Season 1, Episode 3:
Remember Me
Part 2 of 6
Red
Jewel breezed down the corridor, arms laden with paperwork. Updated medical records for some of the
staff, a report on the conditions of two agents who had been injured in
training the day before, and a clean bill of health for the newest
recruit. All to be given to Agent K, who
kept track of such things.
On
the way to his office, she passed Mr. Lancybassy. He was Nick’s secretary and shared her
fondness for the tall, blonde agent.
“Hey, Lancy!” she greeted him, and he did his best to wave, despite
trying to juggle a stack of mail, a large package, and a cup of coffee.
“Jewel,
darling! Just the lady I was looking
for!”
“Oh,
were you?” she asked in surprise.
“What’s up?”
“Well…” Lancy tried unsuccessfully to reposition his
armload of stuff. “Mind if I drop by a
little later to pick your brain?”
“Sure,”
she replied with a chuckle. “I’m just
running some stuff to K’s office, and then I’ll be back in mine. Come on by.”
“Oh,
fabulous! Tootles!” Lance beamed over the top of his package
before sashaying away.
Suppressing
a smile, Jewel went ahead to K’s office.
She felt the familiar feeling of intimidation as she stood outside the
door, picturing the large, lavish office behind it.
K was
all class, his quarters decorated in furniture of the finest leather and
gleaming mahogany, with polished marble floors and plush oriental rugs. Not only was it the nicest office she’d seen;
it was also the cleanest, never a thing out of place. She may have spent most of her time in a
sterile medical ward, but even she could not imagine being as tidy and
organized as K was – her own office was quite cluttered.
But
that wasn’t all that intimidated her. K
himself made her slightly nervous. She
wasn’t exactly sure why, for he’d always been perfectly nice to her, but she
supposed it was that he always seemed sort of closed off, uptight, and hard to
get to know. She’d never heard him raise
his voice above the mellow, subtle Southern drawl he spoke in, but she’d also
rarely seen him smile, and for someone who smiled often, that fact made him
intimidating.
She
knocked tentatively on the closed door and waited. She heard muffled voices beyond it and hoped she
wasn’t interrupting anything important, but a moment later, the door was opened
by none other than Agent Jay.
“Oh…
hi!” she exclaimed, blinking in surprise.
“I’m just here to give these to K,” she added, holding up her stack of
papers. “Is this a bad time?”
“Nope,
it’s fine; I was just leaving. Come on
in, milady,” said Jay chivalrously, holding the door for her.
“Why,
thank you,” she chirped in reply, smiling at him as she passed through.
Her
smile faded when she saw K sitting behind his large desk, his expression more
grave than usual. She wondered if this was a bad time. She was about to apologize, but then K said,
“Come on in, Red.”
Red
Jewel deposited the stack of paperwork on the edge of his desk. “Just the usual,” she explained, briefly
going through the papers to show him what they were.
“You’re
a jewel; thank you,” said Kevin, and one of his rare smiles passed briefly
across his face at the pun, accompanied by a wink.
Jewel
smiled back, relaxing. “No problem,” she
replied automatically, but then she couldn’t help but ask, “Hey, is everything
okay?”
K
pressed his lips together and was quiet a moment, seeming to survey her. She wondered what was going through his
head. How much to tell her and how much
to keep to himself, probably. K kept a
lot to himself, from what she could tell.
But this, apparently, he could not keep.
“It’s
Drums. He’s back.”
Jewel
felt her eyebrows fly up as she thought of the former Agent 009, who hadn’t
been seen since his… accident. “He’s
back?? Here?”
“Not
here. In Vegas. Nick and Diamond met up with him there. He’s changed… and not for the better.”
She
drew in a breath. “What do you
mean? Is his head still-?”
“He’s
on the other side now,” K interjected, his voice curt and grim. “The enemy’s side. He’s part of a terrorist organization known
as FANS, who tried to sabotage the Global
Idol competition.”
“Oh
no,” Jewel sighed, her heart sinking.
She
didn’t stay in K’s office much longer. As
she walked back to her own, she couldn’t stop thinking about Drums. They’d never been close while she was here,
so it wasn’t as if she’d lost a dear friend with his departure, but just
knowing what had become of him made her feel guilty.
If
only she’d been able to fix him…
She stood, ready and waiting,
in her single surgical room, the room where the most serious cases she treated
were brought. The padded table in the
center of the room was cleaned and ready to hold a patient. A stainless steel tray of instruments was
assembled nearby, as was a small case of medications. Not knowing what she would need, she had set
up everything.
As she waited, her stomach
churned with nerves, making her feel almost sick.
The call from Jay had come
several hours ago from somewhere in the
It had unnerved her to hear
Agent 003, third in command at HimTak, sound so shaken. He’d babbled everything to her, and all she’d
been able to get out of it was that there had been an accident during the
mission he had been on with Nick, Drums, and Pearl, a leak of a dangerous
chemical, potent enough to be considered a biochemical weapon, and that Drums
had been injured. She didn’t know the
nature of the damage, just that it was bad.
