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There were many things that a human could become familiar with over the course of their life. Taste, smells, sounds. These variety of sensations which, when experienced for even the briefest moments of time, could bring one right back to those isolated moments of memory which clung just beneath the surface even after one became an adult.
Which was just the sort of unfortunate nostalgia Mars was experiencing now, with the feeling of drugged fogginess still lingering in his newly-waking mind, and that of an icy concrete floor pressing his cheek flat into his face.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me…” Mar’s own voice echoed back to him in this empty concrete room.
Mars didn’t know if many people could say that kidnappings held an element of nostalgia to them, but he knew that he envied those who couldn’t. Then again, who else as an adult would be stupid enough to get caught unawares enough for this to happen to them again? Or maybe it was his own fault that he’d lost that edge in vigilance which had been honed so much since his younger years when he was old enough to become aware that being the child of the Emerald Aegis was seen as a blaring neon sign for any and every one of her foes who wanted to find her weak spot.
Alright. That was enough self-pity wallowing for the day. Time to take stock of the situation.
Mars still felt a little fuzzy, but looked around the room subtly as best as he could. It wasn’t wise for him to have spoken aloud right when he’d woken up, in the event that there were any guards keeping watch over him. It had been more common for him to be left alone in an empty room as a child, but after reaching his teens there had at least been a guard or two in the room with him to make sure he wouldn’t slip out on his own. But, whether these kidnappers were overly-confident or just sloppy, it seemed he was alone for now at least. No windows, no visible cameras (there was always the possibility that there were hidden cameras that he couldn’t see, but given the low-budget nature of this captive room he had to assume that these people were either cheap or were patsies given the least amount of money to get the job done by someone else). The room was so bare that his own shuffles against the ground were extra audible to him. The only other element in the room besides himself that he could see was the door leading out. His sword was nowhere in sight, obviously, so he could only assume they had taken it from him and were holding it somewhere else in the building. His wrists and ankles were each bound together with something (rope, maybe), but he could still bend his legs, and his hands were free otherwise.
These guys must have been real amateurs. With how cheap and worn-down this place looked, the only things that it seemed they’d spent any real money on were the drugs used to incapacitate him, which was the only reason Mars wasn’t completely hating himself right now for letting such people get ahold of him to begin with.
Oh well.
When Mars was a child, the process had always been the same. Sit tight, stay as small and quiet as possible, and wait for mom to come and save him. Though as he’d aged into a teenager and these incidents became more infrequent, he had managed to either get away, or at least get himself out of immediate capture and to safety long enough for the cavalry to arrive.
But really, what an embarrassment would it be for him as an adult, and a Fixer in his own right, if his only plan was to sit and wait for mommy to come save him?
Mars curled his legs backwards, bending his back down just far enough that his hands could reach the soles of his shoes. So few people thought to check those, even for how common it was in the business to hollow them out to hide something in there. Which was why Mars was able to retrieve the small knife he’d hidden in there. Nowhere near useful in an actual fight, but just enough for him to saw through the binds that were holding his limbs together.
He rubbed at his wrists, working the blood circulation back to normal. His head still felt a little fuzzy, but not unworkable. Once he was able to stand, he resisted the urge to stomp his feet against the echoey floor to force more sensation back into them. The door was his next obstacle. On a cursory check, it was locked. Of course. It was almost a relief to discover this. It would just be too embarrassing for him to stand if his kidnappers were that stupid.
Still, this too didn’t pose much of an obstacle. Another benefit of Mars’s unusual upbringing was that he’d developed a decent talent for lock-picking. Which meant such a simple thing as this door was only a proper obstacle with him for a few moments thanks to the contents of his other shoe sole.
