Disclaimer: I don't own it. Can I have it? *Puppy dog eyes*

A/N: Keep in mind that I know nothing about pretty much everything in this story so…yeah.

Penetrating Darkness

Chapter 1-Into the Dark

"Hey Walker, how's the weather?" Auggie asked as the call connected.

"Sunny, warm, nice actually" Annie replied, looking behind her as she made her way through the crowded marketplace, heels clicking against the uneven paved stones as she went.

"But?" He replied, hearing the trepidation behind her words.

"Ok before I say anything more this is not my fault" she replied, increasing her pace as she felt a pair of eyes burning into her.

"Ok Annie, no-one said it is" He couldn't decide whether she was joking or not but given the chatter of voices in the background that was definitely not the hotel room she was meant to be in he went for the safe approach.

"When I got back to the hotel"

"Back from where?" He asked, cutting her off.

"Lunch but that's not the point. So I got back and there was a shadow in the window of my room"

"Shadow as in?"

"Human shaped"

"Ah"

"Yeah and now he is kinda after me"

"Description?"

"Big, muscular, shaved head, Mexican features oh and did I mention big?"

"Yeah, you might have. Where are you now?"

She did a quick sweep of the area busting with stalls and people many of whom carried bags looking for any landmarks but found none.

"Somewhere in a marketplace" she replied.

"Ok, I'll do a quick search for places like that near the hotel, in the meantime you want an extraction?" he asked.

"That would be nice"

"Ok, got you. Can you see the ocean?"

"Gimme a sec" She did another sweep, this time looking for her attacker but found nothing. At least that was one good thing about the size of him, he was not exactly inconspicuous.

"Can't see it but I can smell the salt, it can't be far"

"Follow your nose Walker, when you get there a fishing trawler should be there, I've cleared you to get on. They leave in about ten minutes so be quick"

"Ok, thanks Aug"

That had been two weeks ago. Auggie hadn't heard from Annie since the call and she had never made it onto the boat. A search of the area turned up nothing besides a trashed hotel room, no fingerprints and no witnesses. Joan wasn't sure when, or even if Auggie had slept since the call. He was terrified of losing her, she could see it in his unseeing chocolate-brown eyes every time someone said her name.

She had lost count of the number of times that she had told him to go home, they had people on the ground there was nothing more he could do but each time he steadily refused, his efforts growing more and more desperate as time went on. It was a losing battle though, they had nothing to go on but he had to do something, she understood that so she left him be, bringing him food in an effort to at least keep him healthy. At first he had refused to eat and Joan had been given no choice other than to play the guilt card so that's what she did, saying that it is what Annie would want. He had locked himself in the bathroom for an hour after that but afterwards, puffy eyed he had come out, sat down and ate without so much as a glance in her direction.

Shaking herself out of the memory as Jai knocked on the door she muttered a come in and he stood in front of her desk, his appearance scruffier than the last time she saw him. At least he had gotten some sleep, she mused seeing the lessened circles below his eyes.

"What is it?" she asked.

"The director of the FBI just got back to us" he replied.

"And?" she asked when he hesitated.

"They know about as much as we do" he replied sighing and running his hand through his already messed-up hair.

"Damn" she said. They had been hoping the federal agency, which had more experience with missing persons than what they did would be able to dig something up. She couldn't remember the agency losing an operative as fast, or for that matter as unexpectedly as they had Annie. There had to be something else going on but they were running out of places to look and they were out of time. If Annie had been captured they were likely too late, a possibility she didn't want to consider but could no longer ignore. If they got Annie back there was a chance that she would be burned or worse, turned. But she was strong, one of the strongest operatives Joan had seen and she held out hope that they would find her. They just had to turn over the right rock, talk to the right person and they would find her.

Hey eyes blinked open but apart from her even breathing she didn't move. There was no light but she had come to expect the overwhelming darkness, taking it as a sign of things to come. The surface beneath her was flat and hard, likely a cement floor. Her body was numb and she didn't bother trying to move, what was the point? She had already paced the length of what she had determined was a 10x10 cell. It wasn't the jail cell she had been expecting, rather it was more like a hospital room, one with nothing but a small panel of glass on the door. She wouldn't be surprised if it had once housed mental patients, a huge dilemma for her as it made escape pretty much impossible. What scared her the most though was the fact that she had no idea how she got there. One minute she had been making her way towards the glimpse of blue sea she had caught sight of between two buildings and the next she had woken up here, wherever that was. She hadn't heard a single set of footsteps or voices, nothing but deathly silence, it was like the place was completely empty.

