beauty through broken glass [Oliver/invite]

[Deleted]

Most nights, the "queen of the prefects" did not sleep--at least not for more than an hour or two. Most nights, she stayed awake and accompanied a prefect on rounds to ensure that the school was properly being kept safe, just like Seth used to do. With her complicated stance on the Battle Front, it was easy to accuse Meredith of being inconsistent and ineffective, but no one could say that she did not care. Without discrimination, she did not stand for students hurting each other on the island. Prefect or Battlefront, she would prevent violence wherever she could. For or against the revolution, the soft-hearted woman with the increasingly hardened exterior would protect whoever she could. As much as she hated that she could not join her sister in being a crucial part of the revolution, Meredith knew that the school needed the prefects to maintain some semblance of order and safety until freedom was within reach, and the prefects needed her to keep power from leading to corruption.

In those rare times when she wasn't being the commander, Meredith searched for any information she could find on where Seth might be, but there were places where even Google didn't go, and the few Ashford Project government agents who were on the side of the gifted were still too fearful of their superiors and repercussions to give a grieving fiancee any information on the commander who vanished into thin air.

Between leading and searching, Meredith was drained, and that night, she decided to finally give it a rest. The prefects who were on rounds that night had all proven themselves to be moral and competent. Even Oliver Grey, who --among the prefects on the roster for rounds that night-- had been with the group for the shortest amount of time, had shown himself to be exceedingly capable, so that night, instead of joining them in policing the night, Meredith retired to her over-sized and rarely used dorm. Not even bothering to wash off what little make-up she wore or undo her fishtail braid, the overworked woman melted into her soft comforters and fell asleep before her pillow finished compressing under the weight of her head. Within minutes, she had fallen into the deepest world of sleep, where nightmares lived. Images of the deaths she had seen, the lives she had taken, and the loves she had lost swirled around her mind until her body decided to resolve her turmoils by taking her to the place where it all culminated.

Still deeply asleep, Meredith's body dressed itself and made its way to the courtyard of the school, where the carnage had taken place, where Meredith literally crushed a man's heart, where Calista nearly took her own life and everyone else's as well... where blood was spilled from one end of the grass to the other, where good people died, where innocence was lost, where everyone and everything changed forever. In consciousness, Meredith could repress those memories and act like they had not traumatized her. She could play the beacon of strength that the school needed and channel her grief into her drive to make Ashford Academy a safe place to live as long as the gifted had no choice but to be there. But in sleep, Meredith's fists clenched, and she fell to her knees, remembering the screams of people she could not save as bullets rained down faster than she could heal. In sleep, Meredith allowed herself to remember that the last day she had seen Seth seemed like any other day. In sleep, she realized the horrifying nature of it all, of her life.

Fists unclenching, still asleep, Meredith's hands fell to the grass, holding her body up from completely collapsing into the ground in sheer horror at what reality had become, not only for her but for everyone around her. And for the first time in months, the realization of the nightmarish reality consumed her. Bone-chilling, blood-curling screams escaped from her lungs and filled the air around her. The facade of a composed, fearless, unbreakable commander dissolved, revealing a frightened girl, barely twenty years old, who had lost too many and seen too much. 

 

[Oliver Grey]

Oh yeah split up, fantastic idea. Not like that had gotten who knows how many people killed in the movies. And on TV. And in real life. Oliver rubbed the bridge of his nose irritatedly as he trudged through the darkness of the forest that surrounded the outer perimeter of the school, separating it from the beach. Usually, Kim or one of the more competent commanders was in charge, along with several other more senior members of the prefects. Tonight though, it was mostly newer recruits like himself, and led by one of the goofiest commanders Ollie had ever met. What had his name his name been? Nathan? At any rate, they had chosen to split up and each cover a sector of the forest, checking it for danger or any students who might be out past curfew. As he roamed the darkened woods, Oliver couldn't help but wonder about what they were really out here looking for. Most students, if they were out past curfew, snuck into each others dorms or one of the empty buildings like the library. Not out here into the woods where god knows what lived. No he was almost sure the forest patrol was more for one thing and one thing only: Battlefront.

