thecapitol | (no subject)

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(no subject)

Who| Alex Murphy, Clara, Punchy remote hacking in
What| Alex is hacked by Punchy: he goes out of control in the Peacekeeper HQ and it goes south, fast.
Where| Peacekeeper Headquarters
When| Mid-day, Monday
Warnings/Notes| Character death. Not yet sure how it'll go down.

Prompts in the comments

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Alex Murphy is sitting quietly at the desk they outfitted for him in the corner, as far away from the "real" Peacekeepers as they could put him. The chair is reinforced to hold his weight and someone who's particularly enterprising has been moving a potted plant a few inches each day until it's partially blocking the other officers from having to see him. As it's easy enough to see around with his HUD and the authorized connections to the HQ's cameras, Alex ignores it for now. Eventually it will become a fire exit hazard. When that moment comes, he'll report it to his handler.

There's a high probability the plant will start moving in front of his desk again.

When he isn't on patrol or carrying out voluntary community service, they have Alex file all the paperwork that they don't want to do. No person in their right mind would like to sit there for hours signing papers and checking dates, stapling and embedding watermarks.

Good thing they have a cyborg.

Alex is in the middle of reviewing some low level traffic incidents - tickets, minor accidents - when he suddenly stops what he's doing with a little spasming jerk, staring ahead without seeming to see. His HUD fuzzes with static before it blacks out, blinding him as the feed to his eyes fail.

[ ALERT: UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS - INITIATE EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN ]

The hacker must have read his mind: when Alex goes for his own shutdown command, he finds that he's been locked out with all his authorization privileges revoked.

Edited 2015-02-23 10:25 (UTC)

Back in District Thirteen, Punchy's in. It's taken several days of work, during which he's hardly slept and showered maybe once, but the wild-eyed look on his face seems more awake than most people are in their entire lives. He looks like a cartoon image of someone sucking a sour candy or holding an electrical wire.

He sits shirtless in the dorm room he shares with Albert, chewing on the cap from the same pen that signed his authorization to miss all trainings to work on this project. The District Thirteen staff wanted oversight, but Punchy petitioned them to let him go it alone; he argued that it was because he worked better solo, and that multiple signals and feeds would mess up the security detail, but the truth is that he doesn't want District Thirteen to make him turn Alex into a lethal weapon. His intention is to make a spy camera out of the cyborg man; there will be no bloodshed here.

He moves slowly, imagining some digital, Matrix-esque version of himself sneaking through a massive, black, blocky landscape like a jewel thief through a museum. He's delicate and precise in his art, because that's what this is, an art cased in the trappings of science.

He knows as soon as he hits his first red flag that he can't afford to be so measured, and he immediately disables Alex's internal controls, as well as placing a temporary block on Alex's ability to speak.

He accesses Alex's visual array (which blinds Alex), and sees a Peacekeeper office that's honestly quite disappointing. He expected a torture chamber, not the set of a live-action Dilbert.

[ACCESS: MOTOR CONTROLS RAISE THUMB co-index GESTURE OF APPROVAL]

And just like that, Alex Murphy is rendered even less human than he was before.

He freezes into a graphene statue, his throat closing up as the module chip grafted along the folds of the Broca area, embedded like the shrapnel from his car they pulled out his skull, denies him access to his own voice. He stares forward, no blinking, just a sightless stare that would look right at home on a corpse. He can see the command as it’s initiated, watching the words scroll across his HUD. There’s absolutely nothing he can do to stop his human hand as it jerks up, freezes at exactly chest level, and curls precisely into a thumbs up, each finger folding in turn.

With the potted plant in the way, that one little movement doesn’t draw any of the other Peacekeepers’ attention.

As an emergency shutdown’s off the table, Alex defaults to the next course of action. He immediately sends out his version of an SOS to his handler: in theory it should have her hitting the phones or hitting the remote kill switch for him. Nothing happens. Everything’s been timed perfectly down to his handler’s lunch break: she’s away from her station several floors up, waiting for her pasta to reheat and hoping Jacob from accounting will ask her on a second date. The SOS goes unanswered, floating into the ether. While Alex isn’t directly thinking at Punchy, he can basically see what the cyborg’s planning to do from his action queue as it updates in real time.

