A breath of relief, a brief grin, and a nod that Richard Ray cannot see or hear through the telephone respond first.
“Yes.” Squeaks recovers, sounding hurried. “Don’t hang up.” She doesn’t explain further, but muffled sounds of a door opening and closing reach through the transceiver. Footfalls can be made out, almost running. Then…
A knock on a door.
Praxis Ziggurat, Director’s Office
Praxia, California Safe Zone
February 8th
8:32 pm Local Time
But not on the door to whatever hovel the Umbrakinetic has hidden himself away in. Squeaks isn’t anywhere near Iraq, she’s still very safe and sound in the Ziggurat. It’s the door to the Director’s private office she’s knocking on. The very office where she first met her father, first learned that Adam Monroe was her dad. It’s still sort of weird, but it’s also probably why she’s taking a chance on this phone call.
And cornering him with it.
“Da… Um. Adam? It’s important.” It is important. Or she wouldn’t be searching for him so soon after the briefing. “It’s Jac. I…” She glances toward the phone, held tightly in her hand, hidden from being easily spotted. The idea to abandon the call crosses her mind. But, as she’d learned a year ago, it’s easier to ask forgiveness. Her eyes lift to the door, eyebrows knitted together with uneasiness. “I need to talk to you, please.”
There’s two pairs of eyes squaring in on Squeaks when she looks into the director’s office. One of whom is Adam, standing near to his desk with a tense expression on his face. The other is a woman Squeaks hasn’t seen since the day she arrived, the white-clad and imperious looking woman known as Yao Tze. Yao levels a more scrutinizing look at Squeaks, one brow raised in question when she turns her attention to Adam.
“I suppose it will have to wait, won’t it?” Yao says with a shrug, to which Adam’s jaw clenches shut and the look he squares on Squeaks is one of frustration and surprise. Adam doesn’t respond to Yao’s question, only fixes her with a steady look as she makes her way toward the exit of the office, pushing the door open further. She pauses by Squeaks, looking over at her with a feigned smile.
Adam rubs one hand over his forehead, watching Yao depart and waving Squeaks in. “Five minutes,” he says wearily, swiveling his chair around so he can slouch down into it, “then I need to go to another meeting.”
All the nervousness disappears as soon as she takes a step into the office and takes in not one, but two faces looking at her. The look from the woman is met evenly, without a hint of the worry or fear that Squeaks had shown the only other time they’d encountered one another. Now she returns the measuring stare, without response or greeting. Whatever her opinion of Yao Tze is, she doesn’t show it.
A step aside is taken to let Yao leave, head turning to watch for a second before she walks to the desk. “I have a message for you,” she explains easily, as if she isn’t interrupting and has all the time in the world instead of only five minutes. “I got it the day I left, and I needed to wait a little bit before I gave it to you.”
Squeaks looks up at Adam, blue eyes imploring. Hopefully five minutes is long enough. Without looking at the phone, it’s set on the desk between them, screen up and already set on speaker. “I think now is probably the best time. And this is the only way I could think of to make sure it got to you.” It’s always best from the source, right? A quick look darts between the phone and the man at the desk, making it unclear who the next words are really for. “Say hello.”
The connection’s spotty at best; a faint background static cutting out the voice now and then, but even through that the voice of Richard Ray can be made out. Gone is the casual, confident sarcasm of his usual tone, though, instead there’s a ragged, desperate edge that can be made out by those familiar with his voice.
“…Monroe? Is that— is that you? What the fuck are your people doing, have you— have you gone completely insane you immortal bastard, or have you just lost control?”
Betrayal burns in Adam’s eyes. Shock first, but it quickly melts away into betrayal. Extending his hand toward Squeaks, Adam emits a sudden electrical blast that leaps from his outstretched hand and obliterates the phone on the desk, sending shards of burning plastic in every direction. The bolt leaves a scorch mark on his desk and the electrical discharge triggers a security alert, causing the blast screens to begin to noisily shut outside of the angled windows. A klaxon blares in the distance. Adam’s eyes burn a bright gold as he locks them with Squeaks, his face flushing red with anger.
“Was that Richard Cardinal?” Adam is too mad to remember the name change. “Do you have— do you—” he splutters in disbelief, aggressively circling around the desk. “Do you have any idea what you’ve //done!?”
Squeaks makes a sound as Richard’s voice comes through sounding nothing close to the businesslike tones she was expecting. Indignant, and looking like she's very much planning to call him out on it — she never agreed to try setting up any kind of meeting just so Adam could be yelled at and name called — she starts forward, leaning, mouth fixing to speak her own mind.
Adam's hand raises and she stops short. Her eyes flick up with anticipation of some sign that her words for Richard’s opinion aren't needed then, in the same beat, the girl flinches from the very abrupt obliteration of the cell phone.
Hands reflexively cover her ears as she backs away from the desk. Fear becomes a fixture in her own gaze, as her blue eyes stare up at Adam's gold ones. “I don't,” Squeaks answers weakly. Her mind races, jumping from one possibility to another, unable to find a solid reason that Adam would avoid contact with anyone seeking him out.
“I don't know. He asked and… and…” Any, every reason she could offer isn't good enough. The teen’s hands lower, she continues easing backward to find distance from Adam’s — her father’s — anger. “I thought… I'm sorry… he said he could help. I just… I'm sorry.”
