Ch.15 Mud and Water

Her mission had at least been simple, even if it was a tedious one. No one had even known that Quinn had a brother. No one had cared. It was Quinn who was special. It was she who was wanted and needed. The Mistress hand picked her. Who was this twin brother?

The Mistress gave Adadora this important mission. Find the twin brother. Deliver Quinn's message to him. And bring the twin brother to her. He would take Quinn's place. Maybe he was as special as Quinn.

But now, all that had changed once again. Once again, things had gone very wrong. He was here. He had returned and there wasn't anything she could do about it. With her watch still ticking backwards, she knew that time was running out.

Her eyes quickly scanned the room. Travis would be useless. He seemed to be overcome with shock as he leaned heavily against the window. Adadora would be alone in her fight.

"Addy" Wedge seemed pleased, "you always show up just when the circumstances get hot."

Leaning against the wall and crossing her arms, Adadora retorted coolly, "Things are definitely getting hot. What are you doing here?"

Wedge snorted. "Why do you think I'm here? Did you think that I would return to make peace with my past? Maybe you wanted me to return to the last place we met and you would be standing there waiting for me and I would admit to my mistakes and beg for mercy and you know how the story ends. Addy, you are so predictable."

It was Adadora's turn to scoff. "My name is Adadora. Did you really think I was pining away for you?"

Wedge seemed to take just a moment to consider this. Than he shrugged and lowered his gun.

"You spent a whole year hunting this man down. He was nearly invisible. It's as if he never existed. What does The Mistress want with him anyway? He can't be of any use to her. He doesn't know the difference between mud and water."

"Wouldn't you like to know."

"As a matter of fact I would."

"Too bad. Too bad. You will never know how special Travis really is."

"Oh, he's special all right. Didn't The Mistress at one time think I was special? I would hate to think that her standards have fallen so low."

"Yeah. Well, you got overconfident and..." Adadora left her sentence unfinished.

For it was at this moment that they both realized a stiff cold, night breeze had chilled the air and Travis was nowhere to be seen...

Is it a song? Or is it a poem? Or is it a bleeding heart?

Don't forget to take a moment

To shed a few tears.

We all need some time

To release our fears.

Never forget our humanity.

Never become so strong,

that we lose integrity.

This is way we are different.

This is what makes us unique.

Why do people think that it's a weakness?

Why can't they see the truth in life?

We all have emotional needs

What's wrong with showing

The things that we feel?

What makes us a man or not?

Is it the tears that fall?

Or the lack there of?

Sometimes our pain is so hard to bear

That we all need a moment

For our head to clear.

Even if your tears still fall,

It'll be alright

You'll have me to call.

Author's Note: This is for anyone who's ever lost someone. This is for those who realize it's good to cry and for those who need to learn how.

Ch.14 The Secret of Illumination

Her eyes seemed to casually scan the hallways, but in reality she was intent on finding him. She had to find him. She knew he was here, for hadn't she seen him? It had just been out of the corner of her eye. It had just been a fleeting glance, a reflection even, but he had been there. She had seen him.

Her mind wondered for a moment why he would even be here. Had he been searching for her? Was he even here for her or was he after something else? But in reality, it didn't matter why he was here.

She picked up her pace. He obviously wasn't in the hallways. She knew where he would be. She broke into a run. The people she passed jumped aside, some diving into open rooms and others flattened themselves against the wall allowing her plenty of room.

It was a heavy wooden door in the basement, where nobody would ever think to look. She stopped and stood before the door. It had been almost three years since she had been here. And she shivered as she thought of the last time. She had been here with him. They had stood before this door together and waited anxiously for The Mistress to permit their entry. But she now stood alone before this door. And The Mistress was no longer here.

A lot of things had changed. And everything started with that night that Wedge and Adadora stood here.

She pushed the door open and slowly walked down the stairs into the room below. It was a large room with a high ceiling. The mural that had been painted on every wall was now faded, dusty and indistinguishable. She pulled out her light and shined it about the room.

But there was nothing and there was no one to be seen. It was in this moment that she realized he hadn't wanted to find her. She raced back upstairs. She ran down the hallway and up the stairs and down the hallway and to the door at the end. She burst through that door.

