Chapter Text
Carmen didnʼt wait.
She didnʼt wait for Zach to turn off the ignition before sending her seat belt zipping back into its socket and bolting out of the vehicle. She didnʼt wait for the words forming on Ivy's lips, the anxious look in Shadowsan's eyes, or the quick pace of following footsteps rapping against her eardrums that would come (crud, she hated this) and fasten a leash around her heart, staying her. Someone called her name, the voice a hand reaching out lifeline to her, and for the first time in her life she didnʼt wait for Player.
And when a wave of dizziness slammed into her, causing the world to waver unsteadily before her eyes, she didn’t wait for it to clear, continuing around a stumble as she took the steps two at a time from the garage to the main living area of the warehouse, then faster to the second story and the refuge of her room (or...it used to be).
She didnʼt wait, didn't slow, didn’t stop until the door had been slammed shut and the lock thrown (then, after something like good judgment whispering in her ear, un-thrown because she could not deal with that lecture today). Leaning her forehead to rest against the door, she let her posture flag in a way it never used to and released a long shuddering breath. Someone would be up soon, she knew, knocking on her door, listening at the crack, robbing her once again of that elusive, glorious thing known as privacy. And while she knew they were just looking out for her (and was beyond grateful they still were after...everything), right now...
Right now she really, really needed a minute alone.
For a long moment Carmen stood motionless, slumped against the staunch wood of the door, keenly aware of the throbbing in her head (why couldn’t it just stop for one minute?!?). The velvet silence of the space wrapped around her, warm and sympathetic and comfortaly rumpled by twin ticking from the pair of clocks on the wall and the muted noise of the street beyond. It flowed over her, steadying her racing pulse, an aural balm that existed in stark contrast to the chaos of thoughts that had been clanging a riot in her head ever since that horrible, horrible moment in ACME’s medical offices.
This canʼt be happening...
Stiffly, Carmen straightened. With absent steps she trudged across the carpet, feet skirting Ivy's air mattress spread on the floor next to her own futon and tatami mat, both still smelling faintly of newness, to the picture window filling the far wall, staring out at the city beyond vacantly. It was as it always was, bustling with cars and gulls and people walking briskly down the sidewalks, leaning against a wall as they scrolled through their phones, chatting casually in doorways as the light started to wane, and just...living life.
She missed that.
A passenger jet scraping a scar colored with the setting sun across the sky caught her eye as it flew southward, and her gaze latched onto it. Akin to the searching hand that disturbs the silt from the bottom of a murky pond, the sight stirred memories back to life, clouding her view of the present so for a glorious moment she was transported back to another life, one that was starting to feel more and more like a dimly remembered tale than something real.
Her, with Player in her ear and Team by her side, watching the clouds below as she waited to touch down wherever the Mission had called. Then the bustle and rush and low-level chaos of baggage claim and navigating terminals and piling into an unfamiliar rental car, all to the tune of chatter that fluttered with anticipation and excitement, Ivy’s jabs about the ‘mystery smells’ that tended to accompany such vehicles and Shadowsan’s grumbling as Zach started rattling off a list of must-eats. Then that moment, that singular exhilarating, intoxicating moment- when night would fall and sheʼd don her coat and hat and become the bar by which all others of her trade were measured.
In those moments she was untouchable; truly on top of the world. She became another version of herself, one for whom failure was an impossibility, words of doubt and hesitation hailed from a language her tongue refused to learn, and rules and limitations could not find her. They were hers, those moments; they made her who she was, and now-
Now sheʼd never know anything like them again...
On an impulse she didnʼt quite own she turned from the window, and now she was at the coatrack, standing like a shrine in a corner. There hung her coat, scarlet fabric still burning bright even under the thin coating of dust which had been allowed to fall (a corner of her recoiled at the sacrilege, but she couldn't muster the will to brush it away), and atop it, sitting at a roguish angle, a smirk eternally wound along its brim that tipped under the memory of a cocksure hand (an ache pulsed through her; that hand had been hers), her hat.
With dreamlike movements she reached out and brushed leaden fingers over the felted brim, rubbed the fabric between her fingers. More memories stirred to life, blotting out the texture, the room, and for a glorious, gilded moment the pulsing in her temple and the ache in her heart. Ones of rooftops under night skies where the stars were drowned in city lights; crypts and catacombs where treasures lay in wait for her reverent hands, arid deserts and humid jungles and the scent of salt spray as she leaned back on the rail of a boat off the coast of- Rio? Venice? Ecuador? For once the 'where' wasn't important- and basked in a job well done.
But it ended far too soon; the throbbing in her skull found her and brought her back to her her room and life as it was now and the new, crushing reality that flooded it.
She swallowed hard.
This can’t be happening...
********************************
“Wait.” Carmen sat straighter in her chair as the doctor turned to her computer screen, fingers tapping at the keys slowly (well, maybe not, but slower than Player and so hence slow). “You- you don’t mean...”
“I do, Miss Sandiego.” She didnʼt look away from her monitor, voice as clipped and professional as an impartial television judge reciting the facts of the unfortunate partyʼs sentence.
A crack spiderwebbed across her soul, but she refused to acknowledge it. “There has to be something else.”
The doctor paused to turn and peer over the rim of her glasses at Carmen. “There is surgery-“
Carmen set her jaw. “No surgery.” Unflinching iron was pliable by comparison.
Back to the computer, apathy personified. “Then there isnʼt. Weʼll continue to monitor how youʼre doing with this drug, but we're going to have to shift the conversation...”
The rest of the visit rushed by Carmen like an ocean current around a once-immovable piling one breaker away from splintering beyond repair. Dimly she heard, as though from another room (another life) her Team's voices, angry and disbelieving and desperate in the face of the perfunctory, emotionless replies, but the words failed to reach her, drowned in the echo of the doctor's words, pounding anew against her consciousnes with each mounting heartbeat.
