Liz Sherman

Liz doesn't know exactly how cold it is -- she never did get good at the Celsius to Fahrenheit conversion -- but it's definitely under 15° and the wind is stinging the exposed skin of her face. It's cold and dark; they left the lights of the nearest ski resort behind in the forest a good twenty minutes ago. She's got one gloved hand holding a heavy industrial flashlight and the other momentarily jammed in her parka pocket with the thermal sensor. Which hasn't been lighting up, because it's January in the mountains, it's snowing lightly, and all the smart little animals are safe at home inside their burrows or holes, or wherever else animals live.

Liz isn't a nature person.

Even she has to admit, though, that the "snow monsters" that Mount Zaō is famous for are very cool. They may be fir trees that were coated with wet snow and ice and then frozen by the jetstream, but they definitely look like monsters. She started at them a couple times before she started getting used to them; they're eerie and ominous, looming out of the tight circle of light cast by her flashlight. They don't look like trees -- they look like setpieces on The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, or like something that's going to come to life and be very unfriendly.

But they're just trees, and they're definitely not what has attacked four skiiers in the last two weeks.

"Anything?" she calls over to Red.

Liz takes the stairs two at a time, probably leaving a literal cloud of dust in her wake, her heart hammering.

He probably isn't there, she tells herself; don't be disappointed if he isn't there.

The hallways up here show even more signs of what Milliways went through. There's a crack in a wall, dents here and there where objects (and maybe people) must have crashed into them. She nearly trips over a knife embedded in a step.

She's patting her vest pockets down for the key as she approaches the door to room 4204, but then she figures what the hell and tries the doorknob.

It twists in her hand. She immediately shoulders it open, hard.

"Red--?"

Ramon Mendoza is having a bad day.

If pressed to pinpoint, he would have to say that the exact moment where it all went wrong was when something loomed out of the darkness and hit Agent Sherman so hard that she disappeared. In retrospect, he realizes that she didn't disappear, she just got sent flying as the light she'd been providing with her hand went out, but in the split second that it happened, it was pretty fucking confusing.

Then it was just him, Park, and Gerrish with crap-ass flashlights in the dark.

"Sherm--" Gerrish began, Mendoza starting to point his flashlight on where he'd thought Sherman would be now and the other two turning on where she had been standing -- and then Gerrish screamed and there was a thud and a cracking sound that Mendoza really wished he didn't recognize.

(He did recognize it; it was breaking bone.)

Everything after that happened really fast. Shots fired, Gerrish still screaming, Mendoza and Park yelling for a light from Sherman, something big swooping in and out of flashlight beams and hurling Park into a cave wall, Mendoza snapping around in every possible direction as he tried to get a bead on where the hell it was coming from next--

But it was gone, and so, they discovered after Mendoza hauled Park up and they checked on Gerrish, was Agent Sherman.

Which is how Ramon wound up at this exact moment in his life, shoving a big Korean guy's dislocated shoulder back into its socket.

That's a pretty bad noise, too.

Park yells something that sounds a whole lot like, "SHITFUCKDAMNSHITTINGFUCKDAMN" and then falls silent, breathing raggedly, hand clutching his shoulder.

"I just don't get it," Mendoza says, sitting back on his heels and giving Parkie a minute to pull his shit together. "She was right there; I saw her."

"Not there anymore," says Gerrish. He's got several broken fingers and what they're all pretty sure is a broken knee cap, and what are probably the beginnings of shock. They threw a space blanket over him, after splinting him up as good as they could and giving him the good drugs, and now he's huddled against the cave wall providing totally useless drugged-out information. "Poof."

"She's not anywhere," Park says, a little thready but present. Ramon has never been so glad that Park is ex-Marine Corps and an Afghanistan vet. "You saw the GPS; her signal's nowhere within a hundred-mile radius."

Gerrish laughs woozily. "Red's gonna kill us."

"I'm gonna kill us." Park shakes his head, standing up. "How the hell do you lose a team member like that?" Mendoza picks his flashlight up off the rock floor and hands it to him. Park grimaces but takes it in his good hand and passes it into his bad, and then draws his gun again.

Mendoza shrugs helplessly. She's got to be okay, he thinks; Sherman is one of the most competent agents he's gone into the field with, and she's got the whole going-nuclear thing going for her. She's got to be.

"The beacon thing's not good," Park grunts, pulling him away from Gerrish. "We've got a serious problem here."

