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lizzyverydizzyyo · 6 months

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D.E.A.N | Chapter 25 - Getaway

Masterlist and overall summary of the whole novel is here. | Prompt on trope-appreciation-tuesdays that inspired this is here. | @whumptober-archive

Fandom : Original Work

(I) (II) (III) (IV) (V) (VI) (VII) (VIII) (IX) (X) (XI) (XII) (XIII) (XIV) (XV) (XVI) (XVII) (XVIII) (XIX) (XX) (XXI) (XXII) (XXIII) (XXIV) (XXV) (XXVI) (XXVII) (XXVIII) (XXIX) (XXX) (XXXI - END)

AO3

Wordcount: ± 3826

TW: Suicidal Ideation, Depression, Mention of Sexual Assault Threat, Mention of Torture, Medical Procedure, Medical Instruments, Mention of Weapon/Gun

The time has come for Mark and everyone around him to commence their escape plan. There is no way around this.

Whumptober 2023 Themes:

Day 16 — “Don’t go where I can’t follow.”

Day 17 — “Leave me alone.”

Day 19 — Psychological

Day 29 — Troubled Past Resurfacing

This story is set in the last half of 2016.

——

Something is thrown at him, some kind of clothing. It roughly rouses him from his sleep.

“Get up.”

He blearily raises his head from his crossed arms on the bed. He sees Anna there with an urgent look.

She now goes around the bed to the empty side across from Mark.

“Wake him up too,” she simply says.

He just now notices that Anna’s hands are full. She is carrying tons of gear and other things with her own weapon slung on her shoulder. One of the gears is the bullet-proof vest she just threw at him.

“What’s going on?” he asks in confusion.

“Something about someone accidentally turning on his laptop parts connection. I don’t know,” she answers while walking around doing whatever she is doing, her voice impatient. “Just get him up.”

Mark has just finally realized what some of the things she is bringing are. They're D.E.A.N earpieces comms with some radar wristwatches. Anna's HT is nowhere in sight.

The good thing about being in D.E.A.N is that a lot of things are catered to him and his fellow agents, like those earpieces and the radar wristwatches which are designed specifically for D.E.A.N—the division's preferred mode of communication with each other when in action, as per their standard training.

The earpieces are smaller and more ergonomic than those in public circulation; unobtrusive when agents need to move quickly, even with the attached speaker—which is just as tiny with the length not reaching up to the wearer’s mouth. With their sizes, the earpieces are quiet; the sound coming from them goes directly to the wearer's ear and the speaker is also highly sensitive. There is no need to be loud and have any intel heard by enemies or give away the wearer's position if the agent needs to hide. Each earpiece has a small electrical board for control to be inserted into a specialized slot on the upper sides of their bulletproof vest.

Besides the earpieces, they have wristwatches for radar and mapping purposes which, to some extent, can predict what obstructions are near the wearer, like walls or nature elements if they are outdoor. Apart from those, they can register anything into the wristwatch's database before dispatching and activating them, and the registered objects will show up as dots of various colors depending on what they are: the agents themselves who are similarly wearing the watches, explosives they set as traps, or other items. It's very handy for locating each other if they are in chaos or separated, or for traversing unfamiliar terrain.

Both items have incredibly important features that most of their other comm devices (and other government agencies') don't have; the hardware itself is created to support D.E.A.N’s more rigorous security and encryption technology. While nothing is truly 100% unhackable (as shown by the teams’ concern with Agent Van Hoven’s suggestion before), both devices are definitely much more secure than other widely known comm devices.

When worn together and wirelessly connected to each other, the earpiece and radar watch prove to be paramount for a mission's success and an agent's safety.

Unfortunately, because of their sizes, their storage for electrical power also has to be small, regardless of how advanced it is compared to other batteries produced in the world. The two devices may have the technology of charging using the kinetic energy of the agents running around, but D.E.A.N still won’t just whip them out willy-nilly if it’s not possible to find a stable source of power anytime soon.

