Dr. Stoyer's concerned frown told Sutton that she had given a wildly wrong answer. The last thing she wanted at this point was to stand out anymore as an anomaly.
"I'm afraid that's a bit off-"
"I'm joking," Sutton interrupted. She forced out a laugh and prayed that he'd buy it. "Can you imagine? But really, I feel fine. Practically brand new! Have any of my family called at all though? We were just visiting the city on vacation and I'm sure they'll have noticed I'm missing by now."
Dr. Stoyer's face didn't relax into an easy grin like Sutton had hoped. He eyed her carefully and, taking note of the second-by-second scans the screen was displaying, clasped his hands together in front of him.
"I think it might be best if you stay with us a bit longer for further tests," he said. "But if you give me your family's information, I can comm them for you."
"Comm?"
Sutton knew that word from somewhere, it felt recent in her memory.
Comm, comm, comm.
Use the stupid, probably obvious clues you've been given, she chided herself. She battled through the remaining fuzz in her brain to think more clearly.
Not 2014, comms, old earth, future tech screens.
Sutton felt a trepidatious suspicion slither into her list of ideas.
"Is there a hotel near, uh, near... it's like a big library? What was it- the K-something."
The doctor's face lit up in recognition then shifted to a contemplative disbelief and he nodded in understanding.
"You mean the Kelvin Memorial Archive. Of course, there are a few. Which one is your family staying in?"
Sutton stammered and shifted further on the bed. Somehow the Holiday Inn felt like it wouldn't be an acceptable answer. Dr. Stoyer leaned forward to implore her.
"Sutton, if you are having lapses in memory, that is something I need to know about. I can't help you if you don't let me."
His concern was genuine she could tell, which was a nice change of pace given the doctors she'd had in the past, but his efforts would be in vain. She sighed and leaned back into her pillow.
"I can't remember," she relented.
She already felt drained again as he nodded and stood as if preemptively knowing her answer. He made a few adjustments to the charts on the holoscreen and then turned back to her.
"I'll have the nurses run a few additional tests to check for deep cranial injuries. But it's good to see that otherwise you're seeming well."
He patted her on the hand briefly in reassurance and then gathered a small screen-like device before heading for the exit.
"It was nice meeting you, Miss Sutton. I'm sure we'll be able to get to the bottom of things."
Sutton nodded silently her head already heavy against the pillow as she watched him leave. Luckily for her, the nurse brought in food before she could fall back asleep.
When Sutton woke again the lights in the room had been dimmed and it was quiet. One of the nurses had left a cup of water by her bedside and Sutton guzzled the entire thing before coming back up for air. Her limbs still felt tender and weak, but nothing so severe that she had to be bed ridden. The holoscreen still emitted a pale blue glow as it continued to monitor her condition. One of the graphs sported a jagged line that dipped dangerously into a red zone before steadily climbing back up to a safer green, but it was what sat below the graph that captured her attention. She was scheduled for at least two further tests tomorrow. The doctor hadn't bought her story or her reassurances.
"No," she muttered to herself. She wasn't going to become a science oddity if she could help it. With her luck they'd insist that she be kept in some type of home.
Sutton threw back the bed sheets and wobbled into a standing position off the bed. After a few moments of readjusting, her legs held her up fine enough and she snagged her old clothes that were folded neatly next to her bag of belongings.
When she was dressed she took inventory of the bag and sighed when she found all her things still present and intact. She rubbed her thumb over the cool metal of the fob watch and bit her lip.
"I'm getting home. Just take one step at a time. I can do this."
The door opened automatically for her when she approached it, and the heartbeat monitor on the screen gave a shrill beep while shooting off a notification that the patient had left the boundaries of its scanning field.
Sutton walked quickly.
She was able to make it to a receptionist area before someone spotted her. A woman in a lab coat with too large of eyes was just tucking a tablet under her arm and rubbing at her neck when Sutton crossed her path.
"Wha- Miss, you can't be here. Visiting hours are over!"
