When I Grow Up [10% Complete]

[Fawn Banks]

Prompt List

• Carnival
• Birthday
• Pregnant
• Pain
• Ski Lodge
• Obsession
• Luck
• Sword
• The Movies
• Wine

[Fawn Banks]

C A R N I V A L

[Fawn Banks]

B I R T H D A Y

[Fawn Banks]

P R E G N A N T

[Fawn Banks]

P A I N

Fawn had never felt so much pain in her entire life as she did when Bacchus bit her.

In the instant his teeth broke skin, the entire events of the night flashed before her eyes. She, Chase and Aurora had been dispatched from Crimson quickly and quietly. Their job was to recover as many high-priority targets as they could before Midnight could get there. With Chase's help, they had centralized themselves and were working on dispatching as many hunters as they could to grab people in what was essentially the middle of the night and bring them into the guild houses for safe keeping. Their next task was to hit the home of Vanessa Miller one of the field agents for ISIS, who unfortunately had the pleasure of overseeing the accounts that the firm had with the guilds. Vanessa herself was already safe - ISIS had been locked down, and the people who were there were stuck there within the fortress-like building.

The hard copies of the accounts Vanessa managed, however, were in a safe at her home. They were protected with firestone, but it was only a matter of time before someone figured out that she'd be important to this person or that, go to the house, find the safe, then wonder what was inside of it that warranted being protected by so much. She had names, addresses, personal information down to extended family - any paper that a guild member had ever signed for any reason at all? Vanessa had a copy of it. All of the originals were at their respective houses, of course, but they'd had to take their computers offline, cutting off Midnight's access, so no doubt the villains were scrambling to come up with another solution. Which, of course, brought the trio back around to the original task at hand - get those copies of the documents and get them to the guilds before someone else found them.

With Chase's ability to see things before they happened, the girls had been pretty safe. It was the only reason the trio had been dispatched as they were - normally, Sitara would have never sent Chase out with a trainee, but Fawn at the very least had worked directly under Shannon for the near-entirety of her term with Crimson, plus she was a Nevla. That meant that she was quick and she could fight. With Connor missing (at the time), Sitara was spread too thin to worry about it, and Aurora was capable enough. The fox was definitely a far cry from how she'd first come to them, that was for sure.

They'd gotten to Vanessa's house and gone inside. Just as Aurora opened the safe, Chase began to get flashes of what was about to happen next - the most she was able to do was to tell them to get the fuck out, but it hadn't mattered. Bacchus was an Old One, in the sense that he was able to bend reality freely and he made it seem like the house had suddenly turned itself inside out. Chase was using her precognition to guide them out, Fawn behind them with a fucking safe full of paperwork (she was a shapeshifter, it could have been a car and it wouldn't have mattered with her adrenaline rush right then), when they realized that the car they'd arrived in had been blown up. It currently sat ablaze in the street, a small group of Bacchites approaching them from all sides.

Fawn did the only thing she could think of, which was to smash the safe open against the concrete, then hurled the paperwork into the blaze. From the group, a female that nobody recognized roared with anger and ran forward, but the fire mixed with the shitty New York drizzle had already done enough damage to render the work useless. The paper the guilds used was highly flammable, at the very least, in case of situations exactly like this one.

Bacchus, who had been interested in Chase, had successfully immobilized them by a solid blast of power, and turned his anger towards the blonde who had offended him so. She reminded him of his Deyanira, when the woman had been human - light eyes, tan skin, blonde hair. Attitude. He was behind her in a flash, so quick that none of them had time to react. All Chase could do was hold her hand up in a failed warning, but it was too late. He bit down, and Fawn screamed, the sensation of acid boiling through her veins jarring her senses and blinding her to anything but the searing pain.

"At least tell us who you are," the petite fox demanded.

  Brave. They all were. Full of fear, yet unrelenting, he noticed that while each woman had dropped their weapon when so ordered for fear of the other being slaughtered as Bacchus promised he would do, none of them acted on their emotions, and each stood unflinching as he made the rounds among them. They spoke loudly, calmly, and with conviction.

Perhaps Sitara had chosen the correct group, after all.

