ms_legendary | [For Lilo] Broken Skins

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[For Lilo] Broken Skins

My name is Nikita. Seven years ago, I was taken off Death Row and trained to be an assassin by a covert unit of the U.S. government, called Division. They said they were giving me a new life, a second chance to serve the country I'd wronged, but they lied. When I finally got free, I started over for real, dedicating myself to bringing them down, one mission at a time. Alone. So they couldn't kill anyone else I loved. Then others came to my aid and we were a team. Now, I'm trapped on some tropical purgatory where even the shadows have shadows, and no one else seems to see them. They've already got Michael, and taken Wolf, now Annie and Finnick are gone too. Everyone says 'what is, is' and 'theres's no escape'. They said that about Division, too. And it only took one, me, to prove them wrong...

After what happened with Phedre, Nikita knows she should give up the wild hope that by searching Annie and Finnick's home, their belongings, she'll find some clue. Anything to follow up on, a lead, no matter how small. But if she gives up, then the knife strapped to her thigh is a lie. A child's fairy tale of a possible happy end. Hope may be the cruelest cut, but it's the pain that keeps her alive.

She doesn't feel very alive, crouched in a cabin empty of anything but memories. Her fingers touch the baseboards, drag along the wood, heedless of splinters. Even Cleaners miss spots sometimes, and if she finds blood...

If she finds blood, then what? She doesn't have a backpocket DNA analyst, DNA databases, samples to compare it to. They don't even have a fingerprint database, which is why it's safe to work ungloved, although Nikita's still careful to wipe down anything she touches, just in case part of 'they' has a lot more than she's been able to find. With that tunnel appearing to the Second Island, that seems more than possible.

But she's deluding herself, here; she knows it. There's nothing to find but leftover baby dreams, maybe some sewing needles, and--

Nikita stiffens at the light scrape and rattle of something moving across the wood floor. There's a breeze through the cracked open door, but she doesn't risk it, pulls her knife as she turns slowly, still crouched, and finds the drawing on treated palm bark she made of Alex's butterfly tattoo for Annie.

She shoves the knife back into its sheath and reaches for the soft curl of palm parchment. The sea-blue silk ribbon she'd tied it with is threaded through a small hole at the top, tied in a small loop they must have used to hang it from. Nikita never knew they had, and it's this that finally breaks grief free from madness, breaks sorrow free from her skin.

Alex is gone, too. Even if she never knew she was Alex or understood why the edge-burned paper scrap that came with this read My name is Nikita, she's gone, and Nikita, crouched there, doesn't know how, but she knows she has to go on.

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There's a ghost on the porch of the house where Finnick and Annie used to live. Lilo wonders if that happens every time someone goes away, if the ghost comes and haunts the huts to say goodbye.

Lilo hides in the bushes and watches the ghost, who looks like Lilo a little bit but who isn't from Hawaii. The ghost looks sad and Lilo is sad for her. Maybe no one told her that leaving the island means you're going back to your ohana. Or maybe Finnick and Annie were her ohana and now she's all alone. Maybe Lilo will tell Kate again about the ghost and the ghost can come stay with them, instead of haunting empty places by herself. It must be lonely to be a ghost. It's like being lost.

Nikita hears the first rustle, and then the second. The bushes go quiet after that, but she's being watched. There's a part of her that wants to pluck her little tail out of the bushes, shake her up a little and scare her off. She's much safer without Nikita in her life.

But she can't. It's not in her, and there's some thread that binds them, her and the little girl crouched watching with her pudgy cheeks and big eyes and her hard questions. "It's all right, Lilo," she calls, warm instead of wary, to torn up inside for sharp words to cut herself on. "You can come out now."

Lilo shrinks back into the bushes first, like if she hides more, then the ghost won't know she's there. But of course ghosts can see people even when they're hiding, so Lilo creeps forward out from the concealing leaves with her hands clasped behind her.

"Hello," she says quietly, so she doesn't scare the ghost who looks so very sad now. Her little slippers make little thwap-thwap sounds against her heels as she walks up to the porch.

The thwap-thwap of her shoes makes Nikita smile, a soft, terribly sad smile. Annie-Alex, who might not have been Alex at all, is pregnant. Was pregnant? Somewhere, someday, Nikita hopes she'll have the child whose feet were supposed to make those thwapping sounds on this porch. Nikita won't stop looking for her, but Phedre and Jason and Cassandra have told her that people who leave are just gone.

Nikita assumes they're dead, or Division-dead, like Robbie and Fletch. Maybe, when she gets out of here, she'll be able to find them. Or maybe Annie and Finnick are safer without her to complicate their lives. Maybe, like Sarah, they got away and are gone, not dead.