His ingress into the hallway was slow, as always with a quick check for any people or cameras. Still nothing. There were other doors lining this hall, but still no signs of windows. Maybe this place was in a basement level? Mars checked a few of the doors, seeing which might be unlocked, until he finally found one. This turned out to be the way into some kind of break room, going by the ancient TV in one corner, combined with the tables, a water cooler, and a microwave that was still emitting the smell of warmed-over take-out. There was another door here, but of course it didn’t lead to anywhere useful. Just a janitor’s closet that housed a broom matted with lint, a bucket with a cracked bottom, and a mop so long disused that the head would have probably disintegrated the moment it was dunked into water.
Either these people were seriously untidy, or this was just an abandoned midpoint shell they had taken over and were intending to use while holding onto him before taking him elsewhere. All the better for Mars’s purposes. If that meant they were just as new to the lay of the land as he was, then he’d take what little advantage he could from it.
There was the sound of footsteps in the hall, and Mars froze abruptly. Damn. Were they coming to check on him in his cell? Quickly, he slipped into the closet, doing as much as he could to not jostle any of the cleaning equipment around him while leaving the smallest crack in the door for him to peek out from. He held his breath, willing them to be there to do anything else but look in on him.
Thankfully for him, that did seem to be the case. As the next minute, the door to this break room had opened, and a single man walked inside while humming to himself. He looked too well-dressed to be a Rat, but didn’t have any symbols or style of dress that were recognizable as a Syndicate that Mars was familiar with.
No matter. This was opportunity enough for him to take.
The whole thing went quickly once it began. Mars waited until the man was nice and comfortable, sitting down and eating a nice sandwich with his back to the closet once he’d turned the TV on. Then Mars crept from the closet, and wrapped one arm around the man’s mouth and nose, with the other pressed down around his throat. There was a brief struggle, the usual clawing at him from the other trying to reach back and shake him off. And then the lack of oxygen finally got to him and the man passed out in Mars’s arms.
Of course, there was nothing especially useful on him when Mars searched his pockets. Wallet with an ID in it, but still nothing to indicate Syndicate affiliation. Some change in his pockets. A small set of keys which didn’t look like they’d be anything more useful than the man’s own house keys, but which Mars took anyway just in case. The one thing that Mars found which he was inclined to keep besides the keys was a small black cylinder with a button on one side, which upon brief inspection he figured out to be some sort of stun baton. Seeing as he had no other weapon than his small emergency knife, he figured pilfering this would be better than nothing until he could figure out how to get his own greatsword back.
Okay, time to focus. He had his plan. Figure out where he was, find his sword if he could, and, most importantly, find his way out of here. This guy may not have been here to check on him, but it would only be a matter of time before someone did. Mars took a quick drink from the water cooler, hoping it would clear his head just a little more, and steeled himself for what lay ahead of him. Stealth as much as he could, fighting only if he had to.
He was his own Fixer now, long past the age of needing his mother for rescue.
--
He was so close to making this work, he could practically see daylight through the crack in the door at the end of the hall. But even with his experiences up to now, there was only so much he could do against so many people.
“You really are the Emerald Aegis’s kid, if this is the kind of fight you can put up.” Someone who clearly must have been the Syndicate’s boss stood over Mars, gripping his hair to force him to look upwards. The man was sporting a bloody nose, courtesy of the bottom Mars’s boot when he kicked him in the face. He seemed so much more confident now that Mars had one of each of his goons holding onto each of his arms, and a third weighing down his legs to the ground to keep him from getting any leverage to get up again. His knees were screaming at him from the awkward angle they were being forced into, but there wasn’t much he could do about that in his state. “I will say, you’ve put up a good fight getting past all my crew like that. But looks like you just weren’t enough to measure up.”
“Funny for you to talk like that,” Mars huffed. “Even after beating down so many of your people, I still don’t even know who any of you are. I know my mom must have pissed off a lot of people, but if you’re that unknown you’ll probably be way down on her list of people to check once she learns about this.”
