Be not afraid, my love.
Tactical Theology Hub / Pridefest » Did It Hurt When You Fell From Heaven?
Agent Lament and Dr. Light's first encounter was a typical Foundation meet-cute — which is to say, it happened during a catastrophic containment breach and involved numerous casualties.
Dr. Safiya Light peered through a crack in the door and looked for the people who were trying to kill her.
Her assistant Vaux whispered, "Do you see them?"
Safiya shook her head and retreated back into the abandoned office. "I think we got away," she sighed, tugging at her newly-bloodstained silk gloves. "Of all the days to have a interdepartmental conference… what a mess." There was a distant explosion and the stuttering report of automatic gunfire. She grimaced. "Are communications still jammed?"
"I got a signal for a few seconds, but I don't know if anyone received my request for a retrieval team. We might be here for a while."
"I'm not sure we have a while. Our pursuers are—" The door burst open and several things happened in quick succession.
A besuited man with tan skin and tied-back hair strode into the room, pistol raised.
Vaux shouted, "Wait, that's—"
Safiya darted out from behind the doorframe and swung a broken chair leg into his face, hard. Snap, went his nose, he reeled back — and Safiya saw the ID card pinned to his chest.
"—That's one of ours. Agent Lament," Vaux finished lamely.
"Oh, shit," Safiya said.
An hour later, the three of them were in one of the site's many hidden panic rooms, looking over a map of Site-19. Or rather, Dr. Light and Vaux were looking at the map and Troy Lament was looking at Dr. Light.
He was trying to stay focused, certainly — Troy had never been the sort of person to moon over a pretty face during a crisis — but there was something about her that resolutely drew the eye. It was her skin, maybe, in that looked almost like living clay, as if she were a sculpture that had stepped off its plinth and into the world. Or her hair, in the way that the emergency lights cast through it from below, framing her scarred features with hazy radiance. The effect was dazzling. Ethereal. Angelic, even.
Troy possibly had a concussion.
"What do you think, Agent Lament?" Dr. Light asked. She'd remained remarkably businesslike through the whole ordeal of fleeing through the complex. He would've thought her remorseless, were it not for the occasional guilty glance at his bloodied face.
Troy replayed the last few minutes of the conversation over in his head and said, "This looks like as good a route as any. Definitely doable… if we had a full recon team backing us up. And a tank."
"It's not ideal," Light admitted. "But sitting on our hands here isn't an option." She looked at him sidelong, half-wry, half-apologetic. "Sorry again, about before. Considering that I'm already about to get us killed, breaking your nose feels excessive."
Before his maybe-concussed brain could regain control over his mouth, Troy said, "You could make it up to me by letting me buy you dinner."
"Get us all out alive and I'll consider it."
These are three things that Troy noticed, dating Safiya Light:
ONE. The only piece of furniture in her apartment that hadn't come with the place was a large fish tank with an automated feeding & filtration system.
TWO. She wore gloves at every moment of the day. At work, at home, in bed — it didn't matter. Usually she went with fingerless gloves to keep her dexterity unimpeded, though sometimes she wore silk when attending formal events. The one time he'd asked her about it, Safiya said something about having terrible circulation and changed the subject. Troy, who had always known her hands to be very warm, didn't push it.
THREE. He didn't need a concussion to think her beautiful.
They were sharing lunch in Troy's car when he decided to tell her.
"Uh," he said. "I know things have been getting kind of… serious between us recently."
Safiya's plastic fork stilled, halfway to her salad. "They have," she agreed, a little guarded.
"So, I think it's time I told you that… when I started working here, I used One-Thirteen to change my sex. I'm transgender."
For a long, terrifying moment, Safiya said nothing, her face betraying no emotion. "Okay." She very deliberately set her fork down. "Then I want you to know that I'm not a woman."
Troy blinked in surprise. This was not how he expected the conversation to go. "I'm… glad you told me. I want you to know that doesn't change how I—" Safiya put up a hand.
"By which I mean," she said evenly. "I'm not a person."
Troy plonked his ass down on the edge of Safiya's desk and said, "Why are mummies always going bankrupt?"
Safiya, who had evidently skipped out on their date to answer emails or something, continued typing. "I don't know. Why?" she replied, distant.
Lament grinned. "Because they keep falling for pyramid schemes."
Safiya glanced up for the first time since he entered the room and smiled, a fond quirk of the lips. "Dork." She lapsed back into silence, clacking away. Troy was considering taking the hint and making himself scarce when she added, "I lived in Egypt when I was very young, you know."
"Do you miss it?"
"Sometimes. What about you? Do you miss your childhood?"
"Nah. I can't remember anything before I was about twenty-three, twenty-four?" Troy shrugged. "Can't miss what isn't there."
Safiya stopped typing altogether, turning the full brunt of her attentions upon him. "You can't remember your childhood? None of it?" She was looking at him with unvarnished concern. Troy's mouth suddenly felt very dry.
"Am I supposed to?"
Troy Lament was not a pious man. Faith, to him, was a vestigial organ, a forgotten language. He knew that gods were real — a fact scientifically determined by the fine doctors of Tactical Theology — and prayed to precisely none of them.
Troy's life only truly began when he was twenty-three, in a way. He was a subject of the Foundation's conscription program; an initiative that took captured members of hostile groups of interest and started them over fresh. Full amnesty and Foundation employment in exchange for the full erasure of their memories and records, tabula rasa.
The first Sunday of his new life, years before he'd learn about any of this, Troy woke up early and went to church. This was not a deliberate choice. He had done it automatically, as if by muscle memory — a habit so thoroughly ingrained that it no longer required conscious thought. Troy had sat there, in the church, and listened to the preacher speak. He'd sang the hymns and partaken in communion and felt… nothing. Nothing at all. It was familiarity without comfort. Prayer without God.
Troy would try other places of worship over the course of his life, other religions — churches and synagogues, temples and mosques — but each time, the same result. The part of him that took comfort in faith had been excised by the amnestics, leaving only empty, grasping hunger in the space it left behind.
Another Sunday came. Troy slept until noon.
These are things that Troy noticed, dating Safiya Light:
She was older than she looked and younger than she felt. She accumulated things — coded messages and takeout receipts and high-resolution prints of ctenophores. Her palms were scarred, run through with stigmata. She hadn't cleaned her apartment in over six years. Her kisses tasted like fresh apples, or bloodstained thorns, or saltwater swelling to rise above the tallest mountains.
Once, when they were lying together in Troy's bed, he looked at her and in the darkness her eyes were two white pinpricks, like light cast by distant, long-dead stars. He looked at her and said what's the difference is between a jellyfish and a lawyer and she said what and he said one is spineless heartless and shits with its mouth… and the other is a jellyfish. Her dead star eyes crinkled at the edges and she laughed and laughed and laughed.