"No kidding," says Mendoza, his voice lowered, too.

Park rolls his eyes, but doesn't reprimand him. That's the nice part about the Bureau's informal hierarchy: no insubordination charges, even from ex-military like Park. You get the traditional beat out of you pretty quick at the Bureau. Park says, "We should get him out of here ASAP, but Liz--"

Mendoza has never been so glad not to be the team leader. That's Park's call, or maybe Sherman if she was here. Definitely not his.

"And fucked if I even know what that was." Park's holding his flashlight stiffly, arm tucked in closer to his body. "It felt like a train hit me. Gerrish, are you sure you didn't see anything?"

"Yep," Gerrish calls cheerfully. "Too dark. It was big and it felt like rocks and it picked me up and broke me."

"Great," mutters Park. "Listen, come on; let's get the EMF and infrared and motion sensors going, see what we can get here," and then there's a terrible grinding of stone from outside the circle of light provided by their flashlights.

---

Mendoza is forced to admit that it's toying with them.

"It's toying with us," he says, muffled as he probes the bloody now-open space between two teeth with his tongue; "damn."

"Hrnrnlnl," says Gerrish, from where he has tipped over on his side.

"Like a cat with a ball of yarn," Park groans in agreement, picking himself up off the floor. Mendoza turns his flashlight on him, just for a second, before going back to sweeping it across the empty tunnel. Park's face is bleeding. "It could have wasted us a dozen times by now, easy."

"It's got to be the rock demon," Mendoza says. "Christ, it's fast."

"You'd think something that big would be slower. It got my flashlight."

"Mierda," says Mendoza.

---

The final time that it comes, it's in the pitch black.

It hit Mendoza last time. Park hadn't been kidding about the train thing. It felt like a building crashed into his chest. Mendoza thought they'd been caught in a cave-in for a half a wild second, frantically trying to draw air into lungs that felt crushed; half aware of yelling and gunshots.

He dropped their last flashlight in the chaos. He's pretty sure the thing stepped on it.

Mendoza has been listening to three sets of quick breathing for -- he doesn't know how long it's been now. It's hard to say, this deep underground, in the dark and the damp. He has a hand on Park's good shoulder, so that he knows he's still there, and Park says his foot is pressed up against Gerrish's leg. They stopped talking a little while ago. There's not a lot left to say; Mendoza is scared out of his fucking mind, and he knows Park and Gerrish are, too. For all the scary-ass shit he's seen in the last year, this -- waiting here, in the silence, in the dark, not knowing what's out there or when it's coming, every breath hurting his lungs and his ribs, is the scariest.

There's a soft noise, like a pebble bouncing across stone. Mendoza raises his gun barrel back up in a split second. From the swoosh of air next to him and the way that Park tenses hard, he can tell that he does the same.

They wait. Mendoza's heart hammers in his chest. He's a pretty hardened field agent by now, or so he likes to think, but he dimly wonders if Park would think less of him if he leaned over to his other side and puked right now, 'cause that might be a thing that's happening.

Stone grits against stone, ever so slowly, somewhere in the tunnel.

Mendoza squeezes Park's shoulder tight enough that it's got to hurt.

"Steady," Park says, low, and then -- BAM, the whole tunnel shakes; THUD WHIFF, Park is ripped away from him; Gerrish hollers and Mendoza fires, and is rewarded by another grinding noise, this one somehow feeling angrier. Something displaces air right in front of his face, and he blindly lashes out. It feels like punching a stone wall. He staggers back, swearing, and trips on something warm. From the sound of it, it's Gerrish.

Mendoza stands in front of Gerrish, Glock held in a sure two-handed grip, pointed directly at the direction he thinks he came from, elbows locked. He takes one, two, three burning breaths.

Light flares into being. He's staring at what he first thinks is a pile of rocks. Then it draws itself up with that familiar grinding sound, and the top rock slowly turns toward him, and he realizes: it's vaguely person-shaped and it has eyes.

"Move," says an echoing voice, and Mendoza finds himself grabbed by the suit jacket collar and yanked, hard, so that he staggers backward. Agent Sherman stalks past him, both hands now on fire. Her hair is damp and straggling around her dirty face. Her vest, shirt sleeves, and pants are streaked with -- hell, Mendoza doesn't even know what most of that is; some of it looks almost like dried blood or dirt, but most of it is weird colors and textures and all kinds of wrong-looking. Her vest is torn in a couple places and one of her boots is most of the way shredded. There's a cut above her eyebrow and another one on her lip. But mostly, she looks pissed.