His AI means that where a human would get tired banging up against walls, Alex keeps trying to reroute around the unauthorized user jacked into his system. At the same time he tries to pinpoint a location, some kind of identifier. A face. The database of civilian, Tribute, Peacekeeper and known traitors begins to cycle tabbed to the side of his HUD, too fast for the human eye to follow as he checks and crosschecks.

Punchy, working quickly now, enables a signal disruptor that will make tracking his location impossible. He's sure the Capitol is aware of District Thirteen, but he doesn't want them realizing that it is the center from which the current spires of dissent radiate.

He can't resist leaving some telltale signs of who it is, though. It's not carelessness, but maybe it's ego. Maybe it's because he hopes that news gets back to Dave and Initiate and Gary and Clara that he's out there and fighting the good fight. Maybe it's stubbornness. Maybe he's just curious about how much information his file actually holds.

Regardless, he uses the same hack signature that he used so long ago to crash the network. A human likely wouldn't remember the incident ages ago, before Alex even arrived, but a cyborg's memory is much longer, and its ability to absorb data even moreso.

[ ACCESS: MOTOR CONTROL

RETURN HAND TO NEUTRAL / DEFAULT

ACCESS: A63e78 RECORDS co-index ARMORY / WEAPONS sub-index DEV ]

He gets locked out of weapons development, which doesn't surprise him but which does frustrate him, a little. It would have been quite the feather in his cap to have a sneak-peak into that. After a few attempts to force authorization, he gives up.

[ ENABLE DUAL CONTROLS re: VISUAL:: CTRL2 BACKUP::CTRL1 DEFAULT

ENABLE AUTO trig req auth NEW ACT

ACCESS 54qH367.doc PUN/REHAB/INTERRO ]

He gives Alex his sight back, while he can piggyback on the cam feed. And he gives Alex control to continue about his daily routine, speaking aside. New activities will require Punchy to approve them from afar.

And then he tries to get access to the prison database stats.

Alex, of course, IDs the signature after cross-referencing it. He logs it, reports it, sends it out just like his SOS and there’s that deafening silence from his handler, the kind that would’ve started to scare him if his dopamine levels hadn’t been flatlined. The spike from his feed tells the invader that he’s made the match, flagged it with the highest possible rating he’s authorized to give. He’s doing the cyborg equivalent of shouting to everyone – anyone – who could possibly hear him. Thanks to Punchy being a little too thorough, he’s reduced to a prisoner in his own body, at the mercy of a traitor who desperately needs his face identified.

Unfortunately, OmniCorp didn’t make mistakes when they hooked the connections to Alex’s brain. The hijack ports they installed to ensure that he would be more battle-efficient means he’s also open to vulnerabilities such as his. His hand lowers to flatten against the desk as Punchy peeks through doors, runs through his clearances. Even as he tips his head to look down at the paperwork before him, he’s trying to systematically fight back. It might have been effective if he didn’t broadcast every move to the hacker, every action queue he initiates.

He scrawls a signature onto a form, double-checks it, and then neatly files it into the basket to his right. Another signature. Basket.

The prison database stats come up: a list of those who were released, who required “further assistance” that could be anything from verbal interrogation to outright torture, and those who weren’t fit for release but weren’t important enough to need further assistance. A list of names appears in a list, organized alphabetically. A few are marked with an X – DECEASED IN CUSTODY: PENDING DISPOSAL.

Any distraction could mean the end of Punchy; he's pushing forward through Alex's network while parrying attacks at every step, given only a split second to decide how to disarm whatever safety mechanism Alex puts into place. A typo, a moment's hesitation, a bad call and that's all it would take for this delicate operation to go south. Punchy sucks the inside of his mouth, grinning with his eyes but not with his lips.

This is his realm, he knows. He isn't actually made for the superheroics he tries to model himself after. Everything he does in the Arenas, everything he does to help others through valor and combat are things he struggles tooth and nail for, while right here, under the wire, parsing sense from a language of code and command, he barely seems to be working at all. He feels like he's running through the rain and not getting a drop on him.

(Next to him, one of the few printers in District Thirteen starts to spit out everything Punchy's getting from Alex. Punchy barely pays it mind, unaware that it's puking up a eulogy for the man who's already doomed by Punchy's imperfect competence.)

