When Your Light Goes Dark

Chapter Ten : Hate To See You Go

There was a fly buzzing in Micah's office. It ducked in and out of the bubble of light cast by his lamp, seemingly bent on distracting him. He'd wave at it, but it never seemed to take the hint. It did seem fond of his ears.

Whenever it flew too closely, Micah would lose his train of thought. It'd happened so many times that he no longer remembered why he was in his office.

He never sat in this chair, anymore. What was he doing here? He was usually out in the field, or training groups of new hopefuls, or cloistered in someone else's office being lectured about something he did or should have learned. He barely recognized the four walls around him, decorated with illuminations that he'd rescued from missions; nor that weird, potted fern thing. Even the paperwork on his desk looked inscrutable. It was clearly a dossier, and yet, it wasn't. It--moved.

The phone on his desk rang, but Micah made no move to pick it up. He stared at it, filled with some unnameable, sinking dread.

The noise was incredible. Flies buzzed, the phone rang, and Micah could swear that his tinnitus was speaking to him in an urgent female voice, somewhere beneath the whine.

Gradually, he began to make out words.

"Sir?" she was asking. "Please wake up, sir, we've arrived."

Arrived? Micah sat, uncomfortable amid the cacophony, unable to sort it all out or divine what it all meant.

If I'm not here, then where am I?

"Sir?" the voice prodded again. Aside: "I can't wake him up, Jules. What are we supposed to do?"

Micah smelled canned air, and a whiff of fresh air, drenched in the familiar scent of Mediterranean soil.

He opened his eyes, lids tacky, and worked a dry tongue around an even drier mouth.

His limbs were leaden, his body firmly adhered to his seat in the Boeing 747 that had brought him home from Ireland. His head was still buzzing with the drone of a fly that never existed.

"I'm--" He had to clear his throat. "I'm so sorry," he croaked to the wide-eyed flight attendants. "I don't usually sleep that deeply on planes."

The nightmare clung to his brain like cobwebs to a broom. Monotony and symbology were never good signs. He wouldn't go so far to call them portents, but they did tend to foreshadow horrible things.

For example, he dreamed about standing in running water the night before Marion died.

Micah made his way off the plane, to the relief of the staff. He felt gritty, used, and in desperate need of a shower. Pulling out his phone, he saw that the time was just shy of eleven in the morning; plenty of time to get a cab, suffer through the Vatican's pedantic security checks, and soak in the shower for an eternity before he had to make a report.

When he reached the terminal, the general hubbub opened up its eager arms and swallowed him whole.

* * *

Six hours.

The Vatican's finest detained him for six hours.

Micah knew it wasn't the new hire's fault that his superiors had all neglected to mention the secret order of ghost hunters residing within the holy city's walls. Poor kid took one look at Micah, travel-worn and tattooed, and had gone white as the stone around him. It didn't help that the only ID that Micah possessed was a special license that no one ever recognized, and his worn, illegible passport. Miscommunication abounded from there, and it wasn't until someone thought to call the Order and ask them who Micah Scott was that they took the handcuff off his wrist and ushered him out of the windowless cell he'd been held in.