[Shadowrun] Shatter
Oct. 19th, 2005 09:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
firstlightTitle: Shatter
Genre(s): Cyberpunk, Fantasy
Rating: PG-13 (death, violence)
Themes: #17 Glass; Porcelain
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
giving_ground
Author's notes: This is Shadowrun fanfiction using original characters. I do not own the setting these characters inhabit, have no rights to it, etc. But I do enjoy it. Lots.
And this building exists. It was finished last year or early this year, and it’s the UCL hospital. For some reason, I was walking past it once when they were just finishing it, and had the image of a gunfight taking place in the lobby there. It was quite a Shadowrun gunfight. Frankly, I have no idea why. But that’s probably the reason my warped mind grabbed it for this, though the aforementioned incident does not take place in this fic.
Summary: We have, Senna thinks, a great many chances to alter our path through life.
We have, Senna thinks, a great many chances to alter our path through life.
Hers has forked many times, and she recognises that she has made a choice, conscious or otherwise, every time. Her parents had died; she’d chosen to refuse support. The Marquis had appeared: she’d chosen to follow him.
She would say, looking back, that this was another point at which things changed through her split-second choice, though others might tell her that it barely even rated as such. She was adamant that there was, always, a choice. However unpleasant.
* * * * *
Central London. A medical corporation wanted a sample of a rival’s new drug retrieved from a research facility, and delivered to them... presumably in time to replicate it before the new product went on the market, the Marquis told her. A little research indicated relatively weak magical defence; from there, it was an easy step to arrive at the conclusion that two mages or shamans specialising in illusion would be suited to the task.
“Perhaps it’s about time you tried your hand at the business,” the Marquis had said, and she’d shrugged in a vague agreement.
That’d been it.
Surprisingly simple, no trace of ceremony to it. A choice.
The place they were to hit was on the inner side of the dividing line which was the Euston road, on the very edge of the recognised city centre: a tall structure of green glass, dirtied with age, looming between Tottenham Court Road and the pedestrian area belonging to the University of London. It’d been a university hospital once, and floor plans of it from back then were easily available on the BT grid, though up-to-date ones were hard to come by for those without money to bribe their way through.
They would, the Marquis said, just have to make do. Senna looked up at the building with a mixture of fear and excitement, and said nothing.
The plan was simple, but depended on not being seen. The Marquis had a bag full of electronics, and he’d given Senna a gun. Just in case. They were to walk in, create a few carefully placed distractions if the areas they needed to get to were too heavily guarded, disable the locks between them and their goal. Get the drug. Get out. It sounded simple: “but don’t let the simplicity of the plan make you think it’s going to be easy,” the Marquis had added, a strange sort of smile playing across his features.
Senna knew little, but the Marquis obviously didn’t believe in letting people test the waters and progress at their leisure: she was being thrown straight in. Sink or swim.
It had gone well at first. An older Senna almost laughs at that; doesn’t every runner have a story or ten where those words are used? But at the time, it’d been just enough to make her think that maybe, maybe she could cope with this. They were in the building, masked by the illusion of invisibility, and she’d been creating distractions. A little noise, a little illusion, a little confusion here and there. A few suggestions. The Marquis worked quickly, a combination of magic and technology getting them through door after door.
It’d been Senna’s slip-up, in the end, when they were almost at their goal.
Perhaps the guard was particularly alert, or perhaps she’d allowed her concentration to slip, or not constructed the spell well enough in the first place, but she became suddenly aware that he was looking at her. Not through her.
She dived to the side at the same time as he shot, guided by a kind of desperate urgency. Trying to reconstruct what had happened next was difficult. It was a blur of fear and adrenaline, and pain.
She’d pulled out the gun that the Marquis had given her, feeling a bullet clip the top of her left shoulder. Not much pain, at the time, but an acknowledgement that it’d happened. Later, it had hurt. She’d aimed, pulled the trigger.
(A choice.)
The silencer had killed the sound she’d expected, so that in her memory the shot became the jolt of recoil, and then blood, spreading across the man’s chest as he slid down the wall. She’d stood in shock, unable to do anything more than stare, rooted to the spot. Her hands, still holding the gun out in front of her, were white like porcelain, and she was just beginning to shake as a kind of hysteria set in.
Something in her shattered.
The Marquis found her quickly, must’ve found her quickly because he’d pulled her out of the way, placed a new illusion of his own making over her, and quietened her down. That, she didn’t remember; by the time she was calm enough to think straight, the invisible Marquis was holding her in his arms in a quiet corridor, away from the noise and confusion, soothing her silently. He’d done something to her shoulder, she thought; it didn’t seem to be bleeding as much as it should have been.
It seemed to take forever to get out. There were people everywhere, shouting and running, and Senna was convinced they’d be caught at any moment; but for minute after minute, passage after passage, their luck held, until they slipped out through the main doors behind a distressed-looking suit talking urgently into a phone.
Later, when the Marquis had lifted the illusion from the pair of them, Senna had looked at her pale arms, half expecting to see hairline cracks, porcelain shattered. She still felt sick, scared, and damaged. She could see the man’s face in her mind, contorting with shock and pain. She was pretty sure the sight of the blood spreading from the hole in his chest was going to haunt her.
“Well, girl,” the Marquis had said, looking at her carefully blank face with eyes which said he saw straight past the surface, “don’t kick yourself too hard. You did what you had to, and it didn’t cost us the job.”
She hadn’t said anything. She hadn’t been able to say anything. She’d just smiled an empty smile at him, and walked out into the cold morning, alone. She needed some time to pick up the pieces.
