Without a 1 for your 2,
The weight shifts onto you.
D.C Al Fine sits at her desk. She’s enjoying the brisk moment of silence before a phone call comes in. She reluctantly picks up, her hand passing over the photo of her family back home in Maine — a family she hasn’t seen in 2 years. The voice on the other end of the line is gruff, stern, and terrified. She places her hand on the bridge of her nose and squeezes her eyes shut, hoping for the call to be part of a dream. The man on the line keeps talking, though, and Al Fine pulls back to reality as he describes the 360 casualties their newest termination attempt on the creature from the mountains has incurred. She doesn’t know what she’s going to tell the Secretary General in 3 hours, a meeting she can’t even bring pictures of the target to. Not unless she wants the Secretary General dead within minutes.
D.C Al Fine hangs up the phone. She sighs, and dials the PHYSICS Division Head. Someone will find a way to kill this thing.
D.C Al Fine stares at the placard on the wall in front of her. She’s in the basement of some church in England, surrounded by armed agents and a trigger for an explosive. The evacuation can be heard in the streets above, as the villagers — all who claim to have never seen this before, impossibly — leave their homes, escorted by agents that will later interrogate them endlessly. She chooses not to think about that, and turns her attention to the placard.
PROPERTY OF THE
DEPARTMENT OF ABNORMALITIES
Thousands of options flow through her head, most of them accompanied with symphonies of worry and scenarios ending with open warfare. Are they another group that has to be hunted like the Hand? A potential ally under the thinly-held veil they call “Regularity”? Some secret, unknown, third thing? Al Fine considers these options, staring at the placard and trying not to think about the rust-covered coffin they found inside this dungeon. She tries not to think of the screaming they heard when they set it ablaze.
In a blink, though, the placard is gone. D.C Al Fine waves off the agents around her, watching them scurry away to carefully pull out the explosives placed inside. This might have mattered to someone before, but it's gone now.
D.C Al Fine sits at the head of the Coalition's Conference Chamber, watching the 108 delegates bicker with each other over the newest ways they can cut corners and deal with monsters "properly". She scans around the room, taking note of who's talking and which representative came today. Even in the Coalition, no organization is entitled to enjoy each other's company, and that has never been clearer than the past few years. Struggling to handle the humanitarian consequences of the Kaiju Crisis; the highly-contested reintroduction of SAPPHIRE; the several failed assassinations of Mari MacPhaerson; everyone in the Coalition feels like the blame should be shifted to someone else, and Al Fine often takes the blunt of it. Arguments and arguments go by, and all she can do is sit and listen to people debate on whether she could even hold the office in the first place.
Today, though, Al Fine notices something. There's an empty seat in the Conference Chamber — but even stranger, there's no placard identifying who's supposed to be sitting there. All that remains is a single red circle, one that she has no memory of seeing. Nobody else in the room seems to care; she pulls out her digital list of all the councilmembers, and counts them up to a total of 107. For a brief moment, she's struck with worry, but in the next, it's gone.
D.C Al Fine leans back into her cushy seat, the thought of another angry councilmember to fight against her on everything fading away. She doesn't need someone else to act like revolutionaries.
D.C Al Fine watches the display screen with bated breath, holding her arms close as she watches a blizzard tear through a town in Oregon. The PHYSICS Director, his words barely audible as she focuses on the screams heard through the whipping cold of the snowfall, turns off the audio just as the roar that started it all comes back into view. A polar bear, not much bigger than the ones at the Central Park Museum only just down the road, stomps through the town. In the blink of an eye, it's crawling towards a person wearing a shirt with only the word "WILSON'S" visible. In the next blink, both are gone. Al Fine lets herself breath, and sighs. Cutting through the yelling and panic of the room, she gives the order.
D.C Al Fine tells the rest of the Coalition to raze the town. She doesn't know who Wilson is, but she has to pull herself away from caring. Someone is going to get hurt if they don’t take out that bear.
D.C Al Fine sips her coffee. It’s extra bitter, despite her putting the ingredients and brew together exactly in the way she always does. Earlier in the morning, too, the toilets at the central GOC HQ in NYC stopped working. They’ve been struggling with running water recently. Everyone in the building has complained about New York traffic to a degree not seen before.
D.C Al Fine spits about the bitter coffee in a knee-jerk reaction, splattering the pile of letters — all marked with a capital K in Times New Roman — just placed on her desk. She exclaims, loudly and with an expletive inappropriate for the General Assembly. Someone has to fix these appliances.
D.C Al Fine wakes up in her bed, sweat rolling down her forehead, the image of the fedora-wearing man still imprinted into her mind. She’s been having nightmares recently, and every time, it’s the same man. She doesn’t really understand what the point of any of it is, every single one of these dreams ending the same: the man stares at her, calls her a “disappointment”, and the world ends in some terrible way. Fire, war, plague, floods, all rolling through her dreams and decimating her instantly. The man, though, remains still and alive.
D.C Al Fine looks at her alarm clock.
2:34 AM
She groans, rolling over in her bed, trying to avoid the image of the man, who she assumed was surely some kind of entity looking to haunt her. She recalls a conversation she had earlier with someone from PHYSICS, or some other department. Someone figured out how to kill a dream, and she might be interested.
D.C Al Fine stands before the wreckage of Three Portlands. She can’t look away from the ruined buildings, the humanitarian workers rushing to help injured children, the burning remains of ICSUT Portlands off in the distance. She closes her eyes for a moment, gulping down the regret as the memories of the Coalition raid on Deer College burn through her retinas.
D.C Al Fine rationalizes what she did, and steps into the helicopter. Someone was bound to destroy this place anyway.
D.C Al Fine lays in her deathbed, the faint jingling of angels echoing off in the distant skies above. Her hospital room is empty, her family and friends not present — or unaware — of her state. She thinks through all the things she managed to accomplish, and tries to ignore all the things she destroyed. Al Fine wonders whether it’s beneficial to the Coalition that she’s bound to pass; perhaps a leadership change will help.
Immortality isn’t something that someone like her should have anyway.