"My name, my lovely creature, is Bacchus. I assume you know me," he added.

Chase swallowed, hard, watching as he let Fawn fall into the dirty, wet and now ashen road. The hunter dug her nails into the broken up pavement, gurgling as her Nevla blood worked to heal the wound Bacchus had created before she bled out. She saw that Fawn's XD .40 was only a few inches from her hand, but chose not to notice it, knowing that Bacchus was fine-tuned to all of their minds at the moment. Her concern was blocking out any hint of her foresight, though she knew that because of what they'd been doing all night, the names and addresses of the people they had extracted were still fresh in her mind. Aurora's and Fawn's, too. They were fucked.

"I know who you are," Chase said, her voice clear despite the tremble from the cold.

"Then you know how special it is to be bitten by me," he concluded. He didn't smile.

Aurora was unable to hide her shock. "You," she whispered. "You're the one that got Varekova."

"Varekova? Oh, the blonde from Frost who rushed out so stupidly into the cold to rescue her little cat friend," he said, snapping his fingers as though he'd already forgotten her. "Indeed. Unfortunately, two of her idiot friends managed to slip her out from under me before she could make her way back to my loving arms." The way he said loving arms implied they were anything but. "No bother. If you don't have her up in chains, I imagine she's already killed everyone she could find - or herself, at the very least."

"You're psychotic," Aurora breathed. "Just kill us already."

It was Chase, though, who started to cry. "No!" she yelled. "Please! Don't!"

Bacchus thought she was talking to him, and simply laughed. He had no idea that Chase was already seeing what was about to happen next, or else he might have come up with a different plan. "Deyinara, be a love and hold that one still. I want to save her for later. The fox, though..." He trailed off, then leaned down and grabbed Fawn by the blood-soaked collar of her jacket, lifting her just enough to issue a command while paying attention to little else.

"Listen carefully, my pet," he said, his voice taking on the tone he used to place his followers in his thrall. "First, I want you to kill the fox. Then, you're going to tell us absolutely everything you've been doing tonight, and any little secrets you three are hiding from me."

"Of course, Bacchus," she said, her voice strained.

He shoved her back into the ground, turning to take his leave. Fawn's vision had gone blurry as darkness crept in around the edges; everything had taken a strange, reddish tint. She looked back at Bacchus and realized he lit up like a beacon, and for some reason she couldn't tear her eyes away. What had he told her? Oh, right... to handle Aurora, then to tell him what she knew. It was such a reasonable request, one she could easily fulfill. She wanted to please him so. The urge to win his attention became overwhelming, and Fawn forgot who she was and what she was supposed to be doing right then.

As she stood, the cold grip of her XD in her hand caused a flicker of her memories pass by her consciousness. Bacchus. He had done this to her. She looked at Aurora and Chase (and the woman holding Chase), and for a moment, when she stared into Chase's eyes, she realized the hunter was stifling tears because she had seen everything that was about to happen. Fawn just nodded to her, and mouthed, 'Run'. Then she lifted the gun (which felt as though it weighed a thousand pounds suddenly because she wasn't supposed to have it), fought the urge to put it down (Bacchus had given her an order, why was she disobeying His wishes?), and quickly fired.

She put one round into the center of Deyinara, causing Bacchus' bloodbond to shriek and fall to the ground. This caused Bacchus to yell at the top of his lungs, hitting his own knees in pain as he felt as though his insides were being ripped out. Fawn never had understood why you'd make a bloodbond if you were a vampire - it was like advertising a weakness. She knew he'd recover soon, and when he began screaming at her to kill the hunters, she felt her will slipping away.

"Run," she begged, her voice laboured. "Now, go!"

Chase and Aurora grabbed their own weapons and ran, fighting their way through the crowd of Bacchites with the help of Chase's ability. There weren't many thanks to Fawn, and none stood as the girls cut a path right through. They disappeared around the corner, and Fawn felt the last of her free will break under the pressure of Bacchus' own might.

"GO AFTER THEM!" he screamed, still doubled over from the shock of Deyinara's death.