And then he messes up, only a little bit, only a half-second too late to backspace out of an ill-chosen command, and he gives Alex a little bit of leeway. Not Alex, the machine, but the suppressed man inside the body. Maybe he did it on purpose, out of some naive and hapless belief that Alex would be both willing and capable of aiding his 'rescuer'. Maybe it's just a mistake. Punchy lacks the self-reflection to know, leaving the hypotheticals in his wake as he continues his forward advancement.

For those first couple of minutes, Alex starts to wake up - the suppression slips, melts away in slow, uneven chunks. His dopamine levels rise in jerks. His blocked feed spikes with new, undesirable thought processes that would (should) have brought his handler slamming down on his kill switch. It's the equivalent of someone dragging themselves out of sleep paralysis only to realize he isn't in his bed, he's suddenly on an island with traffic inches away from turning him into road kill.

The first sign that something's changes is the frequency of attacks and attempted bypasses. They peter out from an endless, systematic assault to something that's actually clumsy, unfocused, like the person behind it suddenly doesn't know - or care - how to prioritize. They're uncoordinated, more of a man trying to struggle against someone bigger and stronger. Even with the confusion and panic starting to set in, Alex knows he’s under attack. Wouldn’t be the first time someone wanted him out of the picture. This is just more of the same, he thinks.

For the first time since the unauthorized access began, Alex actually tries to communicate with the intruder. He’s still rendered mute as Avox even as he signs off on forms he suddenly doesn't care about.

WHO ARE YOU scrolls across his HUD. His heartrate jumps, throat closing up like he's got a lump in it.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING. STOP. LEAVE ME ALONE.

Punchy doesn't know much about biological programming, cybernetics, any of that. His bailiwick is decidedly in the computerized part of technology, and thus he provides no help to Alex in changing his endorphin levels or reactivating his neural capacity. It isn't until Alex starts talking to him that he even really even pays attention to the man in the metal exoskeleton.

RSCUIN U

HOW I BRK UR PROGRAMN

Some security feature, beyond Alex's control, starts barraging Punchy. There's a lengthy pause before he communicates again, putting words right into Alex's HUD, scrolling marquee-style.

HELP ME HELP U
STOP FIGHTN BCK

The time Punchy took to give that command is a millisecond too long, and just like that he's blocked out of Alex's controls, ejected, shut down. Punchy sucks his teeth and scrambles in his bedroom to reset the connection, hands flying over his keyboard. For a moment he pauses, holding his cloth and wooden puppet like a rosary, whispering a prayer under his breath and hoping Alex picks up where he left off.

Punchy's brief blink-or-you'll-miss-it sloppiness will, at the very least, make the news in the Capitol.

Of course it's chalked up to a fault in Alex's native programming - there's no mention of a hacker bypassing Peacekeeper security systems, nothing to give him even that much to use as a terrorist's propaganda.

When Alex Murphy stands up, he's still a man trapped inside the chassis, unaware that Punchy's blown millisecond has erased that little DO NOT SHOOT ON SIGHT list they uploaded to his targeting system.

With Punchy's hack running haywire across his systems, Alex Murphy goes rogue. He doesn't book it out of the building for his own freedom. That would be too neat, a happy ending for a man who's been jerked around by OmniCorp and the Capitol over and over until there's practically nothing recognizable left.

When he gets up from his desk, half-blinded by an HUD overrun with error messages and what seems to be a voice, male; unauthorized, Alex staggers instead of walks with that usually neat left-right-left of his. His internal stabilizers turn at the wrong RPM, unable to properly synch to his software.

One of the Peacekeepers almost slams into his chest, looks up, and starts to joke about the cyborg having one too many drinks when Alex's hand shoots out. Graphene slams into the soft, exposed throat. Fingers squeeze with unforgiving force. The man's eyes bulge before Alex neatly snaps his neck and drops the body.

It doesn't take too long for the other Peacekeepers to notice the dead man.

Most of them run for weapons, safety, outside to barricade the building. The few who decide to be heroes find out the hard way that even glitching, Alex can still shrug off the taser rounds, the ammunition that's too low of a caliber to dig into his armor. Soon there are several more bodies sprawled across desks, the floor. Alex wanders the bullpen, his taser pistol held loosely in one hand as if he could drop it at any time, his head listing to the side as he weaves like a drunk and bumps off desks that his HUD warns him is an obstruction seconds too late.

