***GABE***
I'm afraid to ask Elliot...well...anything. He's not particularly inviting with his paranormal floaty-lightning thing going on. I don't care if he currently looks like my cousin; I still don't want to talk to him if I can avoid it. But I'm going to have to if I can get him to open up about what the hell he's got in mind.
Like, for instance, "Where are we going?" Which I ask.
Or, "How do you remember this shit and I don't?" Which Kensi asks.
Elliot gives no answer. Instead, he leads us deeper and deeper into the basement, down another two floors. Just how many floors of basement are there? Peppermint must have a shit-ton of research projects going on. Or maybe they just needed all the storage space for those time-viewing meteorites. Which might explain why they just let us go with a sample of them earlier, if they had more than enough to make up for what would be missing.
It's at the end of the third basement floor's main corridor that Elliot stops short in front of another door. "What is it, boy?" I ask. "You smell something?"
"I'm kinda insulted you compared him to a dog, frankly," Kensi says with a snort. "He's so much more a cat kind of person."
"Who are you talking about?" TJ's voice sounds like it's come back, but maybe still a shade lower. Unless it's Elliot imitating him to try and fuck with us? "I am a dog person! I swear to God!"
"Welcome back, TJ," I say, only to look down and see that he's still floating off the ground. Not as much as he was, say, five minutes ago. Now he just looks like he's standing on an invisible scale. And clearly, I spoke too soon.
"What?" he asks. "Oh wait, you thought I was my twin...wait. I'm in a straight boy's body? Oh my God, help!" He hits the floor, bouncing around on the spot and spinning three hundred and sixty degrees like he's trying to shake off some evil spirit. "What did I do to deserve this?"
"I like this one better," Kensi says. "Can we keep him?"
"NO!" I cry at the same time that not-TJ-and-also-not-Elliot does.
"Come on, are you kidding?" Kensi points at us both, one after the other, while she belly-laughs. "I mean, you two are both yummy as hell gay boys - um, you're gay now?"
"I'm supposed to be," says not-TJ. "When I'm in my own body, which right now this guy Elliot's borrowed from me for some reason. Uh, I'm AK, by the way. TJ's twin brother. Identical in every way that matters except two."
"One of you being gay and the other being straight?"
"Mm-hmm," AK says. "That, and he's got glasses while I don't." AK adjusts those glasses, then pulls them up and says, "Yeah, that's...not good. Ow. Owwwwww! What a fucking headache!"
"Why would you take the glasses off?" I ask.
"I'm not used to having eyesight this bad! I just wanted to see for myself!" He pauses before adding, "Um, pun not intended?"
"Well, what the hell are you doing here?" I ask. "Aren't you supposed to be in Prime?"
"I was!" he cries. "I was there with Alex, and then that Elliot dude, he took my body, but now he's put me here for some reason..." He shakes his head, probably hoping to clear himself out of it, but it doesn't work. "I swear, Elliot's a troll."
"You can say that again."
Kensi passes both us boys and reaches out to open the door. "What do you think's on the other side?" she asks. "Our friends?"
"Do you remember exactly where you came from?" I ask her.
"No, but this is sort of that general area...?"
"It's okay if you're not sure." I take her hand and pull it closer to the doorknob. "Maybe we should open it together?"
She nods once, her lips jammed tightly shut until she opens them to say, "Let's tear that Band-Aid, dude."
And tear it we do, pushing the door open and finding what looks like an empty room. Except it's not, not completely. I think there's another door on the other side, a door that's supposed to be hidden, but it's not fully closed. Someone's just left in a hurry. What and where are they hiding?
"Look familiar?" I ask Kensi.
"Sorta...?" She shakes her head. "Just about everything in this place looks the same after an hour of running around."
"It's a bloody labyrinth, that's what it is." I wedge my fingers into the gap between the hidden door and the wall and try to pull it open. It won't budge, though. On the other side, there must be a chain or a hook or something keeping it firmly in place.
"Allow me." It's no longer TJ's or AK's voice, but Elliot back in the wheelhouse. Well, shit. I was getting used to having this group be all-queer, even for a moment. Whatever the case may be, I step aside and let Elliot do his thing. That thing being a blast of light in the crack, enough to force the door completely open.
The room beyond the secret door is full of time meteorites, scattered piles of pieces in black and white like an explosion in a go factory. One person is throwing these meteorites all over the place, pocketing black ones and abandoning white ones.
"HARRIS!" Kensi and I both call his name, and he drops a number of meteorites in surprise.
"Oh my God!" Harris runs into my arms first, kissing me fiercely until he pulls away, patting his meteorite-filled hoodie pocket self-consciously.
