[ 09 - CHAPTER NINE ]

― someone i don't know ―

The inside of Orion's mind was like a hurricane. A dangerous, malicious hurricane that, no matter how many whips and chains were thrown its way, would not bow down at the feet of anyone. It refused to even lower its head when faced the royalty of Saros, a sentiment that was not ignored by Orion.

His thoughts and memories were being tossed around in his head like leaves caught in a strong wind. His conscience, a coveted artifact that had been missing for years, was bending at the orders of Orion's storm . And his will, a net that would be strong enough to trap the rage of his internal hurricane, was locked up far in the recesses of his mind, in a place so deep that Orion himself was too scared to search for it. He wished only for solitude. For an escape from the rampage inside of him. And yet, even a storm of his own creation had no eye. How was it fair that his subconscious, the serpent-tongued demon that always claimed to be on his side, had been so cruel as to create a hurricane all those years ago and not offer Orion a break, an eye to the storm that would give him a safehouse?

Alas, there he lied in the darkness of his own thoughts, his eyes too tired of tears to bear any more.

He wished he hadn't woken up. The toxin the agents had given him when they pressed a needle into his neck was a blessing in disguise. That angelic toxin had granted him unconsciousness, and in that unconsciousness, his hurricane of a mind had ceased its incessant chatter. Finally, he'd reached the eye of the storm.

But now, the effects of the toxin had worn off. He was awake. His vision was filled with blinding fluorescent lights, his surroundings vacant of everything except four white walls and a door. The lack of furniture, when combined with what had happened before he'd gone unconscious, could only mean that he was being imprisoned by the men in black suits. With another glance around the room, Orion felt a deep and unhappy rumbling in his throat. They hadn't even let Titan share a cell with him.

"Hey!" Orion shouted, hoping that someone - one of the agents from before, maybe - could hear him. "Where's my dog?"

His words echoed off the walls and droned off into silence, pulling a sigh from between his parted lips. Had he really expected anyone to answer him?

Suddenly, a window on the wall across from him caught his attention. His left eyebrow lifted in a perplexed arch. There was a person on the other side of the window. He rose to his feet and stumbled closer to the stranger who, in turn, was staggering over to him. Orion's eyes narrowed. Then, when the hollow eyes of the stranger narrowed as well, Orion's eyebrows shot up. The stranger hadn't been a stranger at all, but a person more familiar to him than his own family. The stranger on the other side of the window was himself, and the window wasn't a window, as he'd originally thought. Orion had been gazing into a mirror the entire time, and he hadn't even realized it.

How could he not recognize his own face? Had he really changed so much that he could not recognize the irises of his own eyes, the intricacies of his appearance that he should know as well as his own name? Despite his disbelief, as he continued to stare at the cloudy mirror in front of him, it dawned upon him that his inability to recognize himself might not have been so insane after all.

His shoulders, once proud and boastful of the skin it wore, appeared to have shrunk since his last days on Saros. His eyes, the eyes whose specks once encapsulated the twinkling stars in the night sky, were sunken back into the hollows of his skull. And his hair - oh, his chocolate curls used to drive Saros' bachelorettes absolutely mad - was now parted in the middle and thinning, its tips nearly reaching his nose. The beginnings of a beard were even beginning to form on his chin.

The disfigurements of his appearance made sense, however, when he remembered how long it had been since he'd looked into a mirror. Just a few months earlier, he'd been plagued with violent memories of his past, a plague that had ended with him striking the only mirror in his apartment. The mirror was never repaired.

"Hello?" he called out, still unable to tear his gaze away from his reflection. He'd never thought it would be so jarring to see the ghost of who he once was.

He lifted his hand slowly, and his reflection followed suit. He couldn't help but notice the new cracks in his fingers as he placed them gently against the mirror, the lines on his hands representing a newfound dryness that the absence of his lotions left behind. A smile crept onto his face as he reminisced of simple comforts like lotion, but it was a smile that was quick to fade.

His brow furrowed. The mirror...there was something not quite right about it. Could it just be that the unfamiliarity of his reflection was setting him on edge, causing his mind to create paranoia where there was no need for it?

All of a sudden, discernment hit Orion as harshly as the winds of his mind. There was no gap between his fingers and the reflection of his fingertips. With all mirrors, even ones that were custom made by the craftsman of Saros, provided a gap when you pressed something against it.