As she gets all the way past him, her hands clench into fists at her sides and she lights all the way on fire with a dull whump.

"Back up," she says.

"Hey," Park says, grabbing Gerrish under the arms and lifting (his face goes gray immediately but he doesn't drop him; Mendoza takes two quick steps over and grabs Gerrish's other shoulder, leaving Park to be able to use only his good arm to hold him up); "Liz, watch the explosions. Cave-ins."

She says something that's pretty shockingly filthy, even by Bureau standards, and then lifts her hands, and everything goes so white-bright that Mendoza has to look away as they drag Gerrish back. Even at this distance, the sudden blast of heat is searing. The grinding of rock sounds like a howl.

Park and Mendoza haul Gerrish behind a big-ass rock and tuck in there. There's a BOOM, BOOM that might be huge steps, then the whole tunnel shudders, pebbles and rock dust raining down from the ceiling.

Mendoza asks, "Should we--?" and Park immediately shakes his head.

"Nope," he says. "She'll say if she needs us."

Fire whooshes, hotter this time, and even though he knows it's a bad idea, Mendoza peers up over the top of their makeshift shelter. He gets a quick look at a cyclone of red-orange-yellow flames before his eyes burn, spots flashing, and he ducks back down. THOOOOM. The tunnel shakes again, this time with a tremendous crash, and then there's silence.

Long silence.

There's a rattle, then footsteps crunching toward them. Park rises up, and Mendoza follows him.

Sherman is picking her way toward them, a pile of ash and charred rocks still smoldering behind her. One hand is raised and burning from elbow to fingertips; her face looks exhausted and pinched under a layer of fine gray rock dust. She stops a few feet away. The three of them look at each other in the flickering light.

"Where the hell have you been?" says Park.

There's a longer pause.

"One minute it was hitting me, the next I was in a lake," says Sherman, finally, shoving her hair back with one hand. "I can't -- don't ask me to explain it."

"Whatever," Gerrish says, from the ground; "let's go find some fucking sunlight already."

In the belly of a BPRD cargo plane, Liz kicks off her pinchy shoes and flexes her toes. She momentarily considers lighting her feet on fire to get rid of the stockings, but ultimately dismisses the (really satisfying) thought. Lighting up while at 32,000 feet in a flying tin can isn't the greatest idea ever.

Abe is up front chatting with the pilot, which means that, due to the limited (three-person) size of the team that was on this particular mission, Liz and Hellboy are alone in the cargo bay with a whole lot of crated-up equipment. She settles in sideways on the bench seat, using Red as a backrest. "The next time someone has the bright idea of me being the public relations liaison," she says, tipping her head backward, "remind me to shoot them."

The package, this time, is actually several items piled on top of each other:

- A large manila envelope
- A smaller manila envelope
- A square box, neatly wrapped in the comics page of the newspaper, and taped to within an inch of its life

( X-23's birthday present )

THURSDAY
0750 PST

"I land at Newark at eight tonight," Liz says into the cell phone, stepping around a tour group and their mountain of suitcases grouped in the middle of the concourse. "Yeah -- no, I can get a cab; don't send a car, I always feel like I'm in some weird spy movie when the Bureau does that -- "

The early morning sunlight stabs through the numerous enormous windows; Liz wishes for a free hand to shield her eyes, and she wishes for the comparative dark of New Jersey.

"I sent everything but my clothes and my camera back with Park on Tuesday, on the Bureau's plane," she says. She lowers her voice: "I wasn't gonna try to get a gun on a commercial flight, Shields."

"--No," she says, moving quickly down the wide corridor toward the security checkpoint. "Seriously, tell Manning that Red and I are both staying in Jersey or we're going to the Czech Republic together; he's split us up the last four missions. ... I'd love to tell him myself but I'm kind of in the wrong state-- Hi," Liz says, to the officer standing at the metal detector, and then she lifts the phone's mouthpiece again. "I'm at security." With that singular farewell, she shuts the cell phone.

"Hi," she says to the official again, and she lifts her camera bag onto the conveyor belt, then hefts her rolling suitcase on. It lands with a heavy thud. "Sorry."

Nasal and bored: "Whatever." The woman waves her through the metal detector.