Fawn didn't have to check the slide for how many rounds she had left. She knew exactly how many. She had one round left. She knew she'd never be able to hit Bacchus - His will over her was too oppressive, too suffocating. She couldn't kill him if she were standing face to face with him; her own body wouldn't let her. She could feel his mind slam down on hers, digging frantically for the information about where the other two hunters were running.

Fawn lifted the .40 and pressed it to her temple.

"Fuck. You." she hissed.

She pulled the trigger.

Already having stolen a plain SUV, Chase and Aurora sped towards the guild house as fast as they could.

"Oh my god, oh my god," Aurora said over and over again. "Chase, we have to go back! We can't leave her there with him! He's going to-"

"She's already dead," Chase said softly.

"What do you mean? How do you know? Did you see it? Oh god, Chase! Oh god, how are we going to tell Shannon?" Aurora panicked.

Chase shook her head. "I saw it before Bacchus even bit her," she admitted. "He was crushing her with his power, so she killed herself. She committed suicide so we could get away before he got the information from us or turned us into Bacchites and sent us back into the guilds to infect them," she said numbly. "If you need to cry, do it now. I'm going to, too. When we get back to Crimson, we're going to have to keep our shit together. This is good... we have a little more insight into what's happening with Capri now. And we know that Midnight is really crippled without the computer systems. This is good, Aurora. This means we might have a chance now that we know what they're looking for."

Aurora nodded. She didn't think it was good, and she didn't think Chase thought so either, but she allowed herself a few moments of sniffling in silence with the other blonde all the same. As soon as they arrived at Crimson, the waterworks stopped. They both checked the mirrors and made sure their eyes weren't red-rimmed and puffy, then took deep, shaking breaths. As they got to the front doors, Shannon ran outside to greet them.

"Where's the safe?" she demanded. "Where's Fawn?"

Chase swallowed hard, and motioned for Aurora to go ahead.

"Shannon," she said softly. "The safe was destroyed, along with everything inside, but...  you may want to sit down for a second."

Despite how quickly Aurora walked, she still didn't miss Shannon's yell of rage come from outside. As other hunters stopped in the halls and turned, Aurora just shook her head. "Don't go out there," she warned them, shocking them in sheer part due to the quiet trainee suddenly finding her voice. She fought her way into the heart of the guild, then went to the door that she needed.

"Stav?" she said, her voice cracking as she entered his office. "Fawn's dead. Bacchus got her. Mark her off."

He looked up, unflinching. "Shannon?"

Aurora shook her head, wiping her eyes quickly. While Fawn trained under Shannon, Aurora had somehow been stuck with Stavros. The man had become like a father to her, much like Axel had to some of the Frost girls. Now was the time for her to be strong, but she still felt like if she stuck close enough to him, he could protect her from the outside world. She didn't know if it bothered him or irritated him, but right now, she didn't care. "Chase is telling her right now." She stood there for an extra second, then turned to leave.

"Aurora."

She turned back around, eyes wide as she willed herself not to cry in the man's presence. That she was pushing herself so hard after what had just happened made him internally promise that each and every Midnight vampire he got his hands on would suffer that much more. "It's going to be okay," he told her. It was probably the nicest thing he'd said to anyone all night.

She nodded.

"Okay?" he asked, making sure she understood.

"Okay," she whispered.

"Go get cleaned up. We're sending you out with one of the Diamonds. Irulan and Rhona Flores are missing, and we intend to find them." He watched as she left, then slowly set the cup of coffee down on his desk so he wouldn't throw the mug at the wall and break it. Then he picked up the phone and called Sean.

"Just cleaned out a nest, 'bout to head back to Onyx," Sean said. He sounded tired.

"Good," Stavros said. "Sean, do me a favour. Watch your back."

Sean paused for a second, realizing that was about as emotional as his father ever got. "Will do, dad. See you soon," he promised.

Stavros turned around in his chair after he set the phone down, then took a red marker and crossed out the name FAWN BANKS written on the dry erase board where they'd divided up teams with partners and given out assignments.

[Fawn Banks]

S K I  L O D G E

[Fawn Banks]

O B S E S S I O N

[Fawn Banks]

L U C K

[Fawn Banks]

S W O R D

[Fawn Banks]

T H E  M O V I E S

[Fawn Banks]

W I N E