It was a game he and Titania used to play when they were children. They would go around the surveillance quarters of the palace, testing each mirror with their fingertips to see if it was truly a mirror or just pretending to be one. If there was a gap between their fingertips and their reflection, then it was a mirror. If there was no gap...

"You!" Orion yelled, his voice hoarse from disuse. "You, on the other side of this glass! I demand that you let me out of here!"

He pounded against the glass, and it shook in its holders. There was no gap. What he'd thought to be a mirror was really a pane of glass, created so that you could only see through it from one side. There was someone - multiple someones, probably - watching him from the other side of the glass. Orion was sure of it.

"I said let me out!" he repeated.

He raised his fist to pound on the glass once more, and just as he was about to let it fall on the hideous reflection of what he'd become, the door to his cell opened and a man walked through. The man was dressed in a black suit, his attire a stark contrast to the spotless white walls of the cell they stood in. The bottom half of his face was adorned with a scruffy beard, his hair was gelled to one side, and his dark eyes were piercing as they glared at Orion.

"Who are you?" Orion growled.

"My name is Grant Ward," the man snapped back, not missing a beat when he added, "Who are you?"

Orion gave no answer. He only stared at the man - Grant - and waited for him to give some explanation of why he was being held captive. They couldn't possibly know where he'd come from. He'd kept his true identity a secret from everyone in fear that he would be apprehended, which it appeared he finally had been.

Grant cleared his throat. "I've been ordered to escort you to a different area of our facility, and the people behind that window want me to take you in handcuffs. I think you can be trusted enough to go without them. Can you?"

Once more, Orion neglected to give an answer. He'd only felt real, raw fear a few times in his life - once, when a battle wound had nearly taken his life, and another time, when he'd taken the lives of thousands of his own men by ordering them into the battle on Cygnus. Now, as he was realizing that his life was in the hands of Grant Ward and his associates, he found himself dangling on a string once more, with fear acting as his puppet master.

If he did not heed Grant's wishes, he was sure he would face consequences for his disobedience. He'd seen organizations like this before. They played no games when it came to dealing with their prisoners. So, like the puppet he was, he danced on the strings his master held. He followed Grant into the hallways that encircled his cell.

If his mind had been in peak condition, he might have attempted to memorize the maze of hallways he was being led through. If he got the chance, that piece of knowledge would be the deciding factor on whether an escape would be successful or not. However, after months of neglect and abandonment, the edges of his mind had dulled. He couldn't even turn his head without losing awareness of his surroundings - it would be impossible to memorize the blueprints of government headquarters in his state.

"This door," Grant said, gesturing to the door on Orion's right that read 'I-C'. "Someone's already waiting for you."

Orion rested his hand on the doorknob. It was plain and silver, its edge elongated into a rectangular shape. The cool metal stung his fingertips, and a crimson stain on the knob made him wonder what sorts of people had walked through this door before him.

He pushed open the door and, to his surprise, came face to face with the woman whose hair had burned itself into the lining of his memory. Her vibrant, fiery red hair was as straight as a piece of straw and just barely reached her shoulders. Her features were porcelain and had perfectly aligned themselves with the curves of her face, her lips plump and entrancing in their own bewitching sort of way. But her eyes...he hadn't been able to glimpse them before, when his face had been buried in gravel, but now that he could see them...her eyes alone made him wonder if there was a god, because how else could someone so ethereal manage to exist?

"Are you gonna stand there forever or do you want to take a seat?" she asked, and as a corner of her mouth turned up in an amused smirk, Orion couldn't help but be reminded of a tiger. Gorgeous and alluring, but almost as if her purr was two-faced, like the beauty would kill you if you got too close.

Orion's sandals slid against the floor as he trudged over to the seat she had been referring to. It was the only open chair in the room, and the only piece of furniture save for the chair she was sitting in and a table that divided the two seats.

"Do you wanna tell me your name?" the woman questioned.

Orion lowered himself into the straight-backed chair and crossed his arms over his chest. "Do you wanna tell me yours?"

Orion knew what he'd been brought in this room for. He was no fool - he'd seen similar situations a countless amount of times before. Granted, on Saros, their interrogations involved much more blood and battery, but who was to say that wasn't the way these people worked?