Clara Murphy arrives just in time to slip through the cordon...

Edited 2015-02-23 10:44 (UTC)

One of Clara's first lessons as a Mentor was that she needed to keep a close eye on the Capitol's version of social media. Not just the main network, but the other bits and pieces. The Twitter and Tumblr equivalents where people talked about the excitement of the Games and what their opinions on the Tributes were. No matter how much she just wanted to block them out for good after winning and finding loads of posts about how she 'didn't deserve her win' (fair enough) or how Tom should've won instead of her (and at least a few talking about wanting him to give them a mustache ride which was just way too much information for her), she knew it was the best way to keep tabs on potential sponsors.

So when a celebutante who had spent her night in the drunk tank put up a mention that Alex was 'causing oodles of mayhem @ PKHQ' according to what she had overheard from a couple Peacekeepers, Clara hopped to her feet and felt like she had practically flown to the scene.

There's an eerie sense of deja vu that she can't quite shake. It feels like that night she had been called to OmniCorp all over again. True, this time she wasn't taken there by a higher up in a fancy car and (thankfully) David isn't at her side. Though, if this ends like the meeting at OmniCorp did and she gets returned home...well, she wouldn't be able to complain in the slightest.

Clara squeaks past the cordon and just keeps running, forgoing the elevators and bee-lining for the stairs. This isn't like the familiar DPD station she used to visit Alex in, she has no clue where she's going. By the time she finally finds Alex, her stomach lurches. The scene before her looks like an exaggeration of the story Sellars had fed her months ago and she can't help but remember the excuse he had fed her then. And, yes, she knows now that it wasn't true, but something in her, be it gut instinct or something else, tells her to proceed with caution, that maybe this time is really is a psychotic break.

It's a moment after she notices the bodies that she notices Alex stumbling around in a manner she hasn't seen in years. He isn't drunk, she knows that for certain, but something's going on. Clara's fully aware that it's not the smartest thing to do, but she runs over to him and grabs his arm in an attempt to help steady him. "It's okay, baby, I'm right here."

It’s a small miracle that when Alex wheels on Clara, his head swiveling as if there’s no tendons, no muscle, he doesn’t just shoot her like the others. It isn’t like she isn’t immediately assigned to the targeting queue. His hand starts to jerk up with the pistol ratcheted up to a voltage setting much, much higher than the one he tased her with not that long ago. It creaks to a stop halfway as he stares at her face without recognizing her at first, his own face that blank mask splattered with something that might’ve been someone’s blood. The truth is Clara can’t hope to steady him if he does pitch over – he outweighs her by several hundred pounds with the graphene chassis attached to what’s left of her husband. If Alex collapses, he’s taking her with him.

His eyes are unfocused, flat. He struggles to see through the HUD glitching out all over the place, the conflicting commands his AI piles on that threaten to overload all his systems. Clara’s face resolves in the gaps, the emotional analysis markers jittering all over her face and unable to get a lock. Her mismatched eyes swim into focus.

“…Clara?” Alex’s voice comes out in a strangled choke.

With every aspect of his body, from the actuators to the chips embedded into the folds of his brain, rebelling against him, there’s the slightest of silver linings. The suppression slips, the flatline of his existence wobbling. The first emotion that flits across his face is fear: pure, unadulterated fear. His mouth works, fingers tightening around the taser pistol only to loosen. He sways dangerously again, something inside him clicking like a fan on its last legs.

“Can’t. I…can’t,” can’t move, can’t drop the gun. Alex’s tongue flicks out to wet his lips. If he had a visible Adam’s Apple, it would be bobbing nervously. “You shouldn’t be here.”

He pulls his arm away from Clara with a jerk. He could tell Clara about all the warnings popping up on his HUD like adware, that his life-support might be compromised. But the first thought on his mind is Clara shouldn’t see this, just like back in China when he’d pushed the camera close on his face so she couldn’t see what OmniCorp did to him.

Clara is well aware of her physical limits. She knows that she doesn't have a hope or a prayer of steadying him, but that doesn't stop her from trying, as if she can keep him upright through sheer force of will alone.

She tries desperately to look like the picture of effortless calm, even though right now she's terrified, especially when she really starts to hear the sounds coming from his chassis. She can't help but feel her stomach lurch as she begins to fully realize how dire the situation really is. And the sight of him coming back to himself now of all times only makes her all the more resolute to stay calm, if only for his sake.

