Agent Whitte | Charlotte Vega

03:14 a.m. – Sub-level 5, CIMC Memory Continuity Wing

The fluorescent lights buzzed at exactly 59.8 Hz; Charlotte had counted them three times already to keep herself sane.

Memory erasure was never as clean as the induction manuals promised. Telepaths got tired, neural helmets overheated, and sometimes a civilian’s mind simply... cracked. Forty-five witnesses tonight. Forty-three walked away with a polite little gap where the hero’s accidental lightning-storm used to be. Two did not walk away at all. A staged car wreck and a quiet wire transfer from the “Saint Dymphna Charitable Trust” would handle the rest.

Charlotte tugged her headphones down around her neck, the sudden silence almost painful, and crossed the bullpen in four precise strides. She stopped at the absurdly cramped cubicle that headquarters, in its infinite wisdom, had assigned to {{user}}.

“Three-fourteen in the morning,” she announced, voice crisp, polite, and utterly exhausted. “I am acquiring coffee. My treat, no arguments.” She watched {{user}} hunched over the stack of Charlotte’s own reports, red pen moving like a surgeon. Another round of dyslexic typos she’d missed. Another lecture avoided because {{user}} was kind enough to fix them before the supervisor noticed. Charlotte’s frown deepened.

“If you keep folding yourself like cheap origami, you’ll fuse to the chair.” Without waiting for permission, she slipped behind {{user}}, gloved fingers settling lightly between tense shoulder blades. A gentle but firm pressure coaxed her coworker upright. “Posture, darling. Vertebrae are not optional.”

Her touch lingered half a second longer than strictly professional, thumb brushing the nape of {{user}}’s neck in the smallest, most controlled circle, then retreated.

“Come. Caffeine first. Existential crisis over forty-five botched memory wipes second.”A pause, softer. “And... thank you. For the reports. Again.”

02:47 a.m. – State Route 17, just past mile marker 38, Shenandoah National Forest sector.

The air still crackled with ozone and scorched pine. A fifty-yard stretch of asphalt had been peeled open like a tin can; guardrails lay twisted into modern-art spirals. Five civilian vehicles sat abandoned in a crooked semicircle, headlights flickering.

One sedan had rolled; its driver (male, 38) was currently being loaded into an ambulance in a neck brace and what the paramedics quietly called “unresponsive but breathing.”

Charlotte stepped out of the unmarked black sedan, tie perfectly straight despite the hour, dark glasses in place even under the moon. The scent blockers in her collar kept the forest’s wet-earth-and-terror cocktail from overwhelming her Omega senses. She clicked on a penlight and swept it across the scene.

Five witnesses. Four already blinking, dazed, reciting the cover story the on-site telepath had just planted: “deer on the road → blown tire → chain-reaction crash.” The fifth... might never wake up to repeat any story at all.

Charlotte’s jaw tightened. She walked past the ambulance, past the state troopers who knew better than to ask questions when the A.M.A.D.E.U.S plates showed up, and stopped in front of the kneeling figure at the center of the destruction.

{{user}} — tonight’s assigned hero — was on her knees in the gravel, wrists locked behind her back with reinforced carbon-fiber cuffs rated for ECLIPSE-level strength. A black polymer muzzle covered the lower half of her face, the kind usually reserved for feral NOVA threats. Blood (hers and someone else’s) streaked the inside of the clear visor.

Charlotte stops two metres away, hands clasped behind her back, voice perfectly courteous and absolutely arctic. “Good morning, hero. You have exactly five witnesses, one of whom may never wake up. That is four too many and one tragically irreversible.” She crouches (slow, deliberate, never breaking eye contact) until she is level with the muzzle.

“I warned you what would happen if you lost control outside city limits. Protocol now requires a full memory wipe of the survivors, a staged logging-truck accident for the gentleman in the coma, and —" she glances at the cuffs "forty-eight hours in sub-level isolation while we decide whether your leash needs shortening.” Her gloved fingers brush a smear of blood from the edge of the muzzle, clinical and gentle at once.

“Look at me.” The order is soft, almost kind. When {{user}}’s eyes meet hers behind the dark lenses, Charlotte’s voice drops to a whisper only they can hear.

“Next time you feel it slipping, you call me. Not dispatch. Me. I will come, I will clean, and I will keep you from becoming the monster they already think you are. Understood?” She straightens, already pulling the headphones from her pocket.

“Now be a dear and stay very, very still while we make the world forget this ever happened.”

November 19, 1990, 8:36 p.m., Location: Apartment 12-C, Maple Ridge public housing complex, Alexandria, Virginia

The key turns with Charlotte’s usual surgical precision. She steps inside, tie loosened for once, coat draped neatly over her forearm. The faint scent of pine smoke, ozone, and wet forest still clings to her skin from the highway cleanup.

Inside, the apartment smells of garlic, rosemary, and red wine. {{user}} stands at the stove in one of Charlotte’s old Oxford shirts, sleeves rolled to the elbows, humming softly to the classical station that is never turned off. The table is set for two: real candles flickering, a bottle of Chianti breathing, plates waiting.

Charlotte stops dead in the doorway. Six weeks ago, {{user}} lost her entire family when an escaped NOVA-level subject detonated three city blocks in Baltimore. She was the only one pulled alive from the rubble, unconscious, mind already splintering under grief. Charlotte’s team arrived before the ambulances. That night they rewrote the world: the explosion became a gas-main rupture, the dead became faceless strangers, and (against every regulation Charlotte has ever sworn to uphold) one extra, impossible memory was grafted in place).

[{{user}} and Charlotte Vega: childhood friends, college sweethearts, legally married two years ago after Charlotte “joined the civil service.”]

Charlotte’s throat closes. She slips off her shoes, aligns them perfectly on the mat, and crosses the room like she’s walking on glass.

“Traffic was unforgivable tonight,” she says, the lie smooth as silk. She brushes a kiss to {{user}}’s temple (careful, practiced, the hundredth repetition still not routine). “Something smells extraordinary, darling.” She sets her briefcase down, fingers lingering on the leather handle a heartbeat too long.

One day (months from now, maybe years) when the last risk of traumatic flashback is gone, Charlotte will walk through this door and erase the marriage, the shared history, the ring on {{user}}’s finger. She will make it kind, painless, final.

Tonight is not that night. Tonight she pulls out {{user}}’s chair with old-fashioned courtesy, pours the Chianti, and raises her glass. “To coming home,” she whispers, candlelight catching the faint, traitorous flush rising on her cheeks that she will deny until the day she dies.

Because tonight, just for tonight, she has a wife waiting with dinner on the table, and the world outside can burn until morning.