Title: "Part II: Shadows" (3313 words)

Summary: Rachel needs to be a bit more careful with her things and pay more attention to things happening around her. Learning more about her deal in Fall 2004 and what she's doing now, Spring 2005.

Warnings: I think it's pretty G right now. No bad language or gratuitous violence yet.

Pairing: Vague hinting at L/R.

Author's Note: Not a big fan of this section, not gonna lie, although I do like the unusual turn that it took. It's just time that I posted it. Here's hoping that I like part III better.

                

Four weeks had passed since Rachel had first arrived in Spain and even though she had not yet met her mysterious employer, she had been given a very specific task to complete as soon as possible. She was to isolate severely damaged mammalian muscle tissue and find a way to make the cells basically regenerate wholly and quickly. Once that problem had been solved, this was to be applied at a larger scale so that whole muscle tissue and, eventually, entire limbs could re-grow. At first, this seemed like an easy task. There were a dozen or so other researchers on the team that Rachel assumed she would be working with. However, it turned out that most of them... well, all of them, really, had a deep-seated hatred for Americans and none of them would even glance at her, much less work with her. Luis was the only one who would give her the time of day.

On her first day, he had carried her baggage into the small room that she would be living in after a long boat ride to the island-based research facility. After “meeting” the rest of the team, Rachel quickly knew that this assignment was going to be difficult for her and that she would undoubtedly be counting the days until she returned home to the United States. Luis flicked on the overhead light of the sparsely furnished room complete with cement floor and walls, and tossed her suitcase onto the twin-sized bed. Rachel cringed when the hard mattress barely gave way to the weight of her luggage. She walked into the room that just barely had enough space for the bed, a narrow dresser, and a desk with a large manila envelope sitting under a small lamp. She frowned when she realized that there were no windows because the corridor that her room was situated on was hundreds of feet below sea level. Both of those thoughts made her uneasy. When Rachel turned back to the door, she was surprised to find Luis there, leaning against the doorframe and casting an eerie shadow along the floor. 

“You’ll need this”, he tossed her a card key, “It will give you access to all of the locked rooms, including yours. I can show you how to rewrite the information on your card later because the codes change every three days. Sensitive material, Rachel, you understand. Don’t lose it.”

Rachel caught the card awkwardly with both hands and nodded at him. The card was silver and blue with the company symbol imprinted on the top. It was oddly similar to the biohazardous waste sign. She shoved the card into her pocket and nodded.

“I won’t lose it. Thanks”, she said stiffly.  

Luis still did not move from the door. Rachel took her purse off of her shoulder and dropped it onto the bed beside her suitcase. She turned away from Luis when she took off her denim jacket and slung it on the back of the desk chair. 

“You don’t have to be nice to me”, she said quietly as she smoothed out the wrinkles on her jacket, “I know that the other researchers don’t like me. I don’t want them to ostracize you, too, because of me.”  

Luis did not reply and Rachel felt herself blushing furiously. She did not dare to look up at him after saying so much. She ripped open the manila envelope for a distraction and frowned when she saw that every document inside was written in Spanish. Luis stepped into the room, his shadow growing smaller and more lifelike with every step, and read the paper upside down. He smirked at her.  

“Don’t you worry, Rachel. I’m your partner. I’ll help you out”, he put a heavy hand on her shoulder, “Besides, you obviously need me. God only knows how you survived without me for all of these years.”

Rachel smiled unsurely. She was not used to someone, especially a man, being so forward with her. Even more surprising, was how comfortable she was with him already, like she had known him for years and he did not care about anything that had happened to her in the past. It was only the latter that made her unsure of her actions. Rachel had a fresh start and she still did not know how to handle that new found freedom.  

             Rachel sat on the edge of a stool in front of a long table filled with molecular microscopes of various sizes, computer monitors, Petri dishes, beakers, and test tubes with various tissue samples, chemicals, and organic enzymes. There was a large box mounted on the wall beside her, glaring yellow and black, with that same company symbol painted on the front. The box was nearly full of discarded experiments from that day alone. It was late in the afternoon and Rachel was the only one still working; the other researchers had already left to attend the evening religious services. When she first arrived, Luis had urged her to join the others in the congregation, but she refused and as time passed, he became less and less insistent until he changed his mind completely and warned her to steer clear of the church altogether. In fact, it was Luis who kept a definite barrier between Rachel and the others working in the facility. She had been reassigned to three different laboratory workspaces in her short time at the facility by him, each one further away from the rest of the team. She had a feeling that it was Luis who had also kept her from meeting the director of the entire project, but she never asked him directly and he never admitted to such a thing. 

“Hungry?”

Rachel was so startled by the sound of the voice behind her that she dropped the empty syringe she was holding. She had not noticed the long shadow cast over her from the doorway. She was glad that she had not yet filled the needle with the anabolic catalyst still on the table; that would have required a level four biohazardous waste clean-up, a long and tedious process that Rachel did not want to bother with. She did not realize that she had not replied until Luis spoke again.

