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Spoilered: Vulgar, content. This fic is safe-ish, but it alludes to a lot of previous material involving TG/TF, mind stuff, corruption, and dark themes.
By now, after the passage of several years, she had made peace with the lingering influence of her unique experience. It was livable, especially because she’d been allowed to stay at Mr. Kingston’s mansion, and formed an enduring romantic relationship with both his son (her best friend since boarding school) and their mutual girlfriend. During a rough start and some touch-and-go procedures to bring her mutating body under a kind of controlled equilibrium, the three of them came to understand the deep feelings they shared. It made for an amazing, nurturing bond that kept her grounded. Even happy. Without their support and acceptance, Lexi didn’t think she’d have been able to cope with her new state. Probably would have tried something desperate long ago. Instead she was able to enjoy their years together in this sheltered estate, feeling something approaching normality, or a comfortable equivalent, as her remaining alterations were… compatible with their mutual preferences. Maybe not accidentally so.
“Doing okay out here by yourself?” he asked with genuine interest. In all the time Lexi resided within his grounds, this stint was the longest she’d spent by herself. It was gratifying to see her calm and apparently well-adjusted. Spoke to the progress she’d made, especially after therapeutic assistance from Firmament tapered off. They still kept tabs, as well as they could, for reasons he knew all too well. He did what he could to protect her privacy from them, which put further strain on his already fraught relationship with the organization. But he also secretly recorded his own data. For the good of Darius and Selene, naturally, but also for Lexi’s sake. If he were a better man it would hurt him to keep this scrutiny so concealed, but someone with his past had long ago relinquished claims to being a better man.
“Heh, not going to lie. It’s lonely. But after those dreams, it was just… harder to be around people. Especially Selene and Darius,” she admitted, tightening up a bit. “But on the other hand, I think the time alone has done me some good, too. Sometimes a clear head only comes with quiet, y’know?” she flipped a lock of her rainbow mane away from her cheek.
“I know all too well,” the elder Kingston told her with the weight experience. “Just make sure you don’t start to disconnect when you shouldn’t be.” Since she didn’t bring it up, he didn’t mention how her body had adjusted to the time alone by growing a little more modest. It was a good sign, reflecting well on her mental state.
“Yeah,” Lexi agreed. It was good to talk to Mr. Kingston; she didn’t know his past, but she knew he had seen and done things relevant to her trauma and spent years grappling with is own ghosts. “Anyway, just dropping in to check up?”
“…. no,” Mr. Kingston said after a deep, reinforcing breath. “We’ve had some news about the ruins. Firmament thinks the containment zone was breached. They took… measures to maintain the quarantine. But even with those measures in place, my sources say there’s some activity out in the open. Apparently it’s been festering in the last week, slowly gaining ground.”
“Last week?” Lexi asked. Stupid is one thing she wasn’t. “So it’s connected to my dreams?”
“There’s good reason to think that, yes,” he said, gauging her reaction. It was acceptance rather than surprise.
“Is this the part where you ask me to come out of retirement for one last mission?” she questioned, the overt pop culture reference masking real apprehension.
“I’m not going to ask you to put yourself at risk,” he said; left silent was the implication that he was more interested in protecting his son than her per se. But, again, Lexi wasn’t stupid. And somehow, that fatherly priority was endearing rather than belittling. “But,” he continued, “with your experience, insights, and unique… circumstances. Well, I’m just going to say it: I think you would be the ideal set of eyes to go in for a look.”
“Go in?” she asked, definitely inclined to reject the proposition.
“It’s not at the mall,” Mr. Kingston said with his hands raised to try and halt whatever train of thought had been gathering steam. “It’s actually at a local college. If you’re up to it. I’ve made arrangements to get you in as a teaching assistant. With the amulet you’ll be able to see where the warp has been woven into the weft. And your tattooed iconography should insulate you from the influence. You’d honestly be the safest person from its effects on campus. But it’s still a risk. Lexi,” he leaned in. “I’ve seen you go from the brink of existential collapse to thriving again. It’s … reassuring for me. I owe you a debt.”
“Heh, I think that’s my line,” she said, using humor as a way to deflect some of the stress this revelation was raising. She didn’t every ill in the world was dealt with, even with Foundation, but she’d started to believe her part in it all was over. That she was going to have a relatively normal existence from here on out.