And so, she’d assembled all that she could and hoped that she would know
what to do when they jetted him back to headquarters.
The waiting, the not knowing,
was the worst part, but finally, it ended when she heard footsteps and voices
entering the medical ward. She hurried
out of the surgical room to meet them and did a quick mental inventory as her
eyes swept across the four of them – Nick, holding his shoulder with a pained
look on his face; Pearl, looking pale but otherwise perfectly fine; Jay, also
unscathed and helping to support Drums, who had his head down and one arm
thrown around Jay’s shoulder.
Her first reaction had been
one of relief when she realized that all four of them were standing. That was a good sign; if they could all walk,
then no one could be hurt too terribly.
Then Drums lifted his head, and
when her eyes moved upward from his legs to his face, she gasped, unable to
suppress her shock.
His head was massive, having
swollen to nearly three times its normal size.
His once-blonde curls were dyed crimson with the remnants of the
chemical, and the stains continued down the right side of his face, where the
chemical appeared to have splashed and run off of him. His eye on that side was also bright red and
bulging out of its socket. It was a
gruesome sight, and for a moment, she could only clap her hand over her mouth
and stare, horrorstruck.
She had never seen anything
like it.
At first, she was frozen, but
then her doctor’s instincts, well honed through her years of training, kicked
in, and she snapped into action. “Bring
him over here,” she directed Jay, motioning to the table. “Help him onto the table.”
She snapped a pair of latex
gloves on, pulling them up over the sleeves of the surgical gown that covered
the rest of her body. Then she pulled
her surgical mask up over her mouth and nose and a pair of chemical goggles
down over her eyes, not wanting to risk getting any of the
“My head,” he moaned in agony,
his hands flying to his oversized cranium in panic.
“Don’t touch it,” Jewel
instructed, pulling his hands back down.
“I need to have a look.”
The most important thing with
any chemical burn, she realized, was decontamination and pain control. She had Jay and
She had no antidote for
His head continued to swell.
She gave him a high dose of
steroids, to reduce the swelling, then packed his head in ice. The inflation seemed to slow, and her
attention moved to his eye. The water
hadn’t worked; it was still bloodshot and bulging, under so much pressure from
the swelling that she was afraid it might burst.
She reached for her penlight
and held his eyelid open as she shone the light in, allowing her to get a
better look. “Can you see my light?” she
asked, moving the light back and forth.
His dilated eye followed it,
though sluggishly. “Sorta… it’s all
blurry and red though. Fuck, it hurts;
can’t you fix it?” Justin moaned miserably.
Her heart ached for him. “I’m trying,” she promised. “I just need to…”
And then, in the middle of her
sentence, it happened. There was a soft
splat, and she found herself looking through a film of cloudy, reddish tinged
liquid that had exploded onto her goggles.
As she hurriedly wiped them off with her sleeve, she heard Justin begin
to scream and knew, even before she could see, what had happened.
“My eye!! My eye!!” he wailed, his voice shrill and
hysterical. “I can’t see!! Fuck, I can’t see!!!”
In a way, it was a relief that
he couldn’t, for she could see, and the sight of his ruptured eyeball, dripping
with blood and vitreous humor, made her stomach churn. Bile crept up the back of her throat, and for
a moment, she thought she was going to be sick.
And still he wailed, in a
voice that would haunt her dreams, “My eye!!
My eye!!”
She
could still hear that terrible scream, still taste the acidic burn of the bile
in her esophagus. Her eyes had closed as
she relived the memory, and when she opened them, they were filled with tears.
If only I could have saved his
eye… I could have saved him.
But
she hadn’t. She hadn’t saved his eye,
she’d barely stopped the swelling, and it was because of her failure that he
was gone.
My failure, thought Red Jewel,
swallowing hard. My only failure…
± ± ±
“Hiiiiiiiiiii, doc!! Here I aaaaaaa-am.”
Lancybassy walked in with a grin on his face, holding a cappuccino and
carrying his Louis Vuitton bag, which K only approved because he had never
actually seen it. But when he walked up
to Red Jewel, who was sitting behind her desk, he noticed she was trying to
hold back tears. “Why the sad face?” he
asked as he put down the bag and handed her the cappuccino.
“Thanks, Lancy...” She took
a sip, after which she forced herself to smile.
“It’s nothing.”
“And pigs can fly. Come on,
honey, spill it,” Lancy said as he sat down on her desk. “Tell Lancybassy what’s wrong.” He got a tube of Clarins hand and nail cream
out of his bag and carefully put some on his hands as he talked. “That guy - what’s his name - David, hasn’t
he called yet? Because I know what
that’s like; Alex hasn’t called me in aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaages. I tell you, darling, men are pigs, whether
they’re straight or not. Men are just
pigs, or worse, they’re maggots. They
eat off of you, use you, and then just turn into flies, fly off, and you never
ever see them again.”
