Shake Hands With The Devil: The Way Home

[x-penance.livejournal.com]

On the flight back to New York, Angel and Yvette reflect.



The plane ride home was an unusually quiet affair. Tired emotionally and physically, the tone was rather somber. Angel had managed to snag a back corner seat by herself and had spent the time just curled up against the wall, watching the clouds go by out of the window. Now that they were out of the situation, it was getting harder to keep everything at a distance. When it was happening, she focused on the then.

Now she had time to go over everything. Again and again.

Yvette, too, was quiet, but given that was her default state, it didn't seem so much out of place as it did with Angel. Returning from a trip to the bathroom, she caught sight of her new roommate sitting alone, and moved silently to sit in the seat next to her, the spikes of her hair gouging into the back of the seat. Strangely, though, she paid no mind, instead focussing those glowing blue eyes on Angel.

"Are you being okay?" she asked softly.

She thought about lying but she didn't have it in her at the moment. "No," Angel responded softly, "not really. I just – can't help but remember how useless I felt we all were back there. We were sent to help people, you know, but were we really able to in the end?"

Yvette wouldn't have believed the lie any way, but she believed in giving people choices - if Angel had said 'yes', she wouldn't have pushed. But at Angel's response, she nodded, eyes dimming. "Sometimes, this is how the world is being. At least until it is being changed some other way. The politics... they do not care about the small people." She carefully lay a gloved hand on Angel's sleeve. "We were helping, a little. Not everyone was taken, because of the camp."

Angel shuddered slightly at the contact and she felt her eyes get a bit damp. "Paul told me I was a hero," she whispered, her voice so quiet that it was almost hard to hear her. Such a vast difference from the girl who had once been threatened with the threat of having the words "Inside Voice" tattooed on her forehead. "But I didn't feel like one back there. I felt I was just a kid who should have been at home - that man that came to the camp, those that followed..."

She turned and stared at her friend, eyes filling with tears. "Those outside the camp? The ones we couldn't take? How do you say 'I'm sorry' to ghosts?"

"By not letting them dying be the waste." Yvette hesitantly stroked Angel's shoulder, the gesture a little awkward from lack of practice. "By keeping on the fight, until the people everywhere are safe." She thought of her uncle, her grandfather, men she'd never met, and her own voice caught. "By living on."

Hiccuping slightly, Angel scrubbed at her eyes but the stresses of the last few days had obviously caught up to her. "How do we fight against something like that?" she asked, sounding lost and miserable. "There was no stopping that..."

"There are many ways to be making the fight. We are knowing what happened, and we must be making sure others know. The more people who are knowing, the less places there are for such people to be hiding. The politics are slow, but sometimes they can be working - if the world is knowing what happened, there must be something to be done, yes?" The last was said with almost childlike hope.

"I don't know," came the reply as Angel hunched further down in her seat, folding herself almost in half until her head was lower than her knees. "I hope so, you know? Because that's not right, none of it's right. I don't know. I don't know what I can do and that hurts because back there, all I wanted to do was run away." It had been a startling realization that the world was much, much bigger than she was and she wasn't as invulnerable as she might have once thought.

"Some hero."