Childhood Fears(Open to Ada)

[Louis DeGrandpe]

Louis lay in bed, shifting uncomfortably from side to side and a cold sweat drenching him. "N-No! D-don't....F-father!!!!" He screamed as he jumped up in bed, pulling the pistol he kept clutched in his hand under the pillow and pointed it towards the door. He was barely able to calm down and rationalize that putting three shots through the door was a bad idea. He breathed slowly and made the pistol dissipate. "It's alright....it's alright...he's dead now." He put a hand to his chest, the scarred skin of his brand burning like fire. Rain was falling outside, heavy rain that made it sound like a round of applause was going on outside your window. That calmed him down a little but then the thunder kicked in. Louis pressed his back to the wall and whimpered. "D-damnit! You're stronger than this!" Thunder was something that had always scared him, it was an irrational fear that he'd had since he was a child and he'd never been able to get over it. He got up and pulled on a t-shirt, it wasn't like anyone was going to be up at this time of night so why hide his scars? He slowly made his way out of his dorm and into the hall, still jumping and breathing heavily with each crash of thunder. "You can do it, just ignore it....you're not a child anymore."

[Ada Ivy]

Who in the hell?! Ada blinked groggily in her dark room, not amused when she heard someone screaming over the thunder. She growled, grumbling under her breath as she fought free of her thick blankets -a need for her since she got cold frequently-, intending to go yell at whoever was making a racket. Did they not know how rare it was for her to be in her dorm?! Seriously, this was probably the first time she was in her dorm at night this week. And she was actually getting some sleep too! "I'm going to kill whoever moron it is....." At least scare them sufficiently enough to make them think twice about screaming their lungs out in the middle of the night. Who does that?! Even her, she of the sarcasm and general meanness, let people sleep. Why? Because sleep is precious. Especially to her since she barely got ten hours a week sometimes.

Thunder boomed overhead, lightning flashing just outside her window. She had always liked storms. Liked the smell, liked the sound, even liked the way they felt. The air felt different, charged with electricity almost from good lightning bolts. During the day they made her excited and hyper almost, during the night they turned into a sort of...loud, discordant lullaby. A lullaby which someone was so rudely interrupting. She trudged through her room, not caring enough to change out of her pj's or even brush the mass of wild hair atop her head. She going to ream someone out, not go on a date. Hell, the worse she looked the better. It would add another layer of scariness to her aforementioned reaming out.

She slammed her door shut, stalking through the halls. They've gotta be close...The screams sounded like they weren't terribly far off, fact she enjoyed. It made her job that much easier. In fact, she was fairly certain she was on top of the idiot, hearing someone move around pretty close to her. She rounded a couple corners, looking for all intents and purposes, pissed the hell off and tired. Which, in her defense, was entirely true. Wouldn't you be if you got woken up in the middle of the night by some numnuts screaming like a dork? Yes. Yes you would be.

....Of course.

It was him.

And here she was hoping she could go back to bed soon.

[Louis DeGrandpe]

Louis was angry at himself for letting himself be scared in such a childish way. "I am not a child! I can get over this!" He thought he'd be safe from walking into someone at this time of night but as he looked around his worst fears were made true. And of course it had to be her, of all the people that could have seen him this way she was the one. "I-I'm n-not in the mo-ood right no-ow." He cursed himself for not realizing sooner that his voice was shaking so much. He felt like a coward and that's just what he needed her to see him as, a coward. "J-Just leave m-me alone...I-I'm not g-going to deal with you!" He crossed his arms closely to his chest in order to hide his scars from view, even though he hated her he still felt ashamed whenever her or anyone saw his scars. Each one was caused by some horrifying injury because of some horrible thing he'd done in his past, each one had a story but he had no intention of any being told.

[Ada Ivy]

This was certainly different. The "big bad assassin" was, quite literally, shaking in his boots. How cute. Serves him right. He deserves it for being an ass. At least, that was what Ada thought at first. It was almost comical; he was a giant and he was terrified of storms. Storms, that, unless a tree fell on you or lightning struck you, were all together harmless to you. Or if you got caught in a flash flood or something... Well still. The point was the same. Thunder was completely harmless, was just a big noise as the result of the expansion of rapidly heated air. What's the big deal? was always her thinking on the matter of irrational fears. By definition, the fears were unfounded and illogical. Usually defied common sense. Why waste your time being scared of something that couldn't hurt you? As far as she knew she had no irrational fears to speak of. At least none that she had ever encountered yet so they remained unknown to her. Knowing her, if she ever found her irrational fear -if she had one that is- she would probably force herself to face it over and over again until she was no longer scared of it.