A small smile graced Jewel’s features at Lancy’s rambling, which
just went on and on and on in the background. She’d better say something, or
else he’d be coming up with an idea of how to get even with David (whom, by the
way, had not called). The smile faded as her thoughts went back to her
conversation with K.
“Hellooooooo, earth to Jewel!!”
She lifted her head and met Lancy’s eyes, which appeared to be
filled with a hint of worry.
“Sorry, Lancy. Um, what
were you saying... right, men are maggots.
And yes, David hasn’t called, but that’s not it. He was too short anyway. I’ve got bigger things on my mind right now.”
“So? Gonna share?”
Jewel let out a sigh, not knowing if she should tell him. Well, K didn’t say it was classified
information. And if she didn’t tell him,
Lancy would find out soon enough through one of the other secretaries
anyway. Nothing remained secret for a
long time if it were up to them. Nothing
non-classified, that is. After all, they
had no intention of putting anyone in danger.
“Drums is back,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.
“What?!” Lancy shrieked.
“Here?! That can’t be. I mean… Oh my God, oh my God... that-”
“No, he’s not here. He’s in
Vegas,” Jewel answered as she set the now empty mug on her desk. “He’s... he’s changed.”
“How? Tell me he has not
changed that cute hairdo of his. Oh
girl, the fantas-”
“Not his hairdo, Lancy!” Jewel cut him off.
“Sorry, sweetie. Go
on. I’ll keep quiet. I promise.
I will really, really, really... Oops, I’m rambling again, aren’t I,
darling?” This time, it got him a stern
look from Jewel. “I’ll shut my mouth
now,” he said as he started to blush.
“See, I’m zipping my mouth closed and throwing they key away! Faaaaaaaaaaar away! See?” Lancy simultaneously acted out
his words after which he crossed his legs and listened to Jewel’s explanation
about the whole ordeal.
Half an hour later, Lancy was walking back to his office, his mind
still occupied with what Jewel had just told him. Drums... the whole thing was such a tragedy,
but to think that he was now on the side of the enemies. Lancy slowly shook his head, still in disbelief
about the whole situation. Things had
started so perfectly back in the days.
So perfectly fine…
Lancy had a perfect view from where he was standing... well,
hiding. Agent Grasshopper had just told the new recruits about the training
schedule of the day, and they were now trying to improve their martial arts
skills by implementing the instructions he had just given them. Some of them
didn’t make any sense though, Lancy thought.
He had been Grasshopper’s secretary for about two years now, and
he still spent most of his time trying to figure out what it was that
Grasshopper wanted him to do. Since his boss was busy with trying to teach the
new ones something, Lancy figured it’d be okay to take an extra coffee break
and keep an eye on the young recruits, just in case they’d need... well,
anything.
Two men in the first row especially caught his attention. And not just because they were trying to kick
each other to the ground. Right now,
Lancy was mostly interested in their physical appearance and was silently
comparing the two, using his S.M.I.L.E. system.
Silently he gave them points in a range from zero to ten. He had come up with the ranking system
himself and used it quite frequently. S.M.I.L.E. stood for ‘Sexy Manly
Impulsive Likeable Ecstasy.’ Lancy liked
his men to be, of course, sexy and likeable, and since he was quite feminine,
he needed his man to be very manly. The
secretary loved to be surprised, hence the ‘Impulsive’ in S.M.I.L.E. (oh, and
he couldn’t come up with another cute word starting with an ‘I’). And last but not least, he loved the
experience of being high on feelings of love and arousal.
Lancy liked the fact they were both blonde. He knew firsthand that blondes also had more
fun between the sheets, in the shower, and at a
The two young men, of course, had no idea that they were being
judged on anything other than their fighting skills and so they had nothing
other than winning on their minds. They
both were very competitive and were thinking of nothing but letting the other
one taste the dust. Lancy was enjoying
the view of two muscular sweating bodies when he saw Grasshopper walking up to
the two. Lancy didn’t want to get caught
(again), so he hid behind one of the concrete poles, praying Grasshopper had
not seen him.
“Stop, young hedgehogs.
While fighting, always stay focused.
You never know when your opponent will blossom and kill your inner tree
by drinking its water.”
Lancy frowned, trying to make any sense of what his boss had just
said. As usual, he couldn’t. And so, he allowed himself to dream about the
sweating, naked bodies of Spiky, Curly, and himself performing mischievous,
steamy activities on the gym mats, in the dressing room, the shower, and a LOT
of other places in the HimTak-building.
Yes,
things had started so perfectly back in the days. So perfectly fine.
± ± ±