The Plane’s Children – Chapter Fifteen -Emersli1

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Dr. Saxon got the unfortunate job of having to go through Frank Spaulding’s journals.

Tony tried to help, having at least a background in Physiology … but he had only gone through Chem II, and that had been a long time ago.

Looking at the packed shelves of journals still to be gone through, Blair made an executive decision and called in a young latent sentinel who worked for the FBI and read at a ridiculous rate of speed.  Then they all had to wait three days because Spencer had taken one look at Mick Brandon and growled “Mine!”, coming online and bonding in such a rush they barely got the duo down to an iso-room in time.

Jim Ellison had looked at the tall, scraggly beanpole in disbelief.  “Chief, we’re going to be here a bit longer.  That kid isn’t built to support a sentinel’s gifts.  Tony and I are going to have to come up with a careful plan or he’s going to sprain everything the first time he gives chase.”

Bethany Parker had laughed at her Prime Sentinel.  “Ever seen a greyhound?  Or a cheetah?  I think if he gets going … but hey.  Think about it.  Who else but a sentinel could have such finely tuned eye muscles?  Reading that fast … you gotta know that puts a strain on the eyes.  Besides, I knew a guy back home just like him.  Ears like a bat and the best tracker you ever saw, but you’d never take him to a bar fight.”

Alone actually thought both of them might be surprised, studying the giant anteater curled up with the golden retriever.

The rest of the team continued tying up loose ends, poor Rachel Saxon continuing her slog determinedly alone.

Tony and Alone went to the upper Plane together.

Everyone came running when they arrived, anxious for news.  But Alone went first to a small, slender figure huddled into themself, surrounded protectively by their friends.  Taking their hands, they knelt at their feet.

“Fidget, the monster is dead.  I know it isn’t nearly enough, and I wish there was something more I could do …”

Fidget raised tired, blood shot eyes from the ground for the first time in what felt like forever.  Looking at their beloved eldest sibling, they drew in a long, painful breath.  “It has to be enough.  No more children torn apart.  No more people left to grieve for a child they sheltered.  It has to be enough.  It’s all there is, so it will have to … be enough.”  They ran out of voice there, dropping to their knees in bitter tears.

Alone opened their arms for their hurting sibling and gave the only comfort they could.

Tony stood behind them and startled when a person slid their arm around his shoulders.  Turning, he looked into amethyst eyes under heavy, dark brows.  “Hello Quicksilver.  My name is Sage, and I am very glad to meet you at last.”

Sage drew him slightly away from the group surrounding Alone and Fidget, towards another person waiting on the outer edges of the still growing group.  “This is my crossmate, Intuition.  We have been worried for Alone for a very long time.”

Tony shook hands readily enough, but firmly shook his head.  “Morningstar.  Not Alone.  Not anymore, and never again.  The Plane Named them Morningstar.  That’s important.  It means something.”

Intuition nodded in agreement.  “It means something.  It’s important.  And we will pass the word.  I don’t believe anyone else is left who is old enough to have actually been Named by the Plane itself.  But Quicksilver, you are the only spiritmate who has ever made it to the settlement.  Can you tell us where our mates are?  We have looked for them for a long time.”

Tony shook his head.  “I don’t know.  Maybe it’s something I can work on once Morningstar and I come home at the end of this lifetime.  Or maybe it’s just part of the One’s plan.”

Sage nodded.  “What can you tell us about the monster?  What was it?  Why did it … I guess, just … Why?”

Sighing, Tony shrugged.  “We’re still working on that.  Morningstar didn’t want to wait any longer to reassure Fidget.  Because of the choice Shadow made.  They were afraid … well, you know what they feared.  But we will learn more.  Still, I don’t know that anything will ever really EXPLAIN why a soul chose evil.”

The group around Tony was growing slowly.  “I can tell you that an ungifted child of the lower plane decided that they wanted something … someone who wasn’t meant for them.  He may have claimed that he was righting some great cosmic injustice, but really … the obsession started when Amalda Vernon told him ‘No’.  In the end, I don’t think her reasons would have really mattered.”

“No child of the One is truly ungifted.”  Morningstar joined their mate.  “Frank Spaulding chose to reject the gifts he was given because they didn’t give him everything he wanted.  They didn’t give him something he felt entitled to … He never understood that you can’t own people.”

“He never understood that you can’t own people.”

Rachel Saxon unknowingly repeated Alone’s words to their people.

“He killed for the first time when he was five years old.  Smothered his baby sister two days after they brought her home for ‘stealing’ his parents.”  Saxon was exhausted after spending days wading through the written expression of a monster’s mind.