His voice is shaking pretty bad...For some reason or another, that affected her. She leaned against the wall, wondering why that got to her. Not like I care or anything. She never cared before if other people were scared of something. She laughed at them, in all honesty. "Well seems like you're gonna deal with me whether ya like it or not. Why're you out here, anyway?" If he was scared why wasn't he still in his room? Don't you wrap yourself up tight in blankets when you're scared? Or at least stay in your room?

She tilted her head at him, almost like she analyzing his reasons for him to be out in the halls at night when he was clearly afraid, when she noticed the scars. She had never noticed the scars before; he always wore long sleeves. Now she could see why, those scars of his were brutal. Hers were bad at least they were semi confined to one area. It looked like his were...all over. She saw them going up his arms and disappearing into the sleeves, hinting at even more. She wanted to know about them, oddly enough. Every scar had a story, and even though why she didn't want anyone to know about hers she liked hearing about others'. Knowing what he had done for a living before Ashford made her even more curious.

Geez, what was wrong with her? Why did she suddenly wonder about his scars or even...care that he was afraid? She was supposed to be happy, dammit! That's what you did when someone you hated and an almost enemy was scared and shaking. You celebrated for lack of a better term. Why? Because you found something you could use against them. You didn't want to hear more about their past or want to kiss their boo-boos and make them feel better. You just...didn't.

But here she was, doing the exactly what you shouldn't do. She blamed it on the fact that they were on a team together now; they spent more time together -unwanted time of course but time nonetheless- of course it'd be normal to develop....protectiveness...over a team member. Even if you hated them. Right? That sounded right. She supposed it was a sort of pack mentality almost; you're in my circle, therefor only I get to kill and/or hurt you. That made sense. It wasn't because she was developing feelings or anything like that for him. It just wasn't happening. Pack mentality, pack mentality, pack mentality....yeah she could get behind that.

[Louis DeGrandpe]

Louis shuffled uncomfortably at the question, he didn't think he wanted to tell her the why to it. It seemed embarrassing, childish. Louis Barnabas Degrandpe, professional assassin, too afraid of nightmares to go back to sleep. She'd mock him and never let him live it down. Any chance she got to make fun of him before she'd taken and this would just be another one for her. But....part of him had to tell someone about it, keeping it bottled up was starting to make his chest burn, and telling a teammate was better than telling a stranger. "I...I d-don't want to go b-back to sleep...I-I had a dream about m-my fa-ther." Saying it made him clench his eyes shut for a second, trying to get rid of the green veins discoloring the black orbs of his eyes. "G-go ahead a-and l-laugh..."

[Ada Ivy]

It was always good to tell someone about your problems. At least, that was what they told you. Ada never believed any of it. It never applied to any of her. She didn't talk, she didn't lay on a cheap couch and spill her guts to some loon with a "degree" that got paid two hundred dollars an hour to nod at the right times. It wasn't something she did or ever did. Sure, she'd listen if the person made a good enough case for her to or she was just in the right mood that day but other than that? No. If anything, she was more of a listener than a talker if she had to put labels on it. She could compartmentalize and bottle up things like no other. She was a professional at it; she had to be. If not than she wouldn't just be dealing with the nightmares. She'd be dealing with a whole host of problems; survivor's guilt, maybe a touch of PTSD, flashbacks caused by large explosions that reminded her of that day and a whole other mess of things. By telling herself she didn't have those, she didn't. By not acknowledging them, they didn't exist. It was almost like Schrodinger's cat. Until you opened the box, you didn't know whether the cat was alive or dead. And Ada was never opening her box.

She didn't say anything as he told her what his nightmare was about and that he didn't want to go back to sleep. She just stood there, listening. She wasn't going to laugh, wasn't going to mock him or anything like he was expecting. She was oddly sympathetic because they both shares the same problem, just their individual problems stemmed from two very different things. It was a weird and not entirely pleasant in any way thing to have in common but they had it in common nonetheless.