In his short time in the prefects, Oliver had already heard mixed stories about the group. Some seemed to think they were rebels, causing trouble and mischief. Others thought they were liberators, trying in vain to free the gifted students of the school from tyranny. Still others said that they were bloodthirsty killers, who cared less about others lives than they did about the rules they blatantly broke. Oliver wasn't sure. He hadn't met any of them yet, with the exception of Bridget Shine who, quite honestly, confused the hell out of him. And being honest with himself, Battlefront was far from his reason for being a prefect. The boy stopped in a clearing, looking up as silver moonlight fell through the trees onto his face and the ground around him. He closed his eyes, sighing. No, his reason for being a prefect was to keep people alive. Anytime he thought of his parents....their bodies....his mother lying motionless among the wreckage of what was once a home....his father lying in a hospital bed....He shook his head. No. He had to stop thinking about the past. He was in the present, here, and his job was to keep people alive. If he had anything to say about it, everyone here would make it home to their families. As for him...

Oliver ran a hand through his blonde hair, turned platinum in the moonlight, and breathed out slowly. He needed to keep going. The others would be expecting him to return around the same time as them, and he couldn't hold them up. He wouldn't. He may have been the newest, but he wouldn't be the worst, or the slowest or the weakest. If he had anything to say about it, he'd be the best. He continued on, eyes scanning the bushes and foliage as he went, of course finding nothing. In all his nights on forest patrol, truthfully nothing had ever happened. Not that it still wasn't a very tense patrol. The nights at Ashford could be truly unnerving at times. Though the moon lit his way tonight, usually it was near pitch black, and the silence...it was almost palpable. Though he was ready for whatever might come his way, Ollie still felt his muscles tense at every sound, amplified by his enhanced hearing. His hands clenched into fists and tiny sparks of electricity played across his hair and skin with each rustle behind him. He actually breathed a sigh of relief when at last he heard the sound he had been waiting for: the ocean. As the trees thinned out, the packed earth starting to turn into loose, coarse sand, Ollie stopped. He had reached the beach, the end of the forest and his patrol.

Though he knew he should head out onto the beach in case the others arrived soon, Ollie couldn't help but admire the view. He leaned against one of the trees, closing his eyes for a second as a cool breeze from the ocean kissed his forehead, ruffling his hair. For a prison, he could never get over how beautiful the island was. The moonlight played across the water like liquid silver, shimmering and even seeming to make the white sand leading up to the water sparkle. He loved the beach at night. The silence. The peace. The... It was at this moment that Ollie's calm train of thought was interrupted by what, frankly, sounded like someone being murdered. The first bloodcurdling scream amplified by his hearing and already carrying through the empty forest and silent night air hit his ears. Oliver literally jumped about a foot into the air, yellow electricity blossoming across his skin in waves. "What...in the hell....was that?!"

Oliver looked around the beach but saw no sign of his patrol mates. He wasn't sure if they'd heard the screaming without his level of hearing, but he found it hard to believe they hadn't. Nonetheless, he wasn't about to wait around for them to show and risk someone being hurt. Turning around he braced himself for a moment, white electricity coursing around his body this time as his muscles tensed and expanded slightly before he took off at a full sprint, wind whipping his hair back and behind him as he weaved through the trees. What could it be? Some kind of fight? Battlefront? He shook his head and pushed on. No time to think about it. The screams weren't stopping, and he wouldn't let whatever was happening carry to its conclusion. Not while he was on watch. He followed the sounds back towards the school, turning and cutting into another zone of the forest and towards the courtyard. He finally slid to a stop as he reached the edge of the trees, scanning the grassy locale. At first he didn't even notice her. He was looking for explosions, a scuffle between two students or some kind of sign of a power being activated at least. What he didn't expect to see was the girl, fairly curled up on the ground, only her hands keeping her upright. He also didn't expect that girl to be Meredith Monroe, leader of the prefects.