Sutton clung to the strap of her handmade bag with both hands and nodded under the doctor's stern, unnerving gaze.
"Right, sorry. I was just trying to leave."
The doctor hummed lowly in her throat and then pointed down the hall.
"Down that hall to the right are the lifts. Take them down to the ground floor."
"Thank you."
Sutton trotted for the elevators as quickly as she was able to while still trying to appear casual. They couldn't force her to stay, right? Even if you really should stay in the hospital, you always had the option to check out. She had made it to the elevators when she heard an alerting chime followed by the clacking of the doctor's shoes and a slightly alarmed,
"Wait! Miss, you shouldn't be lea-!"
The elevator doors slid closed and Sutton breathed a sigh of relief as she descended to the ground floor.
From the ground floor, it was easy to slip out the front doors and into the night. Traversing the city was another story.
Although it was dark, twinkling lights from the surrounding skyscrapers lit up this sky while there was a steady, quiet hum from continuous traffic. Sutton came to a sudden stop as the realization of how quiet it truly was sank in. Cities were never this quiet. New York had never been this quiet. Traffic was always startling and loud no matter the hour, and yet that was not the case here. There were still the sounds of disturbed air and chatter, but it was deathly silent in comparison to what she was used to since moving to New York. Overhead vehicles zipped by, their blinking lights a warning that they were there, and vehicles hovered just above the ground below them. For a moment she hesitated. It was dark and she was in a city and in a world that she didn't really know. Television and movies hardly spent time focusing on earth in Star Trek when there were entire new planets to explore.
It left her at a slight disadvantage on how to correctly handle this situation. She wasn't exactly a Trekkie. Her mother had watched it off and on while she was growing up, but she didn't know the slang and she was still suspicious about the hospital not billing her. But she had no real choice but to continue moving forward and try to find a place that wasn't a hospital to sleep for the rest of the night. Whether it was her deer in the headlights look or the fact that she was waving one arm frantically at passing vehicles, Sutton finally got one to stop for her. As luck would have it, it was designated as a cab. She opened the back passenger side door and poked her head in nervously while the driver turned back to look at her.
"Where to?"
Sutton picked nervously at the door a moment before working up the nerve to ask what was probably a stupid question.
"Um, I don't have to, uh, pay right?"
The driver scrunched his face to one side as he eyed her wardrobe choices.
"Pay?"
"Alright, good."
She climbed into the back of the vehicle and shut the door behind her.
"Y' one of those old earth enthusiasts?"
Sutton huffed quietly and jerked in her seat as the car belted her in automatically.
"Sure," she said. "I just need to get to the nearest hotel."
The man, whose name she didn't have the energy to learn, nodded and pulled back out onto the street.
She didn't have much time for dozing as there was a hotel only a few blocks from hospital and it felt oddly surreal to exit the cab while offering nothing but a thank you. But the man did drive away without any threats and she wasn't about to question a good thing when it actually happened to her.
The hotel was not ritzy, but it was nice, and it sported a different ambiance than Sutton was used to seeing in the hotels of her world. Generally smaller hotel chains tried to create a warm, homey atmosphere to draw people in. She was used to yellows and reds, wooden desks and old TVs. This place was all sleek architecture and gray counters with fashionable splashes of color and shimmering screens without wires.
The man at the desk didn't say a word as she took in the place before realizing how odd she must appear by standing at the entrance in a daze. Sutton pushed herself forward and stood before the receptionist and tried not to pick at the fraying threads on her bag too much.
"Um, hello, I'd like a room? Please?"
"Of course." The clerk pulled up a menu on his screen and pinned her with one of those politely expectant looks. "Your name, miss?"
"Name? Um, Sutton Regan. But I don't have to pay, right?"
The man shot her a look and Sutton told herself to stop asking people about money.
"Identification code?"
"I'm sorry, my what?"
"So that I can locate you in the database."
Sutton clutched her bag tighter and scrunched her eyes closed momentarily. All she wanted was a bed away from prying eyes and the reminder that she might not have a lot of time left to live.