The bad thing about being in D.E.A.N is that, more often than not, they are fucked, especially right now. The fact that they’ve decided to wear those devices at this point means the situation has become serious and dire.

Helga must be coming and close.

So, at the sight of those items after hearing Anna's words, all sleepiness is immediately shed from Mark's body, and he moves quickly to stand from his chair. He puts both hands onto Nick’s shoulders to push at the sleeping boy firmly, but not roughly.

“Nick,” he exclaims urgently as he keeps shaking Nick, “Nicky, get up.”

Nick still doesn’t wake up.

“Nicky,” he repeats more firmly as he shakes Nick’s body even harder, “you need to wake up.”

He pushes and shakes Nick a few more times, fear jolting in his heart with how difficult it is to wake Nikolai up. He worries that something might have gone wrong along the time that he was asleep.

Fortunately, Nick opens his colorful eyes again, although they look a little red and bleary.

“Mark?” he slurs with confused voice.

Mark bends down a little to get closer to Nick so that he doesn’t have to talk so loudly.

“We need to go. They say this headquarter is not safe anymore.”

Nick furrows his eyebrows. “How?”

“I don’t know,” Mark simply says with Anna’s impatience somewhat bleeding into him, turning around to grab his own vest and items. “It’s just not, okay?”

Several people are walking into the room, as he can hear from the multiple footsteps. When he turns around, he sees Angie and Doctor Lowe there.

“He awake?” Doctor Lowe questions gravely.

Mark is busy wearing his vest and adjusting his earpiece, looking at his surrounding to check if there is anything they might need to take, so he says distractedly, “Yeah.”

“Good,” Angie now responds, walking closer to both of them, “get ready now.”

In the background, a nurse enters the room carrying one handheld bag. Mark recognizes her as one of Doctor Lowe’s nurses who assisted the first surgery in their own headquarter before. She approaches the surgeon, who is rummaging through the med bay for whatever medical tools and items they might need.

They only have one medical bag with them as they go over all the drawers and table surfaces to take whatever they need, quietly discussing with each other regarding what to take and what not take to make sure they fit into the bag.

“We’ll take off his IV, yeah?” Angie asks Doctor Lowe distractedly too, now focusing on taking Nick’s right hand.

“Yeah, he needs them off. Otherwise, it’s just gonna get tangled,” the surgeon replies in the background. “We’ll put IV drips in again when he is safe with the backup team if he needs it.”

That’s all Angie needs to hear. She quickly darts to the closest medical cart and pulls out a drawer to take some medical tape and alcohol swab. She still has Nick’s hand in one of her own, so she can quickly step closer to Nick and cut down any unnecessary action to be efficient.

Mark is now helping Anna carry the stuff she brought inside as she is wearing her own vest, utility belt, earpiece, and watch—taking inventory of all the gears and tools and deciding which goes to who. Where Angie and Nick are, Mark can see in his peripheral vision that she is putting all of the medical stuff she needs on the bed. Mark is tapping the tiny button of his earpiece to turn it on while looking at the watch’s screen to check if they’re synced and working, so he doesn’t pay too much attention to either Angie or Nick.

Still, he knows that Angie immediately but carefully peels off all the medical tapes that’s still on Nick’s back of palm, which are tethering the saline and blood transfusion IV needle to his hand. For the needle, she is pulling it out more slowly and carefully until it’s completely out of Nikolai’s vein. She then rips the package of an alcohol swab and pushes it onto the entry wound. Her other hand is grabbing the medical tape roll to pull and rip out a new one before plastering it onto Nick’s hand on top of the swab.

Throughout this time, Nick is pretty much ignored, so no one is aware of Nick’s combative look until he suddenly pulls his hand away from Angie.

“No.”

They all stop moving out of surprise and puzzlement.

“I’m not going.”

They stare at Nikolai, their brains taking an awfully long time to understand what he means.

“Nick, you’re—”

“I don’t care,” he grits out again to the 5 of them. “What’s out there for me anyway? More of my torture footage? PTSD? Bullshit permanent medical conditions?”