What had happened? She didn't look injured. Not physically at least. But she was screaming as if she'd had her heart torn out. Her body was shaking and trembling as if she were afraid for her life. He hesitated for about a half second before his nature kicked in and he took off at a jog, making it over to Meredith in a few seconds. He knelt down next to her. Ms. Monroe?...Ma'am? No response, and the screaming just continued, fairly deafening him at this range. He slowly lifted a hand and placed it on her bare shoulder, a light white spark of electricity sparking between them. As soon as it did, it hit him. She was asleep. Low conscious brain activity but high electrical output from her limbic system gave it away. She was dreaming, sleep walking. He closed his eyes, painfully gulping back a lump building in his throat. He knew what that was like. He relived it every night. Woke up screaming, clutching his sheets. What horrible things had she seen? What terrible deaths? He knew it must have something too painful to bear. And he couldn't let her continue on suffering like that, even in her dreams. He closed his eyes and sent a very light jolt of electricity into her, just enough to gently rouse her from her sleep. "Ma'am?... Wake up. Meredith?"

[Meredith]

Meredith Monroe was trapped, immobilized, in more ways than one. She was trapped on the Ashford island with little to no hope of ever being reunited with the rest of society. The sense of isolation that came with being quarantined from the world like a sick animal was only underscored by the fact that the younger Monroe twin's isolation was much deeper than geographical. If someday in the future, the Ashford Project were to be dismantled, the gifted returned to their families... Meredith would still have no one at her side. Her "sister," Calista, would most likely mend the broken bridges with her true blood relatives, and every other person that Meredith had ever called family had already had their funerals. The young woman was trapped in solitude. She was also trapped in her role as a tool of the Ashford Project agenda by her heightened sense of duty, fated merely to watch and pray while others fought and died for the revolution.

However, at that moment, she was mostly trapped in her sleep, and even more than that, she was trapped in her own world of fear, a terror that was consuming her more and more deeply as the defense mechanisms she had mastered in consciousness eluded her in that comatose state. Though the literal nightmare she was having threatened to suffocate her with feelings of all hope being demolished, the nightmare would come to an end; the fear would offer her no such escape, perhaps giving the woman no rest until she found herself six feet underground or even longer, depending on the existence or lack thereof of an afterlife. 

Just as the night terror was becoming too much for even Meredith, a veteran of horror, to handle, driving her screams to new levels of heart-wrenching desperation and piercing volumes, she was thankfully jolted from sleep. Suddenly thrust from a panorama of gore into a relatively peaceful night, Meredith quickly gasped for several breaths of air, her muscles untensing as she allowed herself a few seconds of reprieve. Her relentless screaming ceased, and the noises that came out of her as she struggled to breathe and regain control sounded more like the soft, relieved cries of a victim of incessant trauma who had just found solace. Few had ever seen or heard Meredith cry in a long time. The faint whimpers highlighted a vulnerability that she had been suppressing for years, but the revelation was short-lived. As soon as the realization that she had been awakened fully settled, and she registered her whereabouts, the soldier in Meredith quickly turned to see who had shocked her, and the PTSD survivor in her responded the only way she knew how. She may not have been sleeping anymore, but her reality was a nightmare in itself, and if she had to decide in an instant if someone who had just sent electricity into her body was an assailant or a well-meaning friend, her instinct was to go with the former. Her usually soft, sympathetic, bright eyes narrowed and abruptly became the eyes of a warrior, zeroing in on her prey. Though she was tall for a woman at 5'8", there was hardly any muscle on her bones, and she knew the only way she would win in a physical affray was by being smart about it. Locating the attacker's collarbones with her eyes, she swiftly grabbed his shoulders and jammed her thumbs behind the bone, pinpointing the pressure points that would allow her to force him to the ground and keep him there by pressing her knees against the weak and vulnerable sternum while her fingers moved to the exposed bundles of muscle, tendons, and nerves in the crevices of each forearm, where she could cause a great deal of pain with the right amount of pressure if she felt the need.

