Evenfall (138 page)

===

“I like to touch you.”

He gasped softly, eyes rolling in his head at the feel of hands on his body, sliding down his hard chest, flat stomach, dull fingernails scraping along his thighs as they teased the skin at his crotch.

 
“Do you want me to stop?” the voice was low, deep, and thick with lust.

He shook his head desperately, hands clenching in the bed sheets that still smelled like sex, sweat, musk… like the night before. “Don’t.”

The hands gripped him and slid up again, fingers digging in harder, hard enough to cause pain, as the man straddled him and gazed down from behind a curtain of blond hair.

Boyd…

“Do you trust me?”

His eyes slid open and he stared up at Boyd through a haze of passion. “Yes.”

Boyd’s lips curled up into a smirk. “Good.”

Then the knife abruptly plunged into his chest.

===

Sin’s eyes snapped open and once again, he was assaulted with bright lights and stark white walls. He lay completely still and tried to catch his breath as he panted harshly, as his heart pounded in his chest, as he tried to figure out if that had been a dream or a memory.

He didn’t really know which was which anymore.

Sin closed his eyes again and took several deep breaths as he tried to gather his wits, as he tried to get past the disorientating confusion that wracked his brain. He tried to figure out what was real, what was fantasy, what he’d made up in a haze of drug induced unconsciousness and what had actually started this chain of events.

As he tried to figure out what it all had to do with Boyd and more importantly, where he was.

Images flipped through his mind like a slideshow on fast forward and his eyebrows drew together as he tried to make sense of the confusing jumble of memories that overwhelmed his brain. Everything shone like glass fragments in the sunlight, reflecting blinding light at him, causing him to flinch away before they shattered and turned into something new. For a moment he couldn’t distinguish memories from his childhood with memories from his life as an Agent and he swallowed hard,
Adam’s
apple bobbing violently, as he tried to weed through them and make sense of it all.

After years of repression, of confusion, of remembering things that were more than a little fuzzy around the edges, suddenly his memories took on a vivid clarity that he wasn’t sure he preferred.

As everything whirred through his brain like a bizarre, avant-garde movie, he made conscious selections as to which memory he wanted to watch in which context and then suddenly… it all snapped into place.

Monterrey. The mission. Boyd. The girl. The Solar Convention Center. Janus.

Once again, slightly slanted green eyes opened but this time there was no confusion in them, no glassy uncertainty or dazed disorientation. He remembered everything.

His eyes snapped down to the restraints and this time he yanked his hands free effortlessly, the cuffs still dangling around his wrists oddly as he once again undid the head brace and the ankle restraints that trapped him against the stiff bed. He sat up slowly, less nauseated than he’d been the first time although there was still a dull ache in the back of his head, and rubbed at his wrists as he looked around the room.

 
It appeared to be the same room although they’d obviously gotten new restraints. The wires were once again attached to his chest with electrodes but he noted the fact that he was no longer hooked up to the IV. He ripped the electrodes off and tossed the wires to the side before swinging his legs over the side of the bed and focused on the door, on the faint conversation he could hear on the other side of it.

“—tests and send the results to Dr. Fredrick right away.”

“Will he… ...erative?”

“We’ll see.”

“—but there’s always sedation.”

Sin’s eyes narrowed slightly and he hopped off the bed, bare feet moving silently over the cold linoleum floor. He watched as the door handle turned and quickly moved to the right side of the door, pinning himself to the wall as the door swung open and partially concealed him from sight.

A woman in her early thirties entered the room with a clipboard in hand. She stopped just inside the doorway and stared at the bed in confusion before spinning around to survey the room. “What the he—“

Before she could finish the sentence, Sin grabbed her violently and pinned her back to his chest, dragging her backwards towards the mirror as she cried out in surprise. Her colleague rushed into the room, a young looking man also clad in a white lab coat, and stared at them in alarm. “Don’t hurt her!”

Sin wrapped one of his hands around her throat and narrowed his eyes at the other man. “Do anything stupid and I’ll crush her throat.”

“Frank, shoot him,” The woman snapped at the younger guy. Despite the tension in her shoulders and the obvious fear in her voice, she managed to speak and hold herself in a relatively calm manner.

“B-but…” Frank stammered and fumbled with the buttons of his lab coat, attempting to extract the gun that apparently lay hidden beneath.

Sin stared at the man incredulously, not knowing if he was amused or disgusted with his behavior. “I guarantee you that this will not end well if you pull a weapon on me,” He said in a low, warning voice. Frank froze and stared at him with a somewhat surprised expression on his face. “Just tell me what I want to know and I won’t hurt either of you.”

Frank stared at him doubtfully and the woman made a skeptical noise, but Frank nodded hesitantly. “Okay...”

Sin tightened his grip on the woman and she gasped. “Where the hell am I? Where’s Clemons?”

Frank blinked at him in relative confusion. “Where’s… what?”

“Hale Clemons,” Sin repeated, tone impatient as his fingers tightened around the woman’s throat enough to make her whimper softly. “Where the fuck is he, where the fuck am I and who is Dr. Frederick?”

There was another confused silence and this time it was the woman who spoke up in a hoarse, strained tone. “H-how do you know… Where did you hear Frederick’s name?”

“Through the door.”

Another pause and this time Frank and the woman appeared to exchange glances. “This room is sound proof.”

“Obviously it’s fucking not so stop fucking around and tell me what the fuck I want to know or I’ll rip your throat out,” he snarled, eyes narrowing dangerously.

“But I don’t know what you’re talking about! Who—Clemons? I don’t know and Dr. Frederick is
your
doctor, the doctor in charge of your case,” Frank blurted out in an almost whine.

