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| Scene Title | Daidō Shōi, Part VIII |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | All Hiros everywhere are dying all the time. |
| Date | April 30, 1945 |
Some time ago, Odessa and Marcus left to go check on a Japanese man captured on the outskirts of Dessau. The building she's occupying now has become considerably more quiet in that time. Most of the soldiers have gone upstairs to turn in to their bunks, while Francois has taken up a cot of his own to pass out from fatigue over the fever ravaging his body and the exertion of having to heal so repeatedly over the last several weeks. The last recipient of his healing, Clara Francis, sits tiredly on the edge of the table in the kitchen when Daphne is making her way back downstairs from tending to le Docteur.
"Don't suppose you found me a cigarette?" Clara asks quietly, shifting her weight forward as she watches Daphne come in through the door. "It's… it's really the forties, isn't it?" The observation has Clara shaking her head, brown eyes afforded to the floor in a vacant stare, teeth worrying over her lower lip as she listens to the sound of the rain pattering against the kitchen windows. "Nobody is ever going to believe us…" she breathes the words out with a sigh, resting her face in her hands and trying to still get over the dissonance of where she is now from where she was before.
Sliding down off of the table, Clara's boots click on the hardwood floor, hard heels giving noisy warning of her movements. "So… how will we know when— " the distant sound of breaking glass catches Clara off guard, her brown eyes going wide and brows furrowing as she looks up from the floor to Daphne with a did you just hear—
"DAPHNE! RUN!" The voice, shrieking over the silence of the village of Dessau is unmistakably Odessa's, but the context of it, the panicked quality of it has Clara frozen like a deer in the headlights.
What the hell is going on?
Dessau, Germany
April 30, 1945
Daphne's mind is not, shockingly, focused on finding Clara's cigarettes, but split between the anxiety caused by waiting for Odessa to return with Hiro and her worry for Francois — did healing both herself and Clara over-exert him to the point that he might not recover — what will that change for the future that he's so inexplicably in?
She's still in snowboots that make no sense in this rainy, muddy past, and she's long since stripped from her too-warm coat. "Haven't found any yet, but I'm sure someone will have 'em. You just might have to trade your watch for some," she begins when the sound of tinkling glass and the shout of her name has her turning, wide-eyed. Her eyes flit to the ceiling — Francois belongs here, he should be fine is the thought that flashes, though her instinct is to protect him.
"Come on," the speedster tells Clara, turning into a blur of light and a rush of wind to grab the other by the wrist, heading to the door of the small building. Daphne Millbrook can run but the question is, where is she supposed to run to?
Grabbed by the wrist, Clara's eyes go wide, big brown saucers staring at Daphne as she hears the pixieish blonde's single syllable. "Go wh— " the world turns into a blur as she's yanked from where she stands, zipping through the ground floor of the house and then snapping back into reality outside of the two story building. Rain falls down all around them, a torrential downpour accompanied by another peal of thunder that rumbles violently overhead.
Squinting against the rain, Clara stares upwards as she watches Odessa tackled out of the second floor window of the adjacent building by a dark-haired man with a pony-tail in a green army uniform. "Odessa!" Clara shrieks, watching the two plummet towards the ground before disappearing in a roar of wind and a splash of water that blows outwards away from the puddle they were about to land in. Breath hitching in the back of her throat, Clara's eyes flick back up to the window when a flash of lightning illuminates the darkly dressed frame of Marcus Raith standing in the broken window, eye-patched visage staring down at the two women.
There's a distant whine that buildings up in the air, a siren that starts low and begins to build in frequency. Lightning flashes again, and Marcus is no longer standing in the window. "Daphne! Daphne we have to go!"
Go where?
Daphne doesn't know where to go — what she really wants to do is go to the future, but how does one go to a time? She doesn't have that ability, and she races blindly, looking for the threat that Odessa's cry warned them of, looking for Odessa — it's Clara's cry of "Odessa" that brings her attention to the building with the two tumbling out of it. Changing direction, the blur that is Daphne and Clara's combined form speeds that way — only to see the two disappear.