The red-headed woman lifted her arms onto the table in front of her and folded her hands, letting out a short-lived laugh as she retorted, "This is going to be a very long interrogation if you insist on answering all my questions with a question of your own."

Orion's jaw clenched. He'd been living on Earth peacefully for a year. Why did these people insist on questioning him all of a sudden, when he hadn't done anything that would alert him of his presence?

Nonetheless, he realized what she'd said was true. If he didn't give them something, then he would likely be locked in a wretched cell for the rest of his life. And so, for yet another time since he'd landed in the government facility, and surely not for the last, he agreed to another performance and let his masters take control of his strings.

"Kyle," Orion mumbled, flicking his gaze downwards to make it seem like he was bowing in submission. "My name is Kyle Wick."

Of course, Kyle Wick wasn't really his name. It was a pseudonym he'd pulled from the most recent names he'd heard - Kyle, from the employee at the pet store, and Wick, from the main character of a movie he'd seen on the television in his apartment. At first, he thought that the red-haired woman believed him. But then, as a flicker of amusement appeared behind her eyes, he realized that she knew he was lying.

He tried not to scowl. How could this organization - an institution he'd never made contact with in his life - know who he truly was?

The woman smiled, and the material of her brown, leather jacket straightened as she pulled at its cuffs. "Let's try this again. What's your birth name? You know, the one that people like us would put on papers like this."

At the mention of papers, she pointed at a stack of them that lied on the table between the two. The word 'confidential' decorated the front of each of them in bold, red ink, and paragraphs of scripted wording lined the page. Orion had never seen a paper like it, but at the sight of his name, his real name, at the top of the first page, he felt the blood drain from his face. He wouldn't have been surprised if the paper listed every fact about him known to man. However, to his great relief, the paper included more and more question marks as the page went on, and the pile of papers was rather small.

When Orion didn't offer a reply to the woman's question, she spoke up once more, saying, "We know who you are, Orion."

A soft 'click' resounded throughout the room, and Orion turned his head to see the man with one eye. He had an eye patch wrapped around his head, its matte bandage covering his left eye, and darkened scars were spreading from beneath it like the tendrils of an octopus. The tail of his black trenchcoat whipped as he walked across the room, his shoulders held back as if he owned the entire facility. Which he supposed, as the redhead stood so he could have her seat, that he did.

"Orion Atlas," the man boomed as he dropped a cardboard box on the table. "You're a hard man to find."

'Good,' Orion thought. He hadn't wanted these people to find him, anyway.

Orion's gaze drifted to the box that sat on the table, and when the man with the eye patch asked if he wanted to look inside it, he rose to his feet to peer at the contents of the container. When he did, his heart skipped a beat in his chest. Inside the box were things that had become familiar to Orion in his time on Earth - a name tag from his job at the local Dairy Queen, a notebook he used for morning journaling sessions, and a bag of dog treats. A frown creased Orion's brow, though he'd tried to suppress it. The things in this box were some of the only possessions he had left, and each one of them had come from his apartment.

"Who are you?" Orion murmured, his voice a gravelly and deep reflection of his blossoming anger. Who were these people to search his apartment, when he hadn't even done anything wrong?

The man with the eye patch waited until Orion looked up at him, and when he did, he answered in a matter-of-fact manner, "Nick Fury, director of S.H.I.E.L.D.. And right now, I'm the person who decides whether you live to see another day or not. So I'd suggest, Mr. Atlas, that you answer my questions very clearly."

Orion swallowed, and it felt like he'd just forced one of Titan's balls down his throat. He'd never heard of S.H.I.E.L.D. before, so the man's title wasn't what sent a shiver of foreboding down his spine. Rather, it was the blind trust the red-haired woman seemed to have for him as she stood, stagnant, by his side. Orion was no stranger to indisputable loyalty, and in his experience, the men who could command that sort of loyalty were the most dangerous kind. His father had proven that.

"I know you come from Saros," Fury began, his eyes widening as Orion's expression hardened. "We found an insignia on your ship that told us that. Saros isn't known for its peaceful behavior, so tell us...why did they send you here?"

A shaky breath of air flooded Orion's lungs as his mouth opened, his lips careful as they enunciated, "They didn't send me. I came on my own."

