Fission Mailed

The three teens entered the elevator. Ashley swiped the card, and Chloe pressed the floor button, while Gavin stood behind them, humming the theme to Metal Gear Solid. The girls looked at him sideways as the machine buzzed into life, lifting the trio upwards. Gavin continued, undeterred, his voice rising as he hit the chorus. His eyes scanned the rectangular box they were riding, imagining alternative routes of escape, as if the elevator would instantly shut down if Hannah became aware of the plan.

“This is why we don’t need a two-way system,” Ashley remarked, looking back at the doors, waiting. “I can’t imagine trying to lie to Hannah with that going on in my ear.”

“It’s annoying me and I’m not even multitasking,” Chloe agreed, grinning congenially at Gavin, who simply shrugged.

“Sorry, this is just very tense, and there’s a lot riding on us,” Gavin admitted, pursing his lips. “It calms me to think of this like a game, rather than how many lives and reputations are at stake if we fail.”

“We’re all nervous. Even Peter,” Ashley assured him, with a soft, comforting smile. “But this is a good plan. With all of us looking out for each other, I think we have a good chance at success.”

“I know, and I want to be here, but I’m definitely out of my comfort zone,” Gavin continued to confess, as he stared down at his feet. “A week ago, I wouldn’t have been here at all. I’d have been Oracle, providing tech support from the bat cave.”

“Isn’t this better though?” Chloe asked as the elevator came to a stop and the doors opened. She led them down the hall to Hannah’s door, recalling the path from memory. “This way you get to really be a spy, rather than just pretending.”

“Also, Oracle didn’t want to be in the batcave, sitting on the side-lines,” Ashley said, swiping the card and unlocking the door. “But when she was **** to, she found a way to put her bravery and intellect to use in a way that still helped people. Our problems don’t make us less than we are unless we let them.”

It was Chloe and Gavin’s turn to balk at the petite blonde as all three entered the apartment, following the short corridor into the main room. Chloe was immediately hit by a sense of dejavu. She saw the couch where she’d sat and made Hannah strip, the dining table she’d bent over while Hannah ate her ass and the stairs they’d climbed to the bedroom. A shiver ran up her spine, remembering just how good Hannah had made her feel. It felt strange for the redhead, to be back here in this place without her, behind her back even.

“Since when did you read Batman?” Gavin asked the blonde cheerleader, incredulous.

“Since Bruce Wayne got hot,” Ashley teased with a smirk. “Honestly, it was all thanks to Peter. He used to bring them round and read them while he was waiting for Hannah to get ready. Sometimes he’d leave them behind, and one day, when I was bored and alone, I picked one up and I’ve been reading ever since.”

“Honestly, knowing a pretty, popular, cheerleader reads Batman…makes you even hotter,” Gavin admitted, as they walked deeper into the room. “Like I have so many questions for you. Who’s your favourite villain? What’s your favourite story? Who-”

“Later,” Ashley cut him off with a chuckle. “Right now, focus on the mission. First, we need to find her laptop.”

“She keeps it on a desk beside her bed,” Chloe told them, her voice restrained. Without waiting for a reply, she immediately began to lead the pair up the stairs.

“I’ll let Heather know we’re in,” Ashley said, following with her head bent low.

Gavin glanced up at Chloe’s face as they walked up the stairs. Gavin could tell that something was wrong. The tightness of her voice betrayed her feelings, but he assumed that she was upset because he’d called Ashley hot for reading Batman. They were just friends with benefits, but maybe something had changed earlier today. Maybe letting a girl fuck you in the ass and find a guy to fuck you in the ass was a line too far for just a couple of friends who got off together on the side.

“Is everything alright?” Gavin ventured, watching Chloe’s ass in front of him sway back and forth.

“Peachy,” Chloe replied curtly, her voice still hard and cold. “Being here…is weird.”

“It’s affecting you more than you expected?” Ashley surmised as they reached the doorway to the bedroom.

Chloe nodded stiffly, as she stared at the unmade bed. Wordlessly she pointed to the desk at one side of the room where the laptop sat upon it. Gavin made a beeline for it, taking a seat and flipping open the lid. Immediately he set about hacking into to the file directory, while Ashley hung back at the door with Chloe. Muffled voices came through her phone.

“Hold on, I’ll put it on speaker,” Ashley tapped at the screen, Peter’s voice coming through mid-sentence as he greeted Hannah. “Sounds like she’s there. Ok, you’re on the clock now Gavin.”

“Oh shit,” he said abruptly, his typing stopping.

“What’s wrong?” Chloe asked, trying to see from the threshold.

“Security is a little tighter than I expected,” he confessed, typing briefly again and running up against the same wall. “The whole laptop is encrypted.”

“Can you get through it?” Ashley asked, trying to listen to two conversations at once.

“I hope so…” Gavin mumbled, stressed. “And I hope Peter can keep Hannah preoccupied. I’m gonna need all the time I can get.”

