Fear Itself

After two days and so much ice it would put the Arctic to shame, my left eye opened up again, and I wasn’t feeling quite so crummy. I was eating regularly, for the most part, and Dean could go back to work and the Brotherhood business for the first time since the Americans had arrived. I was allowed to have some light but not much, just enough to do some quiet reading. I couldn’t really doing anything strenuous, physically or mentally. Avery made sure of that one, trust me. If Dean wasn’t pacing around in the room, Avery was pacing around outside of it. Just a blow to the head turned two grown, hardened men into worried mothers.

It was a long two days: lots of sleeping, lots of waking up at routine intervals, lots of Dean begging me to eat and lots of me not wanting to in fear of throwing up. Even more so, there was a lot of peace and a lot of much needed quiet. It was the most time Dean and I got to spend together in a long time, and I found his returning absence to be even more painful than it usually was. Spending the entirety of his work day trying to entertain myself had been much easier when I wasn’t used to having him all to myself for a full two days. Now, the bed just felt cold and empty. I liked it much better when it was warm, even if it was cramped. We didn’t mind the cramping so much, anyway. Just meant that we were closer.

We spent both of those days just laying with each other for virtually all of the day, but we got up and walked sometimes. Not much, just a little, just enough, and only when we had to. I missed a lot in two days, though. I guess that happens when you sleep all the time. My aunt Sophie ended up down in the base, never quite learned the reasoning behind that, but Dean told me that the League found her stash of contraband: lots of banned books and films. She managed to run before they arrived to tear her house apart, and she made it out with the clothes on her back and her German Shepard, Cliff. We hadn’t spoken for long, just for very brief spurts of time because I mostly woke up only to eat, then fell asleep again. If I wasn’t sleeping, I was talking to Dean about whatever we pleased, but that was less common.

Aunt Sophie brought one single book that she had managed to salvage, and she was kind enough to allow me to read it. For about an hour or so after my nap, I took to sitting in low lighting to entertain myself with the literary adventures I had missed for months now, but it didn’t last all that long. The door came sliding open, and for a brief moment, I didn’t know who I would find standing behind it. When my eyes saw Dean standing there, every part of me want to leap with joy. He chuckled when he saw me.

“You’re grinning like an idiot,” he joked, leaning against the door frame.

“Really? I didn’t notice.” My voice was light and airy, fluttering with tiny, quiet giggles. It wasn’t until he pointed it out that the muscles in my face began to sting from smiling so hard.

“You’re adorable,” Dean sighed through a laugh. “How’re you feeling?”

I shrugged. “Alright.” I could have been better, but that wasn’t anything he needed to know. This was the most relaxed I had seen him in days, and I wasn’t about to ruin it by whining about a tiny, little headache. “Better than yesterday.”

“Fantastic, Blondie.” His voice was cheerful but soft, still careful of my sensitive hearing. His grin stretched wide across his face. “What do you think of having a little chat with Sam and Cas?”

“Am I okay to be around them?” I really didn’t want to throw up again. In a way, it was kind of pathetic how motivated I was by my fear of puking. “Won’t it be loud?”

“Blondie,” Dean sighed mockingly, almost affectionately. His grin became a gentle smile. “Trust me, that’s not gonna be an issue.” Dean was certainly a man of his word. He met his goals. While his methods of achieving said goals may not have always been appropriate, I certainly couldn’t think he would lie to me, so I nodded. “C’mon, then,” Dean requested, stepping in to take my hand and lead me across the main room of the Hangar, into Sam’s office.

Sam, who was sitting at his desk in the top right corner of the room, met us with immediate defense. His whole face seemed to furrow with his eyebrows, which was a little ironic considering Alex was sitting cross-legged in an armchair beside the desk looking much less offended, even though his eyebrows were much thicker and, by extension, far more expressive than Sam’s. Alex lifted his hand in a cavalier kind of wave, just a single flick of his wrist. “‘Ello, Tali,” he greeted me with a casual upward curve of his lips. “Nice to see you with two eyes now.”

