Morgan's Genie Ch. 01

Morgan's breath came out with a quiver. She bit her lip for a second, trying to blink away the tear in her eye, but gave up on it. "Thank you, sir," she said in a wavering voice. The etiquette for the moment was all wrong for it, but she saluted anyway. Wallace returned the salute, holding both it and Morgan's gaze for a moment longer than necessary, then headed out again.

She was alone then. Morgan let out a single, shuddering sob, bringing her hand to her mouth to keep it from quivering. A second tear fell, and then a third. Morgan looked around for a tissue box—there had to be one—and, as she reached for it, saw Thomas still standing there quietly in the corner.

"Sorry," she mumbled after she blew her nose and regained her composure.

"Why?"

"Just...embarrassing," Morgan shrugged.

"Is that man your liege?"

"He's my C.O.," she answered, then immediately realized Thomas wouldn't understand. "We don't swear loyalty to individual people. Colonel Wallace is in charge of my unit. My group of soldiers. And he's...he's about the best leader I've ever known."

"He's very proud of you," Thomas noted simply.

"Yeah," came her shaken reply. "Yeah, I guess so. He doesn't...that meant a lot from him."

Thomas didn't say anything after that, allowing Morgan a moment to regain her composure.

"You can really fix me up?" she asked.

"I can," Thomas nodded. "I could do it instantly and create illusions for others showing injuries. I believe I could create the impression of rapid but normal natural healing if we take some time to be subtle about it."

Morgan thought for a moment. She looked around for something. "What can I get you?" Thomas asked.

"Nothing," she said. "Just...nothing at the moment. Give me a second." There was a mirror hanging on a nearby wall. She'd have preferred to see up close, but she would have to take what she could get in that moment. Morgan then peeled the tape and gauze away from her left eye, revealing the ugly swelling and bruising. As she suspected, she couldn't really open it. She turned to Thomas. "Fix this," she said, pointing to her eye.

Thomas reached out for the side of her face. Over the course of a few heartbeats, Morgan felt the swelling decrease and found herself able to open the eye on her own. She was able to see with it just fine. In the mirror, her eye looked completely unharmed.

She glanced up at Thomas again, who looked down at her quietly. It made her lose her train of thought. For that moment, all she could think was that she very much liked the way he looked at her.

"Okay, do whatever will make that look natural," Morgan instructed. "I don't really want all that bruising back, but whatever will seem like good progress without being strange or suspicious is fine."

He touched the side of her face again. "And the rest?" he asked.

"We'll have to get to that later," Morgan said. "I have something else for you to do right now. I don't suppose you can speak Arabic?"

"I can learn very, very quickly," Thomas nodded.

* * *

Raneen took her time washing the dishes. She had kept herself busy with cleaning ever since that ugly night, taking care of the kitchen, clothing, linens and anything else she could find. Her family's small home had never been cleaner. It had become a chore just to find things to do.

Mostly, she wanted to clean herself, but her mother and father had both finally told her that this could only go so far before it was unhealthy. There were people who would say that one such as her could never really be clean again, but Raneen knew that those people were themselves simply ignorant and cruel.

She knew that in her head, but it was hard to tell that to her gut.

Until tonight, her cleaning habits had always come on with great energy. She focused on little things, little stains, trying to wipe or scrape away anything that was out of place to the point that she sometimes wondered if she imagined it. Tonight, though, she took her time. Her hands didn't shake. She was still cleaning, of course...but for once, she wasn't afraid to think while she washed the dishes.

Raneen had been mortified when the Americans came that morning. Her parents weren't going to let them in, and were enraged at her brother for having told them what had happened. They had themselves lived for a very long time in a world where one simply didn't speak of the things that soldiers did. Her brother, so enraged at what had happened to Raneen, couldn't stop himself.

In the end, neither could Raneen. The woman soldier with the green eyes had an expression to her face that was unmistakable. Compassion, but not pity. She pleaded to Raneen—-pleaded with her, no intimidation, no threats, just pleas—-not to let the other soldiers get away with what they had done. Not to let them do it again to someone else.

For the first time in so many nights, each of them seemingly endless, Raneen felt like she might have some sort of power. Some sort of way to fight back. All she had to do, the woman soldier said, was to tell her story. And so Raneen brought the woman soldier, Morgan, into a small room and fought back her tears and her fear and told her story.