"Wedge!"

Light from the hallway flooded into the room and illuminated two figures. One faced the window in shock and disbelief and the other held the gun...

Rain, rain go away

I don't mind the rain, really. I like to sit in my room with a nice cup of hot choco and watch the rain slide down my window. But why do that? What is the point of watching the rain? When you have something that you really really want to do, it has a tendency to get in the way.

Take, for example, today. I had plans for today. Nothing big. I was going to go out in service and I was going to work around 5ish. When I woke up this morning, it was raining. Oh well, I've gone out in service in the rain before. But this isn't just rain. It's torrential downpour. It's raining so hard that I can't even go to the mailbox without getting so wet that I need to hang my clothes up to dry. Does that seem fair to you?

So, what do I do instead? I sit at home and 'get things done'. This is also known as 'get as little done as possible in the longest amount of time as possible'. Thus, I'm here, at my computer blogging about how I had planned to go out in service and how i'm now stuck 'getting things done'. Do you get the picture?

Well, it's still raining. Sigh.

Ch.13 The Face at the Window

Wilton Read's Institution for the Criminally Insane was not exactly what Travis had expected. Of course as he walked into the seemingly abandoned building he didn't know what to expect; a skeletal figure of a dead nurse sitting behind a steel desk with cobwebs covering her bones and spiders residing in her ribs...maybe. But, whatever it was that he did expect, this institution did not fill it.

To his surprise, he was rather impressed by the cleanliness. Not a cobweb could be seen, not a single spider scurried across the floor and if there was a skeletal figure to be found, Travis could not see it.

What he did see went against all his logical reasoning. The building was not abandoned as he had previously thought. There were only a handful of people around him and passing him in the halls but there were people and Travis had to stop himself from staring as he passed them in the well lit corridors.

"Stop staring." Adadora grabbed his t-shirt and pulled him along. "We have a place at the end of the hall and if you would stop gaping at everybody we see, we might get there before the sun rises."

Travis did stop staring but he couldn't help but notice that everyone in the hallway stepped aside allowing them to pass. It was if Adadora was someone of utmost importance here and everyone else knew who she was. A few of them even saluted her.

They continued down the hall taking a left here and another left here and going up two flights of stairs and a left then a right and another right and before Travis knew it, he had no idea where he was or how to get back to the front door. He was completely and hopelessly lost.

"Are you lost yet?" Adadora stopped at a door at the end of the hall and turned around.

He did not want her to know, to see how helpless he really was. "No. I have a great sense of direction."

Adadora laughed. She wasn't fooled. "I think you are the worst liar I have ever met. To begin, you were literally grinding your teeth. And you twitched. Just faintly but I did not miss it." She unlocked the door and held it wide open. "I am going to leave you here for a moment. I have...some business to attend to. Never fear, I won't be long."

Once she closed the door, Travis found himself engulfed in darkness. There was little light to see by and Travis groped in the dark along the wall for a light switch or a lamp or something. But his search proved worthless. There wasn't enough light shining through the open window to be very helpful, but what little light there was revealed a face, a persons standing behind him. And Travis froze. It wasn't Adadora's face. It was a man's face.

"So...do you trust her? No, don't turn around. It'll be easier if you don't see me."

Travis remained where he was. He couldn't see specific features of the man's face but he had heard that voice before.

"What do you want with me?"

"I don't want you exactly. But you and I, we have a mutual friend. And she is keenly interested in you. And I do want to know why."

That was a question Travis had been asking all day. "If I knew, I wouldn't be here. And I don't think I'd want to tell you."

"Ok. That's all I wanted to know. Now the question still stands. Do you trust her? And the answer I want to hear is...no. Will you give me the correct answer?"

Travis clenched his fists. Trust wasn't something everyone threw around the table the way they threw around money. And he didn't trust anyone.

"I don't have any reason to trust you."

The face at the window shrugged. "Oh, well. At least I tried. That makes my job a little easier. You can call me Wedge."

Author's Note: For reference to Wedge read the chapter entitled "Wedged into Darkness"