Falsely Accused: Seperation

A week after the terror attack, Tom and the others had decided upon their various course of actions, with Tom disengaging any and all protector protocols, essentially disbanding the entire team in one move. However, those who remained knowledgeable about the team weren’t all too keen to following the same plan, and some just didn’t want to remember anymore. Erin was one of these people, having come to Tom immediately after the attack to ask him to wipe her memories, although he sent her away initially, telling her to calm down and think about it.

And think she had, she’d spent every waking movement for the week since thinking about it. And she’d decided that she wants to forget, at least for a little while, so that she can be normal, be human. Tom reluctantly agreed and had Connie bury her memories deep, somewhere only Connie could find, he then asked her to manipulate what remained of Erin’s memory to include her little sister being born as to make her life make some level of sense.

                ‘Are you going to de-age her?’ Connie asked while reorganising Erin’s memories.

                ‘I’m going to have to, there is no way that you can piece together another ten years’ worth of memories in order to explain to her why she is fifteen,’ Tom sighed. ‘No, we have to change her to an age that makes sense for what she will remember, which is that of a ten year old.’

                ‘So what are we going to do about Jackie?’ Connie questioned.

                ‘We worry about her later. For now we worry about how many dead protectors there are that may have come back, there is no way that it is only Claire and Gemma who returned,’ Tom explained.

                ‘Have you looked for Maddi and Ed yet?’ she asked almost as quickly as the thought came to her head.

                ‘I’ve looked but I’m not holding out hope,’ Tom described. ‘If my theory is correct, then they were the centre of the blast that shattered the barrier, thus when they died it was permanent.’

                ‘How’s that fair?’ she snapped.

                ‘Stay calm, you don’t want to erase the wrong thing now, do you,’ Tom chuckled.

                ‘Ha ha,’ she snarled.

                ‘To answer your question: No, it isn’t fair. But it is the way the world works so we just have to live with it and work to ensure it never happens again,’ Tom stated sadly. ‘How long do you reckon?’

                ‘Half an hour, why?’ she questioned.

                ‘Might as well give her family a head start,’ Tom shrugged before turning and leaving.

*****

With DiNozzo dead and Tom quitting, Gibbs’ team was a tad undermanned, until Emma showed up for in the office one day and managed to persuade Leon, the director of NCIS, to allow both her and Cameron to join Gibbs’ team as protector liaisons in order to help track down the individuals responsible for the terror attack in Devon.

                ‘Does your dad know you’re here?’ he asked when she sat down at Tom’s old desk.

                ‘My dad isn’t interested in hunting Jackie right now,’ Emma admitted. ‘He’s more interested in figuring out why the dead are rising than tracking down the person responsible for the countless deaths. Plus he seems to be far more occupied with looking after Connie than me.’

                ‘Maybe it’s because she’s on his side,’ Cameron suggested. ‘She seems to be very willing to go along with the dead are rising ploy, and how do we know they’re not right? Imagine if we find and kill Jackie and then she returns from the dead again.’

                ‘So what, you think figuring out the dead returning thing will help us in the long run?’ Emma questioned.

                ‘I’m not saying that, I’m just saying that their logic is sound. Four groups of us have branched off, so perhaps all four are what we need to stop her once and for all,’ Cameron shrugged. ‘And remember, he may be working with Connie more, but that may be because you’re better branching off and tracking Jackie down while Connie is far better at researching with her immense database of memories for her to search through.’

                ‘I guess,’ Emma admitted before turning to Gibbs, ‘What do you want me to do then Boss?’

                ‘Whatever helps us catch the bitch,’ he replied simply. ‘You have your methods and you can work outside of the law because you’re hunting another protector so you do whatever it is you do best.’

*****

Carl’s words hung with Connor, but he knew he couldn’t trust the others with the information, fearing that Emma could be the one responsible with her white hair while also fearing what Tom would think. The only person he informed of his whereabouts was Jack who agreed that he shouldn’t tell Emma or Tom.

However, he knew that he would require help so he approached someone who he knew to house an underlying suspicion of his central suspect, Josie. He just wasn’t expecting her to have a plus one.

                ‘So a terrorist blamed his terrorising on a white haired girl who controlled his mind?’ Josie laughed.

                ‘Come on, I know that you have a mistrust of Naomi,’ he complained.

                ‘I am, and I agree with you,’ Josie back tracked. ‘I’m just laughing because it took a terrorist who tried to kill you to tell you that Naomi took control of his mind for you to see the problem.’

                ‘It was too specific of a detail for me not to believe him, plus he knew I was going to kill him anyway,’ Connor sighed.