“No!” Adam shouts with one hand raised to the air, “you didn’t think! Do you have any idea the lengths I’ve gone through to keep electronic communications from coming and going into this facility? Do you know there are people who can transmit themselves through radio communications and pop right into this room with a fucking gun! All they’d need is an open route to bypass the shielding and if they don’t bring a fucking bomb we’d be lucky!”
Never has Squeaks seen Adam this livid, and his yelling is layered atop the droning wail of security klaxons blaring in adjacent rooms. The blinds on the windows come fully down and lock into place, throwing the room into darkness save for the red emergency lighting. It makes Adam’s features look more gaunt, makes his eyes look more wild, makes him look more like the Devil everyone says he is. “Richard is compromised! Everyone is compromised! I told you to respect the security protocols, I told you! I let you make your mistakes, I— I gave you your freedom and this— this is how you repay me! By betraying me to Richard!”
Adam’s voice cracks, he has to shout now to be heard over the alarms. At Squeaks’ back the door to Adam’s office practically flies off its hinges when Sabine comes bursting into the room, followed by two armed security officers. She comes to a sudden halt when she sees the scene laid out before her, of Jac, of Adam, of his expression. Even Sabine hasn’t seen this side of him before.
“Sir,” Sabine tries to say over the sirens, but Adam pivots his baleful stare in her direction and points with two fingers.
“Get her the fuck out of here!” Adam bellows, “and will somebody shut off that fucking alarm!”
The yelling, the alarms, Squeaks folds her arms across her middle as a shield to both. As protection from the hands she anticipates to follow the anger. This is the dangerous side of adults, the one she desperately tries to avoid. Most of her life had been spent weathering the wrath of the adults who were supposed to care for her. Even though she thought maybe it was different now…
One mistake. One mistake and she's ruined everything.
Again.
“No, it was secure.” She doesn't yell when she interjects, but her pleading carries, a keening sound, imploring and dreading. She flinches as the tirade continues, face turning to soften an expected strike. Never before has she really feared the darkness. Even the times she spent beneath the city, even with the overrunning of rats, it wasn't the darkness that the girl was afraid of. There had always been a comfort to the shadows, places to hide from what was really scary. That shelter, with her father’s — with Adam’s — infuriation, is gone. “It was, I promise. I didn't… I wouldn't put you in danger, I thought… I was trying to help.”
Words fail, voice giving way to a strangled whimper. Squeaks notices Sabine and the security only when Adam turns his ire that way, and she starts to look but the dismissal keeps her focus on Adam.
“No!”
Stricken, angry at her stupidity, at being cast off, the girl yells right back in defiance of the order. “No, I won't… you can't just… I…” Words can't keep up with thoughts that won't even cooperate. Jac’s mind tumbles with the onslaught of noise, fear of Adam being mad at her, her own slurry of emotions. “No,” she yells more forcefully than intended, as she steps forward instead of away. No running, no more cringing. Simply, “No!”
Squeaks flings herself at Adam. Her arms wrap around his middle, face buried against his chest. She clings with a fierceness wrought from heartache, a child hugging tightly to a father to keep him from leaving.
Three Hundred and Forty-Nine Years Earlier
Mount Kiso-Ontake
Japan
The sky is blood red, ringed with clouds so black they look like smudges of coal.
Cascading waves of green, sapphire, and pink ripple across the open heavens. A hot wind blows across the scrub vegetation growing at the mountaintop, thunder rumbles in the distance, and the sun burns overhead as little more than a golden sliver of light eclipsed by the moon.
“Yameru,” is the breathless plea from a samurai in black and gold armor, kneeling before a mirror-still pond reflecting the eclipse in the sky. His sword is driven point-down into the ground beside him. Floating in the air above the pond, a woman in a flowing red kimono with burning gold eyes fixes a baleful stare down at the samurai, who cradles something wrapped in cloth to his chest.
“Kensei,” the woman in red, the dragon — Uluru — says with a narrowing of her burning eyes, “anata yakusoku shitajanai.” She slowly lowers down to the water, bare feet touching the surface as if it were solid land.
Kensei looks up, face flushed red, eyes filled with tears. “No,” he says emphatically, “I will not.” His language, not the language of the land. “Take everything from me, take my immortality, take my life!” He shouts. “But you will never have her!”
Uluru watches Kensei, her gold eyes narrowing, and she extends a hand out toward him with a low rumble that shakes the surface of the water and casts tiny ripples out to the shore. Kensei bends, twists, and sits up straight in his kneeling posture. The cloth wrapped bundle held at his chest makes one small movement, and then
cries.
“Kensei!” A woman screams from up the trail at his back. Kensei turns, eyes wide in horror, watching as Yaeko comes running up the trail toward the mountaintop with her sword in hand.
Uluru and Kensei lock eyes at the same moment as Kensei lashes out and takes a hold of the grip of his sword, yanking it from the earth. His other arm remains cradled around the infant held fast to his chest.
“You cannot have her!”
Present Day
It feels like time is standing still.
Sabine and the security team are motionless, eyes wide and mouths parted. Adam, too, stands with his arms out at his side and blue eyes wide against the ambush that was sprung on him. One security officer begins to slowly move his hand down to the gun holstered at his side, byt Sabine takes a firm hold of his forearm and locks eyes with him, giving a subtle shake of her head.
Adam looks down at Squeaks, eyes wide and
filling with tears. He blinks them back in that moment, slowly enclosing his arms around her and resting his chin on top of her head. He looks past Squeaks to Sabine and the security team and quietly reiterates only one of his orders.
“Can someone please shut that fucking alarm off.”