"I don't want to go. I want to stay with her."
"Boy," Angelo murmured gently. "We have to let go. Things are at an end, and though you may mourn today, I assure you, we have prevailed."
If this was what winning felt like, Bobby hated it.
Awakening
"Wake up. Come on. Wake up. I can't give you any more stimulants."
Gemma opened her eyes and shook herself. "Fuck me," she gasped. "That was cold as, well, hell."
Her handler was standing over her. The man with the brown eyes, the brown hair, and the brown suit. Mr. Brown. Actually his name. Probably not actually his name, but as close to a name as she was going to get.
Gemma felt the worst she had ever felt. Being shot hurt like hell. That part had been real. The drugs they'd given her to make her seem dead had left her feeling as though she might just be.
The end of the mission was a blur. Something about getting Willow back, something with Angelo and Bobby, and…
“What happened?”
“Your mission failed, that’s what happened,” Mr Brown said. “We’ve had you on ice since you got yourself shot. Angelo and Bobby are in the wind. Willow and Digby are dead. It couldn’t be more of a complete balls-up.”
Gemma was not supposed to smile at that, but she couldn’t help herself.
“I got shot?”
“Digby shot you. The capture teams deployed, but they lost them. We put you on ice, and set up surveillance at the morgue, but they must have paid a third party to switch you with someone else. They never came, and your body was never disturbed. At least, that's what we thought. It took us a while to find you.”
"Are you telling me," Gemma said as sweetly as she could. "That you let them bury me alive?"
"Only for a matter of hours. You weren't aware of it."
"Oh. Okay. Right."
She would have been furious, but what was the point? From the very outset, the Organization had made it clear to her that she was nothing but a tool to be used to bring down the rich and the powerful. She was genuinely surprised they hadn’t just let her bleed out and used her actual corpse as a prop.
"Tell me you're done with me," she groaned, putting her hand to her aching head. "I've literally died for you people."
"Not quite literally."
"You're not going to be satisfied until I do literally die, are you?”
"Here. Pain killer," Mr. Brown said, handing her a white pill and a glass of water.
"Tylenol. Great. I get shot, shoved in a morgue, buried, exhumed, and you give me Tylenol.
"Anything else would interact with the drugs we used on you. Actually, on second thoughts, give me that back. It's probably not safe either." Mr. Brown took the pills from her but left the water. Better than nothing, Gemma supposed.
“What’s next?”
“You’ve been embedded with the Spencers a long time. But an agent of your longstanding service has a chance at being redeployed. We’ll find something else for you. You’re still young. A marriage, probably.”
He spoke about controlling the rest of her life as if she were nothing. The Organization didn’t waste resources, though. She’d known that at some point, her time with Willow would end, and they’d use her for some other plan.
She missed Bobby. She missed Angelo. She'd never felt anything like what she had felt with them before, in any sense. Sitting here, technically out from deep cover, she felt empty. Angelo and Bobby had become… She didn't know how to describe it. Not family. They were her captors. But they'd touched her in ways she didn't know she could be touched, and they'd made her feel this strange, visceral connection, even all the way to the end.
"How are you feeling?" Mr. Brown asked the question, though she doubted he cared about the answer. His questions were bland and unfeeling, just as he was.
“Fine,” she said. “I’m fine.”
“Good. You can have a week off to regroup. I’ve booked you a hotel room, then I’ll be in touch.” He put a brown packet on the bedside table. “Money, and new ID’s,” he said. “And a phone. Don’t lose any of it.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
Fkin Ghost
Weeks later…
"Bobby?"
It was three o'clock in the afternoon, and Bobby had not risen from the bed he had gone to at three o'clock in the morning, which was not technically a bed. It was a couch, and he had been slumbering fully dressed on it since the early hours of the morning when he had finally passed out from sheer exhaustion.
Angelo had something akin to good news, which he hoped would rouse Bobby somewhat. Looking at the tousled hair and the five-day shadow that was starting to approximate a beard on Bobby's chin and cheeks, he wished his boy did not have to feel such pain. A depressed Bobby was perhaps the most sympathetically pathetic thing on the planet.