Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

Prime: Chapter one

I had fallen asleep after fighting with my mother. It was a normal fight over very normal things, my going back to college, my job, my boyfriend and girlfriend, my coming in after curfew. I fell asleep, still slightly sniffle-y and upset, curled around Adian, ******** buddy and general good friend to damsels in distress, or at the very least, me. My doorbell rang, clanging in my head like cathedral bells warding off demons. Ugh. I rolled over, trying to get Adian to answer it for me. That’ll show them for waking me after a fight and on my day off! Not finding him in the bed, I tried to ignore it, then the very insistent knocking started, and then the gong again. And again. And again. Oh gods, what had I done to deserve this? I roused myself, wondering if Adian had left his key again or if one of my many packages had finally arrived. I felt slightly better about either of these prospects as I threw on a plush robe to answer. I sniffled again.

“Who is it?” I inquired, trying to check through my painted over eye-hole. That worked as well as expected.

“Package,” came an oddly familiar voice. I couldn’t place it, slowly cracking the door.

Sighting my new found prey, I snarled, “Jeremies.” I grinned with unsuppressed glee, as I slapped my side for a no-longer-there weapon. “Dammit, this better be good. I’m going to go for my gun, and when I get back you have thirty seconds to explain why you’re here, you ******** life-ruining a*****e.”

The good doctor cowered for me. Good. That made the pounding a little more bearable, not that he would know. Hopefully. I was pissed, livid in fact. How had he found me? Why had he found me? As I grabbed a pair of jeans, digging in the pillows, blankets, and general mess on my bed, I heard the door, then nothing. Dammit. Was he in or out, here or already gone? I threw on the jeans, not bothering to be bothered to put a shirt on for Dr. James J. Jeremies. He had seen me in less than a bathrobe and jeans, not that I’d admit that to just anyone. I didn’t bother with the gun I was searching for. I wouldn’t get sent to prison for him, not like I’d ever see the inside of jail anyways. I was still too valuable.

Rushing toward the door, I realized I was too late. Dammit, dammit, dammit. A couple of unopened packages lay to the inside of the door now. As considerate as ever, the doctor had disappeared, just like I had tried to. Obviously I had failed. More than ever. Why couldn’t I just be the normal I wanted so badly?

I thought back on the encounter, realizing how little Jeremies had changed. Still barely taller than me, a middle aged research looking man wearing glasses and a lab coat, he had showed up once again and I knew my life would take a turn for the worse. I could feel my life, my hard earned sense of normality slipping away. Using the wall as a support, I slid to the floor, my eyes blurring as I picked up the packages. One of them, new clothes that had finally arrived, now meant nothing. It was shirts and skirts, pants, corsets, clothing I would under normal circumstances be ecstatic over. My magazines were also in the pile, but I now saw them as a clue, a way to track me. My loves were being turned against me, used. I started to tear up, still flipping through the things that were piled there. My brushes had come in. Dammit. Another thing to track me, another well known love used against me. An unmarked package lay among the threads that bound me to a stationary life, a normal life I was still trying to build, and like the Tower of Babel, too tall and starting to crumble.

How could I be such a fool? I had believed him when he told me. “Project discontinued.” “Be yourself.” “Go live your life.” I believe I was free. Ha ha, joke was on me. a*****e. I did what I normally did when confronted with stress, I ate, then I cried. And then, once I had pulled myself together, back into a thing resembling a somewhat normal (ok, not so normal) person, I planned and executed.

First, I ate. Ok, I ate and cleaned, resorting to years of ingrained Southern training. Ice cream was my drug of choice, followed by deep cleaning the bathrooms. Ew. I do not ever want to know how mold gets where it does… But bleach combats the mold and keeps me numb enough to get this to the very farthest edge of my mind. How could I have believed him? Because I wanted it to be true. I desperately wanted to live my own life, to not be a lab rat, a guinea pig, a number in a file and I was one of the so called “successes.” And then It hit me. I would never be normal, I would never be left alone. I would never, ******** that. I would, if it killed me, and I knew it just might.

I had years to know this was coming. Alright, not really. I should have expected this, but I didn’t. Who could I call, who could make this all better, who could make this just go away? I debated several options, Adian, the ******** buddy; Boreas, the actual boyfriend; Francesca, the ex-girlfriend; or Drew, the ex-fiancée. Who had betrayed me though? I burst into tears at the thought. I had known I would eventually, I inevitably do when stressed out. I wanted to run to Boreas, who I knew was the least likely to have done something like that, especially as we were living in two totally opposite states, I in Texas, him, far to the north in the UP of Michigan. I missed him terribly, but could I call him? No, as he was still working on his thesis and didn’t even have time for phone sex, much less something like this. I couldn’t, I wouldn’t, take that away from him, from us, potentially. Adian knew about me, about Prime, about the whole of my past that made me who and what I was. He knew why I was a dye-hard, he knew, and he just accepted. He accepted that I had an open expense account with seemingly no limit. He didn’t press, he never asked. And… Well, he kept a room available when my mother, who didn’t know about everything, got to be too much. He let me in one day, just to have sex after work one day, to blow off some steam, and we just kinda stayed like that.

We were both pretty good about not asking questions of each other. He never asked why my government paid expense account still worked (well, to be perfectly honest, neither did I, until now) and I never asked him about the mysterious packages, trips, and sundry other details that went into an ex-mercenaries now day-to-day life. To stay the way we were, we pretty much had to not ask too much, not pry too far, because we knew that when we did, we A) wouldn’t like what we found, B) would kill each other to protect ourselves, or C) would not be having explosive sex any more. Adian knew the right things, and I probably couldn’t turn to him. Frannie, she I could turn to, but it would be bouncing off ideas off myself, to call an Iteration would be just that, especially a younger one. s**t. I could call Boreas, but he didn’t know the whole story yet. That left Drew, the impossible to get a hold of ex-fiancée. s**t.