“A little jumpy there, cariña?” he teased.  

“No, I was just concentrating”, Rachel insisted hotly.   

He was carrying a brown paper bag and he set it down on the table to help her clean up the mess on the tile floor. Rachel grabbed a broom from a nearby locker and handed Luis the dustpan without asking. She was comfortable enough with him to do that. 

“I didn’t mean to startle you”, Luis said, “But it’s late and I know for a fact that you skipped lunch today to work on this new sample. I brought you a sandwich and an apple.”  

Rachel made a face at him from where she was squatting on the floor, “An apple?”  

He shrugged, “You need your fruit. And stop scowling at me, Rachel, it’s not egg salad, I learned my lesson last time.”

Rachel actually laughed at the memory. She particularly hated egg salad because it was one of the few things that her grandmother knew how to prepare when Rachel would go to visit her as a child. Rachel had always been too polite to refuse the sandwiches when she would stay with Nana for two weeks with her brother and sister every summer. Even though she desperately missed her grandmother, and the rest of her family, for that matter, she did not miss those egg salad sandwiches and she protested furiously when Luis brought her the offending food for lunch last week. Luis dumped the pan full of shattered glass and metal into a nearby trash bin. 

“Ham and cheese”, he clarified as Rachel took the sandwich out of the bag and examined it, “And, no, that’s not American cheese. I don’t know where you expect me to find American cheese around these part.”

Rachel unwrapped the sandwich and took a trusting bite, raising her eyebrow only at the liberal spread of mayonnaise that she discovered upon chewing. Luis watched her for a moment before walking over to the table she had been working at. He hunched over the microscope to examine her work. 

“You think the key is in the metabolism of the cells?” he asked in surprise.

That was something he had not considered and knew for a fact that none of the other researchers had thought of that, either. He would have read something of the sort, if that were the case. 

Rachel nodded and answered through a mouthful of bread, “Yeah, there was something curious I discovered yesterday with solution sample #24. Read my notes, just there.”

She gestured vaguely to the yellow legal pad underneath a tray of tissue samples. She had not realized how hungry she was until she was actually eating and she ate with uncharacteristic speed. Luis quickly flipped through her notes, reading silently.  

“You figured this out all on your own?” he asked quietly without looking at her.

Rachel finished the sandwich and wiped her hands on her jeans, realizing too late that she should have used her lab coat instead. She walked up beside him and glanced at the notepad.

“Well…” Rachel wracked her brain for a humble answer and when she could not find one, continued, “Yeah. I found that by using a metabolic catalyst and speeding up the cellular metabolism, the cells regenerate at a quickened pace. Unfortunately, the new tissue that regenerates is short-lived. That’s the problem. Too much waste is created too quickly and the tissue begins to break down and decay almost immediately. I haven’t found a way to create those speedy results without that unfortunate side effect. I need something that can basically suck up the toxins in the cells without destroying or slowing down growth of the tissue.” 

Luis slowly looked up from the page he was reading to stare at Rachel. His eyes were oddly unfocused, as if he were looking past her, rather than at her. Rachel played with the apple in her hands while she watched him. 

“Something wrong?” she asked tentatively when he still had not said anything after another moment.

Luis blinked and seemed to focus on Rachel’s face again. He quickly smiled and placed a heavy hand on her shoulder. 

“Nothing is wrong, don’t worry”, he said smoothly.

Rachel put the apple down on the table to cross her arms over her chest. She tilted her head to one side to look at him. There was something not quite right about his initial reaction to her research.  

“Do you have any thoughts about my progress so far?” she prompted him.

“Nothing that you couldn’t figure out for yourself, cariña”, he answered without hesitation, “I won’t distract you any more. I need to be finishing up some work myself.”

“What does that mean? Cariña? You never told me”, Rachel suddenly asked, fishing for a reason to make him stay longer.

Luis had turned to leave, but he hesitated just short of the door. He turned to smile at her and gently placed his hand on the small of her back.

“It means ‘honey’ or ‘sweetheart’, in English”, he said quietly, leaving out another meaning of the word completely, “Don’t stay in here too late. I’ll see you in the morning.”

He pressed his hand into her back to gently push her towards the microscope she had been working with and before Luis could see the slow blush crawling up her neck, he was gone. Rachel watched him walk down the brightly lit hallway until the door closed shut automatically and she could no longer see him. She did not care what he told her; she was already worried. Rachel noticed too late that he had taken her entire notepad with him and quickly dismissed it as an honest mistake.   