"Look, I'm not going to laugh at you, okay?" Saying that alone might be enough to shock the poor, shaking giant out of his being scared and into the realm of "what the hell is going on?" and if it did, great. She wouldn't really have to any...comforting hopefully if that happened. If not then fine. She supposed she'd make an effort to make the ogre feel better. How she didn't know but she might as well try. She had already admitted to being worried about him because of the pack mentality, and comforting him would fall under that quite easily. Wouldn't it?

"Do you...wanna talk about?" She almost cringed when she heard herself say that. She might have said it or something like it back in the lab -she couldn't quite remember the specifics- but this time she actually meant it meant it. Back then it was just customary "guy I just beat up feels terrible, might as well let him blabber" and maybe just a touch of being interested in his life -she'd only admit to a touch- but this time was a little different. Maybe because she would admit to herself that she actually cared a bit more and wanted to make him feel better at least a little bit in some way. She was a determined person; just because she wasn't particularly good at it or had really any experience in it doesn't mean she couldn't. She'd try and keep trying until he at least stopping shaking so much. And could speak without stuttering. And quit looking like he just saw a ghost come out of his closet or a sewer gator come out of his toilet. It wasn't a good look for anyone, let alone someone that big.

And nothing, absolutely nothing, about it was strangely, oddly, just plain weirdly endearing. It didn't make her want to hug him and tell him everything was going to be okay in any circumstances, imagined or otherwise. Endearing wasn't a quality she usually picked up on, let alone felt something in response to it other than "that's supposed to be endearing, right? I don't see it." It was just an emotional response that never seemed to be wired into her hardware. Until now, it seemed. Geez...damn frog is messing with my brain...Somehow he had managed to show up and discombobulate her and throw her all out of whack. As far as she was concerned her brain needed to be thoroughly analyzed and charted at the moment, it must be a chemical imbalance somehow. She didn't know what chemicals, though, which made her imbalance theory a bit shaky and look like Swiss cheese but it was something.

Whatever experiments were to be conducted though, were to be conducted as far from him as humanely possible. Sure, that might screw up the results but hey. She didn't want to be proven wrong and her not have an imbalance; that it was simply him being him that making her act all strange.

[Louis DeGrandpe]

Louis felt something soften a bit in his chest when she said she wouldn't laugh at him. The imp laughed at him every chance she got, why was now any different? It must have been because they were teammates, he wasn't one for working in pairs but when he had to for his job he made sure his partner got out alive. It was just how teams worked, you look out for whoever you're working with. That had to be the reason since no other explanation was available. "Th-thanks I guess..." He mumbled begrudgingly, hating the fact he was thanking her. Wait...was she seriously asking if he wanted to talk about it? Really he'd made it a rule to never talk with anyone about anything, he didn't want to seem weak around them but she for some reason seemed to be exempt from it since he'd told her about his mission in Paris. What was wrong with him? She just always made him feel out order and messed up in the head. Louis sat against the wall and looked at his feet. "Yeah...I-I wanna talk....You've seen my b-brand and you know who ga-ve it to me, but you d-don't know the full details." He closed his eyes for a second as if he wished he himself didn't know. "I was ten...at the time and I was sleeping, I was always a deep sleeper back then. And all of a sudden I feel a pain like nothing I've ever felt before on my chest, it feels like I-I'm on fire and I open my eyes, shrieking in pain at and I smell burning meat...then I realize it's my skin." He took a quick breath to continue, his voice was starting to show increasing amounts of panic. "I can barely focus on what's happening but I can make out my father's face as he's pulling the brand off of my chest and says. 'sleeping is dangerous, if I had been an enemy assassin I could have easily smothered you.' And then he left me there, whimpering and crying. He didn't even think to put something in my mouth to stop me from biting off me tongue. I never slept without a weapon after that..." That was the just the worst nightmare, his father had done much more to him throughout his life, if he did one thing wrong during marksmanship training he'd be sitting out in the hot Egyptian sun without his glasses to protect his sensitive eyes. Early hand to hand sessions were more like beatings which his father never relented, and his father would randomly throw a kick or a punch in his direction to test Louis' reflexes. Most of the time he wasn't fast enough and ended up with bloody nose or an bruised rib. "I don't know what else to say...he was a horrible man. Barely even human."