He didn't want to give these people answers. In fact, it was the last thing he wanted to do. But he'd hurt his people enough already. If Nick Fury had any suspicion at all that Saros had ill intentions toward Earth, then it was Orion's job to dissuade those suspicions. Even though he was no longer a prince, that title having been stripped from him the moment he'd stolen his father's ship, it was his duty to protect his people.

"I see. And what are your intentions?" Fury continued.

Orion shrugged and scratched at his beard. Had his facial hair always been so itchy? "I wanted to get away from Saros."

Fury reached in the cardboard box, his gaze unwavering from Orion's as he shuffled through the contents. When it seemed he had what he wanted, he pulled it out and set it on the table for Orion to see. A smile crept onto the Sarosian man's face. It was a personalized calendar he'd bought from Wal-Mart a few months ago, right after he'd discovered that Earth, oddly enough, had a different way to keep track of time than Saros did. Where Saros only had four months in its calendar - one for each season of the year - Earth had twelve, and it was the most confusing calendar Orion had ever seen.

The personalized calendar was the only way Orion was able to keep track of the days he spent on Earth, and as Nick Fury flipped through the pages to the map of February, Orion's smile only grew. With every page that was flipped, a new picture of Titan stared back at him. Pictures of Titan, or him with Titan, were the only pictures Orion had, so those were the only ones he'd offered when Wal-Mart had asked for pictures.

"If your intentions were simply to get away from your home country," Fury began as he pointed to the dates in the February page of the calendar. He seemed to be mostly concerned with the things Orion had written on each of the days. "Then do you wanna explain this?"

Orion rose an eyebrow. "It's a calendar. What is there for me to explain?"

Fury's finger moved to February twentieth, his tone sardonic as he asked, "Well to start, you can tell me what this nonsense is supposed to mean, because it looks like some demonic crap to me."

When Orion saw what he'd written on that date, he couldn't help but wince. His heart twisted in on itself, his chest convulsing as memories flooded his mind, and he was certain his pain would be obvious to anyone as he said, "That's my mother's birthday. I didn't want to forget when it was. You wouldn't be able to read that, of course, because we don't write in English on Saros. That's Latin."

Orion didn't meet Fury's gaze, for fear that he would be able to see the anguish in his eyes. He didn't care if Fury believed him or not, and he definitely didn't care if Fury had more questions for him. Orion's time answering questions for the director was over. He was slippin into daydreams of his escape from Saros, of the look in his mother's eyes as her flesh sizzled off of her cheekbones, and he refused to speak to the man who'd returned those memories to him.

"Can I have my dog now?" Orion grumbled, his eyes downcast as his shoulders began to slump. If anything could ease his spiking fury at the mention of his mother, it was the comfort of holding his best friend.

Fury let out a long breath of air. "Not yet, Mr. Atlas. We still have more questions we'd like to ask you."

Orion whipped his hand out in an act of impulsive rage, his knuckles coming into contact with the edge of the table. He didn't bother to tend to his freshly chafed knuckles as he let out a shout of frustration, not just at S.H.I.E.L.D. for keeping him hostage, but at the memories that wouldn't stop buffeting his mind with torment and remorse. His shoulders heaved as he ran his hands through his long strands of hair, and though he was certain he looked like a madman, he didn't refrain from bellowing, "Why can't you just leave me alone? For god's sake, just leave me alone!"

The red-headed woman's hand shot to the gun at her hip, presumably as a reaction to Orion's outburst, and Nick Fury's voice traveled in droning spirals through Orion's ears as he said, "Orion Atlas. Citizen of Saros, runaway from your own home, bane of your own father...your presence here has put Earth in danger, and that makes you my problem."

AUTHOR'S NOTE:

Though this chapter is painfully long(it just didn't feel right to split it when I got to thinking about it), I have to say it was one of my favorites to write. I loved playing around with the idea that even though Orion is obviously still feeling guilty, he might be going insane a little because of the lack of human contact he's had on top of his guilt(ie his outburst at the end of the chapter). I would love to know what you guys think of that!

I'm so happy to finally be writing this book again after nearly a month of leaving it alone, and I'm so grateful that, even though it's been a while since I've updated this, 'Carpe Noctem' is quickly nearing 2k reads! Thank you all so much for your support!

Also, before I forget, the beautiful new sign-off was made by remuslupout!

Q: WHO'S YOUR FAVORITE S.H.I.E.L.D. AGENT?