chaelisa short stories

Chapter 3 -End

So you're like a secret agent. Sort of.

It's strange because you're not sure if you really fit in with that role, with the team. With Lisa.

Of course it's different being close to her, even if your paths never really cross on the BUS. You are training and it is actual murder on your sore body. You like Wang, who ended up your SO, less and less the more you're forced to look at him. Except also you kind of like him, or, you respect him. At least you are meant to. That's the thing about it, that's what makes you feel like you couldn't really be a Special Services agent.

You're not like Lisa. That was something you had established long ago. You don't do well with authority, or rules, or secrets. In fact you were already spilling everything you knew about Special Services to your contact. Compiling as much information as possible to take back with you to your family. The people that supported you when you had no one. To JK.

It sounded like the right thing at the time. It had all made sense to you but you had still felt guilty. You still knew in the back of your mind that you were betraying her.

Every interaction the two of you had, every time you slipped into the lab under the guise of being bored or declaring being nosy, knowing full well both you and Lisa knew why you were really there.

You used to wonder if Mingyu knew too. You used to wonder a lot of things about Mingyu, like you always had. If you had more time between busting your ass training, trying to find your parents, and literal espionage you might have spent more time on that obsession. It probably would have only had you doing circles again.

Even with what felt like a shared secret between you and Lisa and finding some middle ground where neither of you were ever too much or too little, you felt guilty. Lisa didn't demand anything from you, you realized somewhere in that time that she never, ever had. All she'd ever really needed from you was to not shut her out and you had in a way promised you wouldn't but there you were, everyday, lying to her. Lying to everyone.

It catches up with you fast and the mistakes you've made with JK feel like a raw nerve for everyone to see. You figure out from somewhere deep inside you how to trust, just a little and it turns out to be enough.

Enough to admit you were wrong and accept the consequences of what Choi and the team saw as a betrayal. Choi stopped looking at you the way he had on the day you met him. Like he didn't believe in you anymore and it sparks something in you that you want to fight for. It made you want to earn back the respect you knew you'd lost.

With Lisa it's harder. The wounds go deeper and the sharpness of that is shared between the two of you.

Somehow she is still speaking to you.

It's mostly always about work and sometimes, a few rare moments in between.

You catch her making tea in the kitchen a few times because Agent Jisoo has been teaching you meditation and you've found if you focus hard enough you can feel yourself bloom into Lisa's mind. You don't know if she can tell when you're watching her so closely but you make guesses at when she might begin boiling water based on the strength of a tea craving and running into Lisa in most common areas never really is technically an accident.

You really thought it would be easier living in the same place as her. Sharing the same huge part of your lives but proximity didn't turn out to be the cure all to your issues with letting people in and things with Lisa remained complicated.

You are soulmates. It was a fact no matter how you twisted it, and your track record for that was beginning to stack up. You had to face it, that much you owed to Lisa but acknowledgment for the life of you was as far as you could get. It was absolutely bananas.

You never pulled away from her again, she was always sort of there. Her nervous energy during assignments somehow served more as a comfort to you than a distraction.

Every now and then you'd find her absently speaking to you while she is in the lab, typically on a late night. It's like she was talking to herself so intensely it crossed over into your mind too. You could be reading through the billion Special Services' regulations you were trying to memorize or deep within your own focus prying open back doors with effortless keystrokes and surfing surveillance for Choi, and Lisa's voice just trickled through. Nonsense science words until Lisa seemed to notice the slip herself and you would most times settle into each other. Talk like you used to. Like you belonged to one another.

The relationship was definitely nothing near conventional. You'd classify it officially as messy and you suspected most times it was your fault. But you were trying. The both of you were, in your own ways.

And at the worst times.

It took you a long time to realize the gravity of what was happening the day Lisa got sick. You had so much faith in her, so much belief in her brilliance that it hadn't even occurred to you that she couldn't figure it out. That she was ever really in danger in the first place.

Denial really is your strongest character flaw.

It wasn't until you felt her doubt that you really worried. When you watched her deliver instructions to Choi over informing her parents.

You hate the quarantine glass between you when your eyes meet with Lisa's, you've never needed to be physically closer to her so badly before. But you don't challenge it, there is no time to. There's no time for anything and even as you see Lisa staring at you, communicating things with her gaze that she can't seem to say out loud or press into your thoughts, her mind is racing with numbers and variables and things you don't understand.

You find yourself openly sobbing and you don't care who sees. Surprisingly it's agent Jisoo who leads you away. She takes you into the cockpit and you aimlessly follow her, allowing your tears to dry on your cheeks. Your mind is still with Lisa, it doesn't matter where you are going.

It's easier to sit and watch the clouds while you listen to spare thoughts flowing from the fringes of Lisa's brainstorming. And when Lisa finally speaks to you, you almost jump.

She's trying to reassure you. In her own way. Which was less about words and more about the calm ninja auror she always had.

Then something shifts and a jolt of adrenaline spills into you like lightning. Lisa's thoughts move rapidly from one emotion to another and by the time she is speaking to you all you detect is sadness.

She's telling you that she's sorry and none of it makes sense. Dread grows in you until Jisoo diagnoses the alert coming from a sensor on the console as the hanger door opening. Which shouldn't be because as you can clearly see from the position in the co-pilot chair, you are in mid flight.

It hits you too suddenly. You know you are too late. Your stomach drops and you can't make your body spring into motion fast enough. You're not even to the lower part of the plane when you feel terror rip through every space that Lisa takes up in her corner of your being.

You struggle to take a breath in and you feel yourself yell out in sheer reflex to an imaginary weightlessness that comes over you.

She jumped.

Lisa Manoban jumped out of a plane to sacrifice herself. Your soulmate. Out of your reach or help or ability.

Every part of you aches in a sudden chilling silence. There is nothing. You've never felt it come down on you like that before. In the past it had always been you retreating, you pulling the vale down in between the two of you but this time the emptiness closed in around you and it all happened in a second.

By the time you reach the hanger Wang is radioing in with confirmation that he caught her and they were ascending into the ocean.

Mingyu informs you of the rest, his eyes still wide and his fingers continuously finding their way into tight curls in a manic response to his nerves as he does.

It takes too long for the BUS to circle around and retrieve the two team members from the water and even longer for Lisa's shocked system to recover from the antiserum. But when she does you feel like you can finally breathe again.

Lisa's consciousness swims into the vacant void and your lungs fill with a deep sigh of relief.

When you finally get to see her she levels you with a softness only she can manage and utters a greeting that was becoming practically trademark Lisa.

"Hello Roseanne."

And you thrust yourself at her and into a hug with such force it almost knocks the wind out of you.

'I thought you were dead.' You imagine her with your eyes closed and your face buried in her loose hair.

She breathes deeply, and wraps her arms around your back with a firmness you find addictive.

'I'm right here.' She shoots back, filling all the space in your mind with warmth and reassurance.

It takes almost everything in you to finally let go and Lisa gets a separate lecture from everyone on board about sacrificing herself to be a hero. None more scathing than the one she receives from you.