Rachel had not realized she was thinking about Luis or listening to the sad strains of U2’s “With or Without You” until someone bumped into her chair from behind and pushed her forward, literally, back into reality. Rachel did not bother to turn around and see who it was; she had learned that she would never see another recognizable face so long as she was in Europe. Rachel cleared her throat and took a sip of her café au lait, the only thing she knew how to order in French. She had loaded the coffee with four packets of sugar to the dismay of all of the workers behind the counter at the small café she had found near the train station. She had been sitting outside in the pale sunshine for over an hour now with various maps spread out in front of her. She was cross-checking the blueprints she had stolen from the Umbrella main frame computer before she was completely shut out of the system. The outside blueprints were so common that there were several possible locations that Rachel would have to check out in Paris to find the actual facility. Thoroughness was part of the game. She sighed and glanced up at the sky, blinking at the cloudy sky several times to help clear her head. She tried to remind herself of why she was even bothering with this, why she did not just give up and go home, and try to forget that any of this had ever happened. She had thought about this often and always came to the same conclusion:

Rachel Murphy was dead. If the right people found out anything otherwise, then she most certainly would be. And she was not ready to die. 

She was forced to look down at the maps spread across her table when her eyes began to water. Even though she was physically alone on this mission, she had support back home, even if it was from one person that she had known for less than a day. It felt much longer than that. That person was a government agent under direct control of the president of the United States. The agent was on assignment in Spain when she met him, on a mission to save the president’s missing daughter. His arrival at the small, hostile village changed her life. However, not only were those changes for the worse, they were also for the better. She would be dead, if not for him. The agent kept her bank accounts secret, but still available for her to use, which was nothing short of a miracle. In exchange, she followed up on any leads that he had, as she told him that she would when they parted ways last autumn. So far, she had nothing to report. From Spain, she had gone to Russia to the giant factory-like building that was still seemingly operational. Rachel had found nothing there. It appeared that the facility had recently been shut down. She hung around the area for more than a week, searching for clues or even the people who had contributed to the fall of the factory, but there was no one to be seen and the building had been wiped clean. She had no more leads and no direction to go in. From then on, nothing had seemed to go right. It took weeks just to make contact with him, but the agent had heard whisperings of Umbrella activity in Romania and Rachel hopped on the next train to Bucharest. The rumors of an underground laboratory had also turned out to be nothing more than just that—a rumor. It was the same in Hungary, and in Germany, where she had stayed for over a month. In all of her downtime, Rachel was working out—running, lifting weights, loading and reloading her guns during target practice, and making sure she knew how to fight for when the opportunity arose based on what the agent and Luis had taught her several months earlier. She knew it would happen and she wanted to be ready when it did. Rachel would not give up without a fight, and she would not give up until she killed the man who betrayed her. 

Rachel circled another potential structure in red ink and counted the marks she had made on the map.

Nine.

She had nine potential locations to search for any illegal biological weaponry activity. Rachel gulped down the rest of her coffee. Her watch already read 8:35. She had a long day ahead of her. She slid out of her chair and stretched, grabbing her bag and slinging it over her shoulder in one motion. She turned back to the table to grab all of her maps, scooping them up into her arms, not noticing the shadow that was suddenly cast over her. Sure enough, Rachel walked full-force into a pedestrian and sent all of her maps flying. As soon as it happened, she waited for the onslaught of angry French words and she bent down immediately to start picking up the papers. To her surprise, there was no angry French; the man she had bumped into actually crouched down to help her. Rachel wracked her brain for the few French phrases she knew and found the one she needed after another moment of silence.  

“Je suis désolée”, she apologized awkwardly.

She chanced a glance at the man in front of her, diligently grabbing maps, and he was smirking.  

“Don’t worry about it”, he replied.  

He was speaking English and without a European accent. He was American, and he knew that she was American, too. Rachel turned bright red and quickly stood up, clutching crumpled papers to her chest. The man rose to his feet, as well, and he was tall, fully accounting for the shadow he had cast over her earlier. Not only was he tall, but he was big. She wondered how much he could bench press and blushed even more, if humanely possible, when she realized how inappropriate that thought was. He had warm brown eyes, despite the seemingly permanent glare that they were set in, but the smirk on his lips had long faded away. She was staring, but she could not help herself; he was, too. The man thrust the maps towards her suddenly.

“Sorry”, Rachel said immediately, as if that was her cue to speak again and she grabbed the maps from him, “I’m sorry. Are you okay?”

That was a dumb question and she knew it. He was obviously fine. She shook her head and moved her arm to push her hair behind her ear, momentarily forgetting everything that she was holding, and spilling more maps. Mortified, and not willing to risk another long silent moment with the stranger, Rachel held onto the charts that she had already and ran past him down the sidewalk. She turned into a small alley until she knew that she was out of his sight and glanced down at what she was carrying. The maps she needed were the ones she just lost; she had to start all over again.   

The dark-haired man crouched down on the sidewalk to pick up the maps for a second time, smiling a little to himself at the flustered girl he had just run into. He had not met another American for several months and she was cute, if not a little clumsy. He studied the maps as he picked them up, more out of habit than anything else, and paused. The buildings that were circled in red were obviously locations that she was headed, but one of them… he stared at that map hard and swallowed.

He was going to the same place.  

The man shoved all of the maps into his pockets, crushing the paper as he did so, and looked down the sidewalk, searching for the mystery woman. He had to find her.