Daphne slows to a stop, staring at the space that Hiro and Odessa had just occupied, lips parting to speak but only gasping a swallow of air, the lower lip trembling slightly. Were they just left behind? "Where… where did they go?" Daphne whispers, hand still clutching Clara's wrist as she flinches at the flash of lightning. The sirens push at her — she knows she needs to move, but no matter where they go, without Hiro, it will still be 1945.
United States Military Storehouse
Dessau, Germany
A hardwood floor is less of a soft landing than mud, but momentum isn't entirely carried over when Hiro crashes down onto his back, sending Odessa to smash down atop of him. Breath is forced out of his lungs and Hiro is quick to push her off of him as he rolls to the side. Dim lantern lights waggle from side to side in this cramped storage closet from their shared impact. Hiro pulls himself to his feet, only to disappear and reappear a foot away with a roar of displaced air. Handcuffs clatter to the ground with a metallic jingle. After making Harry Houdini jealous, he regards Odessa with a snap of one hand pointed accusingly at her. "How did you get here!?"
He doesn't need to be looking at her to hear his answer though, one arm holding his aching chest as he limps over to one of the storage cases, pushing it aside with a clatter of the contents, rummaging around and lifting a stack of boxes aside, then finally finding a canvas backpack. Hoisting it up and dragging it across the top of the crate, Hiro begins rifling through it frantically.
Houdini isn't the only person jealous around here. Odessa smooths the hair back from her brow and pulls herself to her feet slowly, narrowing her eyes faintly at the newly freed Hiro. "Am I allowed to tell you about what other versions of you do?" Slowly, she turns around, to regard the new surroundings. She has got to learn how to do that trick. "What the fuck have you done? Time is not this straight progression of cause and effect! You've gone and… changed things. It's just this ball of… of…"
Odessa's hands flail and grasp for words out of the air, "Wibbly wobbly timey wimey… stuff!" She stamps her foot and purses her lips at the time traveller. "And me? What about you? What are you doing here? You aren't the Hiro that sent me here! And Daphne! And Clara! And—" One hand balls into a fist, while the other stays rigid in its splints. "Can you get us back to our own timeline? And not some alternate future where I'm dead?" Rant, rave, freak out. Odessa is not at her finest right now.
Rummaging through the backpack and clearly ignoring everything Odessa is saying, Hiro only stops when his hand withdraws from the interior with something small, folded into his palm. Turning around to look at Odessa, he leaves the backpack behind, opening his hand to reveal a small old compass. Flipping the top open, Hiro's brows furrow, watching the needle spin like it was on top of a large magnet, just whirling aimlessly in a circle before Hiro snaps the lid shut again.
"I am not your Hiro." He states flatly, stuffing the compass into the front pocket of his BDUs before marching past Odessa and moving over to a cloth covered rack behind her. "I was here looking for answers to something, because it was asked of me to find them. I did, but not before being caught by the Americans, by their negator, Knight. They took my things, and I couldn't leave until I got them back…" he's much better at English than she recalls, and when he yanks the cloth away from the gun rack, there's three rifles and something else hung up there. A sword that no longer even belongs to Hiro Nakamura, a sword that Adam Monroe took back from him in Tokyo in 2009. Black lacquered, gold trim, featuring a familiar symbol on.
Kensei's sword.
Reaching up to draw it down off of the rack, Hiro turns around and looks over his shoulder to Odessa. "If they got a hold of this compass, everything would change." Turning from the rack to Odessa, Hiro slides the Takezo sword out of its sheath with a shearing sound, checking the blade before snapping it back into place.
"Tell me what happened," Hiro insists, his brows furrowed, "tell me everything."
Meanwhile…
Doors burst open at the nearby building where a window had been shattered and Odessa along with her pony-tailed confidant had made their escape. US Army soldiers dressed in green uniforms come stepping out, looking around and trying to figure out what the cause of the drill is, why the alarm has been raised and why the sirens are going off. "D— Daphne there's too many people looking I— I can't— " Clara steps behind the speedster, curling fingers into Daphne's sleeves, trying to hunch down behind her despite the fact that Clara's a bit taller than the pixieish blonde.
"The woods— anywhere— just— just get us away from here!" Clara shouts in panic to Daphne's back.