"Come on" Auggie mumbled, hitting the keys harder than necessary as he willed the electronics in front of him to give him the answers he desired. The computer gave a whirl of protest and blurted out streams of data, which to anyone but him were incomprehensible. But the stream of data it presented were exactly what he was looking for: only slightly illegally obtained documents from the US embassy or more specifically flight records to Indonesia. Stu was hovering over his shoulder looking at passport photos trying to identify the Mexican that Annie had seen.

"Wait, stop" he said, causing a jolt of hope to shoot through Auggie.

"You see him?" he asked. Sometimes his blindness could be incredibly frustrating.

"I think so" he replied uncertainly. "I mean it's a big, tough looking Mexican guy."

"Get Joan" he said and Stu hustled out of tech ops.

An hour and a half later they had a name and satellite footage of him in Indonesia, unfortunately not from the market but it was something. The ground team were conducting a grid by grid search starting from the area of his last known whereabouts. The Indonesian authorities had been of little help but a little persuasion on Joan's part had convinced them to lend some manpower to the search.

"Report" Joan stated through the comm. The static buzzed for a moment before a crackly voice replied "Nothing so far but we have a lot of ground to cover yet."

"Ok, keep searching" she replied.

"Joan, are you sure about this?" Jai, who was standing next to her watching over the screen in front of them, which showed all the current information they had on their Mexican asked.

"Sure about what Jai?" she replied.

"All this manpower going into finding an American tourist, they must be suspicious" he said.

"Getting Annie home safely is more important"

Another crackle of static interrupted their conversation and all the heartbeats in the room seemed to stop at once as the comm announced "We've got him, closing in now."

"Be careful, we need him alive if we hope to find Annie" she replied into the device. They collectively held their breaths as they waited. The seconds ticked by, slowly turning into minutes until at last the comm buzzed again, announcing the news they had all been hoping for: they had the man.

The interrogation stretched into most of the night, the man refusing to do anything except sit as still as a statue, that was until he was offered a large and entirely false bribe in exchange for Annie's location. It was an abandoned mental facility in the very outskirts of a small farming town, the perfect place for interrogating a prisoner. It took Auggie all of five minutes to dig up and send the team a floor plan.

Tactical planning was done en route and by the time the team got there they had a basic sweeping strategy and orders to shoot anyone who wasn't Annie. They set up a heat-sensing camera outside but it showed nothing. They remained optimistic, putting it down to the walls being too thick for it to penetrate. As they entered breathing became slow and measured, each tact-team member poised to shoot at any given moment. They swept the lower level floor by floor. Paint was peeling off the dirt-washed walls and doors were broken, rubbish strewn everywhere. By the time the team had searched the whole building they had nothing.

"She's not here" the leader, a big, muscular ex-navy seal announced grimly through the comm.

"Is there any way you missed something?" Joan asked.

"We searched it top to bottom, nada" he replied.

"Ok, head back to base until we find more" she said.

"Wait" Auggie shouted, shooting up out of his chair. Joan started at him curiously but gave the order to the team that they remain there.

"Top to bottom that's it" he said.

"What's it?" Jai asked, startled by his sudden outburst.

"It's a mental health facility, right?"

"I don't follow" Joan said.

"So it wouldn't be surprising if they had some kind of hidden basement right? You know, somewhere to keep the real nutcases" he replied.

Joan's eyes widened as she told the team what to look for. Fifteen minutes later they found a hidden door behind a supply closet and they cautiously fanned out along the creaky old staircase as they made their way down.

It was pitch black and torchlight was the only illumination they had. The beams cast shadows across several heavy-duty steal doors. Only one was closed, the glass panel on top covered in a thick layer of grime.

"Break it down" Mark, the leader of the team ordered. Dust covered them, seemingly coming from all directions as the metal gave way with an enormous creek. As they entered the light swept over a form strewn on the floor. Mark kneeled down next to her, shifting her hair aside to feel for a pulse. It was there but the woman was freezing. He draped his coat over her and gently nudged her awake.

"Annie?" He asked when her eyelids fluttered.

She coughed and he repeated the name, gently easing her up.

"Who?" she asked in a croaky voice.

"We've got conformation Auggie, It's not her" Joan said, putting a gentle hand on his back as a sign of comfort. Following the initial confusion the team pulled the woman out and in the light it was clear she was not Annie.

"Why did he take her then?" He asked, voice cracking slightly.

"She said that she was running from something and a woman told her to go to the fishing trawler" she replied.

"Was it her?" he asked.

"It must have been. They haven't gotten much out of the woman, she has severe hypothermia and she's still in shock."

"Did she say what her name was?"

"That's the strange thing, she doesn't seem to know"

"Amnesia?"

"Must be, what other explanation could there be?"

"I've got a bad feeling about this Joan, something isn't right"

"And whatever it is Annie is in the middle of it"