[Ada Ivy]

Monsters were a product of human thought. There was simply no boogeyman, no monster under the bed, until humans thought up the stories to scare bad children into good behavior, later written out to inspire good manners in children -and even scare some more excitable adults- everywhere. In the animal kingdom, nothing was truly evil until human thought and morals were applied to it. A male lion killing the cubs of the pride he just took over wasn't evil; it was a tactical maneuver. By killing the cubs he sent the lionesses into heat, thereby making sure his DNA survived, not his rival's. See? Not evil; smart. To animals there was no concept of such things as right and wrong. They only became evil when they were humanized. But real monsters did exist; they were just much less obvious than you would like to think. They were just human; not some abstract idea that hid in the shadows and stalked in closets. They were real, and they were all around you. In a matter of speaking; man had created his own monsters. The things he was so scared of were of his own invention.

And it was clear to anyone with half a brain that the giant had certainly created, if not acquired, his fair share of monsters along his way. And his weren't the usual sort, his came with demons that obviously haunted him. That's what the demon sort did, they haunted. They ate and ate at you until you couldn't stop thinking about them, till they were always in the back of your mind, watching you. She listened closely as he started talking, just like she did when he told her about the incident in Paris. She didn't want to forget anything, after all. When someone told you something from their past, you remembered. You didn't forget because it wasn't interesting enough to you or you didn't really care.

She couldn't keep from visibly cringing the more he spoke. She couldn't imagine anyone doing that to their own kid, no matter who it was. Well, except in the case of the giant's dad. The more she heard about him the more she began to think he was lower than an amoeba on the food chain. Sure, he was an assassin. But to do all that he did to his own kid? Nuclei were higher on her hierarchy. "Are you kidding? As far as I'm concerned he wasn't human." She sounded a little angry when she said that. Who could blame her? Wouldn't you be pissed off if someone did that to a teammate? She walked over and sat beside him, not really knowing what else to say. He'd probably be ticked if she cracked a joke so that was out. She was running low on her "comfort word vocabulary" and she wasn't about to hug him. No way, no how. She doubted she even knew how to hug it'd been so long since she'd had one.

Maybe she'd hug him later, when we went back to his room as a sort of parting...gift. Like an "I hope you don't have a nightmare again" or something. That was good, she decided. Teammates did that. At least, she thought they did. Eh, it didn't matter. One hug was an easily excusable offense. As was her sitting next to him. Besides, it wasn't like anyone was going to catch them together or anything. And if they did, so what? they were just sitting and talking...in the middle of the night...Well time didn't matter. Everyone in the building had to have heard the frog scream. They'd know he just had a nightmare and she was the one to come out and investigate the racket and maybe talk him into going back to sleep. Simple. And a pretty good alibi, if you thought about it...Nope, she wasn't going to think like that! she didn't need an alibi for anything, she was just talking him down from the ledge so to speak. She wanted him to get a good night's sleep so she didn't have to deal with his sleepy ass the next day. Perfectly understandable if you thought about it.

[Louis DeGrandpe]

Louis smiled a little at her response, he'd expected a pat on the shoulder or some other attempt to make him feel like everything was okay when it obviously wasn't. Her voice told him one thin, that she despised what his father had done to him, and for some reason that made him feel better. "My mother was never part of the equation if you were wondering, I don't have a face in my mind or a voice in my ears to remember her by because I never knew her." The same sad regret that was in his voice when he had told her about the Paris job was working it's way in again. "...Thank you for listening...it's more than a most people have done for me and it mean's a lot."[/color] He couldn't believe he had said that to her of all people. But thinking back he realized that she had really been the one to ask things that others were either too afraid or didn't care enough to ask. And he could tell she really listened and memorized what he said. Louis didn't mind the idea of her asking more questions, he realized that after locking it away for so long that he needed to tell someone his stories. And he'd already told her some of them, why not tell her the rest? She was his teammate after all and one person he should trust the most is his teammate. "I saw that you noticed the scars. I'm guessing you're wondering how I got most of them?"

[Ada Ivy]

Not having a mother...that had to have been tough on the poor kid. She had both her parents, or at least she did once. After the accident they cut off a majority of their contact with her, that contact lessening every year until it was just a sporadic Christmas card every other year. She didn’t spend time feeling sorry for herself and all woe-is-me as she did those first few months after the whole thing. They wanted her out of their lives? Fine. She wanted them out of hers. The whole family all but exiled her; her parents only came to the hospital she was recovering in to make sure she wasn’t dead. They didn’t even let her come her own sister’s funeral for goodness’ sakes…but it was different from not ever knowing your mother. At least she had a face and a name.

