I, Persephone

I woke up slow, the way you wake from something your body has decided you needed more than consciousness. White ceiling. Steady, unfamiliar beeping. The particular ache of a body that had been put back together by people who knew what they were doing but hadn’t had unlimited time to do it in.

I lifted my right arm before I fully understood I was doing it, some old instinct checking that everything was still where it belonged, and found red instead of the plain matte grey I’d worn my whole life. Sleek. New. Unmistakably deliberate, the kind of upgrade nobody gives you by accident.

“They rebuilt it while you were under,” Alexandra said, from a chair pulled close enough to the bed that I understood she hadn’t left it much. “I’m told it was the least controversial thing anyone did to you this week, which I realize is a low bar.”

“How long.”

“Four days.” She reached over, careful, and took my real hand in both of hers. “You gave a room full of very competent doctors a genuinely difficult morning, Persephone. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t make a habit of it.”

“I’ll do my best.”

She held on a moment longer than the conversation strictly required, and something passed between us that neither of us named, the same way nothing between us had ever needed naming to be true.

“There’s someone who’d like to speak with you,” she finally said. “I told her she could have ten minutes, and that I’d be right outside the door regardless of what she said to that.”

She stepped out. A moment later, the door opened again, and Tasha Skye walked in --- no entourage this time, no sitting room dressed up to look like anything other than what it was.

“Ms. Mercer.” She pulled the visitor’s chair closer, unhurried, and sat. “I’ll spare you the speech about how relieved I am you’re alive. I suspect you’ve heard enough speeches this month to last a lifetime.”

“I have.”

“Then I’ll be direct. I want to make you the same offer I made you before, in a different room, with a different answer waiting for me. Formal designation. Government resources. A mandate to go after the people who did this to you, instead of spending the rest of your life running from everyone who’s ever wanted a piece of what’s in your chest.”

“And if I still want to be left alone.”

“Then I’ll leave you alone, and I’ll live with the political and practical fallout of that decision, because it would be yours to make and I meant what I said the first time about respecting that.” She held my gaze, steady. “But I don’t think that’s actually your answer this time. I think you’re a woman who just had someone try to kill her on a public street, and who understands better than almost anyone alive what happens to people who get left to face something like this without real backing.”

I let that sit a moment, turning it over the way I’d turned over every offer for the last twenty days, checking it for the seam.

“I’ll do it,” I said. “Under two conditions.”

“I’m listening.”

“Alexandra gets a real position --- CIA, Integrity, whatever the actual title ends up being --- with genuine standing, not a courtesy chair somewhere. And she gets what she’s actually asking for underneath it: licensed access, controlled windows, for D.O.M.M.E.S. professionals to do their work the way it was meant to be done. The same activation system you already run for G.O.O.N.S. I’m not asking for anything new. I’m asking you to extend something that already exists.”

Skye considered that, unhurried, the same deliberation she’d brought to everything since she’d first sat across from me.

“And the second condition.”

“When this is over --- when the Initiative’s actually found, actually dealt with, not just quieted down and filed away --- I get to stop. Not disappear. Not go back to pretending none of this happened. Just stop, and be believed when I say I’m done, without anyone deciding for me that I’m still too useful to let go.”

She was quiet for a long moment, and I watched her actually weigh it, rather than perform weighing it the way some people in my life had learned to do so well.

“Done,” she finally said. “Both conditions. I’ll have the paperwork moving before you’re even discharged.” A small, tired, genuine smile. “For what it’s worth --- I think a single Persephone Mercer, working with us instead of against everyone, is a considerably safer proposition than the alternative. A hundred more people like you, created the way you were created, with no one they trust standing beside them. That’s the actual risk I’m managing here. You’re not it. You’re the solution to it.”

She stood to leave, then paused at the door.

“Agent Persephone,” she said, trying the shape of it out loud for the first time. “I imagine we’ll have a great deal more to discuss about what that actually means. For now --- rest. You’ve more than earned it.”

She left. Alexandra came back in a moment later, and I looked down at my new arm, red and unfamiliar and entirely mine, and understood, for the first time in twenty days, that whatever came next, I wasn’t going to be facing it alone.

Ten Minutes Later...

It was as if I was released from something of a brain fog.

“Hey Alexandra,” Seph said, “Is Skye still here?”

“Yes she is, Persephone,” Alexandra said.

“Can you see if you can get her to come back in here, please?” Seph said.

“Sure,” Alexandra said.

Skye returned ten minutes later.

“What is it, Agent Persephone?” Skye asked.

“Yeah....no,” Seph said.

“No what, Agent?” Skye said.

“No as in FUCK ALL OF THIS, that’s what,” Seph said. “That anesthesia had me just saying anything, right?”

Seph began laughing maniacally, as Skye looked at her, confused.

“Take this stupid red arm off of me and put my normal arm back,” Seph said. “It looks like Iron Man’s hand-me-downs.”

“So you’re saying you don’t want to do it now Agent?” Skye asked.

“No offense ‘MADAME PRESIDENT’, but it is taking you ENTIRELY TOO LONG to catch on,” Seph said. “That’s EXACTLY what I’m saying, take this DUMBASS red arm off of me and put my normal one, or at least something that looks like it back on, I don’t care who did it anymore, it’s your problem, not mine, And HONESTLY, sending me, ME after these guys was the WORST IDEA EVER. EVER!! And I VOTED for you! Geez! What was I gonna do, ‘MADAME PRESIDENT’? Blow everyone into stopping being an evil, shadowy organization? Oh yeah, they were TOTALLY going to stop rebelling against your system because they got a great handy! REALLY? And STOP CALLING ME THAT!”

“Um...uh...Okay?” Skye said.

“THANK YOU!” Seph said.