A Moment, Captured and Kept Safe - SCP Foundation

They had been lazy, in retrospect. Taken things for granted. They should have been more careful about the backup safehouse, but they were tired, and figured the Coalition was still scrambling after whatever happened to Site-13. Benjamin knew it was a bad idea, but he was just so tired after all the running.

Oh, well. If he was tired, he'd get to rest soon enough, by the sounds of it. Everything had gone quiet again, and he couldn't even hear any moaning. And he really had checked, held is breath as long as he could just to hear something, but it was getting harder and harder to do that. When he gave up, he almost felt guilty for not feeling much when he realized he was the only one left. Then again, he thought as he looked at the trail of red he'd dragged along the ground, he'd felt like they were dead for a while. The others just went on ahead first.

Or had they? He heard some footsteps coming towards him, and in spite of everything, his eyes widened a little and he looked up. They'd gotten out of bad spots before, so maybe…

He felt the hope curdle in his chest as it got closer. They weren't trying to be quiet. Those were the steady, calm strides of someone in control. There wasn't much left for Benjamin to do, he was probably too badly wounded to even have much time to be interrogated. A small comfort not afforded to some of his friends.

"I want to capture…" a woman's voice said thoughtfully. "…that feeling you get when your wounds start to go numb. That place in between resoluteness and resignation."

She stepped into the light coming in through a window. The moonlight wasn't very strong, undulating with passing clouds, but it was enough to make out her appearance. Standing in the light, she almost looked like she was submerged underwater with the way the light gently moved, but even that was enough for someone who'd known the Coalition long enough to recognize her. She was a Hunter-Killer. In its own way, that made Benjamin feel a little bit better. There was nothing he could have done in the first place.

She kneeled down, holding her hand in an L shape in front of her face as if framing Benjamin's slumped figure. With her head low enough to reach the light, he could see clean, surgical scars crisscrossing much of her skin, and a large, asymmetrical gouge over her right eye. From that and the look on her face, she struck Benjamin who had been taken apart and put back together with the seams still showing, physical and otherwise.

Satisfied with what she saw, she reached into her toolbelt as Benjamin watched. There wasn't much else to do. She didn't retrieve a weapon, though, just a small bundle of telescoping metal tubes she extended into a tripod. "I didn't want to take too long for this. Your wound isn't going to let you last for too much longer, and a body is just a body." Setting the tripod onto the red-smeared floor, she gently, almost reverently, opened up a pistol case. To Benjamin's surprise, it only contained a vintage camera, lovingly maintained and slightly modified.

Benjamin wanted to sigh, but it came out as more of a weak exhale. Everyone else was already gone, there wasn't any point in this. "Can't we just get on with it?"

With one of her hands, she brushed her hair away from her face, never breaking her gaze from the camera. "Everyone deserves to be remembered. Any other Hunter-Killer would have just wiped you out, but I want to at least respect that." She looked up to meet Benjamin's eyes for the first time. "I take that very seriously. I capture all of you in my photographs, and I take very good care of them."

"You take pictures of everyone you kill?" Benjamin wheezed. Even now, the world was finding ways to mess with him.

"Not everyone. I don't have the film." She sunk behind her camera's lens. "But you remember your friends, and the photographs remember you."

"Do you keep all these pictures with you?" Benjamin asked, deciding to humor her.

She stopped for a moment, and Benjamin's breath stopped with her. Even when he didn't have anything else to lose, Hunter-Killers still made his hair stand on end. She then lifted her head, ever so slightly, so that she could see him over the camera. Her blues eyes caught the moonlight in an almost indescribable way. "…Would you like to see them?"

Benjamin tried to laugh, but only wheezed. "Sure," he said. He was just along for the ride at this point.

"They're awful things," she replied quickly. "They remember feelings. They reek of the stuff."

Benjamin thought she was going to do a little more explaining, but the woman only stared right through him. She didn't even seem to draw breath, still as a picture herself behind the camera. It was so, so quiet in the house with only the two of them. Benjamin's shallow breath was weak, but it was the only thing he could hear. The emptiness was even more suffocating than the emptiness in his lungs, but even so, Benjamin could not bring himself to respond to that look, and only nodded his head. Somehow, he found it very difficult to deny her now.

Another moment passed, and she seemed to consider the answer, her body still as a sculpture. Eventually, her eyes moved down to the floor and she reached, slowly, into her pocket and produced a photograph. Then, as one might reach for their child, she pushed her hand into the picture and retrieved a binder. Even when closed, it radiated something wretched.

Benjamin's heart moved into his throat. She'd reached through a photograph - that must have been how she got everyone, and it also had to mean… she was an anomaly. Like him.