Playing along, I groaned a little. “I’m so not about that cyclops life, Eyebrows. It was dreadful.”

With a grin on his face, Dean leaned in and kissed the side of my head, right beside my normal eye. “But you made such a beautiful cyclops, even the Olympians couldn’t turn you away.” I swatted at him and huffed. “What?” he laughed. “I think you should go back. I think we could arrange to have one of your eyes removed.”

As we sat down on Sam’s bed, his brown eyes narrowed even further until his brown eyes looked black and squinty. If the rest of his face didn’t look so sour, I would’ve thought he was trying to look at a far-away clock somewhere. Dean huffed, “Careful, Frodo, your face might get stuck like that.”

“This isn’t the time for jokes, Dean,” Sam murmured. “Why is she in here? You know, we’re only supposed to have high-ranking m-members in the m-meetings. Information is on a need-to-know basis, that’s how it’s been since day one, for four years—“

“Fair enough.” Dean shrugged. “Then, why’s Dad here?” In retaliation, Dean pulled me closer and swung my legs over his lap, raising his eyebrows in a cheeky sort of fashion. Sam rolled his eyes and turned his rolling chair away from the desk to face everyone. Casper sat in the corner, flipping around the blade of a Swiss Army knife. Landon sat in a folding chair that had been smuggled down here. His face didn’t look nearly as beat up as mine. That wasn’t particularly fair, not at all. I brushed off the irritation. Now wasn’t the time to play the blame game.

“So, this gala crap,” Cas muttered, popping the bubblegum in his mouth and chewing so audibly that I found it obnoxious. “What’s after this? What comes after Kennedy?”

“Depends on whether it works or not,” Sam jumped in. “Our chances of success seem to be split fifty-fifty with our chances of loss. It’s just as likely that we’ll fail. In fact, that may be skewed. I might be cynical about all this, but everything has to go exactly according to plan—“ He paused and shot a glare to Dean. “The entire mission depends on careful planning and action, or perhaps even inaction, in Tali’s case. We can only strike at certain moments. If we jump the gun or even miss our chance by mere seconds, everything could go downhill quite quickly.”

“Agreed,” Landon piped up. “League militia tends to react rashly. It could really escalate in a matter of seconds.” Dean’s body began to tense up. I wrapped my arms around his center and rested my head on his shoulder; almost immediately, the tension released, and his fingers brushed slowly back and forth against my forearm. His heart slowed down, and it became clear that he hadn’t just brought me in here to listen in.

“So, one misstep, and we could go down in a spray of bullets.” Casper continued flipping his blade open and shut, but he looked up with a devilish grin. “Sounds like my kinda party.”

The meeting was as official and tedious as I thought it would be: just planning and thinking of every possible outcome, trying to think of plans. Our main plan, “Plan A,” was that if things went sour, which we hoped they wouldn’t, Larson and his squad (Garrett, Shane, and Lola) would move to the outside, taking out every militiaman they could on the way and trying to take out others who may have been coming in from the outside. Their main priority was to get outside and keep anymore from entering.

The other team (Dean, Alex, Casper, Avery, and myself) were to plant a bomb beneath the stage at any cost. That bomb was our only chance at blowing Kennedy to smithereens, and it was supposed to be set up during my last song for the evening. The goal was for all of us to get out before detonating it. If things went awry, we still had to plant it, and if we got out, great. If we didn’t, well, such was life.

After quite a long time, there was a lull in the bickering that occurred between the boys, and, rather shockingly, Sam broke the silence. Even more shocking was what he said: “I think that when we win, Tali should act as a second leader.”

What? I must have heard him incorrectly. Maybe there was something in my ear, or maybe Dean had whacked me harder than I thought. “Pardon?” I asked, just to make sure I was correct. Sam merely repeated himself, and I expected people to begin falling out of their chairs. All eyes were on me, and everyone seemed okay with this, even Dean: Mr. “alpha-male-king-of-everything-bow-down-to-me-peasants” Cassidy.

“You heard him,” Alex chuckled, leaning back in his chair. “What’s so shocking?”