“Nick, I know you’re upset, but this is not the time,” Angie tells him, clearly trying really hard to be patient and not get irritated.

“No,” Nick says again more firmly. “Whatever’s waiting for me outside, even if we can escape Helga, I don’t want any of it.”

“Nick—”

“I don’t fucking care,” Nick spits out once more, now to interrupt Mark, his glistening eyes blazing, “I’m not going. They can shoot me dead for all I care.”

Anna hisses and throws her head back in frustration before turning around to stomp to Nick's direction.

"Listen," she starts harshly, "You're traumatized. You're suicidal. You wanna die. Yada yada yada. I get it."

He and Angie just stare at Anna—even their grouchy surgeon too— dumbfounded by the sheer cruelty in her words when Nick is already emotionally fragile like this. Even Nikolai looks shocked at her insensitive speech to the point that he stops looking depressed and becomes angry instead.

"But, they're NOT gonna kill you. Do you understand?" she half-yells at Nick's face. One hand that's not holding her rifle harshly lands on Nick's shoulder.

Mark is about to shout back at her on Nick's behalf, but she doesn't let him put a word in before she talks again.

"They're going to fucking put you through the hell you went through for years before!" she continues exclaiming angrily at Nick's face, her own brown eyes furious as they stare up at Nick's heterochromatic ones, "Maybe even so much worse because you got away and broke their digital defenses down."

Nick's face falls slowly into devastated and even afraid expression, and Mark won't deny the fact that he somewhat agrees with Anna.

"Is that what you want, you little shit? You want to be tortured and gangraped and whored out again? Beaten up, starved, and tased for however long it takes for us to rescue you again? If at all? That what you really want? Huh?"

There is a long moment of silence while Nick searches Anna's eyes, and there is an almost imperceptible change in Anna's eyes into looking desperate.

Mark realizes that Anna, too, is scared for Nick—scared that in her watch he will be caught, taken away and hurt again. Maybe she doesn't want another mounting guilt in her conscience after making Nick almost killed himself before.

Nick eventually pushes himself forward to drop from the bed. He pulls his jacket tighter around himself, looking at Anna and the rest of them. Without words, his face signals that he finally relents and agrees to go with them.

"Thank fuck," Anna shouts.

She throws a bullet-proof vest at Nick then hurriedly shoves an earpiece comm and a watch into his palms, which he receives with a clueless look.

“Wear them, oh my god!” she cries out in frustration.

Nick automatically takes a step back, spooked by Anna’s thin patience.

Mark decides to step forward and gently takes the things from Nick.

He picks up the earpiece comm first, putting it on Nick’s left ear with the electrical board dangling slightly. He grabs a vest next, unzipping and putting it on Nick himself, then he slides in the electrical board into Nick’s upper left slot, seeing as Nick is left-handed. He follows it by tapping a similar button on Nick’s earpiece that he tapped on his own earpiece before.

Eventually, he grabs Nick’s trembling and thin wrist to help him put on the radar watch properly. He clicks the button on the side of the watch’s screen until it lights up, showing various blue dots where he knows everyone else in the room is standing.

Good. They’re all functional.

“Can you wear it now?” he asks as he steps back from Nick with his still open vest, trying to minimize crowding Nick’s space and making him nervous, “you just need to zip it up.”

Nick looks down on his own torso, fingers frantically feeling for the zipper. He finally finds it and zips it up hurriedly.

“Okay,” Mark stares up at Nick’s swirly blue-brown eyes, “do you know how to use the comm?”

Nick gives a small, fearful headshake.

“Look at this,” he says to Nick as he grabs Nick’s hand again to show the watch’s screen. He chooses to ignore the uncomfortably intimate feeling of the gesture that’s supposed to be technical and clinical.

“You’re in the middle of the screen, on this dot,” he says, pointing at the blue dot in the middle with pulsating waves outwards like most radars. “You can drag it or zoom in like normal GPS map to see around you.”