“No, I’m exactly where I need to be,” she says, her voice wobbling slightly as she tries to fight back the urge to cry. “I need you to put the gun down and then we can try to find a way to fix this.” She sounds so certain when she says it, like it’s as simple as fixing a car.

Except she knows it isn’t that simple, not now. Dr. Norton’s and Punchy are both, to the best of her knowledge, dead and gone and Tony Stark is still in the Arena (which makes her want to cry and shout all the more because, as little as she knows him, he’s the most qualified person she can think of that’s still alive and he’s completely inaccessible).

"I can't put it down," Alex's voice breaks. It distorts, takes on a strange double tone as if it's been put through a filter.

He does try, for her sake. He tries to take control of a hand that looks like his but isn't. The scar across his knuckles is gone, removed by OmniCorp during the reconstruction. It's probably reinforced with something instead of "mere" human bone. He can feel something jamming in the center of his palm, that same clicking sound migrating to his hand as he tries to force his fingers to uncurl and release the gun. At best he manages to delay his targeting AI from trying to add Clara to the list. It's a question of how long he can hold it off before it overrides him, not if. Fear chokes him, makes up for all that time under the suppression. Clara stands even less of a chance than the Peacekeepers he already killed.

His eyes flicker around the room, darting like he’s looking for exits, blinking furiously as if he can blink away the warnings screaming across his HUD. Eventually he comes back to Clara, looking so small and fragile without even anything like body armor to at least slow him down.

“I, uh, I don’t think you can fix it,” Alex struggles to force his arm down with the other when it starts to jerk up. “Got – I got,” he twitches, starts to go down onto one knee before he catches himself on a desk. “Hacked. Everything comp…compromised.”

He wants to tell her that she needs to leave right now and find his handler, have her hit him with the kill switch or something because that might be the only thing that could save Clara’s life. The kill switch might not even work. But at least sending her on the errand will get her out of the line of fire, which is the only thing that matters at this point.

The way Alex sounds is unnerving, to say the least. Enough that she almost wants to turn around and run away, except she knows that she would never be able to do that, not to him. Instead she stands her ground, reaching out to try to take the gun out of his hand herself, foolhardy though it may be.

For once in her life, Clara is totally at a loss about what to do. She knows on some level that it would probably be in her best interest to leave, but she can't bring herself to do it, instead mentally scrambling to figure out a way to fix this. For all that she knows about technology from being a child of the Computer Age, this is way too far out of her depth. She could maybe figure out how to circumvent a crashed computer, or a virus (with online tutorials, of course), but a hacked AI? Not a chance.

Which doesn't mean she's willing to give up on him either.

"I know I can't," she says, trying to keep her voice calm and steady. "But I'm sure that there's someone who could." She hates the idea of asking the Capitol for help with anything, but right now she'd be willing to consider it. "Listen to me, we're going to get through this and then we'll find a way to get out of here, I promise." And really, she almost kind of believes it.

She's not leaving. It sinks in that Clara's still here, fear clenching his throat like a stranglehold. He's see that look on her face before back home, here in the Capitol, and he wishes he could say with a straight face that he believes her. That everything could be talked through and that it isn't a matter of trying to fight the targeting system that's dead set on trying to tase her with a voltage that's much higher than the last time.

His knee locks into place, refusing to unfold so he can stand back up. Alex has this vague plan of trying to get somewhere secure. Maybe the weapons vault with its reinforced walls and door, except he already knows he's had his clearance level revoked. It's either that or he forcibly escorts Clara out, and that's assuming he can make it the next couple of minutes without turning her into a hunk of charcoal.

Alex's head creaks as he glances over. His jaw works as he struggles to compose himself. He doesn't need the glitching AI to calculate the probability that they both might die. It won't take too long for the Peacekeepers to kick the door down and storm the place.

"How? It's..." he trails off into static, closing his eyes and swallowing before he trusts himself to speak again. "The connection's corrupted. There's no one who can tap in," Alex's voice takes on a strangled tone as he forces himself to look Clara in the face. She's tired, with dark circles under her eyes that the makeup they put on her here can't hide. "Please, Clara. Get back outside!"

He snaps at her without meaning to, for the first time in months sounding a mix of angry and panicked and shitting bricks.