"Don't move, or I'll do much worse than knock you to the ground," the commander hissed at the person she presumed to have attacked her. Then, she took at his face, which received much more illumination from the moonlight in that position. That blonde, almost silver hair, and those green eyes could only belong to one prefect--and one she had always figured could hardly hurt a fly, let alone a woman. The guilt hit immediately and radiated in her expressive violet eyes as she recognized him.

"Oliver? Oh, my god. I am so, so sorry! Please forgive me." The warmth and concern of Meredith's natural voice returned, making it almost difficult to believe that the maternal woman who emerged as she regained control was the same person who had just threatened to deliver a horrible death. She quickly stood up and released him, offering a hand to help him up.

[Oliver Grey]

Ollie breathed out heavily as Meredith finally woke from her fevered sleep. "Holy crap that actually worked," he thought to himself as he breathed a sigh of relief. Thankful that he'd managed to bring her out of whatever horrible night terror she must have been experiencing, he looked down at Meredith to check on her condition. What he saw nearly floored him. He'd seen that face before...so many times, every time he'd woken in the middle of the night, dragged himself out of bed and stumbled to the mirror to look at himself. He'd seen those eyes...haunted, almost reflecting the faces of the people they had watched die. He could only stare at her, unbelieving and filled with a mixture of pity, horror, and understanding. He was, in fact, so transfixed that for a moment he forgot what he had just done. Namely zapped a likely PTSD patient directly out of a nightmare and into the waking world.

This fact registered a bit more clearly when those soft, delicate eyes hardened and became the eyes of a huntress sizing up her prey. And it became abundantly clear when she took Oliver by surprise, jamming her thumbs into the space between his shoulders and his collarbones and using her momentum to slam him into the ground bodily, a loud yelp of pain escaping his lips as she pinned him, placing her knees against his sternum and moving her hands to the pressure points on her arms. He refused to fight her, or do anything that might hurt her in return. After all if someone had done to him what he had just done to her, they would be getting a 250,000 volt zap right about now, straight to the solar plexus. But it felt as if, if she wanted to, she could break his arms at any moment; she knew the pressure points perfectly, though he supposed that made plenty of sense. A soft groan of pain escaped his lips as he tried to console her. "Meredith...Gah!...please...it's me...Oliver..."

He could tell the words had no effect on her, as she simply growled at him not to move. Again the truth was that he couldn't blame her. She had been here much longer than him. Seen more battles, been attacked more times than he could probably imagine. She was only defending herself from what she likely believed to be just another student or government agent trying to take her life. He did, granted, hope that passed quickly, because he was quickly losing breath, and her grip on those pressure points in his arms was really starting to concern him. It was right at that moment, in fact, that the clouds shifted and the moon drifted over them, shining its silver light down like a spotlight on the two. He watched as her eyes shifted from cold and deadly to the soft, kind eyes that he had come to know, which immediately reflected realization and guilt. As she climbed off him, apologizing profusely, Oliver shook his head, forcing a small laugh out as he took her hand and pulled himself to his feet.

Trying to lighten the mood a bit and get her to relax, he mimed writing in a notebook as he spoke. "Note to self...do not zap badass prefect leader...pressure points hurt." He gave her a warm smile and brushed himself off, finding himself honestly more glad that she was awake and not suffering whatever horrible nightmare that she had been in anymore, than concerned about how close he had been to having his arms snapped a couple of moments ago. "Don't worry about it, I should have woken you a little easier." He looked around to make sure they hadn't drawn any undue attention, fixing his scarf as he did. Convinced they were in the clear and hadn't drawn the other prefects toward them, he looked back at Meredith. Pushing a few of his bangs out of his face he spoke, concern flooding his eyes. "I'm sorry, I was just...I was on my rounds when... I mean I could hear you screaming all the way from the forest...you must have been having one hell of a nightmare."