"I said no Supernatural references," Elliot grouses, though at least he does so in hushed tones. And if he makes good on his shoe-up-the-ass threat or whatever it was, I'll be the first to break his nose until he stops.
"Are you okay?" Kensi asks.
"For now, yeah. But I'm super psyched you're here!" Harris hugs her too. "That means I don't have to pretend I'm worried they're gonna kill you." He takes a look at Elliot and says, "But you, you look like you're still possessed."
"Technically, this vessel is possessed," Elliot says. "Just not by Peppermint's people, so be thankful."
"You weren't possessed, were you?" I ask, peering into Harris' eyes.
"No, I'm the only one they didn't," he says. "I think they wanted to use me as a control subject or some shit." He picks up one of the meteorites he's got in his pocket. "They wanted me to pick up as many of these as I could. So they could, I dunno, re-fuse them."
I scratch my head. "Refuse? Like, they'd send you down to fetch them and then they wouldn't take what you got? Assbutts."
"I know, but that's not what I mean. I mean, 're-fuse.' Put all these little fragments together into one and..." He twitches nervously. "They didn't say what they wanted to do with these babies, but I think the plan's some kind of time bomb."
Kensi blanches. "Literally, I bet."
Elliot holds out his hand, and Harris, in spite of himself, hands over one of the black meteorites. "If I know Kristoff - and I do, unfortunately - this'll probably be his first time attempting one of these 'time bombs,' as you say."
"I don't think there should be a first time," I say.
"You're right." Elliot throws the meteorite down to the floor, where it smashes into a cloud of black smoke that drifts up and around us before dissipating.
"...I think the plan's some kind of time bomb," Harris says. Then his hands fly to his mouth and he asks, "Didn't I just say that?"
"You did," Elliot says. "And that was just from this one tiny piece. Imagine all those meteorites in your pocket exploding at once." He holds his hand out again, and Harris gives him another piece of black stone. This time, however, Elliot doesn't break it. Instead, he simply puts it back on the nearest pile. Following his lead, Kensi and I join him and Harris in emptying the pocket entirely. "Time's a fragile construct," Elliot adds. "All that blasting the continuum back who knows how long, it could reverberate across the whole damn universe and turn us all to slag. Or, worse, trigger the Big Crunch."
"Not just this 'verse, am I right?" I ask.
"Yeah," Elliot drawls after a long, pregnant pause. "Probably not."
"So what do we do now?" Harris asks. "They still have Jae Park somewhere around here." He puts down the last of his space rocks. I notice now that he's only been touching them by the charred fusion crusts. Maybe that way, there's no chance of accidental temporal hallucination. "We need to get him out, like, right now."
"Where do we go?" I ask.
Kensi nods. "I'd like to know too. Gabe helped, uh, clear my mind, but that also took out the mind-control virus from my system."
"This way, guys and gal." Harris pushes past us and opens the door back out of this storage room. "Shit," he mutters when he sees the broken chain dangling from both the door and its jamb. "Who broke this? Who left me so vulnerable?"
"I'll admit I did," says Elliot, "but in my defense, I thought you were working for Peppermint."
"You didn't know it was me?" Harris shakes his head. "I guess I was doing my stealth job too well."
"Not really, if we were able to follow you."
Without another word - I bet he realizes how futile it is to keep on arguing with Elliot, because he just never stops rejoindering - Harris leads us up one flight of stairs and, from there, past about half a dozen pairs of doors facing each other. At this point, it's not just a joke anymore that this place is a labyrinth. I no longer remember the way back up to the surface. And none of us brought any bread to crumb into a helpful trail. Jeremy Hansel Renner, where are you? You too, Gemma Gretel Arterton. If I could play some kind of Ready Player One move and surround us with all the best and brightest fictional ass-kickers I know, damn right I would. Sadly, though, that's not my superpower.
"Wait!" I grab Harris' wrist before he can open the door he's been looking for. How he remembers the layout of this basement, I have no idea, but I trust my B and his instincts. He looks like Tom Holland enough that there's no way he doesn't have a bit of the good ol' Spidey-sense. Still, though, I'm not sure I want to kick open this particular hornet's nest without a few good moments of preparation.
Harris scoffs as he gently pulls out of my grasp. Preparation? Haha, if anyone deserves to be fucked up the ass without grease, as my dad would say-
God, you're making my ass pucker thinking about it-
Or maybe greased with rock salt-
Okay, I get it. I shake my head, struggling to clear out the nasty images Harris planted in there. Images that actually resemble some of my porn viewing history more often than not.
Kensi reaches for the door herself. "Come on, you dirty boys," she whispers.
I swear I hear Elliot mutter, "That's dirty God to you."