"I don't- I don't have a code. My...parents were, um, hippies. I was born off planet- please. I just need a place to crash. I just got here and-"
The man seemed startled by her confession and disturbed, probably due to the way her eyes were turning glassy.
"Now, miss, no tears are necessary! I'm sure we can work something out!"
They were able to work something out because the man was soft and her potential tears worked wonders. He wasn't supposed to check people in without proper identification, but as long as she promised to come work it all out with the morning crew she could stay in one of the open rooms. Sutton agreed.
The next morning she snuck out the back exit.
It wasn't as easy sailing after the hotel. Sutton found that in a moneyless society there was a lot of emphasis placed on identity. And that was a huge set back considering she didn't have one. Small cafes and such were much more lax however, no one on this earth went hungry, and the establishments gave her what she ordered without question. If she wanted a house or a job she'd need some background information and she had no idea how to get that. She was sure that she was going to end up on the news as the girl who didn't exist and it would all be downhill from there.
The most success she'd had in the last two days was acquiring two new outfits to try and better blend in to the population with. Even then, she'd had to guess the style. She'd gone for the space-iest looking pieces and tried to copy one of the mannequins. A lot of it, although cool, looked the same to her and the city was very much into silver and monochrome color palettes. One outfit she'd picked out had a splash of red as a focal point. It would be an odd outfit, even on Marvel earth, to wear in public. What with its black, long sleeve shirt and dark tights under a crimson dress. And it was not just a normal red dress. This one had brassy shoulder wings. It felt adequately future-space themed.
For the moment she was sitting outside a small café with a few crumbs left of a croissant and still sipping at a hot cappuccino. Just while she finished her drink, she let herself feel good. She forced herself to forget her situation, forget what the Doctor said, and forget about getting back home. Just for a moment, she was simply a stylish young woman on a Star Fleet inhabited earth.
Well, she hoped she was stylish.
Waves of people and aliens passed her by on busy sidewalks and she watched them as she savored her coffee. They all seemed so sharp, with purposeful strides and generally happy faces. Sutton wondered how a society that operated without cash was able to function. How did they motivate people to work? How did they convince some people to be garbage men? Did they just like it?
It all seemed too good to be true, a functioning utopia, and Sutton had to just accept that it was what it was. Perhaps it functioned simply because so many people in her universe believed that it did, that it could. She wasn't about to complain about it now. A no money society meant she got to eat her fill when she was hungry and she wasn't about to take that for granted.
Still, well ingrained habits had her feeling guilty about leaving the place without bestowing a tip on a hardworking waiter, so she jotted a complimentary note on a napkin and left that instead. She hoped it wasn't weird.
The differences between the London she had just left and this one were astounding. They might as well have not even been the same place. To be fair they technically weren't the same place at all, but there were so few similarities besides a preserved Parliament and Big Ben that it was disorienting. Navigating the city in daylight wasn't turning out any easier than navigating at night. This wasn't helped by the fact that she had no where to go. She walked in her gold metallic boots with no real destination and a scratchy bag filled with secret keepsakes. She felt anonymous; she felt lost. Growing up in a suburban neighborhood in a small town left her feeling anxious in large cities. New York had pushed her out of her comfort zone, and even then she coped by living in routine and having select locations she'd visit. But universe jumping and alternate city visiting was as opposite to that as she could imagine.
Sutton sucked in a breath and continued on the sidewalk with her head lowered and eyes focused on the clear bits of sidewalk directly in front of her. She wondered what it would be this time. Would she accidentally find herself amongst main characters, like she had with Harry Potter? Or would she have to actively seek them out, like she'd done with Star Wars?
To be honest she was starting to get suspicious of somehow being in the right place at the right time every single jump. Or did these universes actually revolve around all these "main characters"? Sutton eyed a random stranger in pity for a moment before hurrying to look away before she got caught.