But Lilo is here now, and she's watching Nikita with those big curious eyes, and trying very hard not to scare Nikita. That's obvious. "Aloha, Lilo. Did you know Finnick and Annie, too?"

Lilo nods and stops a couple feet away. "A little bit. Finnick and Kate are friends. He was always nice to me. They're gone now. Back to their ohana." It wasn't like dying, Kate said. Not like going away and not ever being anywhere again. Lilo knows how bad it is when people die.

When she stops, Nikita starts to pat her hand on the porch next to her, to invite Lilo to join her. She starts to tell her she won't hurt her and it's okay, but she stops herself, because she hurts everyone she touches and it's better for Lilo to stay away.

Her hands close together around the bark-parchment between them, rolling it back up instead of crumpling it. She can't throw it away. It was for Alex, even if Nikita gave it to Annie.

"Annie was...important to me." Even if she didn't know it or ever really understand why. "Finnick was important to her, so that made him important to me, too." Like Boy Scout. Not for the first time, Nikita wonders what Alex and Sean and Birkhoff are doing, if she's gone and Michael's dead, but she shunts the thought aside. It's crazy to believe in this place, especially when she keeps seeing Division guards, hearing them, and whatever coma she's in or drugs Amanda has her on are starting to fray around the edges. She just has to hang on a little longer and she'll start to come out of it.

Maybe. Or maybe they've beaten her, but she won't believe that. She can't. Which is why she has to treat this as real, even if she doesn't believe in it. Which is why she has to stop wandering away in her mind like this, making a little girl wait whole minutes for words because she's gathering the lost and broken ones together.

"Did you come to remember them?" she asks, finally, voice too soft, faraway and distant.

Lilo waits patiently for the ghost to finish what she was saying and then climbs up to sit next to the ghost, folding her hands into her lap. It doesn't scare her, to talk to a ghost. Ghosts can't really hurt anyone.

She shakes her head in answer to the question. "I remember everyone who goes away." Lilo can remember from anywhere. She remembers Nani and Stitch. And Cobra Bubbles and Finnick and Annie. And Imriel. And she remembers her mom and her dad. All of them are gone away now. Lilo remembers. "It's okay to be sad and miss them. Even though they're back with their ohana."

"I remember everyone, too," Nikita offers back with a small, sad smile before she glances down to watch her thumb run over the curl of bark. She remembers every person she's ever killed, something personal about them, even if they were only a Division guard in black, she finds something unique about them to remember. She remembers everyone she fails to save, every black mark on the report card of her life. It's pointless, because there will never be an end to it, but it's what she can do, and so she does.

"Did Kate tell you it was all right to be sad and miss them?" Nikita remembers Kate, too. The dark-eyed, warm skinned woman who'd looked like she'd gut Nikita if she hurt the girl. That had made her happy, for a few minutes, that Lilo had someone so protective looking after her. Someone who looked like she'd be hell in fight. "That's pretty smart."

Lilo nods, pauses, then shakes her head. Her voice is small and quiet but not scared or shy. "Kate did. But Nani told me before that. After my parents were gone. And the first time that's what Dad taught us. Nobody gets left behind or forgotten. That's ohana. So if they're gone, you have to remember." She sighs, her small shoulders lifting and falling again. "Dad is very smart. He knew everything."

Each word out of Lilo's mouth in that small, quiet voice stabs deeper and deeper into Nikita's already bleeding heart. The sigh twists the knife. A child her age shouldn't make a sound like that, so heavy and wise at once. Nikita lifts a hand to rub the little girl's shoulders, more comfort for her, probably, than Lilo, but she can't help herself.

It strikes her in that moment that Lilo's a lot like talking to Birkhoff. Wiser than you expect her to be. Out of the mouths of babes. "My friend Birkhoff would probably tell us the same thing. He's pretty smart, but don't tell him I said that if you ever meet him. He thinks he's smart enough without us telling him." Nikita manages a little smile that doesn't feel completely false.

Lilo nods solemnly. She knows exactly what that's like. Her teachers say she's precocious and what they mean is that she's weird and too smart for her own good.

The hand on her shoulder feels good, so Lilo leans into the ghost's side. Snuggling up with Nani or Kate makes Lilo feel better when she's sad so maybe it will make the ghost feel better too.

"Birkhoff is a funny name."

"It is," Nikita agrees and cranes her head down so she can look Lilo in the eyes. "His first name's even funnier. Seymour. But we don't call him that. We just call him Birkhoff." Or Nerd. But if she says that out loud right now, she's probably going to cry.

"He's a pretty funny guy. You'd like him. He'd probably say he doesn't work with kids and animals." This is all right, talking about him like this. Nothing she's saying to Lilo, whether she's hallucination or spirit guide or real can hurt Birkhoff, and it feels good to remember him with someone. "But he'd like you, too."