She’d chosen, and she couldn’t go back.
Genre(s): Cyberpunk, Fantasy
Rating: PG-13 (death, violence)
Themes: #17 Glass; Porcelain
Author:
giving_groundAuthor's notes: This is Shadowrun fanfiction using original characters. I do not own the setting these characters inhabit, have no rights to it, etc. But I do enjoy it. Lots.
And this building exists. It was finished last year or early this year, and it’s the UCL hospital. For some reason, I was walking past it once when they were just finishing it, and had the image of a gunfight taking place in the lobby there. It was quite a Shadowrun gunfight. Frankly, I have no idea why. But that’s probably the reason my warped mind grabbed it for this, though the aforementioned incident does not take place in this fic.
Summary: We have, Senna thinks, a great many chances to alter our path through life.
We have, Senna thinks, a great many chances to alter our path through life.
Hers has forked many times, and she recognises that she has made a choice, conscious or otherwise, every time. Her parents had died; she’d chosen to refuse support. The Marquis had appeared: she’d chosen to follow him.
She would say, looking back, that this was another point at which things changed through her split-second choice, though others might tell her that it barely even rated as such. She was adamant that there was, always, a choice. However unpleasant.
* * * * *
Central London. A medical corporation wanted a sample of a rival’s new drug retrieved from a research facility, and delivered to them... presumably in time to replicate it before the new product went on the market, the Marquis told her. A little research indicated relatively weak magical defence; from there, it was an easy step to arrive at the conclusion that two mages or shamans specialising in illusion would be suited to the task.
“Perhaps it’s about time you tried your hand at the business,” the Marquis had said, and she’d shrugged in a vague agreement.
That’d been it.
Surprisingly simple, no trace of ceremony to it. A choice.
The place they were to hit was on the inner side of the dividing line which was the Euston road, on the very edge of the recognised city centre: a tall structure of green glass, dirtied with age, looming between Tottenham Court Road and the pedestrian area belonging to the University of London. It’d been a university hospital once, and floor plans of it from back then were easily available on the BT grid, though up-to-date ones were hard to come by for those without money to bribe their way through.
They would, the Marquis said, just have to make do. Senna looked up at the building with a mixture of fear and excitement, and said nothing.
The plan was simple, but depended on not being seen. The Marquis had a bag full of electronics, and he’d given Senna a gun. Just in case. They were to walk in, create a few carefully placed distractions if the areas they needed to get to were too heavily guarded, disable the locks between them and their goal. Get the drug. Get out. It sounded simple: “but don’t let the simplicity of the plan make you think it’s going to be easy,” the Marquis had added, a strange sort of smile playing across his features.
Senna knew little, but the Marquis obviously didn’t believe in letting people test the waters and progress at their leisure: she was being thrown straight in. Sink or swim.
It had gone well at first. An older Senna almost laughs at that; doesn’t every runner have a story or ten where those words are used? But at the time, it’d been just enough to make her think that maybe, maybe she could cope with this. They were in the building, masked by the illusion of invisibility, and she’d been creating distractions. A little noise, a little illusion, a little confusion here and there. A few suggestions. The Marquis worked quickly, a combination of magic and technology getting them through door after door.
It’d been Senna’s slip-up, in the end, when they were almost at their goal.
Perhaps the guard was particularly alert, or perhaps she’d allowed her concentration to slip, or not constructed the spell well enough in the first place, but she became suddenly aware that he was looking at her. Not through her.
She dived to the side at the same time as he shot, guided by a kind of desperate urgency. Trying to reconstruct what had happened next was difficult. It was a blur of fear and adrenaline, and pain.
She’d pulled out the gun that the Marquis had given her, feeling a bullet clip the top of her left shoulder. Not much pain, at the time, but an acknowledgement that it’d happened. Later, it had hurt. She’d aimed, pulled the trigger.
(A choice.)
The silencer had killed the sound she’d expected, so that in her memory the shot became the jolt of recoil, and then blood, spreading across the man’s chest as he slid down the wall. She’d stood in shock, unable to do anything more than stare, rooted to the spot. Her hands, still holding the gun out in front of her, were white like porcelain, and she was just beginning to shake as a kind of hysteria set in.
Something in her shattered.
The Marquis found her quickly, must’ve found her quickly because he’d pulled her out of the way, placed a new illusion of his own making over her, and quietened her down. That, she didn’t remember; by the time she was calm enough to think straight, the invisible Marquis was holding her in his arms in a quiet corridor, away from the noise and confusion, soothing her silently. He’d done something to her shoulder, she thought; it didn’t seem to be bleeding as much as it should have been.
It seemed to take forever to get out. There were people everywhere, shouting and running, and Senna was convinced they’d be caught at any moment; but for minute after minute, passage after passage, their luck held, until they slipped out through the main doors behind a distressed-looking suit talking urgently into a phone.
Later, when the Marquis had lifted the illusion from the pair of them, Senna had looked at her pale arms, half expecting to see hairline cracks, porcelain shattered. She still felt sick, scared, and damaged. She could see the man’s face in her mind, contorting with shock and pain. She was pretty sure the sight of the blood spreading from the hole in his chest was going to haunt her.
“Well, girl,” the Marquis had said, looking at her carefully blank face with eyes which said he saw straight past the surface, “don’t kick yourself too hard. You did what you had to, and it didn’t cost us the job.”
She hadn’t said anything. She hadn’t been able to say anything. She’d just smiled an empty smile at him, and walked out into the cold morning, alone. She needed some time to pick up the pieces.
She’d chosen, and she couldn’t go back.