She continued on down the sidewalk, just meandering and trying to waste time. She had no idea where anything was nor what time frame or verse she was in. Although the buildings and people looked particularly modern, so she felt safe in assuming this was the new original series. Chris Pine's face popped into her mind and she smirked absentmindedly as she strolled. The flow of people pushed her along and it was a bit difficult to avoid brushing shoulders with people while simultaneously contemplating life and fate. She ended up bumping shoulders a bit too roughly with a gray haired woman and she stumbled on the balls of her feet trying to remain balanced while the woman hardly swayed. She looked up and winced at the look the woman shot her as she continued on her way. Sutton resettled her gaze forward and attempted actually paying attention to where she walked. That's when she saw him.
Sutton froze in the middle of the sidewalk and her chest started shooting sharp pains out from where her heart sped up its beating. The people around her hardly even existed anymore as sweat accumulated on her brow and her hands went clammy. His name tumbled passed her lips before she could think to stop it.
"Khan."
He wasn't even two hundred feet in front of her and walking in her direction. His height and stately march set him apart from the crowd; she had never seen someone with better posture.
Nor had she ever met someone with better hearing.
She watched in a disbelieving horror as his eyes snapped her hers as the final syllable drifted off her tongue and settled in his ears. A normal human wouldn't have heard that.
Fear is what urged her to move again. Sutton swiveled on her heel and began pushing through the sea of people. Her tongue was verging on going numb but she tried to push past her terror as well as she could manage. Maybe she could play it off.
"Khan..'t believe zis. Ridiculooz."
The hair on the back of her neck stood on end and she walked faster.
Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap.
Had he truly heard her? Was he following her? She was afraid to look. Maybe he wasn't following her but if she looked back he'd noticed and then he'd start following her. At least, she hoped, it would be easy to lose herself in the crowd of people. She was still short and generally got swallowed up when in the middle of large groups.
Just act casual, don't flip out. Blend in.
She erroneously glanced back over her shoulder and caught a glimpse of shiny black hair over the sea of people. Sutton stretched her legs out a little farther between steps. She was lost as to where to find safety in a world, on an earth, in a city that she didn't really know. Did they have embassies still? Didn't earth just become one... country on the show? Or something?
Star Fleet! Maybe if she found Star Fleet she could slip inside. No way Khan would give himself up like that. But it was difficult to ask for directions while not breaking her stride. Sutton ducked down lower, hunching her shoulders, and cut quickly to the right to join a mass of beings crossing the street. All the while her eyes darted up, down, and over trying to find a street sign or holo-billboard or something that might lead her in the right direction. But the streets of London were oddly advertisement free and some of the signs flashed too quickly for her to read with her quick pace.
There was a short yelp to the left and a couple people went tumbling into each other, one of them knocked into her and sent her skittering for balance into an open alleyway.
"Sorry, miss! Oi, watch where yer going, mate!"
Sutton paused a moment while leaning a hand agains the cool metal side of a building and tried to catch her breath. Even fast-walking was tiring her out more than it should have.
The light from the alley opening dimmed and her mouth was violently forced closed. Sutton jerked in surprise, throwing an elbow back instinctively. It did nothing to alleviate the pressure on her jaw and only succeeded in having her arm pinned behind her back. It was easy enough for her to be forced away from the safety of the crowded streets in that position; especially since her heart was palpitating and her limbs were noodles. She tried planting her feet deep into the pavement, but it was pushed stumbling forward with nothing more than a gentle nudge.
She was continuously maneuvered down the alleyway and into much slower areas of the city, all the while amazingly out of sight, and Sutton reached up with her free hand to pray at the vice around her mouth in a desperate last attempt. The arm under her grip might as well have been steel. Even more unnerving was the complete silence at her back. Sutton had no delusions as to who it was forcing her along. For the first time in her life she wished she was just the victim of a random mugging.
Except there's no reason for theft in a moneyless world, genius.
Eventually Sutton found that he had toted her some several blocks away into a smaller neighborhood hidden in the shadows that the tall skyscrapers cast. Here the buildings were less sleek, more historic, with a few actually still retaining their brick exteriors that seemed antiquated in this setting.
He dragged her over and into one of those buildings.