"On it," Daphne whispers. "Hang on. And don't throw up." Clara hasn't thrown up yet, but she keeps threatening to, and the pixyish speedster knows it's just a matter of time. She'd rather it not be on her or her spiffy snowboots, even if they are plastered in mud and maybe a little bit of Nazi blood from the execution of Kazimir and his pals.
She reaches for the other's wrist and the two solid forms blur, become one striated streak of color as they flash through the camp, ruffling the coats of Army soldiers in their wake, until they make it outside of the camp into a wooded area. Finally, Daphne comes to a stop, their two forms becoming separate and solid to view once more. "God damn it, where the hell did Odessa and Hiro go!" Daphne grumbles, stamping her foot in a muddy puddle, which splatters Clara's pants. "Think our cell phones'll work if I call her?" she quips. Sadly, she knows the answer to that is a resonating no.
Stumbling back from Daphne, Clara's back thuds noisily up against a tree. She breathes in a sharp, frustrated breath, chest rising and falling, rain beginning to darken the fabric of the gray sweater she wears, devoid of her orange arctic jacket since being healed by Francois. Leaning up against the damp tree, Clara stares into the branches at the blackness of the night, her body trembling, breathing shuddering and jaw trembling in fright.
"They left us behind…" Clara hisses out, her head shaking from side to side slowly, "they— they left us behind." Swallowing nervously, Clara lifts up a sleeve-shrouded hand and wipes at her eyes, a fearful hiccup of a sob rising up in the back of her throat. "Oh God they left us here— they— they left us here…" There's not much more of this she can take, and the panic, it's understandable.
Back at the Storehouse
Odessa tries to force herself to look at Hiro, but her eyes are only for his sword. How she wants it. "You came to me - a future you," she says in a quiet, more subdued voice now that she's gotten the fright out of her system for a moment. "You said to me, some things don't have to happen and you gave me an injection. I can only reason it's a vaccine for the Five-Ten, because everyone around me has gotten it, and I haven't. I assume that the future you vaccinated me so that when the time came, I could find the you from my timeline, who is… was sick with it, and save you - him - you from the government. Only, we were attacked by a man who wanted our abilities. It's how I got this." She points at the wound on her forehead. "When you attacked him, he did the same to you, and you freaked out and sent Daphne, Clara, and I here. When I saw you here, I thought you were the same one." Hiro is a complicated creature, he is.
Finally, Odessa lifts her gaze from the sword and studies Hiro's face. "We need to find them. If Daphne has any sense, she grabbed Clara and ran when I told her to. Means they should have sought shelter in the woods by now. We have to find them as our next move. Period." An accusing finger is pointed at the Japanese man, "And I do mean we. Like it or not, we're out of our time, so that makes us your problem."
"You're wrong," Hiro states flatly, considering the door to the storage room, then Odessa with the same dark eyes and discerning expression. "The one who was sick in the hospital was also dead in the future I come from. You and he both died at the Coler-Goldwater Memorial Hospital on May 10th, 2010. Just a little over a year ago from where I am from…" Stepping closer to Odessa, there's a furrow of his brows, watching her thoughtfully and carefully. "But you have made a very important point to me by telling me this, and I think I've figured it all out now."
Lifting his chin up, Hiro narrows his brown eyes and watches the blonde carefully. "I cannot risk traveling back and forth in my own timeline, even his." There's a squint, and one corner of Hiro's mouth creeps up into a smile. "Doctor Who couldn't, why risk it." Behind that stoic samurai's demeanor, there's still some of the old Hiro Nakamura left behind.
"But if he can be saved, then perhaps there's still some hope." Hiro slants a look over to Odessa, then lifts a hand and rests it on her shoulder. "I can try to take you and your friends back home…" he admits with a furrow of his brows, "but the time for that is narrowing. What we are doing here, what you have told me, is causing a rift. It makes travel… difficult, a fast moving river with a rapidly approaching fork. Go down one side, and you can never paddle back to the other."
Nodding his head once, Hiro offers a thoughtful intonation to her; "Thank you… for what you've done here," before the both of them disappear from the storage house in a rush of displaced air.