“I… I just…” I stammered. Words didn’t exist in my brain anymore. It was as though my entire vocabulary had vanished in the blink of an eye. “I can’t.”

“Why not?” Cas huffed from the corner.

“I’m a woman.” My father had told me plenty of times that women didn’t belong in the government. They were unfit for positions of power and prestige, and that was something best left to men like himself and Dean.

Almost the entire room collapsed in groans. Dean shook his head. “Since when has that ever mattered to you?” he asked. “That’s a pathetic excuse, Blondie.”

Sam sighed faintly and cleared his throat. “I’m going to relate to you on a logical level,” Sam interjected. As if he could relate to me any other way. Certainly couldn’t relate emotionally. The only thing Sam could emotionally relate to was his computer, and that was probably because they bonded over their love of binary code. Nevertheless, I just gave him an encouraging smile and allowed him to speak his mind. “Nobody wants to say it, but Dean’s kind of an idiot.”

“Hey,” Dean protested, eyebrows sinking over his eyes in insult.

Sam barely gave him attention. “You are,” he said bluntly. “Let’s be realistic: if Dean is the sole leader of the entire world, everything would be in rampant chaos. All Dean wants to do is shoot things, and when he’s not shooting things, he’s blowing them up. After a year under Dean, there won’t even be a world to rule. He thinks that’s funny. Look, he’s grinning.” Dean quickly wiped the amusement off his face and shook his head. “Do you really want to put the world in the hands of somebody like that?” Casper murmured some kind of agreement from the corner but averted his gaze to ignore Sam’s aggravated glare.

“Anyway,” Sam continued. “You’re, by every definition, an empathetic and understanding individual, perhaps more so than any other person existing in the world today, which is… weird, but you lived in a house, so you weren’t tainted by all this rubbish—I digress. First of all, you’re rational. You can keep Dean from jumping headfirst into his characteristically catastrophic decisions. You’re also way better with people than Dean is.”

“I’m great with people,” Dean protested.

Alex snorted. “Mate, being feared and being genuinely liked are two totally different things.”

I could practically hear the sound of Dean’s ego being bruised when his face fell, now totally void of any cheer or amusement when he glowered at Alex. “Nobody fears or likes you, Eyebrows, so you wouldn’t even know.”

Laughing, I reached a hand up to touch Dean’s cheek. “Don’t worry, Muscles,” I told him. “I like you just fine.”

A grin graced his features before he leaned down and kissed me. “You’re lovely,” he murmured before pressing another kiss to my cheek. Alex gagged.

Casper’s booming laugh echoed through the room. “Man, don’t hate ‘cause your boyfriend won’t even breathe near you in public.”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” Sam muttered, turning back to the desk, cheeks red with warmth.

“Kid, you’re about as closeted as Liberace,” Cas huffed. “Even dead people know you’re a homo.”

For a bit, this argument continued, and everyone except for Sam agreed that Sam and Alex were, in fact, a couple. Despite all the evidence laid against him, Sam refused to believe he was tied down to anyone. The constant blushing and dismissal of any and all comments, no matter how valid, told me that Sam just didn’t want to say it. The soft gazes he exchanged with Alex several times during the debate, no matter how fleeting, told me that they had probably discussed this already. No matter what garbage Sam was spewing, they had already reached a conclusion. It glowed in Alex’s eyes.

Done with this triviality, Sam shouted louder than I’d ever heard him, voice soaring above all others when he asked, “So, Tali, do you accept your nomination, or not?”

“Yes,” I told him with a nod and a quiet laugh. “Yes, I accept. I will be your president.”

Cas leapt up from the corner hooting and hollering with glee. “Yes!” he cheered, throwing both his fists in the air and shaking them. “Queen Cassidy is real! Bow down, everyone! Bow the fuck down!”

The room burst into laughter, collective and resounding laughter. Cas rushed over to give me a bear hug, and the room was filled with cheer. The stress in the air dissipated, and even through the garrulous enthusiasm and celebration, my eyes caught Landon sitting in that chair with a faltering, lopsided smile on his face.