Hidden Secrets - Motherland: Fort Salem

#39 - A safe place...

Abigail seemed to be hating her life at the moment. Her mother had forced a bodyguard upon her, much to Abigail's protest but her mother didn't budge. The recent attacks on the Bellweather's had the woman on edge and so now Abigail was stuck with Bridey... her bodyguard. Bridey looked like a fine soldier, Abigail didn't doubt that for a second and even the eye patch she sported made the woman look badass however, Abigail didn't want a bodyguard. 

Abigail was hostile towards her, tried to sneak away multiple times but it seems Bridey was good at her job and she never managed to get away. The two had ended up sparring and much to Abigail's frustrations she hadn't been able to land a hit on Bridey at all, her pool of self-pity and self-doubt only deepening. Things were starting to overwhelm the young Bellweather, the cherry on top being when Bridey struck a hit with her Scourge and tore Abigail's uniform. 

The girl broke down in tears, "I can do this." She said through a broken sob, trying to convince herself. Bridey looked down at Abigail who'd fallen down on her knees. "Why can't I do this?" Abigail asked her in a now deflated tone. The bodyguard didn't know how to answer the fragile girl. "I let my guard down, didn't I?" It was a rhetorical question, Abigail wasn't actually ask her but rather tell her. "I let my guard down." Bridey kneeled down beside Abigail, giving her a sympathetic look and allowed the girl to lean in as she continued to cry. 

Once Abigail had calmed down the two sat on the grass, watching out at nothing in particular. 

"Do you mind?" Bridey asks, point towards the tear she'd created on Abigail's uniform, Abigail nods and watch curiously as her bodyguard raises one finger and traces it along the tear until it's no longer there. She looks at it impressed. 

"Thank you."

"Mm-hm."

"Can I ask you a personal question?" Abigail says. 

After a second of pondering Bridey replies, "Sure." 

"Why isn't your eye fixed?" Bridey looks at Abigail, "You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to." Abigail tries to assure her and Bridey in fact doesn't respond at first, Abigail worrying she'd made it awkward. 

"We were in the Cordillera Blanca range, in the Andes. My unit and two others. Coming down through a pass that looked wide open." She shakes her head, "But it wasn't. The attack came from all sides at once, and they were throwing everything at us. Snow Devils, Razor Hail, lightening strikes bigger than I'd ever seen. I could tell where some of it was coming from, a rocky ledge off to the left. And I hit it hard." A grin spreads wide across the woman's face as she recalls the memory. "Best Windstrike I ever did. Knocked the whole thing down. But what I didn't see..." Her tone changes to a sad one, "...is that the debris was gonna trap one of my unit on the other side. There was no way to get to her, no way to save her." She says with a sad tone and expression. "She knew we had to go, she could hear the storms, she knew what we were up against. So the rest of us fought our way out. But we had to leave her behind." She lowers her head, "I lost my eye on the way out and never got it fixed." She clears her throat, finishing the story. 

"But it wasn't your fault that she died." Abigail states. "It was war." 

"She was my sister." She says in a gentle voice, "Without her I would never see life the same way again, so I decided I didn't deserve two eyes." She confesses. The two fall into a comfortable silence as the both pondering and think of the story, Abigail thinks about her own unit. Her guilty conscious takes her to thoughts of Tally and how hostile she'd been to her earlier back in the suite when Tally had only been trying to help her.

After her brief encounter with Carmen, Raelle had set off on her own mission. Still riled up thanks to Anacostia, Raelle went to the one place she heavily associated with her missing girlfriend, the crypt. It's where Scylla spent most of her time, surely someone down there had to be as worried as she was, maybe even want to help her. The only issue is Raelle had to wait for someone who's actually necro to enter the crypt because she couldn't get in one her own. So when she saw two women in white lab coats enter through the front of the crypt she made a break for it, reaching the door just before it closed.