The Forests of Dachau
"Clara." Daphne says sharply, grabbing the other blonde and shaking her a little. "Stop freaking out. If they left us, they'll be back, right? Odessa knows where we are, kinda, and Hero threw us into 1945 once, he can come back." Even as she says it, she isn't sure it's altogether true. Surely Hiro didn't mean to send them back to this time or this place — but it could be worse. They could be in the Jurassic period with a tyrannosaurus rex bearing down on them in the forest.
"She'll stop time and we'll know we can approach the camp, right?" Daphne creeps closer to where the forest starts, to peer into the camp. "I don't know if she'll be able to stop it where we are, if she can't see us, that whole one room at a time business we did at the hospital, remember? But if we can watch the camp and see stuff come to a stand still there, we'll know it's safe." Daphne sadly doesn't know about the negator in the camp.
Sucking in a sharp breath when Daphne takes a hold of the collar of her sweater, Clara nods her head twice in rapid succession. Swallowing noisily, she lifts a hand up to wipe at her eyes, lips stilling when pressed firmly together. The rain keeps falling down around them, a slow and steady progression of a downpour soaking into the damp earth. "Okay…" Clara breathes out, "okay I— we— we'll be okay." In the distance, the siren is still wailing, that whining air-raid warning alarm that fills the camp. They're not far enough away, and that's something out of necessity to be able to tell if something else goes on there.
There's a shout in the distance, a man's voice and a woman's voice calling out. A moment later it's gone, and Clara leans away form the tree, towards Daphne, and looks sharply into the woods, trying to discern exactly where the sound came from. It pops up again a moment later in another part of the woods, distant voices shouting "Daphne! Clara!" Then silence before disappearing again.
"See!?" Daphne says victoriously, as if she never had a doubt in her platinum-dreadlocked head. "Here! Odessa! Hiro! We're here!" she calls out, eyes narrowing to see through the gloomy dimness of the rainy forest. She grabs Clara's hand and speeds toward the sound of what is hopefully their ticket to ride back into 2010. "Coming!" she adds, almost giddy, the words lost in the rush of wind that rustles the leaves on the trees as they zoom through the forest — luckily her reaction time is fast as well so she does not plow into a tree and kill them both like a politician on a ski trip.
Under the roar of the siren, in the dark of the hillside thickets on the edge of the woods, a speeding blur of blonde comes careening through the forest, weaving between towering pine trees and out into the rain. There on the hill that Daphne emerges out onto, with a view of the village of Dessau spread out before her, stands Hiro Nakamura, rain soaked and dressed in the drab green of a US Army uniform, the Kensei sword held at his side in its sheath, ponytail langing limp behind him soaked from the rain. At his side, Odessa is likewise drenched by the downpour, and on seeing the emergence of the two missing blondes, his hand lifts up off of Odessa's shoulder.
"Ohayou gozaimasu," Hiro notes with a tip of his head into a nod, and Clara simply stares up at the time traveler, brown eyes wide before they settle on Odessa, then Daphne, her knees wobbling a little and stomach lurching. God she hates super speed.
Odessa smiles thinly to the other two women, gesturing for them to come closer. "Glad to see you listened. Raith turned on us. He wants to use our knowledge of the future in the name of the good ol' red, white, and blue. They've also got a negator, so we need to get the fuck out of here." She turns to look at Hiro. "Like now."
"Domo Arigato, Mister Roboto," Daphne says cheerfully enough, though her dark eyes are as wide as Clara's as she sees Hiro standing before her for the first time in a body that is both real (maybe, if this isn't all a dream) and isn't about to die — either from fever or gaping abdominal wounds.
"Let's blow this popsicle stand, yeah? Come on, Clara, you can make it a little longer without throwing up that red curry, right?" She tugs the other by the sweater and edges closer to Hiro and Odessa, wide eyes not leaving Hiro's face, perhaps noting the differences between the Hiro she saw back in the hospital and this one with a little wonder. But, he's a temporal manipulator, after all — maybe he took a moment to clean himself up while the world hung in stasis around him.
"Where— when am I taking you?" Hiro asks sharply, offering a brown eyed look to Odessa. Clara, though, seems a bit confused in all of this as she stumbles forward, shaking her head back and forth slowly. There's a tightness in her throat, teeth working at her bottom lip as she tries to puzzle out how the Hiro who was completely babbling and incoherant just a few hours ago to them is now a sword-wielding man of action.
