Participants:
| Scene Title | Was It Worth It? |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Post-raid, Cat and Candy meet. |
| Date | October 19, 2009 |
A wrought-iron fence borders several small garden beds and the stone stairs leading up to the house's front door. The house itself is a structure of old stone - not even concrete blocks, but quarried stone — with natural-color wood doors and window frames. The windows on the ground floor are barred.
Inside, the level is divided into only three rooms. The first is the foyer, with polished hardwood flooring, a freestanding coatrack on either side, iron-dark against soft-amber interior walls. The main staircase spirals up from one corner of the foyer, girded by a wrought-iron railing.
To the right from the entrance is the kitchen. The walls just off from white, the floor tiled in dark gray. In the center of the kitchen is a black-topped island, matching the counters that line the room. One wall is dominated by an eminently modern stove framed by an anachronistic brick hearth. Cabinets above the counters have glass doors; the windows above the sink are framed in light-colored curtains, the illumination they let in adding to the expansive atmosphere.
The dining room takes up the back of this floor. The far wall is brick and stone, with a facade of a fireplace mantle in the center. Interior walls have been painted a tone intermediate between amber and ivory, which is also the accent color in the dark rug beneath the long dining table.
After meeting with Elisabeth, Cat's day continues. She thinks about returning to the Bronx, but a debriefing for Candy needs be done. It's not far from the Nite Owl, thus within a short time she's entered the Hangar in Greenwich Village. Wearing a conservative black dress, the color of mourning, she seeks out Miss Allard.
Her features are neutral in expression, Cat's projection is poised and calm.
Candy isn't poised and calmed at all while she sits on the bed and stairs at the floor. A mostly empty bottle of tequila by her bed while she continues to think about it. She should be happy that she rescued Helena, but she can't reconcile the loss of life that it took to rescue one life, and it stings inside of her. Never having felt guilty or bad for having killed someone till she had to kill evolved while under cover.
"Candy," she greets as the room is entered and the sought after woman sighted. No other word is spoken, she just studies the hydrokinetic and leaves her the floor.
"Was it worth it?" Candy asks Cat, when she hears the other woman enter the room. Looking up at the other woman she says, "Was all that I did to be able to rescue her. Was rescuein' one life worth the lives that I ruined, Cat?" She shakes her head a little, eyes going back down, its rather obvious she's been crying and drinking.
"I don't see it as just rescuing one life, Candy," she tells the extracted spy. "I see it as having worked into their organization, found their headquarters, and brought their ops to an end." She moves to settle onto a chair while speaking, her voice even. "Remember also their plan, with all the explosives, to blow Helena up along with some high-profile target. That would have taken a lot of lives, people who won't die now."
"But… does that really make all the lives I ruined, that I personally," Candy says while she sits there. "Cat, I took them from their homes sometimes. I knew exactly what Humanis First was going to do to them, and I still did it. They were tortured and I watched! I participated! I kept drugging up Helena… for christ sake… what makes me any better than them?!"
"It's not likely anything will take what you suffer over that away, Candy," Cat replies somberly. "Lives that ended because my path was crossed will still be over no matter what I do. They're in my unerring memory, and aren't leaving. Ever."
"Nor are the names and faces of people I've known who died. My lover, killed because we couldn't… wouldn't give up what the captors demanded in trade. So many others, too. Most recently Mona Rao and Carolina Perez."
"One might think, given the capacity of recall I have, vengefulness would be a top priority, but it isn't. I've let slide chasing down people who wronged me, because I realize there are quite a few people who'd look at me the same way. Fathers, daughters, mothers, sisters, sons, brothers, husbands, wives who lost people close to them in our operations. Moab, other places. I have to hope they'll eventually let it all go. There was a fight for survival on, and someday we can all hopefully move beyond that."
"I can't give you any easy answers, cure your pain over the things you've done any more than I can purge it from myself, except to say we've done what we knew we had to do, and that we feel remorse says we're still human."
She then lapses to silence, her voice having been quiet and a bit haunted through all of it.
Candy looks up at Cat while she sits there on the bed and she asks, "Am I human, just because I feel remorse, Cat? I don't feel remorse, not for the men I killed that night. I can't feel remorse for making them explode like they did, or for watching as they killed each other and as we killed them." A smirk comes to her face while she sits there, falling into her own silence as her own haunted gaze goes to the floor.
"But you also don't do it for sport, or indiscriminately," Cat goes on to say. "In the situations where lives have ended by your hand, you had a choice of killing, or dying, and you're not dead. That you feel something about that is what shows you're still human. That you don't want to do it ever again."
The panmnesiac makes no commentary about what took place during the raid, other than it falling under kill or be killed.
Candy doesn't talk about the bodies behind her that she has killed, that weren't either kill or be killed, but were just killed. Her eyes moving up from the floor and to the bottle thinking for a moment before she says softly, "I can't ever do that again. Ever, Cat. If I'm helping you all again, I will not do that."
"We won't ask you to," Cat replies somberly. "When we asked you to infiltrate, we didn't imagine it would come to that. We aren't casting you to the winds, but you won't be put in that position ever again."
Candy looks at Cat, before she nods her head a little. "Then what happens next?" Candy asks while she sits there, taking the tequila bottle and swigging from it and then just holding it in her hand.
"We don't know yet," she answers. "Helena's recovering, she and I really haven't talked business yet, but we will. There are things coming our way to be dealt with, over and above the world itself. Spreading the word, encouraging resistance to things like registration; dealing with people who seek to do us physical harm."
"A good question is what you want to do."
"I don't know, Cat. I just spent three months living in a world where I could be killed with a single slip of the tongue," Candy replies after a couple of moments, her eyes watching Cat, "You know what I can do, and I don't know where I'd fit in in the grand scheme of things."
"Sometimes things just find us," Cat replies as she moves. "You may find yourself in a position to save lives without having to take any. It may happen you see a flood coming and are able to make the waters reverse course. Or see an island being submerged and hold the ocean itself at bay."
She steps toward the door, pausing in it to look back and suggest "Think over the things you wanted from life, if you hadn't been placed at Moab. What life you'd have been out to make for yourself. No guarantees, but we may be able to help you work toward it."
Candy nods her head a little while she sits there, still not able to open up completely to the woman who is in the room with her, though the gods know she wants to get it off her chest. She merely nods though and says, "I'll give some thought to it, but… Moab broke me, Cat. Broke me in a way that I don't think I can ever recover from."
"You can," Cat assures, "even if you don't believe it, Candy. Because you're stronger than Moab. Trust in that, don't let it be tougher than you." Eyes linger on the hydrokinetic's face for a string of moments. "We'll speak again soon." Then she's gone, headed out to tend leaders suffering withdrawal, discuss nukes and nutjobs with a shadowy man…