Sutton renewed her struggle as they approached the old, wooden front door. Her stomach rolled and curdled at the thought of being out of sight of any witnesses and alone with a genetically engineered madman. A few muffled yelps slipped passed his fingers and Sutton attempted going lax in his hold and then tried striking out at his shins with her feet. All efforts proved to be ineffective. He was able to open the door, shove her inside, and close it all with only minimal effort. Every muscle in her body went taut as the door closed and the room went dark. His deep, baritone voice curled around her and Sutton felt another adrenaline rush shoot down her legs.
"I would introduce myself, but it appears you already know my name. Who are you?"
Her heart pumped double time; she couldn't feel her fingers. Her prolonged silence was met with his hand moving to her throat and a thumb pressed against the artery in her neck just enough to serve as a warning.
"I can snap your neck with just a flick of my wrist and be done with you, so I suggest you answer my question."
"Sutton! My name is Sutton; I'm no one!"
"Do you work for Marcus?"
Sutton clutched at her bag and the wall to her back, trying to put as much space between her and the augment as he would allow.
"Work for-what? No! I don't work for Marcus, I don't work for anyone."
He hummed in disbelieve and Sutton felt trapped by the calculating look in his sharp blue eyes. His thumb pressed more firmly into her neck.
"I find that hard to believe considering he is one of the only people who know my true identity. And it was obvious that you recognized me on sight. If you truly do not work for Marcus, then I suggest you explain how you know me, and rapidly for your own sake."
Her mind was threatening to go on the fritz, because this man who looked and sounded like Benedict Cumberbatch, but most certainly wasn't, was talking to her and her mind was flipping the same switch that it had for Loki.
They look like the person she found attractive. They were not that person. They were scaring her. All good feelings associated with them disappeared.
So she tried to shove down all the fear and confusion and focus her thinking so that she wouldn't have spent all that time in the hospital only to die now. She needed to become decent at lying and fast.
"I'm sorry," was the first thing she gasped out. The pressure on her neck was uncomfortable and only a mild hindrance, but she needed a moment to stall. "I'm just a-a history nerd, ok? I was reading a history book on the Eugenics Wars. They-they had a blurry picture and you looked like him. I don't know anything, please just let me go. I won't say a word."
Khan's gaze darted over her body and his eyes narrowed marginally.
"A history book," he asked.
Sutton started to nod, but then felt the pressure hadn't alleviated at all and stopped.
"Yes, yes, they had a chapter on the Wars. I just saw a short documentary on television and got curious and read up on it. Please."
Khan released the pressure on her neck marginally and Sutton tried to blink away the dizziness that threatened to sweep over her.
"And what did this book have to say about me?"
Sutton eagerly spewed the bits of information she knew and hoped it would be enough to convince him.
"The war took place in the 90's, scientist tried to create soldiers that would ensure peace, but it backfired on them. Augments took over, and you, you ruled over...over Asia!"
His next question was random and threw Sutton off kilter and left her clammy.
"What year did you graduate?"
Her blood ran cold as her brain sputtered a bit. Year? What-what year was it now? Math, she had to do math without paper or a calculator.
"What year? What-what does that matter? It's not even specific. Graduate what? High school, college? I don't understand."
Khan hummed again in the back of his throat and studied her closer than she felt comfortable with.
"Interesting."
Sutton let go of the wall and started trying to pull his hand away from her neck fruitlessly.
"What? What's interesting? I'm not interesting!"
"Well, of course you are," Khan insisted. "You recognized me from a distance, you're dressed like an elderly woman, and you're using archaic language that I haven't heard since I ruled part of the earth."
Her face went cold and her pulse threatened to burst from the artery he still had lightly pressed. She could feel her tongue almost going numb again as the realization that she had severely messed up sank in.
"No, I just like old earth things. I swear."
He eyed her again and Sutton set her gaze just passed his left cheekbone, unable to hold his icy stare.
"Alright," he finally said. "Tell me one thing and I will let you go right now."
Her eyes darted back to his as hope simmered tentatively in her belly.
"What is today's date?"