War (FM Feb) Try to do it right this time around
I couldn't stop thinking about her. I'd gone on half a dozen missions since I went back to Manticore and a part of me just stopped working. Nicole might joke that my brain never worked but she's just a bitch. It was a gift, the ability to just shut off that part of myself, the part of me that could turn a blind eye to the pile of bodies I'd left in my wake, all in the name of Manticore. Oh yeah, did I mention mission is actually a code word for "assassination"? I stopped thinking about it, feeling it, everything just stopped. I wasn't human anymore, just another soldier.

That was until I got the phone call. I'd stopped listening to messages a week after I left. Because I couldn't stand to hear another word from Nicole, Faith, Fred, any of them. They didn't understand. They couldn't. They'd hate me until they died and that was fine. I'd stopped feeling that too. And eventually, they stopped calling. Which was the reason I'd even listened to the voicemail in the first place. Not even any of them but her. Her voice was waking up parts of me that had gone numb and silent weeks before. She sounded scared.

It was enough to jar me back to reality, to make me slip away from my unit on another outside mission. Before I could think about it, before I could think of the consequences I'd stolen a motorcycle and was heading down the highway to California, just hoping that I wouldn't be too late.

As luck would have it, I was right on time. Faith didn't exactly look happy to see me and I couldn't even get a glance from Grace but at least they were letting me help. In fact, Connor seemed relieved that I was around because he instantly split the girls up into two groups. One following him and one following me. Hey, I always wanted an army of girls to follow me around but I'd never actually pictured that happening with a giant dragon burning holy hell down on us.

"Damn." I muttered when it got so close for a second that I swear I could feel the the hairs on my arm singe a little bit.

This time was different. It was another mission, and we were killing demons but it wasn't exactly an assassination. More like a war and the stakes were the mother of my child inside the building going up against her evil asshole of a dad. If Faith weren't in there with her I'd say fuck the mini slayers and go after them. I tried to keep a special eye on Tyler cause I just liked the kid but he was on Connor's side. Although after a while the sides melded together and we were all just fighting for our lives.

Honestly, it was just kind of easy at first. The demons weren't hard to kill, I was snapping necks at every interval but there was just so damn many of them. Once you killed one, ten more would appear each one bigger and uglier than the last one. That didn't even include the freakin' dragon flying above us. What exactly were we gonna do about that?

After I'd gone through more demons than I could count I stopped proactively fighting and started keeping my eye on the slayers. Anytime one of them got backed into a corner I tried to help them out. The problem was, there was just too damn many of them. I saw Fred fall and I tried to make my way over to her but one of the mini brats had her back and killed the demon who was about to do Fred and Connor both in. Shit. Connor was down for the count too. In fact, everywhere I looked there were unconscious and dead bodies. There's always casualties in war, right? As long as we fucking win I guess I might be able to accept that.

And as long as my son and his mother were okay. Glancing up I saw the building start to shake and implode.

"Grace." I said as I watched it start to come down. Using my speed, the thing that Max liked to call 'blurring' I hurried inside the building determined to find her.