Spencer Reid was no less exhausted, but he hunted monsters for a living.  “When he suspected his father of having an affair, he killed him in a ‘hunting accident’.  No one even suspected the grieving ten-year-old.  At fourteen he killed his best friend when their family was preparing to move cross-country for a new job.  That was a ‘drowning accident’.  And when his mother began dating a man while he was in college, he killed them in a ‘car accident’.”

The team was gathered for one last debrief before Jim and Blair left to return to Cascade and the lives they had dropped so abruptly to answer the Upper Plane’s cry for help.  All the i’s had been dotted.  All the t’s had been crossed.  All that was left was trying to understand why it all happened in the first place.

And deciding how much of that to share with the Ramsey and Caulfield/Vernon families.

“When Amalda Vernon came online, and became the sole guardian of her brothers at nineteen, she broke up with the boy she’d dated casually for the past two years.  The boy her latent-guide father didn’t like.  Frank Spaulding couldn’t stand that.  In his mind, she belonged to him.  Not to her brothers, and not to some future sentinel.”  Dr. Saxon had been disgusted by the enraged rant that had covered the pages in one of the journals.

“I wonder how long those boys would have lived, if Mallie Vernon hadn’t broken it off with Spaulding.”  Emmet Jackson’s mother had been so firmly against the idea of people ‘owning’ each other that he didn’t even know who his father was.  He had been raised in a loving commune and any of the men could have sired him.  He just couldn’t wrap his head around Spaulding’s way of thinking about the people in his life.

Blair agreed with Emmet’s thinly veiled suggestion.  “Oh, I don’t think either of them would have lived to grow up.  Spaulding could never have handled the attention Amalda would have needed to give them.”

Spencer picked the tale back up.  “Apparently he was fixated on the idea that if he’d been a sentinel, or even a latent, he would have had everything he wanted.  And he really was a genius.  He refocused his chemistry major from engineering to biomedical and began looking for a way to transform himself into a sentinel.”

“Along the way, he did come up with some innovative and effective treatment protocols for some truly terrible cancers.  But that was almost incidental to his real goal.  His experiments were brutal, usually fatal, and frequently failed.  When he finally felt he had the correct combination, dosage, and sequence of brain-altering chemicals … he began experimenting on himself.”  Some of his colleagues were trying to argue that Spaulding had had a noble if misguided goal.  And that it was only his self-experimentation that had driven him over the edge into madness.

Spencer knew better.  The man’s own words condemned him.  “He destroyed the test subjects that were still alive.  And set out after the woman who’d had the nerve to tell him ‘no’.”

Bethany Parker had been the one tasked with tracking down Spaulding’s test subjects.  “Most of his subjects were college kids, agreeing to participate in a medical study.  He was careful to only choose mundanes, and they never knew what they’d really gotten themselves into.  I’ve tracked seventeen people with the information the good doctors have given me.  Seventeen families that had been holding onto hope that their child would come home.”  Those had been tough notifications.

It was left to Jim to sum up.  “So, a monster from the cradle who used his brilliance to destroy at least twenty-four people in the name of his own twisted sense of entitlement.  Matthew Caulfield and Jason Ramsey deserve to know.  They can decide what to tell their families.”

Blair looked at Alone.  “You’ve already done the notification to the family on the upper Plane, but I don’t know that the details would mean much to them.”

Alone agreed.  “They wouldn’t.  Fidget is trying to find the heart to continue on.  They have many good friends, and I believe they will succeed.  I will speak with Seeker and tell them anything they want to know.  It is in their nature to need to know.  I will share some of the information with Sage and let them decide what to tell Steadfast.”

Jim and Blair would be gone, back to their lives on the other side of the country.  Spencer had agreed to join the team, helping to fill out their roster and bringing with him a wealth of experience and knowledge.  And incidentally bringing a lot more people into Tony’s world of contacts.  Spencer’s old team had been almost fully made up of latents, and one by one over time they would come online.

When the time came that Tony needed to have two more teams, Sentinel-Agents Aaron Hotchner and Derek Morgan would be ready to come on board to lead them.  Tony would eventually find himself needing to move into a more administrative role in the growing agency, and Sentinel-Agent Spencer Reid would take his place leading the original team.

And through all of it, Tony and Alone, Quicksilver and Morningstar, would be together in all things.

Blair would ask once, why Alone was able to switch between their otherself and their original form when other spiritmates could not.  Alone would simply say that Tony needed them to, and that was apparently that.

Many papers and seminars would be prepared.  Introductory education modules would be modified or developed.  Blair would take it on as a personal mission to ensure that sentinels and guides never forgot that their spiritmates were their equals in every way.

Lives well-lived.  A tribe well served.