“Cute.” Mars gagged, feeling a boot slamming into him mid-torso. If there was anything in his stomach he might have puked from the blow, but as it was all he did was spray flecks of saliva onto the man’s shoe. The force on his hair increased, and Mars felt his roots stinging. “You know, you talk awful highly for just some punk riding on mommy’s coattails.” The man extracted something from his pocket, which Mars was quick to identify as a knife when it was brought up close to his face. “Here’s the thing, you’ve caused me an awful lot of trouble today, and I’m not in the best of moods. And the people that hired us said that they don’t care how roughed up you were when we drop you at their door, as long as we get you to them in mostly one piece.” Mars willed himself not to wince too much, when the point of that knife dug just the slightest bit into his face just behind the corner of his eye. “Maybe I’ll say that we had to take a few… liberties in how we got you to behave. Especially if you keep on being such a pain in the a-”
There was a slamming of a door, and a rush of sound like something whistling through the air.
Then the space was filled with the slamming of something heavy into bone, and the sizzling stench of burning meat and hair. The knife went flying, the head of the man holding it suddenly rocked to one side by the force before the rest of his body followed suit, toppling him to the floor.
The ensuing chaos only lasted a few minutes, with yelling and people being pulled into the fray. Mars went down on his front hard, unable to recover his arms from the people holding them fast enough before he went face-first into the floor. The ensuing dizziness leaving him stunned and unable to move while noise and movement surrounded him.
It was only by the time Mars managed to push himself back up to his hands and knees that things seemed to have ended as quickly as they’d begun.
There were hands on his face again, someone speaking loudly, and Mars instinctively jerked backwards in the event he was going to get struck or cut again. But the hands held on, just firmly enough to keep him in place but not enough to hurt.
And he realized just how familiar they were, as well as the voice speaking to him.
“Mars! Mars, open your eyes, damn it!” Cautiously, Mars blinked his eyes open, and the tense face before him came into focus.
“Lu… Lulu?” It was indeed her. Lulu was kneeling in front of him, her still-sizzling bat cooling down from bright red to cooler shades, still stinking of the people it had hit. But he couldn’t even focus on the horrid smell. Just the feeling of sheer relief to see someone else had come for him. Especially if it was her. “What are you doing here?”
“Saving your ass, obviously. You thought I wouldn’t come for you?! If those assholes hadn’t sped off in a van, there was no way San and I would’ve let them nab you like that.” Lulu looked up somewhere over Mars’s shoulder, probably to where San was, if he was indeed here as well. “Yeah, he’s okay, San. Just a little banged up is all.”
Now alongside the relief, he just felt shame. More than just needing his own mother’s rescue to get out of a situation like this, now he’d just proven himself a burden to his own Office. Especially if he was this weak to get them caught up in this again.
“I’m… Sorry, that I’ve caused you so much trouble,” Mars said quietly. “I’ll make it up to you later for-”
“Ugh! Will you stop with the self-pity already?! You’re pissing me off, you know that!!” Lulu pinched Mars’s cheeks, putting a stop to any more of his attempt at an apology. “You got mobbed, big deal! You’re not the only Fixer who’s ever gotten ganged up on and taken down. You running around and getting into fights with these guys just to try and save everyone else some trouble just got you beaten up even more! And you’re still just feeling bad about it!”
Lulu suddenly let go of Mars’s face, and he found himself now with his chin over her shoulder, and Lulu wrapping her arms around him with her face buried into his.
“You should’ve waited for me. Didn’t you think I’d come get you?” Lulu’s voice was muffled, buried into his shoulder as her mouth was. “I must be a really shitty girlfriend if you went and got yourself beaten up like this all because you thought you’d have to get out of here all on your own.”
“… You’re not, Lulu,” Mars said softly. He brought his arms up to embrace Lulu back. Holding her like this filled him with a sense of relief and comfort that he’d had no idea he was sorely in need of. “I just wanted to get out on my own, so I wouldn’t make anyone worry… But I guess I screwed that up, huh?” Lulu mumbled something into his shoulder, but he got the gist of it. Yeah, he sure had. “… Thank you for coming for me, Lulu.”
“Dumbass,” came her slightly choked voice. “Don’t have to thank me for something I would’ve done no matter what.”
“Maybe… But thank you anyway.”