"I'm only going to get one shot at returning you all to your proper time, there's no telling what the changes you've all done here have caused, and that ripple— it is like throwing a stone into water, spreading outward. I need to know where I am going before I leave, otherwise I could strand you some place worse than this, or do even more damage."
Hiro looks over his shoulder to Dessau, then up to the shadow of one of the nearby cottages who'se roof is level with the hill, then back to Daphne, Clara and Odessa, expectantly.
"Not Antarctica," is all Clara has to offer, waving her hands back and forth warningly.
"Well, we could go back to Coler-Goldwater, but I have a feeling that we won't find our Hiro there anymore. Perhaps it's best to cut our losses and regroup…" Odessa sucks her lower lip in between her teeth and worries at it for a moment or two as she thinks, apparently the newly appointed head of this expedition. (As it should be, in her mind.)
"Do you remember a bar called Old Lucy's?" Odessa asks Hiro, uncertain of where his timeline has taken him. "If you can put us there as close to April thirtieth, two-thousand-and-ten as you can, that should be a safe place to simply appear out of thin air. The only people who're supposed to be there right now wouldn't bat an eye." Or so Odessa hopes.
"Not the hospital," Daphne agrees. "If we miss the slot and are late — they'll be wondering what the hell happened. There's no way they missed the commotion, and there were like DHS agents in there. And I went through the window. And that smoke guy might still be loitering around trying to get your power, forget that shit." The speedster frowns a little at the mention of the bar — she'd rather it be a quiet apartment, but she's not about to give these people her address. There's really cool stuff in there that they might want.
"April?" Hiro's brows lift, seemingly surprised by how close to Odessa's death they'd come from, but it the analogy to the present date where he stands now is at least helpful. Rubbing at the side of his neck, Hiro offers a nod of his head and steps down off of the hill, moving out to the middle of where the three women are. "I can try, I should be able to move you all at once to — "
A gunshot ruings out, and Hiro jerks to the side as a flash of red erupts from his chest, spinning him around and sending him collapsing to the ground. His Kensei sword splashes down in the mud beside himself as he rolls to one side, and a moment later Odessa feels a sharp, aching creak in her joints as a familiar sting of negation rolls over her. Soon that same negation comes upon Daphne, muscles feel sluggish, her heartrate drops, and it feels like her legs may give out from beneath her. But she's only suppressed, not what had happened with the H5N10 virus.
Clara's missing right after the gunshot goes off, just completely out of sight and out of mind. Odessa and Daphne's attention is raised from Hiro's prone form to the man standing soaked in the rain at the bottom of the hill, a revolver with a smoking barrel aimed at them, long black coat hung heavily over his frame.
"Nightingale," Marcus Raith hisses out through clenched teeth, blood running from the split on the bridge of his nose where Hiro had headbutted him earlier. "I didn't tell you that you could go." Marching up the other side of the hill, two green-dressed army soldiers in black rain jackets with bolt-action rifles raised train their weapons on the trio. Behind them, a wiry red-headed man with a crew cut in an officer's uniform is narrowing blue eyes at the two women. When Odessa's eyes flick back down to where Hiro is—
— was –
—she finds only blood stained mud. Clara.
"Don't look around for her," Odessa warns Daphne quickly when she realises Clara's gone missing. "If we want to get out of this, we can't—" A look back down to where Hiro should have been, where she was about to kneel down and take up his weapon. Damn.
The temporal manipulator makes a grab for Daphne and for all intents and purposes, she looks terrified and like she's huddling into the other blonde for safety. Into her ear, she hisses, "If things go completely sideways here, and you get the opportunity, you need to run. Leave me behind. Do you understand me? Just keep outrunning them. Clara and Hiro won't abandon you."
Okay, so maybe Odessa is a little scared. But she's also absolutely furious with Raith right now. Letting Daphne go, she takes a step away from her and narrows her eyes at the man. Speak loudly, and all eyes will glue to her. "Now what did you go and do a stupid thing like that for, Marcus? So good looking, but not much of a fucking brain in that skull of yours, is there?"
