Skyborn The Divine

24: Choice

It was over an hour past her normal reporting time when Alice strolled into ORIGIN headquarters. She was dressed in jeans, boots, and a printed tee, and she had a heavy duffel bag slung over one shoulder. The guard at the front desk waved her in, and she sauntered into the elevator, suddenly aware that the sights and sounds around her had become incredibly familiar.

It wasn't long after she started navigating the tangled corridors that she met an even more familiar grin.

"Heard you went home and crashed last night," Ethan probed. There was no mistaking his emphasis on the word crashed.

Alice glared at him, trying her hardest not to give him the satisfaction of seeing her smile at his horrible joke.

"What's the matter?" he asked with a shrug. "Is it too soon?"

"Ethan, people got hurt," she reminded him, continuing past him as though she couldn't spare him another minute of her day. "Hundreds of people almost died. We barely prevented this from becoming a major national tragedy."

He fell into step beside her.

"Being able to joke about it afterward is a sign that we actually saved the day, don't you think?"

Alice wondered if he were right.

As the two of them entered a brightly lit conference room, they were greeted by Athena with curt nods and by Clawson with stern silence. The rest of Meta Team stood as well, each one giving a curt but warm greeting to Alice, as well as congratulations for a mission well done. She noticed none of them gave the same to Ethan.

Alice wondered how to bring up the decision that weighed heavily on her mind, but she found her attempts to speak her feelings quickly bulldozed by Clawson's authoritative tone.

"It's highly irregular for us to have a debriefing so long after the mission," he said, his eyes resting on Alice like anvils. "It's even more irregular for you to arrive at your own mother's house in uniform."

Alice winced as she thought of what might have happened if her mother's neighbors had seen her flying into her mother's backyard in the Skycamo body glove. "Yeah," she admitted, "I know it was pretty stupid of me to do it. I guess I just..." She realized she didn't quite know how to explain why she felt so drawn to her mother's house. Force of habit, she supposed, to seek out her mother when she felt the way she did that last night. Still, hard to put into words.

"I understand that going home is your way of coping with the stress of your assignments," interjected Clawson with the tone of a doctor summarizing the results of his examination. "While I don't approve of your mother being privy to the classified nature of your work here, your mental and emotional health are paramount to us. If you feel you need to visit your home to regain your equilibrium or to deal with your battle stress, I don't object. It matters to us that you feel happy and supported."

Ethan snorted a laugh and quickly stifled it.

Clawson immediately turned on him with a force of stern disapproval that might have crushed a lesser man. "Do you find something funny, Ethan? Does our discussion about Alice's mental state amuse you? I hope you paid attention. Perhaps if you dealt with your personal struggles in a healthy way, you might demonstrate better judgment in the field. Maybe you'd show a little more restraint than you did when you tore a hole in the side of a plane filled with people. And maybe then you'd start to live up to your potential."

"Wouldn't that be something?" Ethan muttered.

"What was that?" Clawson growled.

Ethan didn't answer. He sank into the creaking leather of his chair and fixed his eyes on some nothing on the floor.