Clara is well aware of the fact that sometimes she can be painfully stubborn and that driving her heels into the ground like she is right now isn't always the best choice. But at the same time, she can't think of another option. She's gone through the cycle of losing him and getting him back too many times now, and she doesn't intend for it to end like this (the only way she intends for it to end is for them to get out of the Capitol and live out the rest of their lives).

It's that stubbornness that keeps her in the room, instead of turning around and running for safety. "No," she says as she tries not to lose her shit on a catastrophic level. That won't help either of them right now. Instead she does her best to stay calm and ignore the tears pricking at her eyes.

She can't remember ever seeing Alex look this scared, which only pushes her on. She reaches up and brushes his cheek with her fingers before finally cupping her hand against it, trying to pretend that she can't feel the graphene siding as well. "Dr. Norton's gone, but I'm sure that there's someone here who knows how to get around all that." She tries to sound as reassuring as possible, even though she can hear her heart pounding in her ears as she wracks her brain to try to remember if Carlos ever said anything about specific District 13 contacts in the Capitol.

Despite her fears, and how bone tired she is, she forces a small smile on her face. "And I finally got you back, so I don't intend on going anywhere."

Alex’s face freezes – not in that mask from the suppression but in the stiff goddamit, Clara expression he got once in a blue moon. She could count on one hand how many times he’s gotten that look.

“Clara,” he swallows, tries to focus past the error messages fluttering across his HUD like floaters. “I just killed a bunch of Peacekeepers. They’re get back in here,” he forces a stiff hand to cup hers, “They’re not gonna bother with repairs.”

It’s blunt, a jerk move to tell your wife to her face there’s a good chance you aren’t leaving this room alive. Probably, and he doesn’t need the fancy million dollar probability program to tell him that. Still needs to be said. He’s seen how these people work, knows first hand their policy on liabilities. Before he was neatly controlled, this side project that might have shown the Peacekeepers that they could make more like him and stop worrying about sick days and bribes. Now he’s just shown him that a security compromise can turn him – or someone like him – on them, just like that, just like flipping a switch. That loyalty he had before vanishes in seconds. The messed up thing is he can see why they’re mobilizing the real heavy fire power to punch through his armor. The jittery images he gets, like flashes of déjà vu, from the security cameras around the building says they don’t have long.

He manages to control his hand long enough that he can grip Clara and pull her gently, but steadily, away from his face. She might be a Victor but he figures she’ll be considered expendable. To the Peacekeepers, his wife’s just an acceptable casualty. He’s heard his “co-workers” gossip: Clara doesn’t have the fans of Victors like Katniss and Peeta.

“I’ll meet you outside, okay?” Alex settles for lying, knowing that if he doesn’t, Clara will be the woman he married and put her foot down.

Clara knows that look. Hell, she has her own version of it that's gotten a hell of a lot more mileage than the look Alex is wearing right now. And she can't help but be a little (okay, a lot) peeved that he's giving her that look right now, of all moments. Sure, she can understand why, but at the same time, can't he save it for later?

Never mind the fact that there's a small, niggling fear that they don't have a later. She can't pay attention to that right now, same goes for the fatalistic Alex is speaking. Because of course they do. In her mind, this isn't how their story's supposed to end. It's supposed to end in fifty or so years, after they've gotten to a place that's better than where they are now, both physically and emotionally.

The only reason she doesn't bring up District 13 is because she's fairly certain that someone from the Capitol is watching them. It's the one thing she's holding onto right now, that someone in 13 or someone else connected to the rebellion is also watching and is planning a way to get them out of here safely.

Of course, Clara's never really been willing to believe in no-win scenarios and that's a big part of it.

Otherwise...well, the otherwise is something she refuses to acknowledge. That they'll find a way to kill Alex and probably her along with him. Suddenly she can't help but wonder if that's what happened to Punchy and Wyatt, if they accidentally got in the way of something and were viewed as expendable.

"No," she says, knowing it comes out sounding sharper than she had planned. "We're going to get out of this together. We're going to be fine." She doesn't realize how her eyes flicker away from his face towards the ceilings like she's expecting for someone to come through at any moment. "We're going to be fine and then we'll go on that trip and we'll get through all of this."