So much for knowing a Hiro that's not dying. Apparently all Hiros everywhere are dying all the time. Daphne makes a choked sound of fear when she feels that weighted-ness, that slow languidness creep into her limbs, stumbling slightly before regaining her balance just as Odessa latches on to her. She gives a slight shake of her head.
If she has to run — hopefully the negator's range is not very far, but unfortunately bullets will win a race for the perimeter of that range, whatever it is. "Can't run fast," she whispers, eyes wide as she stares at the men pointing their weapons at her.
"Did you know there're people out there, who can suck the memories out of the brain of a person who's been dead for five hours?" Marcus' eye angles towards Knight, then looks back to Odessa as he takes another step up the hill, boots sliding in the mud and hair plastered down over his forehead. "You know you girls may have cost me Volken, but I'm willing to say that information about the future is going to be worth a lot more than one dead Nazi."
Motioning with his gun towards Daphne, Marcus furrows his brows and crooks his lips up into a smile. "Come on you two, once I get you both locked up then we can have a discussion about where your little Jap buddy went." As Marcus is marching up towards Daphne and Odessa on the hill, one of the two soldiers standing watch lurches forward. He makes a dry, choking sound and releases one hand from his rifle, clutching steadily at his chest.
Birds that were sleeping scatter from the nearby tries, shrieks crowing out from them as they are taken alight by some silent warning that only they were perceptive enough to notice. Sebastian takes a step forward, laying his hand on the lurching soldier's shoulder, before a silhouette of a man moves up behind him, and places hands on either side of his head.
A howl like an animal escapes from Sebastian Knight as black veins coruscate through his flesh at the sides of his head around the hands touching his temples. His eyes shrivel and wither in their sockets, the flesh burns and peels away from his cheeks and muscles blacken beneath the shriveling parchment of his skin. When his head crumbles into dust between the hands, his body collapses to the ground to reveal a tall and gaunt spectre of a man soaked in rain and mud.
Cadaverous is the sunken cheekbones and deep set eyes of Kazimir Volken, and the ashes falling from his hands are all that remains of the negator. Stepping forward, he offers a blue eyed stare to the two soldiers that had been on the firing line to execute him hours ago. Their screams are horrified, punctuated by the cracking pops of their rifles firing into his midsection. Black clouds of ash and dark blood erupt from Kazimir's back as he lurches from the gunshots, before the light dims around him and a black miasma expands out from his body.
The soldiers scream, crippled and harrowed screams before falling to their knees, hands pawing at their faces as their life is siphoned away by the entropic field of hungry shadows. Bullet holes slowly squeeze shut as Kazimir steps forward, making a steady progress towards Marcus. "No!" The eyepatch laden spy hisses, turning his gun from Odessa to Kazimir, "Stay back!"
Odessa's eyes get wide. He lost Volken? Surely the man isn't dead. He can't be dead. But that means he got away somehow? She fights the urge to start looking for a ridiculously blue-eyed soldier.
At least until all that screaming begins.
"I tried to tell you, Marcus." Odessa grabs Daphne by the hand and tugs. "We need to run. We need to run right now." Already, she's turning and scrambling away from the hill. Marcus is distracted, so now it's time to get while the getting is good. "Come on!"
"Wha—" Daphne begins, whirling, suddenly in a spinning blur when her power returns to her, to stare at the man she saw die not many hours ago. "Kazimir," she breathes, face paling as she realizes what he just did to the man. Francois told her that Kazimir could kill — now she sees what he means.
When Odessa tugs, Daphne takes a breath and throws herself and Odessa into forward momentum, though she hisses, "We still need Hiro and Clara — Hiro was shot! Where is he? If he's … if he's dead…"
Her words are lost in the rush of wind as she moves them away from the men with guns and the man with the ability to kill with his touch, but her mind spins with the consequences: if Marcus Raith just killed Hiro, they are lost.
"Kazimir!" Marcus chokingly spits out, slipping in the mud and nearly losing his footing when he tries to scramble away from the century old man. "What— what the hell are you doing!? We had a deal!" Kazimir's blue eyes stay settled on Marcus, and his advance is steady, purposeful and without fear of the fact that gunfire just erupted on the outskirts of a military base. "We had an arrangement what— the hell are you doing!?"
