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Paul feels his heart start to race as he nears the corner. He’s low on ammo and he isn’t sure how many more hits he can take. He presses up along the wall. This could all be over before it even starts. He’s gotten lucky once today, and he’s not entirely sure how much longer his luck is going to hold out.
Three, two, one.
He rounds the corner and quickly scans the corridor, finding it empty save for a single body sprawled across the floor. Fresh kill. He’s gotta keep moving, but he needs firepower. If he moves fast, it’ll only take a few seconds. He rushes over to check the body for ammo, and, successful, reloads his weapon.
It’s still a few seconds too many. “Gotcha,” is all he hears before the gunshot rings out and everything goes dark.
Game Over. Player Two Wins. flashes across the TV screen…again.
Paul cranes his head and glances up at Kara, sprawled out on the bed, with her hands still clenched around the controller and a grin on her face so oddly familiar that feels like a sucker punch. “Wanna try for best three out of five?” she asks with a bounce of her eyebrows, and while Paul knows that he’s the never-give-up-never-surrender guy, there’s this look in her eyes and he knows there’s no way he can beat her.
“No,” he says, putting his controller aside and pushing himself up from his seat at the foot of the bed. “I think I’ll let you off easy this time.”
“Easy? You’re just afraid of getting your ass kicked again, He—” Cutting herself off, Kara rolls her eyes, shaking her head. “Paul.” She rolls over, reaching for the radio on the nightstand, flipping through the static. After about a minute she gives up, and shoves herself to her feet. “I’m going down to the convenience store. Want anything?”
“Not particularly,” Paul says, walking over to the small table in the corner of the room. He shifts through the massive piles of papers scattered across it. How the four of them have managed to keep any of the intelligence they’ve received in order, he’ll never know.
Kara shrugs her shoulders, snags one of the room’s key cards, and leaves. He’s grateful for the privacy. Save for an hour playing video games, he and Kara have barely spoken since Caroline and Josephs went out to investigate a tip that morning.
Paul has been called crazy and superstitious a lot in the past few years, but he likes to think of himself as a sane, rational person. Even though people back in the Bureau had looked at him like he had two heads, he continued to believe in the Dollhouse because he’d found the tangible proof and he knew he was right. (Even if it had begun with that stress-induced hallucination of a blonde woman in a red dress.)
In any case, he couldn’t deny he felt unnerved by the constant sense of déjà vu that struck him whenever Kara or Lee was around. When he finally confronted Josephs earlier in the week about it, the man had started going on about these myths and cycles and insisted he’d never really been a believer until now. Paul and Caroline had both come to the conclusion that the pair were completely nuts, but they needed all the allies they could get, even if they were crazy.
It’s then that he realizes Kara left the radio on, and the static is doing nothing for the headache he’s developing. As he crosses the room to turn it off, a crackle of classical piano slips through the noise and Paul suddenly feels a dizziness wash over him as an image flashes in his mind’s eye. It isn’t much more than a flash of yellow sky and rotten food, but she is there, and he knows this never happened to him. Another flash, a symbol or something painted on the wall and it looks… familiar somehow.
He goes to the table and rifles through the papers until he comes across the one he was looking for. At the bottom of the pile, a crinkled paper—yellow, red, blue, white swirling in a series of concentric circles. The colors on the paper are fingerpainted, childlike. Paul remembers the day he walked into the art class and saw Bravo smearing the bold primary colors across the page, and later how she presented it as a gift to her handler with pride.
Just then the door swings open again and he looks up. “Kara?”
“Yeah?” she asks, voice sharp as she closes the door.
Paul studies the circles with intent. He knows this symbol. “Do you believe in this...remembering past life...stuff?”
She scoffs, sitting heavily on the bed before falling back and sprawling out, taking up the entire mattress. She digs out a pack of cigarettes from her pocket. “It's all I can remember.”
“You’re not supposed to smoke in here,” he says, but she ignores him and lights up and the familiarity of it all is starting to make him feel like he’s going nuts, too. There’s no such thing as past lives, as mystical patterns. He just needs to keep reminding himself of it.
The room falls silent again, and the quiet lasts until she has noticed the way he’s watching her. “What?” she snaps.
“Why are you here?”
Kara swings her legs over the edge of the bed and, sitting up, rests her elbows on her knees. She takes a drag on the cigarette and blows a puff of smoke in his direction. “You first.”
He’s here to take down the Dollhouse. He doesn’t need to explain himself to her. What he needs is answers. “I mean, you just got your life back—you escaped slavery. You could be doing anything right now.”
Kara studies the cigarette in her hand; barely started but she stares at it, as if she’s looking for some kind of comfort from it that she’s just not getting. “Because all this has happened before,” she mutters, stabbing it out against underside of the nightstand. “And I won't let it happen again.”
And there it was again. First the hallucination in the red dress, then Josephs, now her. More of these cycles. He glances back down on the painting and decides to bite. “Was I there?” She quirks an eyebrow at him. “When all this happened before, was I there?” he holds the paper out to her. “I know this symbol. I… it feels like I remember it.”
Kara takes the paper from him and lets out a short, almost empty laugh, but the tiniest hint of a smile crosses her face. “Yeah... Yeah, you were there.”
Paul settles himself on the bed beside her. Okay. That was question one answered; time for question number two. “Who was Sharon?”
“Gods,” she says, scrubbing a hand over her face. “That's a good question... She was...an enemy...an ally...a friend...” She glances sideways at him. “And your wife.”
“My wife,” he echoes. “Were we... Were we happy?
“Looked like it.” There is something distant and almost envious in her voice. “You loved her so much...sometimes you were a complete idiot about it. But you didn't care... You and Sharon and Hera, you all just looked so godsdamned happy together.”
“Hera?”
“Your daughter.”
Paul sits and lets the information wash over him. He used to be a man in love, a family man. All he’s really had in his life is a wife who left him and a woman who wasn’t and maybe he’s glad he doesn’t remember, but still, his curiosity is piqued. “Who was I?”
Kara runs a hand through her hair, staring at the wall ahead of her. “Your name,” she starts slowly, “was Karl Agathon.” She takes a deep breath and shakes her head. “And you… You were my best friend.”
Paul stares out at the wall as well and suddenly understands why she looks at him like she wants something he can never give her. “You know, I spent so long on the Dollhouse case it started to eat up my life. I lost my friends, my wife, and pretty soon I lost my allies. All I had left in my life were my enemies.” He turns to find she’s looking at him again. “And I’m just starting to get used to having allies again. I may not be Karl Agathon, but give me some time and maybe we could be friends.”
“Well,” she says, digging through her pockets again. “We played video games. I guess that’s a start.” Her face lights up as her hand finds what it was seeking and she pulls out two lollipops and holds one out to him. “You want?”
“Yeah,” he says, raising an eyebrow. “I love these, how did you know?” Off her grin, he rolls his eyes and nods. “Right, of course.” He peels back the wrapper and studies the candy. “So,” he says, then sticks the lollipop into his cheek and picks up his controller, tossing the other back to Kara. “Best three out of five?”
--End--