Chapter Text
She was made aware of the news well into the night.
2, maybe 3am, and Dinah is woken from her turbulent slumber by a phone call from a hospital. Hospitals never have good news, no matter how they try to sugarcoat things and make light of a situation; how they provide solutions to problems that crush lives just by existing, cancer, lupus, polio, AIDS, to name a few. She’d seen her fair share of the ugly. Ugly was a neutral term in her mind by now, nothing she ever saw was ugly anymore. There was nothing that could shock her.
Except this.
She was wound up in the morgue of a hospital near to where she was based. It wasn’t facilitated like she’d seen back home, nothing to stop diseases spreading through a place of such supposed sanity, to prevent innocent people dying in a waiting room because there weren’t enough staff to see to them in time. They’re run off their feet, she can tell that as she’s escorted through the trawls of trauma in the bay. She often flinches at doctors and nurses -- even patients, running past her, darting round corners and frightening her. Just because she had seen the ugly, doesn’t mean deep down she wasn’t still slightly afraid of it.
Her tears get the better of her when she’s left alone with the news.
Dinah wasn’t one for crying; never had been, but something about Ahmad Zubair’s belongings in a plastic bag sat upon a counter set her off immediately. It wasn’t much: a watch, a wedding ring, a photograph of his family. A small stuffed toy, a giraffe, clearly given to him by one of his children. They sit together in the bag, and the way they’re enclosed together in such a small space, these remnants of his life, of what it was- it’s hard to imagine anything bigger. It’s hard to see him as anything bigger than these items in a bag and it angers her.
He was dead. Murdered. Slaughtered, for what seemed like betrayal at that moment in time. Caught by those he was working with. Tortured by the men he had gained the trust of. And they completely took advantage.
She opens the plastic bag, wiping the fallen tears onto her sleeve, and retrieves the wedding band. Dinah fondles it in her fingers, looking at the Arabic engravings on the inside, which only built more tears in her eyes. The ring was a symbol of who he was, who he loved, who he fought for, who he died for. A family man, at most, more than a soldier, more than an agent, more than her partner. It always came first. Everything he did was for them, everytime he stepped into danger, he kissed his ring for good luck, for hope to make it home safely. And it failed him on the time he needed it most. It made her angry. So angry. In the best of times, anger fuelled her work. Anger took her mindset into overdrive and she worked, she fought the injustices and the misrepresentations and stood up for the right things and shamed the wrong.
And it felt like nothing but a ring, but it sparked everything within her to fight against the injustice done to him. It electrified her wires and fused them together in a mass circuit of fusion, of power and justice and determination, of hope. Hope that tomorrow would be a better day. That she’d avenge Zubair and assure his family that he didn’t die in vain.
And that she’d do it without crying, with his wedding band in her hand; for hope.