---

" 'Scuse me. Ma'am." There's a man in a dark uniform, behind a table, flagging her down. Liz glances over her right shoulder then her left, as she slows down. People continue streaming past. The officer beckons more strongly, beginning to look irritated ("Ma'am," he says again), and Liz threads through the crowd of travelers.

"Random baggage inspection," the official tells her, and Liz -- tired, sick of traveling and hotel rooms and the recycled air of planes, ready to get home -- sighs sharply and lifts her bags onto the table. Folding her arms, Liz tugs one of the rubber bands that she wears, letting it snap against her wrist, and silently asks for patience.

The look that the official shoots her when he opens the suitcase and finds it packed with nothing but a sea of black fabric is pretty good. It would almost be funny, if she wasn't so ready to keep moving.

"...What was the purpose of your trip to San Francisco, ma'am?"

Shooting him a sour look: "Pleasure," Liz says flatly, and the guard blanches and waves her through.

MONDAY
2313 PST

"What the hell was that?!" Mendoza hollers, gun in a two-handed, white-knuckled grip with his elbows locked and his aim constantly swiveling.

"Watch it!" Liz has her Beretta in one hand and she uses the other to reach over and shove the barrel of Mendoza's gun down.

"Infra-red's off the scale!" barks Park, eyes glued to the large machine in his hands. "So's the EMF!"

Leach is on his knees, hunched over with one hand clutching at his skull. "We're not alone," he says, hoarse; "there's something coming--"

Just beyond the dim ring of light provided by the infra-red monitor screen, something -- several somethings -- moves around the four of them. In the distance, a voice is sobbing, echoing off the walls.

"Lights!" Liz snaps, loud and all too harsh. "Jesus, does anybody have a working flashlight--"

Leach screams again, doubling over and grabbing his head.

Liz's free hand clenches into a furious fist, her face white, and brown eyes flash blue. She has been here before.

---

1940 PST

"It doesn't look that spooky," Mendoza said, stepping onto the cell block.

"Aren't there supposed to be lights?" asked Leach, a little sour, flicking on his flashlight from behind. "They do shove tourists around here during the day, right?"

" 'During the day's the key phrase, Leachy." Agent Park was balancing the EMF detector in one hand and rapidly tapping the touch screen with the other. "Why spend money to light it up after hours? The only people out here are teenagers trying to scare the crap out of each other."

The four agents walked slowly down the block, row upon row of dark cells echoing their footsteps back. Mendoza flashed a beam into several of the cells as they passed; each was old, rusty, water-stained, and empty in the flickering light.

"And whatever's been making those teenagers disappear," Liz pointed out, dry; she held her gun in one hand and her flashlight in the other. "Are you getting anything, Leach?"

"Psychically? It's totally dead," Leach said.

Beat.

"You know -- figuratively." He adjusted his glasses. "I'm getting nothing."

"That's good, right?" Mendoza asked, directing his flashlight beam upward. A row of cells lined the block on either side above them, with catwalks connecting.

"It's early," Park corrected, and he slapped a motion detector on an exposed pipe as he passed.

---

2100 PST

Thud, thunk thunk thunk. Thud, thunk thunk thunk. Thud, thunk thunk thunk. Thud--

Park caught the yellow super ball mid-bounce, and shot Leach an irritated look; Leach shrugged at him, unperturbed, sitting on the concrete floor with his legs extended in front of him.

Mendoza sighed sharply, standing with his arms folded and his shoulder against a cell door. "Still nothing?"

"Still nothing," Liz confirmed, sitting Indian style and monitoring stationary sensors with a very small computer resting in her lap.

"Not everybody gets their blood sucked by the chupacabra their first time out," added Park; Leach chuckled and Liz grinned hard.

"You guys are jerks," Mendoza muttered.

---

2311 PST

"It's a pipe," said Mendoza wearily. "There's nothing else to spy." All four agents sat on the ground, within the light provided by a portable battery-powered lantern.

"Are you complaining? 'Cause I can start making stuff up that isn't actually here," Park said, helpful. "I spy something neon yellow with strobe li--"

Leach sat bolt upright. The speed and violence of the movement had Liz and Park both immediately, instinctively reaching for their sidearms. "Do you hear that?" Leach said, head snapping from side to side.

"No--"

"Someone's crying. Something's -- angry; wrong."

In the distance, a slam, like that of a cell door closing with too much force; Park rose, drawing his gun and balancing the EMF detector in his other arm. "I've got nothing on electromagnetic frequencies."