Mark put his index finger on the screen then drags it to the left to see more of what’s in their left side: two pulsating red dots where Doctor Lowe and his nurse are standing and a faded straight line where the wall to this room is. He then puts his thumb and index fingers on the screen and drags them away from each other, making the line seem thicker and more dynamic. He sees a more shadowy part of the line where the door is supposed to be, which makes sense because the door is obviously thinner than the wall.

Nick looks at the screen intently throughout this.

“Tap twice if you want it to go back to showing your relative location and normal mapping size again.”

Mark decides to grab Nick’s other hand, pulling the bony right index finger, then he pushes the tip to tap the screen twice. As he explains, the screen snaps back to showing Nick’s location in the middle of the screen. Mark then looks up to Nick’s face, silently asking if he understands. Nick frantically nods.

Now, he points to the tiny, almost flat-looking electrical board fitted to Nick’s upper left shoulder.

“You see 5 buttons, right? One circle, one square, then below there are left and right arrows with triangle in between?”

Nick simply looks down uncomfortably so that he can see the buttons Mark is pointing over his chin.

“The circle is to activate it. You click on it when you want to communicate with someone, so that it’ll connect to the network it’s set into.”

The network being the one comprising all agents within this headquarter wearing the same kind of pre-set and pre-connected earpieces and watches, of course, but the details aren’t so important for Nick to know right now. At least, not until they’re far enough from here and closer to the backup team, where they will disconnect from the current network and connect to Central Hub backup’s network instead.

“You can leave it on all the time so that people can continuously contact you, but I suggest against doing that because that leaves the connection vulnerable to Helga’s infiltration if they have the right tools and skill.”

This time, Nick gives a firmer nod. Encryption and digital connection security are his forte, after all.

“You already need to have this watch constantly on, to see where you and other agents are. It’s risky enough already. So, when you’re not using your earpiece, click the circle again to deactivate it.”

“Okay,” Nick replies shakily, more because of his nerves, Mark guesses, than not understanding something. It’s all pretty straightforward.

“The left and right arrows are to toggle between receivers.”

Nick simply nods at Mark’s further explanation.

“When the earpiece is on, you’re not always going to be automatically connected to the agent you’re actually trying to communicate with—” Nick nods again while looking at Mark slightly, “—so click either left or right to shift your connection to different agents until you find the agent you need.”

“Uh…” Nick mumbles, “…how… do I know?”

“You can see who you’re going to switch to on this watch, because the one you’re connected to will not blip in and out anymore. Left arrow means you’re connecting to agents in the left portion of your watch, and right arrow to the right area. It favors closest horizontal distance rather than vertical to your relative location.”

Nick looks up unsurely again with bitten lip, seemingly scared of asking questions Mark or the others deem as stupid. Mark decides not to explain that a dot that stops blipping in and out can also mean that the agent is most likely dead, since the watch can’t detect any pulse from the wearer’s wrist anymore.

They don’t need to scare Nick off right now.

“I mean, how do I know who they are? Is it… is it just random agent… on my left… or right?”

Shit. He didn’t think about that.

Mark is debating whether he should give Nick a copy of the list of all agents’ names along with their corresponding codenames, or only to tell Nick the teams’ codenames, hoping that whoever Nick connects to is the right agent to help him when needed. Nick might not need to know who the specific agent is, only whether they’re from 4 of the Offensive teams, Medic teams, or Tactical Intelligence team here.

Hell, even Mark has not memorized everyone’s name and codename here—just what team they’re from—considering they’ve only been here for less than 24 hours. Besides, Nick might not be able to keep constantly pulling out a paper and looking at it while clicking left and right. He is going to get shot or run straight into a Helga member because he isn’t paying attention to his surroundings.

He eventually shakes his head at Nick.

“Don’t worry about it.”

That reply doesn’t seem to inspire confidence in Nick, but he seems too intimidated by how serious everyone appears—including Mark—in this room to argue, so Mark continues.