Peter stood up from the barstool as soon as he seen Hannah enter the room. He smiled, and rocked on the balls of his feet in a sort of nervous excitement, like a dog greeting its owner, waiting to be walked. She smiled back, slightly more pained, as she crossed the bar, hugging him briefly and kissing his cheek before taking a seat on the stool beside him.

“It’s great to see you. I’m glad you could come,” Peter said rapidly. “I got you a beer.”

She looked down at the bottle Peter motioned towards. “Thanks. It’s nice to see you too. Unexpected though.”

“Well, I had some free time during Spring Break and decided to come back and see what’s changed,” Peter lied, still smiling, so hard it was becoming creepy. “I guess I had hoped to hear Taylor had come back too, but…”

“I don’t know what happened to Taylor,” Hannah looked away and took a long swig of her beer. “I hope that’s not why you called me out here.”

“No, I wanted to meet up with you to talk to you about you, or rather us, I suppose,” Peter insisted, trying not to irritate his ex-girlfriend before he’d even begun. “We haven’t spoken to each other since that night…”

“You mean when we broke up,” Hannah cut to the chase. “If you’ve come back looking to get back together, I don’t think now is a good time. Fuck, I’m surprised you’d even ask.”

“Well, it wasn’t my idea to break up,” Peter noted, his anxiety fading slightly as they began to discuss real issues. “I thought we could have worked through it, tried to understand each other, but you’re the one who insisted on breaking up entirely. But that’s why I’ve come back. For closure.”

“For closure…what does that even mean?” Hannah asked. “Like, are we meant to come to a better understanding of why it happened? We wanted different things, it’s that simple. What good does it do to rehash the past?”

“Because I wasn’t convinced back then that you wanted different things, and I’m still not,” Peter argued, searching Hannah’s face for any sign that he was right. “We were in love, and everything I knew told me that you wanted exactly what I wanted, for that love to continue, but then, out of nowhere you decide that you were done. Either you were lying then, or you were lying before.”

“So, I’m just a liar; it can’t have anything to do with the weight of the decision you placed upon me,” Hannah scoffed and drank deeply again. “We were also young. I wanted to be free to live my life, visit new places, but you would have been happy to settled down in this sleepy little town for the rest of your life, writing fantasy books. Can’t you see how incompatible we were?”

“Sure, maybe we should have been. You were the wild one, I was the bookish, smart kid. We shouldn’t have worked, but we did, didn’t we?” Peter asked, a slight begging tone in his voice. “I guess I just need to know that it wasn’t all in my head, that the things I felt were real at least.”

“Peter…” Hannah sighed. It had been tough enough to hurt him the first time. Time hadn’t made doing it any easier. Saying something would hurt him, but not saying anything would hurt him too.

“Please,” Peter was close to grovelling at this point.

“Whatever I say, there will be more questions,” Hannah protested, not looking him in the eye. “It’s not just as simple as whether or not it was real.”

“I swear, that’s all I need to know,” Peter assured her.

After a pause, Hannah confessed, still avoiding eye contact, “….it wasn’t a lie…”

“Then why-“

“Oh, fuck you,” Hannah growled, turning and taking another drink. “You said there wouldn’t be more questions.”

“It just doesn’t make sense,” Peter said, hoping that by pressing her he could get answers and time, and that she wouldn’t just storm out. But he’d known her along time, and known her well; he didn’t think she was at that point just yet. “If what we had was real, if what I felt wasn’t a lie, then why did we have to break up?”

“It’s more complicated than whether I loved you or not, or whether we had a future,” Hannah said irritably, staring into her bottle. “When you proposed to me…”

“WHAT?” Ashley half screamed, intensely grateful that no one on the other end could hear her.

“D-Did she just say propose?!” Chloe asked, sharing Ashley’s disbelief. “Peter asked Hannah to marry her!”

“And Hannah must have said no,” Ashley concluded, her eyes darting back and forth as she tried to piece together the story. “And that’s why they broke up.”

“But Peter said he didn’t want to break up, so…” Chloe noted, wondering as he had done why they didn’t continue to work through things if Hannah had still loved him.

“Hmmmm,” came Gavin’s contemplative voice from the desk.

“Any luck, Gavin?” Chloe called over. “I don’t know how much longer Peter can hold Hannah at the bar.”

“No, it’s just…this coding…it’s familiar…” He remarked as he continued typing, slower now.

“Does that mean you know how to get through it?” Ashley enquired, still trying to listen to the two conversations at once.

“Not exactly. But coding is like handwriting, everyone has their own style. Some people loop their g’s and some people put little heart’s over their i’s,” Gavin explained, his confidence growing again. “And once you see the pattern, you begin to see the weaknesses in the code.”

“If you say so,” Chloe said, turning her ear back to the stream of Peter and Hannah’s conversation. “Just do it quickly.”