Clara says that only because she doesn’t know the Peacekeepers like he does. Maybe he wasn’t best buddies with any of them - Alex remembers, as if from a distance, that none of them invited him out to drinks after shifts or even had a real conversation with him that wasn’t stilted, distrustful – but he knows their operating procedures. What, exactly, they do to elements that no longer have a use, that are liabilities. These are the people who bombed the holy hell out of their own District. Busting out the big guns to take down a cyborg isn’t that long of a stretch.

“Goddamit, Clara,” Alex grits out. It’s the first time he’s actually lost his temper in months and he isn’t at all ready for what it feels like: it’s not a brief, millisecond spike. It’s an uncontrolled wave in comparison, a flash of anger and fear and everything in between. He reaches forward, manages to fight his way past the error messages to order his hand – OminCorp’s hand – to grip around Clara’s arm so he can frog-march her out if he has to.

It occurs to Alex too late, human-reaction late, that they should’ve moved away from the skylight.

He’s in the middle of dragging her to the back door when the Peacekeeper squad comes rappelling down, the glass spraying down in a shower as his faulty targeting system struggles to pinpoint the first one to pacify. The first thought he has is irrational, the kind that the suppression wouldn’t have wasted its time with. He thinks got to get Clara out of the way even though his AI would argue that, logically, he’s the primary target, not her. She’s a Victor, she has just enough fans on record that killing her would result in backlash. But Alex Murphy, husband, is in the driver’s seat for the first time in months. He reacts without thinking, pushing her away from him.

He turns toward the first Peacekeeper as she touches down. [ FEMALE; 5’7’’…GIMANI, LENA -- ??]. His other hand comes up on its own accord with the pistol. The lag is fatal. It’s fast, over in seconds. The thunder of the woman’s cannon cracks, his graphene chest plate shatters as the round punches through. Debris splatters out: high impact glass, wires, something red and glistening that could be his lungs or his heart being shredded into mincemeat. The blast actually kicks all several hundred pounds of Alex backward with the force of a battering ram.

It’s a stroke of luck he doesn’t crush Clara as he slams into the ground, sprawled on his back, eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling.

Clara doesn't know exactly what she expected, but whatever it was, it definitely wasn't Alex losing his temper. And if this were any other situation, she would probably snap right back at him to stop being so stubborn because she's just trying to help. Hell, from the look on her face, there's a good chance that she might.

Until there's a crack and crash above them from the shattered skylights. She doesn't know how she missed that there were skylights in here, other than the fact that she just wasn't paying attention and that she doesn't know this place like she knows Alex's DPD station (knew, really, from what Jack had told her about the bleeding edge renovations OmniCorp has poured into the station). Between that and the fact that there are Peacekeepers swarming in, all she wants to do is stay close to him so they can get out of here together.

Which, from the way he pushes her away, she quickly realizes that might not actually happen, as much as she doesn't want to admit it.

Everything's happening too fast for her to know what's going on and properly react. Before she really understands, there's a boom-shatter-thud as someone yanks her by her arm. It's only a moment later when she finally sees Alex sprawled out and lets out a sound that echoes through the room and sounds less like it would come from her and more like it would come from some sort of feral, wounded animal as she tries to fight her way out of her captor's grasp.

She doesn't hear the man who's holding onto her call out for someone to get him a tranq, or the way it feels when someone grabs onto her arm and forces a syringe into it. No, instead she's far too focused on the fact that Alex is dead and these people killed him (and that, no, he can't be dead because he's survived worse than this and Dr. Norton had even told her that Alex had survived back home, so he had to survive here to get home. Right? That's how this was all supposed to work).

It's that mix of grief and denial that lingers with her as she finally stops fighting and succumbs to the tranquilizer. In the morning, when she wakes up, she'll hope that this was all just some sort of vivid nightmare, that Panem and the Arenas were just a vivid nightmare. That the carbomb was just a nightmares. That none of this has been real and she'll wake up next to him and send David off to school and everything will be fine and normal.

Except it won't be. What she'll wake up to is a newscast with a bulletin interrupting the broadcast of the Arena to report that Alex Murphy had a psychotic break and murdered a number of Peacekeepers before trying to do the same to her. That she was fortunate to be rescued.

She won't feel fortunate at all.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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Punchy

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and thread end

Clara Murphy - post hack

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and he's a goner!

just tossing a thread wrap on here!