Damn You, Morals

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To say she felt good punching Owen would be a lie. To finally know who had killed Noah didn't feel good, freeing, anything she thought she'd feel working with Birkhoff. Even now, she didn't have the strength to reach out to him. Birkhoff, Michael, Nikita, anyone.

Alys stuck herself in tracking down Sergi Semak, to getting Amanda a location. Anything to get Noah and her hollow stomach off her mind. She hadn't been able to push Owen from her mind, connecting all the dots along the lines of the time she knew the man, the drawings often came to mind as well. She had tried to pinpoint which one was Noah but she wouldn't let herself dwell far before she realized what exactly she was doing with her time, she'd bury herself in work or drown her thoughts in vodka.

The only thought she couldn't rid herself of was the clock ticking in her head, on her medulla - Pecry knew she was compromised. Any second now she could drop like a sack of potatoes, ripening until Roan came to disintegrate her. From what she could see, her work was the only thing keeping her alive. Nikita had tried to contact her, but Alys never picked up, she hardly even opened messages from Birkhoff.

Currently, she was about a quarter of the way through her new bottle of vodka, unable to help a glare when someone knocked on the door. She'd been avoiding everyone outside of work for the last three months, no one currently should be knocking on her door. Alys groaned when the person knocked again, heaving herself off the sofa and taking a drink as she came over.

She lowered the glass as she opened up the door, tilting it the rest of the way back again as she opened the door further. She didn't know why she did it, but she allowed Owen into her home again, moving to refill her glass after the door shut. "What do you want?" she asked tiredly, her drunken slur more Russian than British. At the very least, she figured he wanted the regimen he'd left here.

"You look like you're doing well." Alys took a drink from her glass and flipped Owen off, not caring to look at him as she sat back down in the chair. Why. Why? Why let him back in? After he killed your lover? Inadvertantly killed your baby? Alys hoped to find the answers in her drink.

"Which one is he?" she asked, turning her head over her shoulder but still not looking. "What tattoo did you get for Noah?" Owen took a deep breath, if he'd moved at all from his spot she couldn't hear it.

"The sea shell," he informed in a soft tone. "You talked about how he loved the water." Alys scoffed and turned forward again, recalling seeing that piece near the purple butterfly on the right side of his chest

"Why are you here?" she asked flatly.

"I need your expertise, Doctor Gordon." Alys scoffed again, the sound turning into a drunken giggle.

"I'm still chipped, and I threw out Nikita's jammer months ago." She finished off this drink, too, sighing tensly as she set down the glass on the arm of her chair. "How do you think you'll get past that?"

"Well, uh, I had something in mind." The glass clattered to the ground but miraculously didn't break as Alys' arms flailed up to latch onto Owen's arm, one that currently took place around her neck. Despite how much force was needed to keep her in a choke hold, he was considerably gentle about strangling her. He kept his grip firm as she struggled, the effort slowly dwindling.

It took a little over a minute, she was drunk and an asthmatic, it didn't take much for her pulse to stop. As Alys went limp in the chair, Owen carefully came around the other side of the chair, picking up the glass before laying her out on the floor. After about thirty seconds, in which he needed the chip to believe she was dead - which she very much was - he started resuscitating her.

By the time Alys came to, Owen's lips were on hers, preforming CPR, breathing for her to jumpstart her body. Putting a hand on his chest and his throat, she forced him away, rolling to her side as she coughed and tried not to let the sensation gag her. Being as drunk as she was with her very muddled emotions towards Owen alone was enough to make her stomach turn currently, no need to add on the fact that she just died for the second time in her life. "Little bit of warning next time, yeah?" she croaked.

Owen nodded but didn't speak on the subject. "I need you to come with me, I found a lead on the regimen. You still up for helping me get off this stuff?"

"Oh, so now you give me a choice?" The Russian accent, no matter how soft her voice was, made the sarcasm in her voice sharp.

"Nikita wanted me to get you out of Division's clutches, whether or not you want to help me is entirely up to you." Alys grunted and pushed herself up on her elbows, struggling with what to do with herself. The doctor in her was screaming to do what was right and another part was yelling that after ten years, she was finally free to do whatever she pleased, why waste her time on the man that killed the father of her unborn child?

It was a strong mental debate, and as she mulled it over, Owen handed her an L-shaped piece of plastic, practically bathing in his sympathy. And as she sat there, letting the medication do it's job, trying to set a steady rhythm to her lungs, she realized there was only one thing she could do. "Where are we going?"

In her ten years imprisoned by Division, there was one solid thing she could take away from it: 'Under orders' was a hard phrase to work around. If she could live with herself after the things she'd done under orders, the things Michael, Nikita, and Birkhoff had done under orders, she could live with what Owen had done under orders. They were strangers then, now they'd shared a living space, grown comfortable around one another. And as much as she had wanted it to, as much as she'd been telling herself it had for months, what Owen had done didn't absolve this fact.

Even now, after he just strangled her to death, she had found that comfortability returned, the weight of his eyes on her as he monitered the way she recovered was as regular as it had felt before she'd known what he did. "Connecticut," he answered simply.

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