“No, I’m serious,” Devon Kingston insisted, his rich brown face a monument to solemnity in that moment. “You won’t understand why, but just trust that I am. So believe me when I say you’ve already earned your happy, safe life here and I don’t want to take that away from you. Ever.” The hardness in his face softened a little as he turned back to the subject of the request. “So you absolutely don’t have to do this. We have other ways of getting the information. They’re just… less certain. And I want to warn you upfront; Firmament won’t be backing you on this if you decide to take it on. You’ll have Jay and myself and our resources, but that’s it.”
“Dr. Hutchins?” Lexi asked, confused. Didn’t he work for Firmament?
“He’d be your handler for the duration, and he can be your back-up in a pinch,” he said. Lexi remembered well how the grizzled doctor suddenly appeared in her apartment and … dispatched the thing that was keeping dominion over her at the time. And she remembered the role he played in her therapies during the aftermath, slowly restoring measures of her self-possession against the insidious conditioning. “But,” Mr. Kingston interrupted her recall, “I want to drive the point home; this is not a safe mission. There is every chance it could end badly. And worse than that,” he said, leaving the ‘worse’ implications unspoken but understood.
“You wouldn’t be asking if you didn’t think…. didn’t know that sending me in would give us the best chance,” Lexi pointed out, looking at her fingers on the keys. They were pressing down hard, the tone they’d hammered long ago faded to silence. The elder Kingston’s silence was reply enough to confirm it. He was a scholar, among other things. He’d already weighed all the possibilities. If he really believed other methods would suffice, he wouldn’t have approached her. “It’s not just my past. It’s not just that my dreams are… a reaction. You think there’s a psychic link that could be useful. What are you going to do to keep the link from going wrong?” she asked, voice breaking during the last question. Such a possibility was one she didn’t want to admit here, in the safety of the grounds that had shrunk to become her entire world while she recovered. She thought it was safe, that the Kingston grounds’ defenses were adequate. But if something was knocking on her mind’s back door even here, with every precaution taken, it was likely whatever broke out of the ruined mall would try to use her to its advantage sooner or later. Even here.
“Well, regardless of whether or not you want to go through this with, I was going to recommend another round of reinforcement therapies,” Kingston said, regarding her carefully. “If you stay here, then combined with the other measures in place they may be enough to keep you cut off completely. If you go into the thick of it, they might only be a flimsy shell, but they’d be better than nothing.” Lexi lifted her white-knuckled fingers from the keyboard and folded them onto her lap. ‘Reinforcement therapies’ meant conditioning. Sure, it was ‘the good kind’ of conditioning, but it still meant implanting some sort of externally-constructed mental scaffolding into her brain. She hadn’t had any of that since the second year of recovery, and was just getting used to the idea that her rebuilt self was enough as-is. “Either way, some defensive reinforcements are, I think, warranted. If you take this risk, you’ll also receive some conditioning relevant to your role. No offense, but it’s unlikely you’d be able to pull off a convincing TA cover with old-fashioned rehearsals.”
Yeah, hypnosis is way faster for that, she thought, and has the advantage of making it harder to break character. She knew from experience. “Okay,” she said after a moment.
“For the extra therapy?” Mr. Kingston asked.
“For the mission,” she corrected him. “I’ll do it. You said I would be the safest choice and I trust you.”
“I am… not going to dissuade you, Lexi,” he said. “Just understand that this is strictly voluntary. You don’t owe this to anyone, least of all me.”
“I get it,” she said, brushing another stray lock of rainbow mane out of her eyes. “Can I have a day, first? Before the conditioning, or therapy, or whatever you want to call it. Just a day?”
“We can spare you that, absolutely,” the elder Kingston said. “I imagine you’ll want to break the news yourself, anyway.”
“Yeah,” Lexi agreed. Break the news, and some other things. It’d been a long week of self-isolation here, in the grounds, where she could walk to the main house any time she wanted. If she was going to be out of the grounds and virtually cut off for a few days, or longer, she wanted to spend a lot of time with Selene and Darius first. No scaffolding getting between them.
“I… hate to feel like I’m talking you into doing this,” he said, breaking eye contact with her for the first time as he turned to leave. A slender hand grabbed his, holding him in place. Lexi rose to her full height, looked him in the eyes, and pulled him into a reluctant embrace. A fuzzy ear twitched as it brushed against his horseshoe of short, curly, greying hair.
“You’ve been more of a father to me these last few years than my real dad was for my entire life,” she whispered. “Even though you knew what I was. Thank you Mr. Kingston.”
Awkwardly and out of practice, caught off guard by this outpouring of intense gratitude and affection, his large hand found the back of her shoulder and gave it a reassuring rub. “You can call me Pops.” Something warm dripped onto his shirt collar.