She just shrugged when he thanked her, not really thinking he needed to say it. All she did was listen, why did he need to thank her for that? It was what any sensible human with a some form of a heart would do. If she ever actually decided to tell anyone about her past she’d want the same. She’d never need anyone to because she wouldn’t breathe a word of it to a soul; living, dead, or otherwise. But it was still a nice notion. Maybe that was why people paired up so much, they wanted someone to talk to. She quite honestly didn’t get the reason why, seeing as how she could pretty much compartmentalize things into oblivion and only allow herself certain times to think about them. Why talk when you could cope with things alone? It was how she’d end up anyways, alone. No use trying to convince herself otherwise or be optimistic about it.

So he had noticed….Well, if he knew then there was no point in hiding it, right? And it wasn’t like she didn’t want to know. She wanted to know all about them, curiosity eating up at her by this point. She could blame it on morbid fascination, but she knew better than most people that every scar had a story behind it. She wouldn’t deny that she wanted to know what his were; she just blamed it on that teammate thing again. That was all. She just developing an attachment to him because she was forced to go on patrols with him almost every night. It was only natural to become used to a person’s presence after that and feel some weird kinship with them. “If you wanna tell me...I’ll listen.”

There was no way she was going to get sentimental about it or anything. She was already sitting in a hallway with him in the middle of the night. That was the extent of her sentimentality for the night. She was only doing this to sate her curiosity.

[Louis DeGrandpe]

She would listen....no one had ever before and he'd never really wanted to before but right at that moment he felt like he needed to get some stuff off of his chest. "Well....it's not fun to hear but.." He trailed off and pointed down to the side of his ribs. "I got captured on a job and my target wasn't to happy about my presence there so he decided to keep me alive for a few weeks. First he broke my ribs so bad I needed to get four metal pins just to hold them together. He ran his hand across all four bumps on his skin, and moved down to his abdomen. "Then he decided that a blowtorch would be fun to use." He lifted his t-shirt a little to show her the burns. He could feel his breathing pick up a little. "You can't see them but I have two cuts going down my thighs, he did that so I couldn't run. OH and how I got caught...I almost took a bullet to my head, it only grazed my jaw here." He ran a finger across the jagged scar on his jaw. Then there were the ones on his wrist, he was afraid she might get the wrong idea if she saw them before he explained. "The marks on my wrists are from when he was done, he tied me to a cinder block and dropped me in a river....I barely got out a-alive..." To finish off his tour of his scars he pulled down the collar of his shirt, the scar was jagged and old but most were surprised he still had a head when he showed them. He had told her about everything on the outside but the worst to him was below the skin. "I've taken a lot of bullets in my time, and some have almost made me bleed out but...four hit me in just the right spots. I have only one lung that's really mine, someone else' liver, a sy-nthetic joint in my left arm, and thanks to a shotgun blast to my back half of my sh-shoulder blade is a r-replacement made of steel." It was too much, he'd never told anyone a single one of those stories let alone all of them. Louis curled up and tried to stop the stinging in his eyes. He was not going to cry in front of her! Or anyone for that matter.

[Ada Ivy]

She should have mentally prepared herself for this. Granted, she should have known the stories would be bad, based on what scars she'd already seen. Though in her defense, thinking about it or just knowing that stories would be bad was a whole heck of a lot different than actually hearing the real stories be told. She actually had to bite her lip, so hard the thing turned white and had indentations from the bottoms of her teeth, to keep from making a sound. That, or losing whatever food was left in her stomach from dinner. She wasn't squeamish, never was, but who could blame her. Almost or above 50% of the boy sitting next to her was either scar tissue or synthetic.

Pins holding his chest together... Questions swirled in her head amidst the disbelief, nausea, an general feelings of "how the hell did he survive all that?" Could he feel the pins? Did they hurt? Did his artificial shoulder feel different than his real one to him? Did it hurt? What did it feel like? And what about his arm joint? Did it still have full motility or was that motility compromised since it was fake?

