Twenty Five Years Earlier

The last day she ever went by Jain had been her last day on the base. It was not by her choice.

It may have not been the last thing on her mind, but that day was also one that set in place the fate of John Bradford. Later, she thought that the person she left behind would, finally, get his chance to show what he was worth. After all, the man was strong, willful, and compassionate as she had trained him to be. And, she reasoned to herself, she was only holding him back from greatness.

Not that she was given a chance to say good-bye, even if she had wanted to. Jain got the news that she would have ten minutes to clear her things from her office and leave or else be escorted off of the premises by who was likely to be someone she had trained herself—maybe even John. She knew that it was construed this way to make damn sure her back was permanently turned against the place that had been a home for her for over a decade. Save, of course, for the time she spent on the "project" that had seen her doing little other than throwing three years of her life away in a strange land. Three precious years that she spent in the time since wishing she could earn back, spend on something more meaningful.

And now, when it was her turn to be bold and try to do something she wanted to do, Jain realized the truth of what she was to these people after everything. A misfit toy who had served its purpose and was now trying to start a personal rebellion that the politics of the time couldn't stand for.

Humiliated wasn't even the half of what she was feeling as she walked, carrying the box of what she could find in her office that was worth grabbing before she would never see the rest of it again. The sinking feeling, that she had left something behind, was something that took months to get over. Even then, certain feelings never really went away.

Once she was outside of the gates, the tears had started in earnest. There was no time to think about the fact that she said nothing in the way of a good-bye for anyone. Hell, no one she cared about remotely even knew that she was being effectively wiped out of the service because of her "indiscretion". She might as well of been killed, along with over a decade she had spent mostly in the chainlink fence of the base. Almost another decade on top of that, trained to live as a cog in a large war machine.

What the hell was a cog supposed to be, when it had been torn out of a machine that had warped, broken it?

When she got to the duplex they had given her to live in for a good few months until she "found her footing"—a place conveniently located in skid row half an hour away from the base by car—Jain was deep in a sort of pain that left her spending most of that first day sitting in one of the dining chairs in the next-to-empty kitchenette. It was one of the rare pieces of furniture there was in the place, and it wobbled anytime she moved even a little bit in it.

The place reeked, smelled like the remnants of the fire that it had been badly repaired from. The outside of the house had never been fully repaired, and the hideous peek of baby blue material that had been used to patch the damage in the upper part of the walls looked like an unhealed scab. The memory of an old fire, and the combined nasal bouquet of the old filthy carpet, had a habit of killing any appetite she may have otherwise had. Would be a major reason for her almost extreme weight loss in the months to come.

For a brief moment, Janis found her old humor before the mood of the place suffocated it. Good luck to me, finding any chick who'd come in here.

She found herself counting the years of her life, fingernail dragging across the fabric of the thigh of her pants as though she were writing it out on paper.

Three years on a pointless project, which she spent in some desert making sure the algebra of stupid, pointless war made some semibalance of sense. A handful of years, learning how to be a person of value, unlearning everything her filthy excuse for a father had taught her. Fifteen years—and then some—doing what she loved, whether it was mentoring young men and women or deciding stratagems for everything from budget concerns to defense planning. And this was her gold watch.

A remodeled meth lab and a gag order that she couldn't hope to break out of, unless she wanted to never work again in this country. Her homeland.

She was staring at the filthy uncovered window in the kitchenette as though the view of the wooden plank fence two feet from her window could give her some understanding. What she ended up doing was listening to her neighbor on the other side of the wall watching what sounded like that Republican news channel. It was the only sane reason why she would catch someone ending a sentence by saying, "...and I think we saw evidence of the good instincts the President has with this new bill."

Burying her face in her hands at those words, Jain could feel the moment she lost hope. It was like a switch had been flicked in her head, taking her from the person who felt as though she had been submerged in a frozen lake to finally feeling the killing hypothermia biting through skin and muscle. Staring at the fence, Jain wondered what she would even do tomorrow. The regimen of being in the service had been a strange but welcome contrast to herself, bright, insane bird she was.

The suicidal thoughts were intrusive but subtle against her thoughts and mood, as though they were nothing more than the brush of a butterfly's wings against her mind. In a way they were a comfort in a situation that would have otherwise felt like she was cattle being shoved down a chute.

At some point, though, even someone trapped in a maze of morbid thoughts had to pee.

Getting out of the chair and heading into the claustrophobic bathroom, where the voice of the blaring misinformation news network was all the louder through the ridiculously thin wall, Jain urinated into the off-white toilet. Still not having tucked herself away, as she passed by the poorly made bathroom mirror she paused and looked at herself.