"What does he call you?" Lilo asks, thinking it was funny that the ghost didn't call people by their right names. Seymour doesn't sound all that funny to Lilo, at least not anymore than all the silly names that tourists had when they came to the island. But if the ghost thinks it's silly, maybe she has a normal name too, like Lilo.

Niki. A slow shudder works up Nikita's spine as she looks into those soft, wide brown eyes. He calls me 'Niki'.

Oh god, she misses him. She misses him and Michael and Alex, her Alex, so much she can't breathe again.

Tears start to swim in her eyes and she tosses her head back, shaking her hair out and the tears along with them. She hates it when he calls her that, but she doesn't want anyone else using it, and, at the same time, Nikita can't bring herself to answer 'Nina'. Instead, she tells the little girl, "My name is Nikita."

"Nikita's a pretty name." Lilo's glad that the ghost has a pretty name. That makes sense. She looks down to the paper in Nikita's hand, turning her head to try to see what's on it. Lilo saves things to help her remember. Maybe Nikita is the same way.

"Thank you. It means victorious," Nikita replies but she feels anything but unconquered today. She feels more like Perseus chained to the rock than one of his patron goddesses, and recalling the reason she knows the myth - Amanda - helps nothing. To distract herself, she opens the partly rolled bark parchment and shows the butterfly drawing to Lilo.

Her eyes blur again as she looks at it, giving her doubled vision - of every line of it, perfect and pristine on golden-pale skin and covered by a spill of hair that's almost incongruously soft and of the parchment, blank and the lines appearing one by one in soft smudged charcoal between Nikita's fingers.

"What do you think?"

Lilo looks over the drawing carefully, her round face screwed up in thought. Finally she nods. "Yes, I like it. It's good. When butterflies flap their wings, they cause hurricanes. Was it your friend's?"

Watching Lilo study the drawing with all the unselfconscious seriousness of an art critic steadies Nikita, pulling her mouth into a smile that's more appropriate for talking to a child than the grief she's been fighting. "Yes," she tells the little girl, resisting the urge to brush her bangs from her eyes when she explains the butterfly effect like magic; in a place like the island, whether it's real or imaginary, it might work exactly like that. "It was Annie's. I drew it for her. She..." was. "Reminded me of another friend from home who had a tattoo like that, right--" She lifts her own hair and run her fingers across the back of her neck. "Here."

Edited 2012-10-04 20:02 (UTC)

Lilo shifts to look at Nikita's neck but there's no tattoo there to match the one on the bark. "What does it mean?" That's something Lilo knows. Tattoos have meanings. "My social worker's knuckles said Cobra."

"Cobras are good fighters." It's an interesting choice for a social worker, but the knuckles make sense. "A fist looks like a snakehead when it punches," she says and shows Lilo with a little jab. "Like a cobra."

That's all a lead up for explaining Alex's butterfly. "Butterflies," she says quietly, fingertip tracing the edge of a wing. "Butterflies look fragile, but they're strong enough to get out of their cocoons. They're special, because they start life as a caterpillar and then become something else. Alex would tell you, 'Butterflies are God's proof that we can have a second life,'" but Nikita's already had her two.

Lilo reaches out and traces her small pudgy finger after Nikita's along the wing and wonders why butterflies get another life when people don't. It's not fair and Lilo abruptly snatches her hand back. "It's not really a second life," Lilo argues. "They're still the same inside."

"Not exactly the same." But Nikita knows how Lilo feels. No matter how much she's changed since Carla, since Division, she's still the same girl deep down. There's still evil inside her and those butterfly wings are a lie, aren't they? Her phoenix comes from the ashes of itself, just like the butterfly comes from the caterpillar...that, she knows, is what Michael would tell her, and what she'd tell Alex. "But you're right. It's not really a new life. It's the same life, started again, differently with a chance to be something beautiful. So butterflies also mean hope."

Nikita's a ghost, but Lilo's just a little girl, even if Nikita's made her up from a movie poster she saw once a long time ago. There's no chance for Nikita, but there is for Lilo. She holds out the drawing again to the little girl. "Would you keep it for me? I think...you'll do a better job of holding on to hope than I will."

Lilo accepts the memory-butterfly with great care. Ghosts don't have homes to hang up their memories. Only living girls have that.

Lilo holds the drawing out of the way and stands to hug Nikita around the neck with her other arm. "I'll take care of it. I promise. I always take good care of things and I'll remember the butterfly for you."

"I'd like it if you'd do that." Nikita's voice is soft, choked by the memory of Max, who called her the gun lady and hugged her goodbye. She wraps her arms around Lilo and squeezes her as tightly as her little frame can take. "Her name is Alexandra. My butterfly."

Her butterfly.

I miss you, Alex.

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[For Lilo] Broken Skins

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