“Now, the square is to lock the connection when you think you have the right person you want to contact. It can be the other person clicking their own square button, or you, but the point is…” he looks up again at Nick’s eyes, making sure the younger man is still following, “…once you or the other person clicks it, no other agent can switch connection to either of you until one of you clicks the square button again to unlock the connection.”

Mark can feel the presence of the others behind him, expectant and somewhat impatient.

“The last is the triangle, which is to take turns talking when you’re already locked onto an agent. Basically, you talk, you press it, then listen to the reply, then they also click it once they want you to reply back.”

Nick is so engrossed in looking at Mark’s fingers with deeply furrowed eyebrows that he doesn’t look up.

“You know, where you say something like “It’s NK56, do you copy? Over.” Like in Hollywood,” he tells Nick with a little exaggerated voice and a smile in an attempt to alleviate Nick’s very apparent anxiety.

Nick does look up, but he simply gives Mark a blank face. It’s clear the joke doesn’t land.

“Do you understand?” Mark checks in, changing back the tone to being serious.

Nick nods frantically before saying, “Circle is on and off. Arrows to switch agents. Square to lock and unlock from an agent. Up arrow—I mean tri… triangle...”

“Yes, whatever you wanna call it,” he quickly interjects.

“Um… triangle is to take turns talking.”

There is another button on the earpiece itself to completely turn it on and off that he pressed before, which is to disconnect from one network and connect to another, but it’s not important for Nick to know right now, so he doesn’t tell Nick that.

“Good,” Anna chimes in this time, now calm and firm again. She then puts a helmet onto Nick’s arms. “Wear this too.”

This time, it doesn’t take long for Nick to understand what to do, so he immediately brings it up to put it over his head.

The others take a vest, other protective gear one by one, and the comm devices, but no helmet. Anna obviously couldn’t bring all of them enough helmets on top of everything she carried, even if she is deceptively strong, so most of the people in the room are left with unprotected heads for now.

“Oh, before I forget,” Anna says, digging into one pocket of her fitted cargo pants, “You need to have these with you at all times.”

She is holding a handful of keys, some tangled up with each other. She doesn’t wait for Nick to understand what is happening before walking towards him and opening the flap of one of the pockets on his utility belt. He just freezes while she drops the amalgamation of metals into it, then she closes the flap so that the velcro stick again.

“Those are keys to the possible vehicles we’ll use to transport you.”

Nick still stares dumbfoundedly, not following Anna’s train of thoughts.

“Whoever ends up with you ‘till the end will need the key to escape, so it’s better for you to carry them yourself than letting random agents hold them, just in case they don’t end up going with you to go to the backup team.”

Nick seems to somewhat understand the implication.

“They said not all agents will go with you to backup. Some need to stay because Helga people are too close by. They decided to just battle those bastards while in here in our turf than while enroute.”

Eventually, Nick nods, so Anna turns away from him.

“The rest of our stuff is outside. And the other agents too,” Anna explains more, “More detailed plan will be explained there, but the gist of it is they’re gonna divvy all of us up to fitting positions and choose who will go with Nick. Hopefully done before Helga people arrive.”

She steps away now with long strides towards the doorway, expecting the rest of the people in the room to follow her without being instructed, so all five of them walk out of the med bay with Anna.

Once they’re out in the open area of the headquarter, they all walk automatically to the gear shelves to take a helmet one by one with some rifles and other tools, except for Nick. Although Doctor Lowe and his nurse don’t grab any firearm either, aside from the other non-weapon items they take.

The place is buzzing tensely in the background, all agents going around busy with all sorts of things. Fortunately for now, Mark can see that there are no Helga people arriving yet. Maybe they’ll have more than enough time to prepare.

Still, he realizes, this is getting real now.

***

(I) (II) (III) (IV) (V) (VI) (VII) (VIII) (IX) (X) (XI) (XII) (XIII) (XIV) (XV) (XVI) (XVII) (XVIII) (XIX) (XX) (XXI) (XXII) (XXIII) (XXIV) (XXV) (XXVI) (XXVII) (XXVIII) (XXIX) (XXX) (XXXI - END)

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