                ‘If we’re going to do this, no one else knows,’ she decided. ‘Unless we bring them into the fold.’

                ‘Jack knows what I’m hunting, but he isn’t going to tell anyone,’ Connor stated as someone knocked on the door. ‘Expecting someone?’

                ‘No…’ Josie replied suspiciously as she approached the door slowly, as she pulled the door open until she could see boy stood behind it her heart skipped a beat. ‘Leo?’

                ‘Hey Jose,’ he smiled sweetly. ‘Long time no see.’

She didn’t saying anything in reply, instead she just threw herself out the door and into his arms and kissing him. Not stopping her, Leo picked her up and moved into the house, gesturing for Connor to make sure no one followed with his free hand.

When Josie finally released him, he explained what had happened after he’d been resurrected and how he’d managed to escape from Naomi detention centre for resurrected individuals through his father causing a violent distraction that likely got him discarded into Naomi’s vacuum room.

                ‘She has a vacuum room!’ Connor exclaimed, as the realization of what the room was hit him.

                ‘Yeah, anyone who she gave a mission to who also didn’t play ball was banished to suffocate and freeze as their entire air supply was torn from them.

                ‘Has she gone that far off the deep end?’ Josie questioned.

                ‘Her mother is in said vacuum room…so yes,’ Leo explained. ‘So you guys are hunting her?’ he questioned.

                ‘I believe that she took control of some random people, turned them into terrorists and had them attack the campsite Tom was staying at, perhaps in a way to divert his attention onto Jackie, although that may not have worked out entirely as he is focusing more on the resurrected dead as opposed to Jackie,’ Connor detailed.

                ‘This is Tom we’re talking about. Emma at NCIS tracking Jackie, him working on the dead and tracking my dad no doubt, and then you guys tracking Naomi,’ Leo chuckled. ‘No. He is focused on everything, he’s just separating the tasks amongst us without us even knowing it.’

                ‘Then why is Jack heading to the future?’ Josie questioned.

                ‘Because the future of the future has some interesting characteristics, seeing as to nobody in the past is from there, both sides of the timeline collapse into one, as such it’s the barren wasteland we know, while also having aspects of the new timeline that we created here, in the past. If Jackie leaves a trace, then Jack’ll find.’

                ‘So even when he isn’t manipulating what we do, he’s manipulating what we do?’ Connor groaned.

                ‘No, you all decided your course of action, he just didn’t stop you as he knew that you’d need all four cogs turning in unison in order to catch and stop Naomi and Jackie,’ Leo shrugged.

                ‘Tom repairs the barrier, Emma and Jack kill Jackie, and we find Naomi and hand her to Tom on a silver platter,’ Josie summed up.

                ‘Basically,’ Leo agreed as Josie pointed to the stairs, at which point she mouthed to Connor that they’ll start the next day.

*****

Jack had recruited only two people to accompany him to the future that they had no knowledge of, Emily and Leanne. However, both were extremely willing to come along, with both having their reasons for hating Jackie and wanting her dead. For Emily the main reason for this was that Jackie turned on her almost as fast as she’d turned on Tom, as she feared that Emily would defect. For Leanne, it was because Jackie had sent her and her sister on a mission to kill Tom, Emily and Jack after Tom ran away initially.

The future that they travelled to limited their travel, with anything off world being impossible, and certain areas of the Earth were so distorted due to the merger of timelines that any attempt to transverse them would have resulted in instantaneous death. Likewise, any voyage into space would result in your ship being met with a sea of nothing that caused your craft to just be deleted out of existence.

                ‘What the hell happened to the Earth?’ Leanne asked, the terror and unease in her voice showing more than she’d hoped.

                ‘I’m guessing two timelines combining into one led to various parts of the planet being important to one or both of the timelines, but at the same time they couldn’t be combined, so you just end up with whatever the hell those temporal distortions are,’ Jack shrugged. ‘Come on, let’s find what we’re looking for and get out of this forbidden time.’

                ‘Where to first then boss?’ Emily smiled sweetly.

                ‘The Catacombs,’ Jack responded. ‘They existed in both timelines, as did the basement, so in theory our monitoring equipment from one or the other should be there.’

                ‘No satellites,’ Leanne pointed upwards, just to prove a point. ‘All we have is the sun and the moon.’

                ‘We also have the observation relays on the moon as well as the codes and schematics for the Zoombian craft that is housed within,’ Emily stated energetically. ‘We can use that right?’

                ‘Maybe not the superweapon bit, but definitely the observation relays,’ Jack smiled as they began making their way across the sky, towards the town of Newton Abbot.