Okay, moving on from that nonsense...we burst through the door, but Harris leads the way, crowing at the top of his lungs, "YOOOOOOOOOO! Your Sith Lord is back in the house!" In an undertone, he adds, "Forgive me, Scottish daddy of mine. I know, it's 'sheeh,' not 'Sith,' but I can't bloody resist!"
"Sounds similar enough to another famous Sith Lord's real name," says Kensi.
"Sheev Palpatine?" I ask.
"You know it."
Meanwhile, all the Peppermint lab techs in this room look at us like, "These are the teenage buttheads we're supposed to fight against? For real?" I'm not even kidding, I pick up on one or two of them thinking those exact words.
"He was here, though!" Harris looks around the room in shock. "Jae Park! Where'd he go?"
"We, uh..." One of the lab techs, a deep brown-skinned Latin-looking man, begins talking, but he quickly shuts up before he can give away anything.
"Yes?" Elliot bears down on him. He's not very tall, not in TJ's body, but knowing who's really in there makes him look a hell of a lot more imposing. And, on a subconscious level, I think the lab tech feels the same way, super intimidated. He squirms in his swivel chair, determinedly not looking at Elliot until he catches him in the eye. I'm not sure, but I think I see some kind of light connecting their eyes. Is that what it looked like when Elijah, as the Aqua Killer, would possess his victims? Alex could probably tell you, because he witnessed the last one as it happened.
"They're down the hall," says the Latin guy. "The, uh, Sith Lord was supposed to bring the time meteorites to test them out with those guys."
Elliot breaks his gaze away from the guy to look at the rest of us. "Please tell me we kept one of those meteorites from downstairs."
"Did we?" I look at Kensi first, but she shakes her head, as do I.
"Shit!" Elliot cries. "We might need one! Like, right friggin' now!"
Harris reaches into his pocket and gingerly picks out one little black meteorite, which, again, he holds by the fusion crust. "I thought you said no Supernatural references."
"Shut up and follow me, Darth Bisexuous!" Elliot seizes the stone from Harris' hand and takes off running. "Everyone! Now!"
Did he steal that nickname from you? Harris asks me.
No! I wouldn't call you anything like that. Unless you, uh, wanted me to?
Quick, start doing it before he ruins it forever!
Next time we have sex, then.
He kisses his fist before bumping it with mine. That's a deal, Sweaty Elf Boy.
Well, shit. Now I'm following Elliot in the hopes of saving Jae Park's life, and I'm going to head into that particular Peppermint room with a hard-on trying to escape my jeans. Though let's be honest, I'm not about to be polite in their house, because they don't have a care in the world about infringing on my rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Mine, or any of my friends', for that matter.
As it happens, though, when we find Jae Park, he's managed to overcome whatever mind-control virus Peppermint put into his brain. Or maybe he didn't have any virus to begin with. Either way, he's busy putting up a fight against his captor, who doesn't look strong enough to fight a big guy like him.
So that's probably why he takes the economy-size kitchen knife with which he was no doubt about to stab Park dead and throws it out towards the door.
Right into Elliot's chest.
Except it's not just Elliot's chest. It's TJ's too.
They both look down at the knife handle poking out from their lightly bloodstained shirt. Then, when the blood starts to pour like mad, staining the entire shirt and hoodie dark with death, I hear both their voices whisper "Oh shit" before they sink to their knees.
"NO!" I run forward just in time to see them fall forward, driving the knife deeper into their chest with a sickening squelch. So deep, in fact, the tip punctures their back. "Where's...where is it?" I turn my cousin's body over, searching for that stone Elliot took from Harris. I try his pockets first, but nothing. Turns out, it's in his hand all along. So I grab it, jump to my feet, and throw it down to the ground, stomping on it as well for good measure.
Time flies back, but only for a few seconds.
And, sadly, not enough of those seconds either. Because when the meteorite's effect wears off, the knife is so close to burying itself in TJ's chest that there's no way we can stop it. Not that I don't try to push him to safety, but it doesn't make much difference. It's not on the heart side of his chest - the angel's heart side, that is, the left, as opposed to demon's hearts which point to the right - but it's still going into his ribs and lungs.
I know that when you get shot, it's supposed to be better to have an exit wound. Not that that did Steve Walker much good when the scrivs shot him with toxic dark bullets and killed him. But when you get stabbed and there's only an entry wound, is that worse than if it went all the way through your body?
"I'll get more meteorites!" Harris calls out as he and Kensi take off running.
"No, don't!" I call after them, but they don't listen to me.
With TJ taking his last breath, I look up just in time to hear the lab tech make a barely-there chuckle.
It's enough for me to take the knife out of my cousin's no-longer-breathing chest and throw it back at he who threw it at TJ to begin with.
"We're gonna want some more time meteorites to undo that too!" Jae says as he follows me out the door, on Harris' and Kensi's sixes.