And those were just some of the questions. At least the ones she could come up with at the moment. She was still trying to wrap her head around the fact that he wasn't even all that much older than her and he had to have organ transplants already. In the medical world a liver transplant was fairly common but a whole lung?! She was positive that was on par with heart transplants.

Through the whole time he was talking she just sat there, quiet as a mouse for once. She didn't know how to react. He was basically telling her that was the twenty first century Frankenstein. But instead of sharing the villagers' penchant for pitchforks and torches and the sentiment that he was a monster, she thought quite the opposite. Her Frankenstein was just huge and somehow still alive after going through major surgery after major surgery and major surgery.

"H-how are you even..." She couldn't even get through the first word without stuttering, let alone finish the sentence. She wasn't  any stranger to major surgeries herself but a little over half a day in surgery and a few skin grafts wasn't anything compared to all his. Great reaction, Ivy. Why don't you just run down the hall screaming? But to her credit she hadn't moved a muscle. In fact she might have just scooted closer.

[Louis DeGrandpe]

Her question is what broke the damn, Louis could feel hot tears start to trickle down his cheeks. "A-ali-ve?" To be honest he didn't know the answer himself. He'd wanted to give up so many times and just die on that operating table or on the cold ground of some no name piece of desert that two groups of people with almost identical ideologies had been fighting over for centuries. But his body just refused his desires and kept fighting to go on no matter what hellish pain he had to endure during the surgeries. "I don't know...I wanted to end the pain so many time on those tables but....my body wouldn't let me die no matter how much pain it endured." He sniffed, wiping at his eyes. "But when you're allergic to most know form of anesthetics what could save you can feel like it's killing you." That's right, each and every surgery he was awake and feeling it all, in most they strapped him down as tight as possible and others they just waited for him to pass out. He looked over at her and realized she was closer than before, part of him knew he should have hated that but the bigger part needed someone to be close right now. He tentatively scooted closer to her letting it all out. If she saw him crying so be it, if she stayed this long she would know to keep it between them.

[Ada Ivy]

Oh god here come the waterworks...He was crying now? Like, actual tears? What was she supposed to do with those?! She could handle talking it out but tears were a whole 'nother beast. She had nil to zero experience with tears. Well...other people's. But that wasn't the point. The point was that she had no freaking clue what to do. At all. She tried to think if she ever saw someone comforting a crying person, hoping she would at least get an idea of what to do. When that didn't work she went down the movie route. But seeing as most movies she watched were action, horror, or sci-fi, she drew a blank yet again. "Um...There, there..." She awkwardly patted his shoulder. That was good, right? That's what she was supposed to do, wasn't it?

"It'll be okay...?" It sounded fine in her head and when everyone else said it but coming from her mouth it sounded unsure, more of a question than a reassurance. But it was the best she could do at the moment so she'd just roll with it. At least try to anyways. When he told her about his lovely little allergy her plans sort of...derailed. She remembered her own surgeries, had the doctors tell her all about them and she couldn't imagine what it would be like to be awake. And not just a little conscious but conscious and fully aware and feeling everything. That was a nightmare in and of itself. Can someone say psychologically scarring? He was probably the PTSD poster boy.

She let him move closer, figuring that it couldn't hurt. She herself didn't move closer, but she didn't move away either. It seemed to help him somewhat as as long as she didn't have to actually talk to him she was good. She could pat him on the back, whatever, but actually verbally comforting? Noooo. She didn't want to repeat her last attempt. Besides, what more could she say? 'Hey I'm sorry you have a suckish allergy and were awake during horrific surgeries but what're ya gonna do?' Yeah. That would go over well.

[Louis DeGrandpe]

Louis sniffled a little, he knew she didn't know what she was doing but he still felt a little better that someone was trying to make him feel better, even if it was Ada, the same girl he'd hated for the last few days. "Th-thank you..." He said shakily. "Most people would have just said that it'll all be and leave me to just cry it out." He looked down at his hands, he was still a little afraid of telling her all this, last time he told her stuff about himself he got kicked out of her lab with no explanation as to what he did wrong. He didn't want that to happen again, not after what he'd told her this time. "....Why did you kick me out of your lab? Did I do something wrong? I thought we were close to becoming civil if not friends.....I'm sorry, that was a stupid question..." He looked up at her his eyes finally back to normal, as normal as they could be.