“Oh for God’s sake, Frank. He doesn’t know where the hell he is," the woman said impatiently. "He
has
been in a coma, you know. You’re back, Agent Vega. Is it that hard to figure out?”

This time it was Sin’s turn to blink in confusion and he stared. “What?” His eyes once again flicked around the room in search of some sign that they were telling the truth, that he was no longer with Janus and finally his gaze fell on the right side of Frank’s lab coat. The maroon Johnson’s Pharmaceuticals logo was a stark contrast to the white cotton.

Green eyes rose and he stared at Frank blankly although he did not let the woman go. “Where’s Boyd?”

“Who?”

“Boyd Beaulieu, you fucking moron. Where is he?” Sin dragged the woman closer to the door, simultaneously shoving Frank out of the way, not really knowing what the hell he was planning to do because his mind was spinning.

He’d been in a coma. He was back at the Agency.

He thought he’d had everything figured out but once again there were huge black holes in his memory, once again he didn’t know what the fuck was going on and the pounding in his head was getting worse—the disorienting confusion was once again making him feel dizzy. The last thing he remembered was a malnourished looking man with square rimmed glasses slicing into his body as his blood slowly bled out onto the filthy floor. The last thing he remembered was the door closing slowly and Clemons staring at him with a look of pure hatred just before it slammed shut.

“My partner. Where is he?” he said from between grit teeth, trying to calm himself even though impatience was making his temper get hotter, slowly spinning out of control in the dark way that hadn’t been an issue for months… since before the mission.

“I haven’t seen him since you’ve been back!” The woman blurted out, real terror making it into her voice as Sin’s expression grew visibly darker, as his hands tightened around her throat in a way that meant impending death. “They said that he isn’t coming back!”

Something went still in Sin for a long moment as he tried to figure out what that meant. As all of the possible implications ran through his mind, his temper finally got the best of him. Without warning he spun the woman around and shoved her so hard that she literally went flying across the room, slamming into the wall and collapsing onto the floor in an unconscious heap.

He turned on Frank, who’d frozen in terror, and stalked towards him. Frank automatically backed away but Sin swung out, crushing his fist into the younger man’s face and causing him to also fall backwards and slide down the wall. Sin yanked his lab coat open, popping the buttons in the process, and grabbed the standard issue handgun that he wore. He tucked it into the waistband of the plain, white pants and grabbed Frank’s set of keys as an afterthought before he slipped out the door, shutting it quietly behind him.

He ignored the rising nausea, the way his head pounded and the soft humming that wouldn’t seem to leave his ears, forcing himself to sprint down the hallway and towards the staircase. He’d been to the medical unit often in his career as an Agent but this particular wing did not look familiar at all. It seemed particularly quiet and deserted but for the moment that worked in his favor.

He passed several doors on his way down the hall but no sounds came from any of them and the entire floor, with the exception of the two doctors he’d just assaulted, seemed deserted. He was almost to the exit when he encountered a glass door that appeared to lead to an office. He skidded to a stop and looked inside cautiously, noting that once again no one was inside although that seemed to be a recent development judging by the files scattered across the desk and the way the lamps still burned.

The keycard on Frank’s ring was the standard issue Agency card that unlocked any door that Frank had specific access to. When Sin swiped it in the office door and the little light turned green, he could only assume that this was the man’s office or at least an office he frequented. The office was fairly small and seemed slightly unorganized but Sin didn’t really have interest in snooping around at the moment. He looked around in search of a shirt or jacket of some kind, anything that would make him stick out less than running around bare chested would and spied a black hoody on the back of the desk chair. It seemed that shoes would have to wait.

He grabbed the sweater and started to make his exit when a file on the desk with his name on it caught his attention. He paused, not really knowing if he cared enough to look inside but not able to stop himself from flipping it open. His pounding head and blurry vision proved reading the tiny text to be extremely difficult but as he flipped through the pages he gathered that they had in fact performed extensive reconstructive surgery on his body, which explained his sudden mobility. There were other confusing things in the files about proteomes and somatic cells that he generally did not understand and the throbbing in his brain prevented him from even making an effort to do so.

Sin closed the file and exited the office before continuing his way down the hall. He bypassed the elevator bank and slipped into the staircase exit, which automatically locked from the inside once it closed. He found that bizarre; he’d never seen anything like it in the medical units since people often rushed in and out of there at all times of the day. However when he glanced out the window he saw that he wasn’t even in the main building; he appeared to be in one of the smaller, squat buildings that was unnamed and typically unused by the general populace of the compound.

Once again, he found this odd, but he supposed they’d wanted to keep him away from the general population in the other areas. It wasn’t too surprising when he put it into that context; they’d most likely been unsure of how he’d act upon emergence from the coma.

His bare feet padded against the concrete stairs and oddly enough, not once did any staff members appear. He got to the third floor when another violent wave of vertigo overtook him and he nearly fell face-forward down the flight of stairs. He caught the railing just in time and leaned against the wall, squeezing his eyes shut as he tried to ignore the way his head was spinning. The pounding in his head was the only thing holding him up although he’d expected to have more problems with his limbs. Despite the odd feeling of unfamiliarity, the feeling that he wasn’t used to his own body, there were no lingering effects from the abuse he’d taken and it caused him to stop, to wonder, to doubt his own memories. Had everything happened as he’d thought it had?

With trembling hands, Sin forced himself to stand and ignored the dark spots that danced before his vision. He needed to get out. He needed to find Boyd. He needed to get to someone who would know where Boyd was. That was all that mattered at the moment; he could puzzle over his strange condition after that. But first he had to figure out how to even get out of the fucking building without being dragged back to his room.