It probably should have registered in his language that he was speaking to a superior officer, but he couldn't help it. His voice instead carried tones of not much more than sympathy, understanding and worry as he put his hands in his pockets and shifted a bit. "Are you...ok?" He knew it was a stupid question to ask. Clearly she was not ok. Clearly things hadn't been ok for her in quite some time. But the tone in his voice was nothing but genuine; he just wanted her to know he cared. He felt like maybe...that was something that she needed to know right now. He knew that he wished to god he hadn't been here for so long without someone to ask him if he was ok, to care if he was. He hoped at the very least, it would do some good.

[Meredith]

It was chilly. No, it was more than chilly. Summer nights on a tropical island had no business being so damn cold, Meredith thought to herself, her body assimilating its newly discovered surroundings into her awareness as Oliver took her offered hand, the warmth of it making her own skin feel like ice. She held onto it for a second longer than she would have otherwise deemed appropriate, appreciating how nicely warm it was, then realized her mistake and let it go a bit abruptly. As she glanced down bashfully at the mild blunder, Meredith realized that it was entirely possible that it was actually not that cold; she was simply naked-- at least by her reserved standards. She grimaced a little in disapproval at the poor decision of her subconscious to drag her all the way out to the courtyard, a screaming train wreck, and not even have the decency to dress her half-sensibly. As Oliver talked, the not-so-regal prefect commander smiled and discreetly pulled the outer cover of her practically sheer nightgown around herself more tightly as she listened. Feeling rather embarrassed at being more "exposed" than she would prefer to one of her male prefects, the shyness that had defined her in the past (which seemed like another life at that point) returned, and she merely chuckled softly at Oliver's comment about her tackle, rather than returning with a joke of her own. Luckily, she didn't have to say much, as Oliver seemed happy to do all the talking, going from the joke to an apology to an explanation to... a question, which finally required her to respond. As sweet as he was, he had asked a question for which she had no clear response. The ever-present smile on her face dimmed just a bit as he asked the three-word question that would require an eternity and then some to answer. Was she okay? She paused to mull the question over in her head before speaking, praying that she could put a few words together coherently to explain how she felt about the completely senseless tragedies. 

My name is Meredith Monroe. I'm a resident of Ashford Academy, an organization that systematically quarantines the gifted. I have survived six years of this hell. I am their prefect commander... Meredith stopped herself in her own internal diatribe. Repeating facts to herself had become an odd habit of calming herself down, regrounding herself in reality, and perhaps most importantly, reconvincing herself that she was still, indeed, a sane person in spite of all that had happened. But she did need to answer Oliver's question eventually.

"There's no need to apologize, and it's nothing a... 'bad-ass prefect commander' can't handle," she deadpanned at first, a half-smile forcing its way onto her lips. Even to her, the forged composure sounded so ingenuine. Even worse, feigning bravery seemed like a blatant injustice to all those who had been slaughtered, who lost their lives. It seemed insensitive to stand there and act like she was okay, when clearly she wasn't, and nothing was, especially when she could see from the level of concern flooding his eyes that she wasn't even close to fooling Oliver. "But if you want the truth, I'm barely holding it together," she added finally, though the extra words were nearly a whisper. She looked down for a moment to avert his worried gaze, hoping that if she couldn't see him looking at her that way, with pity in his eyes, it wasn't real, and she didn't have to cry, and as a bonus, if she did cry, at least it'd be with her face somewhat out of sight. Once the moment had passed, she looked back up and realized that she was bearing her vulnerability in front of one of her soldiers. Hoping to salvage whatever respect for her he still had, she quickly shifted the conversation away from herself, finishing with, "And how are you doing, Oliver Grey?"