Like all the people she's killed.

Without making any noise, she stood up and handed the photo album to Benjamin. Slowly, carefully, like she was handing him her heart. It made Benjamin's head swim just looking at it, more like a void in her hands in the light. She placed it in his lap so gently, Benjamin might not have noticed if it didn't feel like it was constricting his throat. It looked like an expensive photo album, with a nice, leather cover, but even once he brought his hand up to it, he couldn't open it. Something was screaming at him not to.

He could feel the malice coming from the album, but after a moment, the discontent of the woman became palpable. "I told you," she said, watching his inaction with those blue eyes open just a bit too wide. "It remembers everything. You said you wanted to see them." Restrained, but forceful.

She seemed more emphatic now than she had before. Maybe he was right before, about this being her heart. And if she was an anomaly like him, then maybe there was something in there, anything, that could help him reach her.

Benjamin did as he was told. In the low light, it was difficult to make out, but even without really understand what he was looking at his mind began to spin and he tasted bile. With a shaking hand, he began to flip through the pages of laminated polaroids. Some pages were angrier than others, some dragged him into despair, and on some he found himself weeping without knowing why.

He made the mistake of looking a little closer at one of the faces, eyes half-lidded and confused. The poor lighting was only half of what made it difficult to parse, the state of the subject being just as bad, but even then, the face looked familiar, lying in a heap. Benjamin wanted to turn the page, to get away from it, but he watched it like someone would watch an animal wheezing after being hit by a car. The picture seemed injured, despairing, and mad as hell at something it didn't fully understand.

"Do you recognize that one?" The woman crouched down, assuming a sickeningly friendly pose. "I do. She was stubborn." Her fingers traced the outline of a phantom scar against her neck. "More so than you, though you two seem similar to me."

Benjamin withered. It was stupid to ever hope to appeal to her solidarity, but this was just sick. He wasn't even alive to her anymore, the thought as he glanced back up to her pristine camera, he was already a memory for her album. Distantly, he started flipping through the pages, some making him cower from their indignation, some dragging him down into their veritable tar pit of emotions, some only deepening his sense of resignation. As his hand reached out to flip to the last page, he found he couldn't breathe. He couldn't take his hand away, and he couldn't look anywhere else, either.

Seeing this, the woman took the album from him, tracing her hands over his for a moment as she did so. She felt warm, but perhaps Benjamin was simply cold now. "That's a picture of me, from nine years ago. The first death I photographed. It's the most loathsome picture I ever took. It's my magnum opus."

Able to move again, Benjamin looked up at her, standing against the window looking down at him. There was something wrong with her eyes, but he couldn't sense any malice from her like he had with all the other Coalition members he'd run into. If anything, she looked sympathetic.

After a moment, she turned and walked back to her camera, still patiently waiting for her. As she did, Benjamin found his voice again. "You're an anomaly, right?"

"Yes," she replied simply, as if it was a given, like an anomaly working for the Coalition was as normal as anything.

"Th-Then…" Benjamin squirmed to take a better position, knowing he needed to at least ask. Even if it was meaningless. "…That means you're a victim too."

"Of course I am." She lowered herself back behind her camera, blue eyes disappearing behind the singular unblinking lens. "Everyone is. This is simply my role, and that is yours."

Benjamin deflated. He wasn't sure why, but he felt as though a small piece of hope he didn't know he had left him, though even having it just felt juvenile at this point.

The woman cooed. "Ooh, that's it. Yes. Exquisite." She brought her hands up to the camera, her trained touch not moving it whatsoever as she made some adjustments. "This one's going to need to be a bit longer of an exposure due to the light. And I simply must soak up that feeling."

She didn't move when she took the picture, and Benjamin didn't even have it in himself to move and ruin it. Once it was done, she waited a moment and took the instant photo to develop before pulling a marker out of her pocket and labeling the photo. "Benjamin Luin, Type Blue, Serpent's Hand, yes?" Benjamin nodded once. "Good. I'd hate to get you mixed up with anyone else."

She set about placing her camera back into its case along with the tripod, ever so careful with her own equipment. "Protocol dictates I burn your bodies. This house's construction will let it burn long enough to do the job well enough."

Of course she knew about the house, Benjamin realized has his vision began to get foggy. She was probably the reason they'd been forced to come here in the first place.

"I'll let sleep take you first. Burning's a bad way to go," she said in a low voice, as though she didn't want to disturb him too much as he drifted off. "Benjamin Luin," she said to herself as she delicately slipped his picture into a laminated page as Benjamin's senses finally failed him. "I'll take good care of you."