She looked a fucking mess, a fitting addition to the neighborhood she had been unceremoniously dumped in. They had taken the uniforms she had gotten used to wearing until they were a second skin, left her with the street clothes she had. Currently she was wearing a shirt that she had won at a Trivia Night at the bar that was a short distance from the base, a worn white shirt with the words, "Trivia Games Winner", written in dorky, once bright, 90's-riffic colors. It was old—much like her, she thought, bitterly—dating back when she used to do those things without Bradford as her friend.

The title of "winner" written on her chest equally might have been what drew her eyes to her reflection, but what drew her attention was the thing she was holding in her hand.

As though in a trance, Jain pulled her hand away from her penis then lifted the hem of the ridiculous shirt up, over her head. Balling it up in the crook of one of her arms, Jain stared at her flat, undeniably male chest. As she stared at herself—more accurately, at the body that she had been slowly trying to crawl herself out from for the past decade—she felt something besides shame, sadness.

Anger, visible in her reflection with the way she was breathing heavily, dragging in air so that it shook her frame, felt like it, at least for the moment, was a formidable antagonist to the creeping, deceitful feelings that inspired a self-immolation. She realized something, remembering why she had had no choice but to confront her superiors. The day that she had planned for a long time was coming up, a surgery that felt as far from elective as she could ever imagine. The first step towards finding who she was going to be for the rest of her life.

They had done more than take her past away. They had tainted a future for her that felt bright, shining. Clean. And they expected her to kill herself in this place. If not outright, then to bury herself into obsolescence quietly.

Uncomfortably since she was a teenager, Jain had started to show more and more of the strange and undoubtedly handsome attributes in her face and body frame that fit Arthur's to a tee.

Of course on the man she had inherited the attributes from, everything had been corrupted, made ugly in some way. The easy, slightly wicked smile that her mouth had a habit of naturally forming felt downright evil whenever she had seen Arthur grin, probably at something in itself evil, wrong, his teeth tobacco stained, chipped. Her slender, straight posture had been ruined on Arthur, whose habit of slouching and love of overindulgence in alcohol left him with a perpetually bloated look. Near the end of the man's life, Jain could remember too easily the blotched, broken network of veins the skin on his nose had, also a gift of his alcohol abuse. Otherwise, Jain knew that he might as well as been staring at a slight duplicate of Arthur's face, with slightly more slender cheekbones, a sharper chin. There, the same curving of the man's forehead, the same sharp blade of a nose. Even a similar, subtle dip of the cleft in her chin was a clear carry over from the dead man.

Staring at a man who looked uncomfortably too close to the father that she wanted to leave in the miserable, unmarked grave they had buried him in in a potter's field, Jain realized one thing that was more powerful than her despair.

She couldn't die in this body, in the bizarro, unfitting meat suit that never felt like it was hers.

It was months later from that rock bottom of a day, and Janis was sitting in the hospital's day room, working on a crossword that she kept balanced on a knee. She hadn't realized that the room had been gradually emptied of other people until she heard someone speak, and she knew it was directed at her.

"How goes the house hunting?"

Janis felt the pulse in her neck jump into high gear. Instead of looking at the speaker, sat in one of the plastic chairs on the far side of the room, she pretended to be gazing at the puzzle a moment longer before she turned, focused on making her body language look only slightly curious.

How long had that man been there? She was shocked that she couldn't recall. Was she so easily rendered placid by some time spent away from chain link, out of uniform?

Wearing one of those smiles she had resigned herself to weeks ago that she would never lose, Janis looked at the man in the suit. The one that she had assumed had been waiting in the room until it was his time to visit someone.

Now Janis could have kicked herself at missing the obvious Spook—a term that wasn't a racial slur in this context, but was rather referring to an immaculately dressed man who was purposefully as nondescript as possible—that she was currently sitting in a room, alone, with. He had "government" written all over him. To be more precise, deep government. The kind that transcended presidential dominion, political party.

She answered back, "Oh, you know. Could be better. By any chance, did you get, in those notes of yours, the information about my ten visits to the shrink? Did you already ask her about my mental state, or would you rather I just tell you?"

The man hardly seemed to smile, as if it was the ghost of good will—or the revenant of it—crossing his features. "There's no need. The therapist was a plant. Been working with us since we contacted her for this job."