When it was done, Morgan asked Raneen if she could tell it again to others. After a moment's thought, Raneen decided that she could. She could not fight off three armed men, but she could certainly speak.

Better to die, she decided, than to stay silent.

It was one thing, though, to speak to Americans about Americans. They would someday leave. They had to leave someday. Raneen didn't relish the idea of facing her neighbors, though, or what they might say. She hadn't really left her family's home since it happened.

She was thinking about this when there was a tap at the window. Raneen jumped a bit, startling as it was, but felt strangely unafraid. She looked out of the kitchen to her family, who sat in the next room talking—Hasan apparently hadn't yet absorbed enough of their father's wrath—but they did not seem to have heard the knock.

Against common sense, perhaps, Raneen moved over to the window and opened it. Standing outside was a lone soldier, unarmed and with his hands out in the open. "Morgan sent me," he said simply.

Raneen blinked. "What do you want?" she asked.

"Morgan asked me to look in on you," he said. "Are you alright?"

"I am fine," she said, but frowned. "Are you alone? You have no gun. Aren't you afraid?"

The soldier shook his head. "No one will see me," he told her. "Morgan asked me to look in on you and tell you not to be afraid. There will be no trouble from your neighbors. I have seen to it."

Raneen frowned. His words had the ring of truth to it, but still she asked, "How can you be sure?"

"You will have to trust me," he shrugged, "but please. Don't be afraid. You are going to be fine. I am also to tell you that Morgan was in a battle today, but she is fine. If you hear about it, don't worry. She was hurt but it isn't bad."

"She was hurt?" Raneen said. "May I see her?"

The soldier shrugged. "I will ask her, but I suspect that could be arranged." He paused. "Morgan wanted me to tell you that you are very brave."

Raneen blinked. "Tell her thank you," she said, "and tell her that I will pray for her."

The soldier bowed. Raneen thought this was strange -- she hadn't ever seen American soldiers bow -- but she nodded her head, and as it seemed like her conversation was ended, she closed the window.

The dishes were done. There was nothing left to clean, and no need. Raneen moved through the kitchen, joined her family in the other room, and listened to her father tell her beloved brother in all sorts of new and amusing ways how stupid he was sometimes.

It was the first time Raneen had laughed in many seemingly endless nights. Her father, mother and brother all noticed, but did not say anything. Instead, her father continued to rant at Hasan for another half hour. Raneen laughed more; her father was quite good at this.

Hasan's intellect was compared to that of various animals, vegetables and rocks, but as it brought the first smile he had seen from his sister in so long, he didn't really mind.

* * *

All talk of betrayal and collaboration with the Americans ceased in the neighborhood that night. It happened in one house after another, suddenly and with finality, but no one actually took notice. The subjects simply changed. The fighters who came through to investigate reports of American soldiers interviewing a family never found out what family it had been, or why, and quickly forgot about the whole thing.

The sickness that threatened Raneen would never take hold. It disappeared from her body without her ever knowing she had been infected. It was simply gone, as if the men had never touched her in the first place.

That couldn't be remedied, of course. Thomas had the power to erase it from everyone's memory, to undo the damage done and make it as if it had never happened, but Morgan had counseled against that. It was a moral quandary for her, but in the end there was too much that could go beyond Thomas's control. Erasing the past was a tricky thing. Ensuring that one could survive it, however, was more reliably done.

That was bound to happen without his aid, but magic certainly didn't hurt.

Thomas slipped into the small home again when Raneen finally went to bed, unseen and unheard as he passed through walls and peered unhindered through the darkness. He helped her get to sleep, and when that was settled, he helped her through her nightmares. Fewer and fewer of them would trouble her in the nights to come.

He would go back, Morgan had said, once she had thought things through more thoroughly. But in the meantime, the family would be safe from reprisal or illness or accident. The healing had begun before Thomas had ever even shown up. He wasn't there to fix things. He was just there to make it all a little easier.

As he returned to the base and the infirmary, Thomas thought back to Antioch and the warnings of the old man. There were men who rode in flying metal carts here, and other carts that rolled on with no horses to pull them, and women who fought with an army that would follow orders from men of dark skin. The world had changed so very much.

The old man had warned him that it would take a long time to find a worthy master -- or mistress. But as Thomas found Morgan asleep in her bed, he felt no regret. This woman seemed very much worth the wait.