"Our arrangement— " Kazimir twitches his head to one side with a nervous tic, "Marcus, ended when you thought I would be some sort of puppet dancing on your strings. Do you think I actually would have allowed myself, with all that you knew about me, to be lined up by a firing squad and executed?" Slithering tendrils of ephemeral black snake up through the tattered fabric of the brown jacket Kazimir wears.
"I made a new arrangement, with a young woman named Daphne. She performed her role magnificently, and now I will repay the kindness to her. I am, after all, fair." Fear wells up in Marcus' eyes as he sees Kazimir beginning to approach again, and lowering his pistol he raises that kinetic wall of shimmering blue-green light that swirls and churns as though it were a sea.
"Don't— don't do this, Kazimir. Icarus is going to re-start, we have Francois, we have everything you'll need. I already sent word ahead before— before all this happened, they'll be expecting you overseas!"
Kazimir lifts one thin brow, considering Marcus for a moment. It's in that blurted omission that Marcus made his mistake, and Kazimir is soon to vocalize it. "Then why, my old friend, do I still need you?" Turning to run, Marcus' floating shield of force sweeps away from Kazimir, and the old Nazi suddenly breaks into a sprint that a man of his age should be incapable of. Long, thin legs carry him fast, and it's with a heedless leap down from the hill that he crashes atop Marcus, bony fingers clawing at the spy's head. Screams erupt from the other side of the hill, out of Odessa and Daphne's line of sight, screams like an animal would make.
At the women's backs, there's a hiss of breath and a stumble of voice. "Daphne, Odessa…" Clara stands draped in her orange winter jacket, hair bound back into a pony tail and dry, or at least it was up until she came back into being. Hiro has changed his clothing entirely, a black zip up vest worn over a dark long-sleeved sweater, his sword sheathed at his back, pressed slacks now soaking in the rain. One of Hiro's arms is in a makeshift cloth sling, but all in all he looks no worse for wear. It's hard to tell how long they've been gone, but enough for Clara to perform medical treatment and get them a change of clothing.
Hiro squares his jaw at the sound of the noise, the screams, and offers out a hand to Daphne and Odessa. "We should go."
Odessa nods her head slowly, gaze transfixed behind her as if she might see through to the other side of the hill where Marcus is no doubt meeting a rather gruesome demise. She can't even think it serves him right, because it's horrifying. She can't wish that upon anyone. Finally she turns her gaze back to Hiro and nods. "Yes. We… we definitely should get out of here." Swallowing uneasily, she admits, "I think I need to lay down soon. I don't feel so good."
Daphne and Odessa's streaked blur comes to a still, coalescing into two separate and solid forms at the sound of Clara's voice. She blinks at the sight of the changed and tended Hiro. "God. You time bandits have less of an excuse of ever being late than I do," she quips, glancing back to the men grappling in the distance, frowning slightly — Kazimir helped them.
"Let's go. For realsies, this time. Do we all hold hands and sing Kumbaya or what?" she says, glancing up at Hiro with questioning eyes. "By the way, I don't think you're the right you, but … for what it's worth, I'm sorry, and thank you for helping us." The words are a rush, spoken in case something else happens and she doesn't get the chance.
Lifting his hand up to rest on Daphne's shoulder, then his other hand on Odessa's, Hiro watches the two women, then glances towards where Kazimir rises up from above Marcus' body, ash and soot streaked down his face. Clara lays a hand on Hiro's shoulder, and in that moment of silence, Hiro turns back to Daphne and furrows his brows, expression looking somewhat grave as he nods his head once. "I'm sorry too."
In the rush of air that comes next the four disappear, leaving Kazimir Volken alone in the rain, with a siren wailing at his back.
New York City
65 Years and 12 Days Later…
With a roar of displaced air, Hiro Nakamura's rain soaked silhouette emerges into the kitchen of the cold, empty apartment situated above Old Lucy's. The air is rife with chill, lights are out and the city all beyond the picture windows is pitch black. Rainwater drips off of Odessa, Daphne and Clara by his side, and when Hiro takes a step back from them, it's with a somewhat nostalgic look up towards the ceiling of the apartment, then back over his shoulder to the blondes.