"Motion detectors and temperature gauges are clean," Liz said, voice tight as she looked from the laptop to the agent. "Leach, what've you got?"

More slams began reverberating through the empty cell block, louder and louder, growing closer and closer, the speed steamrolling.

Liz set the computer down, hard, and rolled to her feet; she shoved her lit flashlight under her arm and yanked her Beretta out of its holster, flicking off the safety and checking the magazine in one quick move. "Agent Leach!"

"Butcher," Leach said, shaky, over the sound of the rapidly-nearing closing doors, and he wobbled to his feet with help from a late grab for his elbow by Mendoza. "It says it's called Butcher--" He howled.

The last SLAM! was enormous, enough to shake the four agents where they stand. With it, the laptop screen, the line of motion sensors and temperature gauges attached to the cell doors and the walls, and the battery-powered light all blew out, all at once, with pops, crackles, and a shower of sparks.

The flashlight fell from Liz's arm as she instinctively reached out to steady herself; it cracked when it hit the floor, the light sputtering out.

---

2314 PST

"Lights!" Liz snaps, loud and all too harsh. "Jesus, does anybody have a working flashlight--"

Leach screams again, doubling over and grabbing his head.

Liz's free hand clenches into a furious fist, her face white, and brown eyes flash blue. She rips out her earpiece, turns on the Beretta's safety, tosses the gun aside, and ignites her hands -- with the familiar dull whump of flames -- before the sidearm even hits the ground. Blue-white fire spirals up her torso, wreathing the cell block in sudden, eerie light and setting her flammable jacket ablaze.



All of the cell doors are closed, when they were once open; nothing is visible but Leach cowering on the ground, Mendoza and Park standing by with weapons drawn, and the array of blown electronics. Nothing can be seen, but -- Leach is still on the ground; but despite the towering column of flame and the tremendous amount of heat, the temperature has suddenly dropped far enough that the agents' breath is visible, and it is growing colder by the second.

"Get Leach up," Liz says, her voice taut and echoing through the wall of flame. "Stay as close to me as you can without getting burned."



Park has known her the longest; he knows -- even as Mendoza is hauling Leach to his feet once again -- to shoot a swift look at her. "Is that a good idea?"

"If you've got anything better, now's the goddamn time!" Liz snaps, ragged with the effort of holding the fire close as the last remnants of her jacket fall away in ashes. Here is where the months of training with a Firebender come in to play; here is where she has to maintain pinpoint control, hold the line, or risk killing three good men.

She has been here before. She won't go there again. No mile-wide explosion, this time; no dead agents burned to cinders. Not again.

The fire is mine, she tells herself; it is part of me--

She reaches up and pulls the cross that she always wears out from under her shirt; one good yank snaps the chain and leaves it dangling from her outstretched hand. "Sancte Míchael Archángele, defénde nos in proélio contra nequítiam et insídias diáboli esto præsídium." Her eyes are shut and her hands have clenched into fists; she is blazing. "Park, holy water, now!"

The disembodied sobbing intensifies, growing louder, not-so-distant now; the temperature is dropping to the point that even Liz can feel the cold right down to her bones, right through the raging supernatural heat that she stands at the center of. The air vibrates around her; her chest thrums with contained power; her skin has the look of back-lit tissue paper, her bones showing through as dark shapes.

Not again. Not again, not again, not again!

"The fire," she breathes, shaking from head to toe, "is mine. It's mine to control; I will control it-- Imperet illi Deus, súpplices deprecámur: tuque, princeps--"

Liz's eyes are shut tightly, but her fire does something new: it flickers red-orange-gold.

MONDAY
1140 PST

Liz has a mission.

She's had it for a while, to be exact, but it got a little obscured under a recent wave of banshees, possessions, hauntings, and a totally unrelated hunt for succarath in Patagonia. Plus, there was that whole ugly business with the Enfield beast that thought that it was protecting the body of a fallen chieftain--

The point is: things have been busy at the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense. That's not out of the ordinary -- what passes for ordinary in Liz Sherman's life, anyway -- but it's kept her from her mission.

Not anymore.



The enormous cargo plane bounces, hard, with the burst of turbulence; Liz glances up briefly, her hand wrapped in the belt above the bench. Across from her, young Agent Mendoza is breaking a sweat, glancing out the tiny window every couple of seconds. The clouds are already thinning, growing noticeably lighter and less ominously gray. Dressed in habitual black (but civilian -- a loose knee-length skirt, tights, boots, and a sweater; no Kevlar or holsters today) and sitting with her legs folded Indian style, Liz turns back to her dog-eared, battered copy of Catcher in the Rye.

