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Quatrain 22, Century 4. "When twice three years and twice again, find secret skill in darkest hour. "Tween Blessed and Cursed a Third will come, or world's consumed in battle's fire."
Nightmares. They were stealing my rest. Making it impossible for me to sleep. In them, I'm twelve years old, in a white room, strapped to a chair and there's a man there. He gives me a gun, commands me to shoot. I do it. And then I wake up.
And I'm terrified.
Don't even like to admit it. But Jordan and Eddie were noticing and thought I needed help. Didn't want me becoming a liability in the fight. Eddie keyed into the quatrain, thought Nostradamus was talking about me all those years ago. Even if the prophet was right I figured the news was about sixteen years too late.
Jordan disagreed. Mentioned a Raven Nation regression therapist, thought I should check him out - he could take me back, help me relive my past. But my childhood wasn't any picnic - and living it once was enough. Wanted to let it go but the team wouldn't let me - it was one of the lines in the quatrain -- "find secret skill in darkest hour." As much as I hated the idea it looked like I was going to have go back to my past and relive some dark moments. If I did, maybe we'd finally find the edge we need to win the war.
Got me thinking about my father. My real father, the one who died in combat. My mother always yearned for him. Came home one day to find her staring at his picture, just like any day. She always told me "he was brave and died so that others could live." She told me I was just like him.
And then Ned came in and ruined the moment, again, just like any day of my life then. Ned was my stepfather. A poor excuse for a person, a drunk, a nobody -- and he knew that's what I thought of him. He was always goading me, wanting me to take a shot at him. Who does that to a kid? People like Ned do. He fostered my anger. Made me want to kill him.
It was like watching him kick the hell out of my life all over again so I woke up. I was in "regression therapy" with Jordan and Tyler Greer, her RN Doc. I'd already had enough. Jordan wanted me to give it another chance but I wasn't buying. My mother and Ned weren't in the dream - they had nothing to do with this. I took off.
The nightmares continued. This time my mother was there, with a hole in her head. I was being tortured, my mother was being beaten. It was worse than before. Quatrain or no quatrain it looked like I was gonna need more "help."
Greer explained that nightmares weren't random, that they were triggered by traumatic events in our life that we couldn't face. The answer to what my mind was trying to tell me lay somewhere in a twelve-year old me. I was back on the couch, regressing again.
Ned was there, Mom. But it wasn't real, this hadn't happened. The memory was too … good. Greer said I was using my memory "creatively" to create walls and hide a painful truth. That's what was happening in the real world, but inside my head the truth was crashing down all around my mom and I. She was going to the hospital and I promised to stay with Ned until she got back. Too bad that wasn't gonna happen.
Ned had sold me to some experiment, told me I was gonna earn my keep around there. The man who was there to take me away was a scientist, a guy named Rook who promised I'd be back before my mom returned. Rook's flunkie handed Ned a wad of cash and they grabbed me, so I fought back.
And that's when I saw the truth for the first time. I cut the flunkie and he healed right before my eyes.
He was Gua. Ned had sold me to the Gua.
Eddie did a search. A Dr. Rook never existed but he'd found something else. There were a lot of missing kids in the Chicago area at the exact time this stuff would have been happening. They were almost all found a day or two after they'd disappeared, but none of them remembered where they'd been. And they had social problems when they got back - were in and out of hospitals, committed suicide. And Eddie thought I was one of 'em. All of these kids' fathers had died in the war and all of them were 12 years old.
I was furious. It didn't make sense, the Gua had started messing with my life only a few years ago. How could I have been a test subject all this time? Greer thought the Gua had found some way to block the memory. That only made it worse. As lousy as my memories had been at least they were mine. I owned my crappy childhood. Now I find out the Gua had been there too. Their manipulations never seemed to end.
I needed to know why.
But there was a wall in my mind. And every time I hit it I'd plunge back into reality. Greer said we had to be more aggressive to get to the suppressed memory. He'd have to put me directly into the white room. Bypass the blocks.
Told him to do it.
And it almost killed me. Saw my first Gua flash alien and I went into cardiac arrest. I was trapped in my own brain, in these first memories of the Gua.
And it didn't look like I was ever coming back.
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First Wave (1998) - 3x13 - Shadowland