"Oh, that's fantastic." Janis felt her need to remain calm, to not show any emotion to the unwelcome intruder, leave her. "So I take it this is a "warning"? I need to know that I can be touched, that my information's not private, that I'm not safe? Well, in that case, you should know that I don't have anyone that you can threaten me with." When the man said nothing, Janis almost burst out, "Someone further up the pipeline not in the mood to deal with some weirdo who might want to air dirty laundry in public?"

Almost to her surprise, the man finally spoke up. "I think you have me confused for someone else. I do... apologize; this is not how I would have preferred us to meet. In fact, we had every intention of reaching out to you once your suite of operations was a foregone occurrence, and you had healed to an appropriate degree that we could be sure that you were in good enough condition."

Janis was out of her own seat, unsure if she was relieved that this was a private conversation or if she should be worried about being isolated. She was still healing, in truth she had further to go than she could almost stomach imagining. More time in stitches, sometimes left to sob in agony, alone save for the occasional compassionate nurse to listen to her bawling. In fact, this felt like the first time in a month that she felt anything except for physical agony at the metamorphosis she was undergoing. Anger and fear was an almost welcome inclusion.

She bared her teeth at the man, said, "Good enough condition for what? Planning on—on cutting me open to take a look at me, is that it?" To her surprise—and genuine terror—the older man started to smile, the first genuine show of emotion she had witnessed on the man's face. "Because you can't threaten me, alright? You shitheads already took everything from me—"

As quickly as the smile had formed on the man's face it disappeared. "Whoa, Janis, hold on—"

For some reason hearing him use her new name, the one she had given herself to start this new half of her life with, enraged her. Forgetting that she was a fragile, newly stitched together thing, Janis flung the chair she had been sitting in, sending it clattering to the ground before it nearly knocked over another chair, whacked against one of the small circular tables.

She nearly shrieked, "What the fuck do you want?"

It was the Spook's turn to look worried. He held his hands out, rising out of his seat. "Be careful, I don't want you getting hurt." Janis, about to tell him that that was news to her, was cut off by the man. "I thought meeting you in public would be the way to stop from causing you—undue stress."

"Well, that obviously isn't fucking working," Janis snarled, her body a puppet for the stress and instincts that coursed through her body.

"I can see that." Again he held out a hand, as if he were trying to soothe a feral animal. "This is obviously one sided. I can promise you a few things. First of all, we don't want to hurt you, quite the contrary. Secondly, if you cooperate, I can tell you everything you want to know."

Something wicked, angry and spiteful at the situation, made Janis ask, "Alright. What are you sexual preferences? Come on, you already know too much about me. You've read those notes—hell, probably have recordings of me—from that therapist. Come on. Know that I've always been interested in playing for both teams, but I'm terrified of letting a man see me naked, never been with one aside from a regretful jack off sesh when I was still in training?" When the man paused, stunned perhaps, she tilted her head to the side, waiting. "Fair is fair."

With a sigh, the man said, "Personally, I don't think there's such a thing as gay or straight. It's a—a spectrum." He feigned a cough, an awkward, face-saving measure that didn't fully work.

Catching his wind, Janis felt a smile form on her mouth. "First thing you've said that I agree with." She stared a hole through him, saw that besides his obvious embarrassment at having told her his own sexual preference that he was apparently unshaken. "So what are you here for?"

He said something that at first left no impression in her mind, any memory of what it could be in reference to. "Do you remember Clear Skies?"

Janis scoffed, felt angry at the man once more. "Uh, is that supposed to mean something to me?"

He blinked but otherwise showed no real emotion. "You were interested in the leftovers from Project Blue Book. Might have been a passing interest, but it's one we know of, nevertheless."

Okay, that definitely rang a bell. The inheritance Arthur had left his child had been the rights to a trailer park that was almost immediately seized by the authorities following his "untimely death", and a strange predilection for strange lights in the sky. Although she never took to listening to Coast to Coast or to buying those crackpot books that Arthur once ordered through the mail.

Quickly she remembered her inquiries into the strange project that seemed to only exist for a short period of time before it had disappeared into the ether. Clear Skies had been the title of an email that seemed to have been sent by accident, surely, a truly eerie missive that recounted surveillance done and a variety of collected information on figures, subjects referred to by names that immediately recalled memories in her childhood, spent listening to her father's conspiracy theory radio shows.

She had been lucky; some instinct had lead to her making a copy, both digitally and hard. She only then realized that surely both were lost to her when she lost her office. Shortly after it had been sent, Janis had only been half surprised to discover that any proof that it existed had been wiped clean. Her email appeared to have been destroyed, someone undoubtedly performing a clean from the server.