"Welcome home…" Hiro intones quietly, trying to put aside in his mind the apology he had offered Daphne before their return. Brown eyes look askance to the kitchen table, then around the dark and silent apartment before settling on Odessa. "I don't know what happened to the Hiro that you saved… but I know that you spared him from both the virus, and the man that was coming for him." Hiro shakes water off of his arms and onto the floor, and Clara hunches her shoulders forward, feeling the chill of the apartment hit her now.
"Thank you," Hiro clarifies, his breath visible as a warm steam in the air.
Odessa doesn't say thank you in the way that most people do. It's too simple, and in her mind, too hollow. To show her gratitude, she instead grabs both sides of Hiro's face between her palms and plants a hard kiss on his mouth that lasts several seconds. When she breaks it-slash-comes up for air, she simply turns on her heel as if it had never happened and wanders over to where her watch sits next to the kitchen sink. "Somebody get the lights, huh?"
The woman of the (proverbial) house falls silent as she stares at the face of the timepiece. "It's May twelfth?" She looks up and stares at Hiro, "How did it happen, in your time?" How did I die, is what she asks. She finds it hard to believe a virus managed to kill both her and a counterpart of his on the same day.
Hiro may be trying to put aside an apology, but Daphne is confused and presses the issue. "What — why are you sorry? You helped us — you saved us — you saved me twice now," she says, brows knitting together as she steps out of the way of Odessa pressing in for a kiss. She hurries to the window to peer out, hoping that somehow the snow has ended, but gasping instead. "Shit, I don't know if even I can move around in that mess," she mutters — and realizing belatedly she left her coat and her Olympic tuque in 1945. She will have to find another Olympian to steal from. She liked the moose hat.
There's worse things to be rewarded with when saving someone from being stranded in a century not their own. Though Hiro Nakamura reacts with all the tension and posture of a wooden plank, brows lifting and eyes widening but body not really moving. He clears his throat, awkwardly, then takes a step back after the dignified motion of wiping a sopping wet sleeve across his mouth. "You got sick, your ability failed, and you died. There is no cure, only a vaccine. This weather and the virus killed thousands."
Hiro sounds like he only has a slightly heavy heart about that, and it's with a mild scrutiny that he watches Clara shed her winter coat to a wet slap on the floor, the clothing she wears beneath at least still dry from wherever they'd been prior. Instead, she's clomping around from where the jacket was tossed to the kitchen.
"The man you saved at the hospital," that he has repeatedly refused to call himself, "succumbed to the disease, but… he did not die from the virus. You prevented his death, here, if you confronted the man responsible. For that, I am grateful. He…" Hiro shakes his head, then looks back over his shoulder as he hears a chair scuffing across the floor and Clara crawling down onto her hands and knees. Squinting, he turns to look back at the other two women, most importantly Daphne.
"I'm sorry… because I know what is coming in the next year, and that there's nothing I can do to stop it. Nothing I should do. I'm sorry for what's going to happen to Abby." Swallowing awkwardly, Hiro's dark eyes avert to the floor, and he turns to offer his profile to Daphne. "Wherever he is… I am sure he is thankful. Should either of you see him… do not mention me to him. It is best that he never know."
Hiro's shoulders slack, one hand wipes water from the top of his head, and he looks back up to Daphne and Odessa again. "I have a vaccine to retrieve…" he notes to Odessa in explanation, and much as Odessa does not say thank you, Hiro does not say goodbye. He just disappears.
Sitting up from under the kitchen table, Clara lifts up a still steaming styrofoam container of red curry, fork in mouth and brows lifted, looking around to try and find where Hiro went. Swallowing loudly, she sticks the fork back in the rice, offering a grimace.
"It's still warm."
Odessa looks over her shoulder to smirk faintly at Clara's little revelation. But then her eyes get wide and her boots pound noisily on the floor as she tears through the apartment and to the door on the far end of the hall. "'Inger!"
"Oh, sweetie," comes the murmur from the bedroom. "Look at what you've done to the room." A heavy sigh. "Mommy will never leave you locked up again, no she won't."
That poor cat.