Silver ||Joel Miller||

while this should be personal, it's not

LAURA

"Joel!"

"Laura!"

Laura didn't respond to Joel, she couldn't when a Firefly dickhead had walked into her room and pointed a gun at her. What she could do, however, was stand up from her hospital bed and look to the table outside the door where her bag and bow were.

"Where's Ellie?" She asked the guard who shook his head.

"Marlene will speak to you soon," he answered. Oh, so that's how it would be.

"How fucking generous," she hissed before she turned to face the wall. Her stomach twisted and turned, and it told her that something was wrong.

Something was severely wrong and she didn't know how to fix it—how could she when didn't know what the problem was? All she was sure of was that the Fireflies couldn't be trusted, and this was no fucking exception.

"I'm glad to see you're awake," Marlene's voice echoed behind her and she turned around.

"I doubt that," Laura replied as she looked at her things again. There was no way to get a hold of them, not without getting shot. She would have to wait for an opportune moment to attack, but she was patient. However long it would take to get the upper hand, she would wait. "Where is she?"

"You and Joel getting her here, it was a feat—"

"No." Laura cut Marlene off, her voice near poisonous. "You aren't doing this to me, you aren't bullshitting me around again. You aren't keeping me out of the loop, not this time. Now, you're going to answer me plain and simple." She stalked towards Marlene, her head lowered. No one heeded the threat, but they should have. "Where the fuck is my daughter?"

"Your daughter?" Marlene questioned. If there wasn't a guard standing at her door with a fucking assault rifle, she would have moved to rip Marlene's hair out of her head. "She's not yours, Laura—"

"She's not mine?" Laura took another step towards Marlene, overly aware of the guard who was also getting closer to her. "To hell with that. She might not have come from me, but I'm the one who's been taking care of her every day since you palmed her off to me."

"Laura, we went over this back in Boston. She's immune. What I didn't tell you was if we remove the cordyceps that's been growing in her since birth, we could engineer the chemical messenger that it sends. The doctor we have thinks he could make a cure." Cordyceps grew in the brain, everyone knew that. If this so-called doctor wanted to remove it then...

"He thinks he could make a cure?" Laura asked, her eyebrows furrowed as she stared at Marlene. "You're going to kill my kid based on a fucking half-baked theory? Are you fucking insane?"

"Laura, I'm sorry, but this is best for everyone." Everyone? It wasn't best for fucking everyone when they were going to kill her fucking child.

"You can't take her... you don't fucking understand—"

"I do understand, just like I told Joel. I understand—"

"No you fucking don't! How could you?" Laura couldn't stand to hear the bullshit version of sympathy that Marlene had. If she understood—if she truly understood—they wouldn't need to have this conversation. "You haven't been there for her everyday since she was a baby. You didn't watch her grow up, you never saw her change into the person she's become. You haven't gone through what we've gone through together since Boston. Don't you dare say that you fucking understand when the only time you've cared about her was when she could further your cause. You only care about her now because you think the cure's within her, it's not."