Janis could feel the blood draining out of her face. She had opened that email half a year ago and if not for the stress that had made up her life she would have not forgotten the disquieting mis-sent update on a seemingly on-going project that seemed to suggest...

The man seemed to have regained some of the control in the conversation and he took advantage of it. "You inquired about an email that you were never supposed to see. Tried to be subtle. You were good, you know. If you hadn't already been under surveillance, you might have slipped under the proverbial radar."

Janis swallowed. She had been ready, in spite of his assurances that she wasn't in danger, to deal with fallout from her dishonorable ejection from her station. She was beginning to realize that this was far more dangerous, potentially, than someone wanting to keep a trans woman from speaking out against her former employer.

Slowly, she asked, "Am I... in some kind of trouble for this?"

That earlier, strange smile returned on his mouth, this time—almost—comforting. "Of course not. You passed a very important test. We made sure that select people, people with the skills we need, were "accidentally" sent the same correspondence you were. Imagine our surprise when only one person took it upon themselves to dig deeper into such a strange, ongoing conversation." He nodded meaningfully towards Janis.

"What the hell is this?" Janis felt some of her earlier anger returning, unabated. "Am I in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?" When the man, infuriatingly, didn't answer her, Janis added, "Maybe everyone thought it was a joke. This could still be a joke, for all I know." Or a ruse, meant to lure her into a false sense of security. Right before she ended up "suicided"—another one of Arthur's favorite conspiratorial terms.

If she thought she would find some answers in her unnamed visitor's face, she was disappointed. Blank faced, but with a hint of warmth, he said, "They were likely afraid. Afraid, or incurious. Both traits that we find ourselves in... current abundance of." His eyes seemed to flicker with some emotion, surprising depth in a man who made it a point to outwardly look unfettered. "Neither are traits we need in our potential appointee."

Janis was wracked with confusion; confusion and curiosity, until it overwhelmed even her fear. If she was right, this conversation had gone from being what felt like a threat to an opportunity. But what dark arm of the government wanted to hire some trans woman who had been dishonorably discharged for some trumped-up charges meant to make her disappear off the map in a time where the politics swung as hard and away from people like her as was possible?

Let alone one who was being patched up like a misfit toy being sewn together.

The man sensed her unease, took a few steps towards her. He was close enough that she could smell his aftershave—like the rest of his outward appearance, it was boring, but not notably bad, like something a child would buy for Father's day. "Your reaction is reasonable. Our intel says that you're in between operations and you should be up for some light walking. Would you like to accompany me for a light walk?" He held his arm out, as though he meant for Janis to take hold of it, like she was some old silver screen actress on a date.

The first really funny thought she experienced all day passed Janis' mind and almost made her smile. Too bad he's not my type.

The one thing she would come to learn about this man she would come to know as the Arbitrator, the connecting tissue that would be formed between the XCOM Initiative and the Council's Spokesman, was that he was very good at his job. And funny enough, successfully scouting her had been his own first task with the job. Passing this had been a crucial stepping stone in his career—one he kept, until the day he was imprisoned following the fall of XCOM and was tortured to death.

But this was still years away from his early, tragic death.

Apparently seeing something warm in her eyes, the Arbitrator smiled for the first time, a surprising show of emotion. "You're gonna like what you see. Think of it as a long-overdue promotion." She would also come to learn that he meant everything he said, made it a point of never lying unless it was to outsiders to the Initiative.

Months after the "promotion" was in effect, Janis found her thoughts returning to her old friend, John Bradford. At first she had thought that she could compartmentalize it; that she was insane to think about reaching out to him, of all people. After all, even at this point, she knew she had cut and run on him. At that time, though, she was sure that what she had done had been for his good. Undoubtedly without her there to be an unneeded crutch, he could finally find his footing, prove what kind of a man he was always meant to be.

She believed that on his own, John Bradford was almost certainly strong, not just physically, but even more importantly, maybe even strong enough emotionally to make the kind of difference she ultimately failed to make.

Nevertheless, by the time the voice in her head that said that she at least owed the man an explanation became more of a shriek, she called him and discovered that Bradford was no longer there.

She was stunned by the news. Although she was hesitant to involve John in the Initiative, she had always envisioned reconnecting with him. Showing him her new self and laughing about the strange turn their lives had undoubtedly taken, had been a continual fantasy for her. For a day, she thought that she might never see the man who had been such an important part of her life again.

And then she got the fuck over it, decided that she would find John if it was the last thing she did.