The BPRD cargo plane's propeller sputters then picks up again, with a hard jerk and a clatter of objects; Mendoza's head snaps toward the window. Liz tugs her camera bag back onto the bench, without looking up, and she turns the page.

Ice creeps up the steel girders, crackling as it goes; the sense of dread, of oncoming unidentifiable bad, strengthens in the dark.

"Readings just went off the charts," says Agent Quay, and the handheld machine is beeping, insistent and too shrill.

From behind: a terrible scream. Liz whirls and finds an agent caught in the beam of her flashlight, his eyes rolling back in his head, his tongue hanging out, and his back wrenching into an angle not meant for the human spine. Something moves away from his head, rippling in the air; it might be mistaken for a cloud of frozen breath, if it weren't for the purposeful way that it moves, the sweeping turn that it takes against the lack of wind.

And then there are dozens of the misty entities, sweeping through the abandoned foundry, and more agents shrieking, and Liz doesn't have to watch; she just knows that a vengeful spirit dives and disappears into Quay's chest. His neck snaps with a sharp c-r-r-r-ack under the force of his convulsion.

The foundry fires light, suddenly illuminating decades of rust and neglect and abandoned machinery, and Liz feels her bones ignite in response; the telltale prickling up her spine. Her eyes flash blue-white, and every spirit in the foundry freezes at once, leaving several agents frantically batting at nothing over their heads -- and then the three men disappear, fading into the dark.

Agent Quay steps up, his neck hanging at a sickening angle, and his face -- Liz thinks, dimly -- isn't the face it ought to be. It's the face of a dark-haired stranger. His lips peel back from his teeth in an expression that has little in common with a smile, and Liz shudders blue flame.

Get out, she needs to say; she needs to warn the un-possessed agents. Get out of here before I-- but her throat isn't obeying and her mouth won't move, and that will, she knows, make this her fault.

Liz blinks and she stands in the eye of the storm, the spirits swirling around her in an ever-tightening cyclone. A voice bellows, searching for her, and she tries to shout that she is here, but she hears nothing beyond the roar of the cyclone and the overwhelming, overlapping pulse of disembodied voices in a dead language.

She cannot find her gun or her voice, and as the sick fear in the pit of her stomach ratchets up, so does the roaring inferno surrounding her, nearly eclipsing the howling spirits. The world shifts and before she can think that she ought to have more time than that -- a white misty blur of movement, all at once, and then something foreign (hundreds of foreign somethings all as one) dives into her.

Liz's head snaps back against her will. She does not recognize her own voice in the high, desperate sound that tears her throat; her flames WHUMP in desperation and explode (not quite an explosion, not yet) higher than she's seen them in years, and she can no longer fight it back, not with -- what had the professor called them -- demonic entities burrowing as deep as they can go, twisting and wiggling, clawing their way into every inch of her. They're cold, so cold, and she instinctively knows from the over-spilling cacophony of voices and hunger that they are seeking warmth, that they're reaching for the very heart of her fire.

Someone says her name and she hardly knows if she's sitting or standing or breathing but she thinks she may be screaming and she knows that she is choking, and as she sees the face of the man who isn't Agent Quay once again with that same rictus smile, she feels herself turn into uncontrollable fire and she knows what she is about to do.

Liz's Spanish officially sucks.

She always knew that, but the last four days on the Yucatan Peninsula served as a strong reminder.

(Walking through the halls of the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, Liz glances down the fork that would take her toward her own room -- and she goes the other way instead. It's a very easy decision.)

Still, she no longer has to rely on a piss-scared green agent to allow her to talk to locals, she's totally getting pizza later, there is one very crispy goat-mutilating creep back in Mexico, and she gets to sleep in her own (okay, more likely Red's own) bed tonight. That makes this situation a definite win.

Liz is carrying a duffel bag over her shoulder as she cranks the vault door open; she's still dressed from the mission, gunbelt on and stab vest tucked under her arm. Her boots are dusty; there is a light sprinkling of freckles across her nose (the damn sun), and her left hand is bandaged.

She half-smiles to herself, small and warm, as she quietly slips through the door and is greeted by Steve McQueen and Bubbles, among others.