The girl who is facing Aegis is brave. She's young, but she wants to do good. Her powers are unorthodox for a hero maybe, but she's learned to make them work for her. She's not an energy mutant, tossing around bolts and zapping bad guys, and she's not juggling cars, but she's learned this: everyone is afraid. Everyone has that vast abyss of fear inside of them, and if you can reach into that and pull it back out, bind their hands with it and blind their eyes, you can win any fight. You don't have to be stronger or faster. You just have to be smart.

She reaches out to brush the man's mind. There's a chill against her mental self and she shivers. Aegis follows each movement with the quick, predatory gaze of a hunter. She's running out of time, she realizes, and wedges herself into his mindscape looking for--

There's nothing. She expected to find the usual emotions first: anger at being stopped, enjoyment or amusement at the fight, frustration, glee, anxiety, eagerness, the dozens of contradictory states of being that make someone human, even when they're about to kill, but there's nothing there. He might as well be staring at a blank wall in a silent room.

She might as well be staring at a blank wall in a silent room. Her vision fuzzes and she steps back, blinks hard. His mind is buzzing; she can feel the brush of thoughts, but he's feeling nothing, and she plunges back in, looking closer this time. 

There, distantly--she can feel the familiar abyss. It's quieter than she expected, and also somehow vaster, dwarfing her consciousness inside his mind, but she can pull it out. She can shackle him. 

The entire exchange takes a second. Maybe a second and a half. Aegis lunges toward her in the real world, and she panics, reaching into the pit to cripple him, and it reaches back. It's an onslaught. She can't bear up beneath the avalanche. There's nowhere to find her footing, no way to control the seventy years of pain and fear and rage and torture that sweep her away in a torrent, no way to redirect it. It just keeps coming.

The entirety of Aegis' creation downloads itself into her brain in milliseconds. Neither of them make it.

He drops out of his lunge and barely catches himself to roll back to his feet, unsteady and with a hand on the nearest table. The hero goes to her knees, face slack and eyes blank. There are tears running down her face, although she doesn't seem to notice them. She doesn't seem to notice anything. 

A second. Another second. Aegis' breath rattles in his throat as he fights for air past the suffocating embrace of memory. Neither of them move.

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This is your brain, and then this is your brain on Spectre: all the irritating, inconsequential bits that make you a person smoothed away and ironed over. What you have is this: mission report, mission accomplished, and the ice. No other options. No other possibilities. Your brain on Spectre is nothing much to behold, unless you can admire the elegant, brutal beauty it requires to strip a man out of his body and leave only the skill and a will to follow orders behind.

All of that goes into the blender when the hero opens the floodgates. The clean and ordered lines in his head that say do this and nothing more fall away. He is in the ice, and he is in the chair, and he is being pummeled with a spray of water from a hose; they are cutting open his body, and he is screaming on the rack until someone gets bored of the noise and gags him; he is shooting a target in the head, he is cutting the brakes in a target's car, he is being held down with surprisingly gentle hands, hands that are useless because she knows the words that make him go limp and boneless and helpless. 

He takes a breath and trembles minutely. He wants, with animal instinct, for the pain to stop. His vision blurs and refocuses onto the nearest movement, an orange-haired woman punching the hero in the face. Memory overlaps with the present; she has another face for a moment, a name he doesn't know, an iron command over him. He faces her, hand falling away from the table. Displaying weakness in front of handlers: not allowed. He remembers that.

"<Mission report,>" he says in German. The target is still quietly dying in the corner. Aegis puts him down with a shot from his pistol without looking before continuing. "<Target eliminated. One hostile encountered: neutralized. Multiple witnesses. Permission to neutralize?>"

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He knows English, speaks it with with flat regularity. He knows many other languages, can speak them as fluently as any native, although all have that same distant, cultivated accent that denotes a learning process that was more akin to installation than anything else. 

"Understood," he says, and holsters his gun, ready for further instructions.

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Aegis does exactly as he's told and follows her. Nothing more, but he scans constantly for any threat to his handler that might appear, ready to defend her at a moment's notice. The compulsion to protect her is bone-deep, has been beaten into him on a level beyond the verbal. She doesn't need to order him to die for her; he simply will.

He does note, however, her fear. He is rarely allowed to keep memories--and even those they are fine with him having, which are few, never survive the ice and the chair--but whatever happened in the bar, with the hero, has rattled his brain. Images float up like lilies to the top of the water, clear and unconnected from anything else, and he knows with certainty that this woman has never displayed fear in front of him before. This is a situation no one has briefed him for.

They trained him to think on his own in tactical situations, and nothing else. He follows.

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His analysis of the situation is becoming not concerned but say instead, uncertain. His handler continues exhibiting signs of weakness and anxiety. This safehouse is inadequate and indefensible. There are no weapons. There is no armory.

There is no chair. There is no tank. They cannot stay here. 

He sits when she tells him to do so, scanning the room for threats, but when the sound of vomiting comes from the bathroom he's on his feet, charging inside.

There is no enemy, no ambush, just his handler bent over the toilet.

He does not compute.

"<Poison?>," he asks, and then corrects himself: "Poison? Do you need medical assistance?"

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She dismisses him. Aegis understands. He has rudimentary training for medical field assistance, primarily for self-maintenance during missions, but he is no medic. She moves into familiar territory. He does not wonder at her questioning him about his mission, when she handles all of his missions, because he does not wonder. 

Wonder is unnecessary in a weapon.

"Activated at 00:14," he says. "Briefed at 00:53 after maintenance. Target was John O'Keefe, Oricon executive. Eliminated at 7:32."

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