"We're going to shift the conversation.
There isn't anything more we can do.
There isn't.
There isn't."
And if there wasn't anything more they could do, then… that meant…
A breaker crashed, and she splintered.
The room vanished, swept away in the riptide of emotions eddying and whirling through her fractured mind. Shock and dismay and anger and grief, a gutting and bottomless grief too painful to be real (this couldn't be real!) swirled together into an indistinguishable murky bracken that drowned the world. Screams, of rebellion, of refusal, of rage (no! No, she didn't want this to be her life! She wouldn't let it!!!), clawed at her chest, tangling with sobs begging to be loosed to try and change her fate (please! Please, don't let this be her life!), but they stayed caged in her throat, threatening to choke her.
They were choking her.
"There's nothing we can do."
Her name (or something like her name) brushed against her ear, cautious, concerned, lifted with a timid, fearful, lilting note. She barely even noticed. She was too numb with- she didn't have a word for it. Not pain, not anguish, not even the ire she was distantly aware of rolling off her Team, just the soul-deep hurt of watching her life slipping through her fingers like so many grains of sand, unable to do anything about it.
Powerless.
Helpless.
Hopeless.
Through the turbidity, she felt Shadowsan's hand on her elbow, and then feet that didn't feel like her own were shufling across the threadbare carpet, timorously squeaking on the linoleum, scuffling through more voices (Jules? Chase? She didn't care), all the while with eyes on shoes and thoughts on the doctor's haunting words and what they meant.
"There's nothing more we can do."
She- she was- she'd never-
"Red?"
She blinked. Player was seated next to her in the car (when did she get in the car?), eyes anxious behind overgrown bangs.He tried to smile, a wobbly, paper-thin effort, the hand squeezing her own ever so slightly quivering. "Hey. It's gonna be okay. We're gonna help you through this. It's going to be okay." It was clear the reassurance was as much for himself as her.
The others nodded, valiant, drooping smiles and eyes shining with barely-witheld tears that would fall the second she wasn't there to see.
" 'Kay?" Player asked, gripping her tight, knuckles white, as though he expected her to throw herself out the car and onto the California freeway any second (because he doesn't trust you to keep your promise, the sneering voice of her VILE self whispered; she splintered further).
She didn't answer, merely turned away from Player and let her pounding head rest agains the window, a vague ache, too big see or understand all at once, swelling in her chest as she watched the scenery blur past.
********************************
With hands that remembered what it was to hold the holy and priceless treasures of the world Carmen lifted her hat from the rack, the weight of it- slight but ponderous all the same- still known to her sinews. It was her, the hat, down to the stitch; the texture of adventure and daring, of unmatched skill and unshakeable conviction; of midnight capers and midday sightseeing; of intoxicating adrenaline racing through her veins, and the heady thrill of success that so often replaced it once it faded.
Of freedom. Everything sheʼd had. Everything sheʼd been.
And...everything she’d lost.
The ache swelled, and a pang bled from it, sharp and piercing enough to blur the hat before her eyes.
"There's nothing more we can do…"
The twin clocks on the wall ticked fretfully at the future they pulled closer with each advancing second, her grip tightening on the brim.
She didnʼt want this! She wanted more out of life than pills and medical offices and warnings to ‘be careful’ and having moments of her day ripped from her grasp and her family always being so worried about her, so much more!
To sojourn and wander and see the sun rise over a different horizon every morning and feel the ecstatic rush of stepping off a plane and setting foot in a place she'd never been before but couldn't wait to know and make a part of her.
She wanted to feel free again, strong, like someone for whom ‘can’t’ wasn’t a word.
She wanted to wear the hat again.
Turning on her heel, she walked, steps quick and anxious, to her closet and headed straight to her vanity, not disturbing the heavy layer of dust that had settled over the bottles of perfume and tubes of lipstick standing in stasis there. Her reflection stared back at her from the mirror, dim in the rapidly advancing night, but still clear enough to make out her visage. Lifting her hat, she held it supended above her hair, hands poised to set it atop her head, an action done so many times done without a thought.
It stayed there.
Her hands wouldnʼt obey. They couldnʼt.
Because the hat did not belong atop a face with pale cheeks, drooping lips, and despondent, defeated eyes, gray and lifeless as the ashes of a long extinguished blaze (to think she used to like her reflection...). The fineness and brilliant self assured color of the fedora held tantalizingly above her head, the bright self-assured felt stiffened by some sort of cunning haberdashery into a prouder, more dauntless version of its limp dollar-store cousin, everything that made the hat a thing of beauty and pride, was transformed into a callous mockery of what was shaded beneath the brim.
Because the hat was not for this downtrodden, dispirited version of herself; it was for another. One who still could...who didnʼt have...who wasnʼt...
She let her arms fall, the hat now dangling from a hand, brim nearly brushing the floor. Leaning forward she rested her forehead against the cool glass of the mirror, breath fogging her dismal reflection as the perfume bottles clinked confusedly in their slumber. The ache in her temple pushed harder, aggravating the crack in her soul sheʼd been trying to ignore-
-her fingers were empty; the hat was on the floor, senselessly dropped. She blinked, not understanding, then groaned when realization clicked, the bottles now clinking apprehensively as she thunked her stupid damn uncooperative head against the glass.
Another one.
"There's nothing more we can do.
You're just going to have to learn to live with seizures."
For the rest of her life.
Something hot trailed down her face and dripped off her nose, leaving a spot of shameful wetness marring the prized felted crown. Another followed, then another.
She didnʼt have it in her to care.